South African variant - The African Mirror

Feb

2021

Nigeria to stick with AstraZeneca vaccine

NIGERIA has not yet found the South African variant of COVID-19 in its population and will continue with plans to distribute the AstraZeneca vaccine, the head of the country's primary healthcare agency said yesterday. On Sunday, South Africa said it would put its use of the AstraZeneca shot on hold after research showed it was only minimally effective in preventing mild illness against the coronavirus variant dominant in the country. Faisal Shuaib, director of Nigeria's national primary healthcare development agency, said authorities were diligently searching test samples for the South African strain, and subjecting samples from travellers returning from the…

Jan

2021

By The African Mirror

Data on AstraZeneca vaccine and S.African variant should come soon – UK expert

COVID-19

DATA on the highly contagious COVID-19 variant identified in England do not suggest that vaccines will be less effective against it, while data on the South African variant should be available within weeks, a top British vaccines expert has said. "We have the most data on the UK variant. That doesn't suggest that it will be any less well protected against by the vaccine," said Wei Shen Lim, chair of Covid-19 Immunisation on Britain's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Asked specifically about the South African variant, he said that Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine trials had been conducted in South Africa which…

Jan

2021

By The African Mirror

New variant unlikely to fully negate vaccines

COVID-19

ALEXANDER WINNING A variant of the coronavirus first detected in South Africa is unlikely to completely negate the immunising effects of vaccines, a researcher studying it told Reuters. British scientists expressed concern on Monday that COVID-19 vaccines may not be able to protect against the variant identified by South African genomics scientists and which has spread internationally. Richard Lessells, an infectious disease expert at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, which played a central role in identifying the variant known as 501Y.V2, said his understanding was that the comments were not based on any new data but on shared…