A military health worker is preparing a dose of Covishield coronavirus vaccine, AstraZeneca / Oxford’s Covid-19 made by the Serum Institute of India, at an armed hospital in Colombo on January 29, 2021.
ishara S. Kodikara | AFP | Getty Images
LONDON – Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, the UK’s deputy chief medical officer, has played out the chances of a South African coronavirus outbreak spreading across the country in the coming months.
His comments, made at a press conference Monday night, follow concerns that the AstraZeneca-Oxford University injection shows limited effectiveness against that particular snoring, formally known as mutation B. .1.351.
“There is no reason to think that the South African strain will catch or pass on our conventional virus in the coming months,” Van-Tam said. on the UK mutation first found in the south east of England.
He said the “immediate threat” would be from the variant found in the UK, which vaccines have shown to be more effective against.
South Africa said on Sunday it would suspend the use of the bullet in its immunization program after a study, which was not peer-reviewed, found that the AstraZeneca vaccine offered “minimal protection ”Against moderate to severe disease caused by the pressure found in South Africa. Drugmaker AstraZeneca is now racing to modify its Covid-19 vaccine against the new variants.
Researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand and others in South Africa, and the University of Oxford, noted that the study was small, with only about 2,000 volunteers of average age 31.
Oxford University stated that “protection against moderate-to-severe disease, hospitalization, or death could not be assessed in this study because the target population was at such a low risk.”
Van-Tam said later Monday that early modeling data do not suggest a “transmission benefit” for the pressure found in South Africa. He said there were small numbers of cases in the UK at the moment, believing 147 diseases.
“I don’t think this is something we should be worried about at this point,” he said.
– Holly Ellyatt from CNBC contributed to this article.