GETTING coronavirus vaccines rolled out to protect as many people as quickly as possible is the priority for the NHS at the moment, says Wales' chief medical officer.

But Dr Frank Atherton said too that it is a possibility that in the future, a vaccination system to that established for flu may be the way forward in dealing with variants of the virus.

He told today's Welsh Government coronavirus briefing that when the new variant was identified several weeks ago, "there was a worry that it may not be as responsive to the vaccine as the original virus strain".

"[But] the evidence so far is that it is not a risk. There is no evidence that this is a more serious strain," said Dr Atherton.

"The antibody response to the vaccines does cover both the original virus and the variant virus.

"Of course, there's also a T-cell immunity, so there's both types of immunity, we believe, that work with the new variant as well as the original virus."

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On the question of whether there is a chance of successive variants of coronavirus outpacing the effectiveness of vaccines, Dr Atherton said: "This is about the long game. We need to think, as we get more experience, about how the vaccines' effectiveness changes, if it does.

"It may be that in the fullness of time, we have to move to something like a flu vaccine system, with different vaccines over time, for different strains of virus."

The flu vaccine is changed every year to take account of new or predominant strains in different parts of the world, and if coronavirus demonstrates regular variations over time that require a different vaccine approach, this may be a way forward.

That however, stressed Dr Atherton, is an issue "for the future".

In the here and now, with the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford AstarZeneca vaccines available - the latter has begun to be rolled out in Wales this week - the "pressing need now is to deal with the virus that we know we have, and get the vaccine rolled out as quickly as we can".

That is being done against a backdrop of rising infection rates across much of the UK, including Wales.

Considerably more infectious than than what Dr Atherton termed the "original" Covid-19, the variant may not be any more serious an illness - from what we know so far - but its effect is demonstrated by a rapidly rising number of cases.

"The fact it spreads more rapidly means more people are infected, more people are in hospital, and more are in intensive care," said Dr Atherton.

"Once in the population, it rapidly spreads to become the dominant strain."