Sage expert rebukes Matt Hancock by saying 'people should leave the virology to scientists'

A health expert has made an apparent dig at Matt Hancock after the minister caused widespread alarm over the discovery of a coronavirus mutation.

Hancock announced a raft of further coronavirus restrictions on Monday and said the new strain of the virus may be behind soaring infection rates across parts of England.

But Calum Semple, professor of outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool, said on Tuesday that more information was needed on the COVID variant and urged people to “leave the virology to the scientists”.

Prof Semple, also a Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) expert, said: “People should not be losing sleep about this, they really need to leave the virology to the scientists because we’re at the very early stages of understanding what’s going on here.

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“What I can say is that coronavirus, like many other viruses, mutate all the time.

“And without the presence of community immunity – that’s because we don’t have herd immunity and won’t have for many, many months – the virus essentially is free to change and become more comfortable with the humans with which it is living.

“That’s what the virus is doing – it is learning how to become slightly better at living with us and becoming slightly more infectious. But that does not mean it’s harming us more or causing more severe illness in people.”

Hancock said on Monday that higher infections in the South East may be in part due to the newly identified variant of coronavirus which is growing faster than the existing one.

Public Health England (PHE) said that as of 13 December, 1,108 cases with this new variant had been identified, predominantly in the south and east of England.

Hancock said people should be "extremely careful" about who they mix with in the run-up to Christmas if they are planning to see elderly relatives over the festive period.

Downing Street insisted there were no plans to change the "Christmas bubble" policy despite the fears.

But Dr Lucy van Dorp, senior research fellow in microbial genomics at the UCL Genetics Institute, said: “It is frustrating to have claims like this made without the associated evidence presented for scientific assessment and the variant remains to be officially announced.

And Prof Semple played down fears that the recently approved coronavirus vaccine would no longer be effective.

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"I would expect the (COVID-19) vaccine still to be reasonably effective because it's currently 95% effective,” he added.

"Even if we dropped a few percentage points, it's still going to be good enough, and much better than many other vaccines on the market.

"So this is not a disaster. This isn't a breakdown in all our plans. This is just what we expect with a new virus, and it's what the scientists and the doctors have come to understand, and we will adapt."

Watch: The COVID dos and don’ts of Christmas this year