Covid: Second jabs to be given sooner amid variant concerns - BBC News
The Indian Covid variant "could pose a serious disruption to our progress," Boris Johnson warns.
Sam Coates from Sky says the fourth test for the next step of the lockdown to go ahead is that there can't be variants of concern changing the assessment. But he asks given cases of the Indian variant have almost tripled in the last week how can you say you've passed that test?

Johnson says: "We are concerned about this variant...and we do think it certainly may cause disruption to our attempts to continue down the roadmap but it doesn't change the assessment to step three."

"If you look at the numbers, even in Bolton you're not seeing a significant increase in hospitalisations and the overall numbers across the country remain low so they're not changing the assessment at present."

Prof Whitty says we are broadly in the same territory with regards to the four tests.

The thing that has changed is the "very clear view" that the Indian variant is more transmissible. "We expect over time this variant will overtake and come to dominate in the UK in the way that the Kent variant did," he says.

We need some time to gather the data but if it is a lot more transmissible that would imply we could have a really significant surge, Whitty says.

We also do not know what impact the vaccines will have in practice, he says.