VACCINE passports may be needed to travel abroad in the future, a deputy chief medical officer has warned.

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, England's deputy chief medical officer, said it was "certainly plausible" that countries will insist people have received a coronavirus jab before allowing them to travel.

He stressed that the British position had never been that there should be mandatory vaccinations.

However, he told the BBC: “I can’t tell you how other countries are going to react to us, react to the idea of international travel in the post-Covid pandemic world, and whether in fact other countries will themselves insist that visitors are vaccinated, I don’t know the answer to that.

“And I don’t think other countries yet know the answer to that. ”

He said it was “certainly plausible that people will start to frame things that way” because of concerns about the spread of variants.

“People are very cautious at the moment about new variants and where we can take all around the world.”

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Professor Van-Tam also said the study carried out in South Africa which showed low efficacy for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for mild disease should be interpreted with caution.

He said: “I’m not sure that really tells us about whether the vaccine is still going to be really important in terms of protection against severe disease and protection in an older age group, and they’re the people who are most at risk.

“It would be a very, very big public health win indeed if all of the vaccines that we’re deploying simply stop people going into hospital, even if they don’t flatten the infection rate. That would be a major, major public health victory.”

He added that the South African variant was not the UK’s most pressing problem: “It’s not our major threat right now.

“The thing that is going to kill people in the next one to two months in the UK is the problem we have with our own circulating virus, which is the Kent variant as we now know it. And we have good data now that the vaccines are very effective against the Kent variant.

“So from that perspective, I think it’s not today’s problem – the South African variant.”