Yeah, I don’t think there’s a nefarious government plan to keep us all in lockdown forever or anything. But ‘clarification’ that she didn’t actually mean masks and she didn’t actually mean forever is a bit of a stretch, given what she clearly did say - repeatedly - in that interview.
SM: Vaccines are a really important part of the pandemic control, but it’s only one part. Test, trace and isolate system, border controls are really essential. And the third thing is people’s behaviour. That is the behaviour of social distancing, of when you’re indoors making sure there’s good ventilation, or if there’s not, wearing face masks, and hand and surface hygiene. We’ll need to keep these going in the long term, and that will be good not only for covid but also to reduce other - at a time when the NHS is -
Interviewer: Sorry to interrupt, Professor Michael, but when you say ‘in the long term’, what do you mean by that? How long?
SM: Um, I think… forever, to some extent.
Then a bit later:
Interviewer: Do you really think that people can continue to live the way that you think we might potentially have to live, wearing the masks, social distancing, spending more time outside, do you think this is something that we can really adapt to? Forever?
SM: I think there’s lots of different behaviours we’ve changed in our lives. We now routinely wear seatbelts, we didn’t used to. We now routinely pick up dog poo, we didn’t used to. When people see that there is a threat and there’s something they can do to reduce that to themselves, their loved ones and their communities, what we’ve seen over the last year is people do that. And I think we can just begin to adopt routines. When we go out of the house, we check that we’ve got our phone, we’ve got keys, we’ve got tissues, we’ve got a face mask in case we need to use it.
Going “obviously I didn’t mean that!” and calling it a ‘clarification’ is a bit of a stretch.