British Health Minister Matt Hancock says he is “extremely concerned about the South African variant” as cases increase in the country.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the new variant of COVID-19 identified in South Africa is a greater risk than the highly infectious variant in the UK.
“I am extremely concerned about the South African variant and that is why we have taken the steps we have taken to restrict all flights from South Africa,” Hancock told BBC radio on Monday.
“This is a very, very significant problem […] and it is even more problematic than the new UK variant. “
Hancock said Britain needs to tighten restrictions in some areas of the country to combat the rapid spread of a new variant of the coronavirus, after the increase in cases in recent weeks.
On Sunday, there were almost 55,000 new cases and, in total, more than 75,000 people in the country died of COVID-19 during the pandemic – the second highest death rate in Europe and the sixth worst in the world.
Both Britain and South Africa have discovered new variants of the coronavirus in recent months.
Meanwhile, the political editor of the ITV network, citing an unnamed scientific adviser to the British government, said the scientists were not entirely confident that the COVID-19 vaccines would work on the new South African variant.
“According to one of the government’s scientific advisers, the reason for Matt Hancock’s ‘incredible concern’ about the South African variant of COVID-19 is that they are not as confident that vaccines will be as effective against them as they are for the UK variant, ”said ITV political editor Robert Peston on Monday.
Scientists say the new South African variant is different from others circulating in the country because it has multiple mutations in the important “spike” protein that the virus uses to infect human cells.
It has also been associated with a higher viral load, which means a higher concentration of viral particles in the patients’ bodies, possibly contributing to higher levels of transmission.
John Bell, the regius professor of medicine at Oxford University who is part of the government’s vaccine task force, said on Sunday that he thought vaccines would work in the British variant, but said there was a “big question mark” about whether would work in South Africa.
He told Times Radio that if the vaccine did not work in the South African variant, the vaccines could be adapted and that would not take a year.
“It may take a month or six weeks to get a new vaccine,” he said.
Great Britain started on Monday to vaccinate its population with the COVID-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, announcing a scientific “triumph” that puts it at the forefront of the West in inoculation against the virus.
Britain, which is running to vaccinate its population faster than the United States and the rest of Europe, is the first country to launch the Oxford-AstraZeneca injection, although Russia and China have been vaccinating their citizens for months.
Just under a month since Great Britain became the first country in the world to launch the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech in Germany, dialysis patient Brian Pinker, 82, was the first to get the Oxford vaccine -AstraZeneca at 07:30 GMT on Monday.
Britain, struggling with one of the worst economic scams of the COVID crisis, has already put more than a million COVID-19 vaccines into arms – more than the rest of Europe combined, Health Secretary Hancock said.
“It is a triumph of British science that we have managed to get where we are,” Hancock told Sky News. “Early on, we saw that the vaccine was the only way out in the long run.”