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

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by Isabel Hardman and James Forsyfe.

As the vaccination program picks up pace, concerns are growing over the South African variant of COVID.

The government has said the number of cases in the UK that they have identified as growing

to 147, while new data, only a small sample on the Oxford vaccine suggests it had a low

effect or low efficacy when it came to tackling mild

to moderate illness. James, just to, I suppose, set the scene here, how genuine is the concern

or grave over the South African variant? It's still a small number of cases. The sample is we're

being told we shouldn't read too much into it. So what is the level of concern?

So I think the level of, there is obviously concern because this is a variant that the vaccine

appears to be ineffective against in terms of stopping you from getting kind of mild or

moderately sick. The Oxford team still seem quite confident that it will stop you from

ending up in hospital or from

dying from COVID. But I think it is a worry. I think there is a sense that because the Kentish

variant is so transmissible, the South African variant is unlikely to become the kind of dominant

strain in the UK. But I think what is causing concern is the sense that this might not be a purely South African

phenomenon, you might see the variant, the virus, sorry, evolving in this way as a kind of survival

mechanism in other places. And obviously, if you fuse together kind of higher transmissibility

with this other mutation, that would be particularly worrying and problematic.

...