LONDON: Developers of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine hopes to have a modified jab to deal with the South Africa coronavirus variant until the fall, the vaccine’s principal investigator said on Sunday.
Health officials in Britain are trying to stem the spread of the variant first identified in South Africa amid concerns that it is more contagious or resistant to existing vaccines. More than 100 cases of the South African variant have been found in the United Kingdom.
Sarah Gilbert, chief researcher at the Oxford team, told the BBC on Sunday that “we have a version with the South African peak sequence in progress”.
“It seems very likely that we can have a new version ready for use in the fall,” she added.
Your comments came as Oxford University said that the first data from a small study suggested that the AstraZeneca vaccine offers only “minimal protection” against mild illnesses caused by the South African variant.
The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, involved 2,000 people, most of whom were young and healthy. The average age of the volunteers was 31 years.
“Protection against moderate to severe illness, hospitalization or death could not be assessed in this study because the target population was at such low risk,” said the University of Oxford.
Robin Shattock, a scientist who is leading coronavirus vaccine research at Imperial College London, urged caution about the study’s first findings. But he said it was “worrying, to some extent, to find that it is not effective against mild or moderate illnesses”.
Authorities in England went from house to house last week to administer the Covid-19 test in eight areas where the South African variant is believed to be spreading after a handful of cases were found in people who had no contact with the country or anyone who traveled there.
The testing campaign is an attempt to extinguish the variant before it spreads widely and undermines US vaccination implementation. Public health officials are concerned about the South African variant because it contains a mutation of the virus’s characteristic spike protein, which is the target of existing vaccines.
Britain saw the deadliest coronavirus outbreak in Europe, with more than 112,000 confirmed deaths, but embarked on a vaccination plan faster than the neighboring European Union. So far, the UK has given the first coronavirus vaccine to about 11.5 million people.
