Therapeutic drugs should be used to treat all coronavirus patients in hospital at serious risk of illness, not just those taking part in a national clinical trial, Tony Blair has urged.

The former prime minister said there is “no safety issue” in giving potential treatments that are safe and meet a minimum level of efficacy to all patients in need.

Mr Blair said that, rather than offering therapeutic drugs “only to those in the Recovery trial”, co-ordinated by the University of Oxford, any “hospitalised patients at risk of serious illness” should be offered drugs that are safe.

In a foreword to a report on coronavirus by his institute, the ex-Labour leader said: “We should give these patients the drugs and track the data from them.

“There will be resistance to this, because it means altering the Recovery trial process, but this is a lesser risk than denying potentially life-saving drugs to those who need them.

“The AstraZeneca therapeutic drug, one of the most promising, is not part of the Recovery trial in the UK, but we should urgently investigate whether we can speed up its introduction, even with limited doses being available.”

The Recovery trial, which includes 176 UK hospital sites, found in June that a cheap steroid called dexamethasone could save the lives of people with severe Covid infection.

It is currently testing whether the antibiotic Azithromycin, anti-inflammatory drug Tocilizumab, convalescent plasma and an antibody treatment called Regn-Cov2 are effective treatments for coronavirus.

Mr Blair also said that, while he was “optimistic” that by the spring there will be vaccines and therapeutic drugs which allow a return to “something like normal”, he was anxious about the coming months.

“We simply can’t afford to put our society and economy into severe restrictions for the winter months.

“The toll in terms of health and the economy will be enormous,” he warned.