there are 60 000 new infections recorded today partly driven by kids spreading this new strain more readily parents want realism can you look parents in the eye and tell them that all kids will definitely be back in the classroom before the summer holidays so patrick valance we’ve heard quite a lot recently about a second new variant this is the one from south africa has it reached our shores and how worried should we be about the south african variant of coronavirus being resistant to the vaccine and professor chris witte how normal can life really be after just the 13.2 million most vulnerable alone have been vaccinated isn’t the risk for those age 20 up to 50 too high to let it rip through those age groups uh well sam i’ll i’ll take the the first one of those excellent uh questions uh just on uh whether we can be absolutely sure that uh that schools will uh will reopen well i just go back to the answer really i gave to to robert peston we think that with the vaccination program we can do a huge amount to uh take out of the path of the virus those who are most vulnerable that clearly offers opportunities to our country uh to to do things differently uh to approach the uh the whole issue of non-pharmaceutical interventions very differently so i’m you know i’m i’m full of the the same optimism uh and fundamental hope about the the position that uh that i think chris has uh adopted uh uh and that i think that things really will be very different uh by the spring and that is what i would certainly say to every parent in the land so on the question of the variance um as a virus replicates you get changes in the genetic code as new variant new mutations come in and things change and and those changes in the genetic code then lead to changes sometimes in parts of the protein and that may lead to shape changes or charge changes on the protein that might mean that the virus becomes recognized differently by the immune system and that’s really the the concern that people are looking at if i take the uk variant um what we know is that those changes and there was 22 changes in in in the genetic code um made the virus more transmissible as far as we can see it doesn’t make it hidden from the immune system so if you’ve had an infection before actually the evidence is you probably neutralize this virus as well and the expectation is the same would be for a vaccine with the south africa variant there’s another change that change is theoretically a bit more substantial in terms of the shape if you like so it has a bit more of an effect potentially on the shape of the of the um viral protein which theoretically gives it a bit more risk of not being recognized but there’s nothing again yet to suggest that’s the case so this is being looked at very actively and it’s worth remembering that when a when a vaccine is given you don’t just make one antibody against one bit you make lots of antibodies against lots of different bits and so it’s very unlikely that all of that would be escaped by any mutation it’s more likely that if there’s an effect it’s a sort of minor effect to decrease the binding or decrease the efficacy of the vaccine but we don’t know yet for the south africa and that needs to be looked at but it’s a theoretical risk and every time we see a variant that’s going to be the question that comes up but it needs to be looked at but at the moment you’d say that the most likely thing is that this wouldn’t abolish vaccine effect it may have some um if uh overall effect on efficacy but we don’t know
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