BEVERLY HILLS, February 08, (THEWILL) – South Africa has shelved plans to vaccinate frontline healthcare workers with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after a pilot trial found it might be powerless preventing the COVID-19 variant prevailing in the country.
“The AstraZeneca vaccine appeared effective against the original strain but not against the variant. We have decided to put a temporary hold on the rollout of the vaccine. … More work needs to be done,” Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said on Sunday.
The country took delivery of its first 1 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine last week, and originally planned to begin administering them to healthcare workers by mid-month.
However, early results unexpectedly indicated that the AstraZeneca vaccine might have been overrated with respect to South Africa’s local need.
Statistics from a pilot study inferred that the AstraZeneca vaccine gave only “minimal protection against mild-moderate disease” caused by the variant in South Africa.
The variant appeared be more infectious, causing a fatal revival of COVID-19 in the country and accounting for more than 90 percent of the Covid-19 cases, according to Mkhize’s weekend report.
The study, still awaiting subjection to peer-review, covered 2,000 people, most of them young and healthy, with an average age of 31.
According to a statement by Oxford University and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, “Protection against moderate-severe disease, hospitalization or death could not be assessed in this study as the target population were at such low risk.”
In order to prevent death and severe disease, Mkhize said, scientists would study whether the AstraZeneca vaccine worked against the variant.
Although other vaccines had proved less effective against the variant, they provided good protection against death and serious disease.
Public health officials are concerned about the South African variant because it includes a mutation of the Coronavirus’s characteristic spike protein, which is targeted by existing vaccines.
South African officials submitted that the variant was more contagious, with evidence emerging it might be more virulent.
South Africa will urgently roll out other vaccines to inoculate as many people as possible in the coming months, Mkhize said.
Other South African scientists have said that clinical trials for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine showed good results against the variant.
The early results for the AstraZeneca vaccine against the variant could have far-reaching implications, as many other countries in Africa and beyond have been planning to use the AstraZeneca shots.
The international COVAX initiative has bought the AstraZeneca vaccine in bulk from the Serum Institute of India.
Developers of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine expect to have a modified shot to cope with the South African Coronavirus variant by autumn, its lead researcher, Sarah Gilbert, told the BBC on Sunday.
Authorities in England last week went house to house to test for COVID-19 in eight areas where the South African variant is believed to be spreading after a handful of cases were found in people who had had no contact with the country or anyone who had travelled there.
More than 100 cases of the South African variant have been found in the UK. The testing blitz is a bid to snuff out the variant before it spreads widely and undermines the UK’s vaccination rollout.
Britain has had Europe’s deadliest coronavirus outbreak, with over 112,000 confirmed deaths, and it has embarked on a speedier vaccination plan than the neighbouring European Union.
The UK has thus far vaccinated about 11.5 million people.
