There is no sign new coronavirus variants will affect the immune impact of a vaccine that China has just authorised for public use, Reuters quoted a disease control official as saying on Friday.

The shot by an affiliate of state-backed company Sinopharm was approved on Thursday, the day after news of China’s first imported case of a variant spreading in Britain.

“No need to panic,” Xu Wenbo, an official at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told state TV.

“The mutated variant, compared with previous mutated variants ... has no obvious change so far in its ability to cause disease,” he added.