South Africa suspends application of Ox vaccine …

The South African government has decided to suspend the application of the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca after a study showed it had limited effectiveness in combating the variant coronavirus discovered in the country.

“It’s temporary until we consider the next step”, said South African Minister of Health Zweli Mkhize, who gave a virtual press conference this Sunday with other specialists.

The decision not to apply the AstraZeneca vaccine, the only one to have reached the country so far, was taken after preliminary data from a study developed by the University of Oxford and the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg ) have been known.

According to this study, which will be published on Monday, but the results of which have been put forward by the British newspaper Financial Times, the vaccine is only 22% effective against mild and moderate cases of the South African variant. This new strain, discovered last December, is 50% more contagious, but so far it has not manifested itself more seriously for patients.

Again it is not known whether the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine is effective or not in preventing severe cases of coronavirus, since the volunteers who took part in the study belonged to low-risk groups: 2000 people, mostly young adults and in good health.

“This is very disappointing news. What I should point out is that two-thirds (of infections) in the study were due to mild infection and one-third to moderate illness. What the data doesn’t tell us is whether it protects against serious illness, ”said vaccination expert Shabir Madhi, professor at the University of the Witwatersrand.

The temporary suspension of the vaccination campaign is forcing the South African government to develop a new plan to gain immunity for its population, the most affected by the virus on the African continent.

Because the only vaccine that has reached South Africa is that of Oxford / AstraZeneca, local authorities are working to secure doses of Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer / BioNTech vaccines, among others, which have demonstrated sufficient efficacy against the dominant variant of the coronavirus in the country.

Despite this setback, South Africa maintains its plans to start immunizing its health workers this month. So far, the country has recorded 1,476,135 cases of covid-19, of which 46,290 have died.

Oxford and AstraZeneca, for their part, have already announced that they are making a new vaccine that works in the South African variant. This new drug would be available for the last quarter of the year.