Chris

The evidence available in the UK seems to more-or-less concur with that coming out of South Africa. It lessens severity of disease among those infected with the SA variant but doesn’t necessarily prevent it. There’s no doubt a targeted update of the vaccine is now highly desirable, however in the meantime there is still an overriding public health goal, which is to control disease so people aren’t dying of it and they aren’t filling our hospitals so that people end up dying of other things going untreated. The programme must continue at speed, with what we have available.

It looks to me as if the national vaccination programme, once complete, is likely to start again from step 1 just as soon as the modified vaccine is ready. The important thing is we know the Oxford ‘recipe’ works; it’s now just a matter of substituting the updated genetics.