worth a read8 Jan 2021 10:18
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UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps warned today the current wave of vaccines might not protect against the South African strain of coronavirus.
Mr Shapps said introducing a mandatory test and release system for travellers coming into the UK had become 'much more urgent' because of the threat the variant poses to Britain's mass vaccination programme.
But there was confusion about the timing of his comments, which came just hours after a study by Pfizer/BioNTech suggested their vaccine could be just as effective against the super-transmissible strain.
Amid international fears about the South African strain, thought to be at least 60 per cent more infectious than regular Covid, the UK has made it compulsory for travellers to test negative when they arrive in the country.
Mr Shapps told Sky News: 'This is an extra check and we're doing this now because there are these variants that we're very keen to keep out of the country, like the South African variant, for example.
'There are the concerns about the South African one in particular about how effective the vaccine would be against it so we simply cannot take chances. So today because of that variant it has become much more urgent.'
The Pfizer study – which hasn't been peer-reviewed yet – tested how well the vaccine worked on the key N501Y mutation, an alteration on the virus's spike protein which is thought to be responsible for making it far more infectious than regular Covid.