Sir John Bell: South African variant of COVID is more worrying than the Kent one "by some margin"

Sir John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, has warned that the South African variant of COVID is more worrying than the Kent one "by some margin" and that he believes "it's here".

Speaking to Tom Newton-Dunn on Times Radio's G&T programme, he added that there was a "question mark" over whether the vaccine would be effective against the South African strain - but that, if it wasn't, developing a new one might take "a month or six weeks".

He was optimistic on the deployment of the AstraZeneca vaccine, saying that if AstraZeneca geared up production "you could administer 5 million a week if you want to... you don't have to be a doctor, you could administer the bloody thing. It's not complicated to stick a needle in someone's arm. So you just need a doctor there to sign the prescription".

He further added that he understood the UK had "530,000 doses sitting on the shelf as of yesterday, and there's another 450,000 arriving on Monday, so there's a million doses ready to go" of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.