“There is an obvious loophole and it’s very difficult to close,” Professor Pennington said.
“You can’t have border guards at Gretna, it would just be impossible to do administratively.
“If there’s a policy and they haven’t worked out the details, then it’s a daft policy. I think they will just have to live with the English system – there are hardly any international flights arriving into Scotland now anyway.
“In Australia and New Zealand they don’t have different policies about this. We’re one island, so you really have to have the same policy for England, Scotland and Wales.”
Last summer, the EU decided to seize the initiative from member states: instead of embarking on their own vaccine-buying programmes they would partake in one joint effort.
The theory was that it would utilise the bloc s buying power – and make it fairer, so that rich countries wouldn t be able to monopolise supplies.
The result is somewhat different: all EU states have been left short.
Worse, the European Commission has threatened to prosecute countries such as Germany and Ireland which try to go behind its back and order their own supplies.
Meanwhile in Britain, which declined an offer to take part, inoculations go on apace.
Dr Daniele Bryden, of the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine, said that the crisis in critical care was extremely serious . One in five large hospitals in England has no spare intensive care beds.
Scotland has a record number in hospital and in Northern Ireland the system is facing huge pressure as it braces for the peak.
The number of new infections announced yesterday in Scotland is 412 below the 1,753 announced on Saturday and is the lowest since December 28 – although there tend to be fewer cases recorded at the weekend.
But the number of patients continues to reach record levels – increasing daily since Christmas Day, when there were 973 people in hospital.
LOCKDOWN restrictions could be lifted in March if Britain s vaccination programme stays on track. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said that easing measures will not happen in one big bang, instead insisting they will be phased out in individual regions.