This podcast is sponsored by Canacord Genuity Wealth Management, award-winning wealth managers who go

above and beyond to support and guide you. Visit can-dowealth.com to start building your wealth with confidence.

Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Cindy Yu and I'm joined by Katie Bowles and Kate Andrews.

So today it's been announced that surge testing will be happening in some parts of London to find the South African variant.

Kate, can you tell us more about the situation?

So surge testing already started in South London a few days ago and now it's moving to areas of

North London as well because there's concern that there has been small breakouts still but

breakouts nonetheless of the South African variant and as Ross Clark writes on the blog today

it raises several questions the first is whether or not this could actually become a dominant

strain in the UK. Now, the deputy

chief medical officer Jonathan Van Tam said a few weeks ago that it was unlikely that this would

happen or that it wasn't a major concern because the Kent variant had become so dominant and

it didn't seem like the South African variant was competing particularly well with it. And that said

with virus level so low now, perhaps,

you know, that there's a question mark as to whether or not the variant could get farther.

But the bigger question is what this means for the vaccine rollout. And we've had some conflicting

data so far about how vaccines can hold up. Pfizer and Oxford in particular. Those are the ones being rolled out in the

UK against the South African variant. Now, one study in particular was concerning that showed that

the Oxford efficacy really quite drastically fell when it was tested on the South African variant.

But these data samples haven't been very big and some around Pfizer have been really positive.

Others around Oxford have been more negative.

...