A leading Conservative lockdown-sceptic MP has said that Britain will need to learn to live with the Chinese virus rather than submit to the “doom-mongering” put forward by the likes of Professor Neil Ferguson.

On Thursday, Imperial College epidemiologist Neil Ferguson claimed that the so-called Indian (or Delta) variant of the coronavirus could lead to in excess of 1,200 deaths per day this summer.

While Professor Ferguson resigned from his role as senior scientific adviser to the government in May of last year — after he broke his own lockdown measures to meet his married lover twice, despite her and her family being under quarantine — he has since returned to advise the government.

On Thursday, the professor said of his latest projections: “The uncertainty spans the range of having a third wave which maybe is 100 [or] 200 deaths a day, at peak, to something which is at the scale of what we went through in January,” when 1,200 per day were dying.

In response, Conservative MP Sir Desmond Swayne told talkRADIO: “Professor Ferguson has not just been consistently wrong, he’s been consistently spectacularly wrong, as have all those doom-mongers from the very start.

“The whole basis of policy was to break the link between infection and hospitalisation. We are never going to get away from people catching this disease. It’s going to be with us until kingdom come.”

Mr Swayne continued: “The question is how can we live normally with it, and we have been handed this gift in terms of vaccination which allows us to live normally with it.

“We must stop living in fear devastating our economy and our social lives on the basis of fears… that have been deliberately raked up.”

Sir Desmond said that it is curious for the health establishment to be pushing dire warnings in light of the UK’s successful vaccination regime, saying that “the emergency by any measure has passed”.

“We have been more successful than anyone else with our vaccination programme, so why have we thrown away the advantage of it? Why do we have members of SAGE… out there sharing their dystopian nightmares of the future, saying we must wear masks and distance ourselves forever? What planet do these people live on?”

“I’ve always believed that masking was much more to do about social control than ever it had to do with prophylaxis and the notion that we might want to hold on to that as a means of continuing that fear and control, I just wonder what is the agenda here?” the Tory MP questioned.

On Friday, the National Health Service (NHS) announced that vaccinations would be available to all people over 18 in Britain.

To date, the government has vaccinated over 42 million people with at least one dose of the jab, representing approximately 81 per cent of the adult population in the UK, with more than 31 million people receiving two doses.

Yet, while countries with much lower vaccination rates, such as France and Germany, have begun to loosen restrictions, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has delayed returning freedom to Britons.

Despite living under some of the world’s strictest lockdown conditions for over a year, the British public seemingly supports the extension of coronavirus restrictions.

A survey of 1,500 adults in the UK, conducted by Redfield and Wilton for the PoliticsHome website, found that 62 per cent of the public would be in favour of keeping the current lockdown restrictions in place past the already extended date of July 19th, should the government claim it was necessary for public health.

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