The British Minister of Health, Matt Hancock, says that he is “incredibly worried about the South African version”, as the cases increase in the country.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the new COVID-19 variant identified in South Africa posed a higher risk than the highly infectious variant in the UK.
“I am extremely concerned about the South African version and that is why we have taken the steps we have taken to restrict all flights in South Africa,” Hancock told BBC Radio on Monday.
“This is a very, very significant issue […] and it’s even more of a problem than the new UK version. “
Hancock said Britain needs to tighten restrictions in some areas of the country to address the rapid spread of a new variant of coronavirus after cases have emerged in recent weeks.
On Sunday, there were almost 55,000 new cases and a total of more than 75,000 people in the country died of COVID-19 during the pandemic – the second largest in Europe and the sixth worst in the world.
Both the United Kingdom and South Africa have discovered new variants in coronavirus in recent months.
Meanwhile, the political editor of the ITV network, quoting an unidentified scientific adviser to the British government, said that scientists are not fully confident that COVID-19 vaccines will work on the new South African version.
“According to one of the government’s scientific advisers, Matt Hancock’s” incredible concern “about the COVID-19 variant in South Africa is that they are not as sure that vaccines will be as effective against it as the UK version, ”ITV political editor Robert Peston said 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 virus particles in the body of patients, possibly contributing to higher levels of transmission.
John Bell, a regius professor of medicine at Oxford University who is part of the government’s working group on vaccines, said on Sunday he believed the vaccines would work on the British version, but said there was a “big question mark”. if the South African one works.
He told Times Radio that if the vaccine did not work on the South African version, the photos could be adapted and would not last a year.
“It may take a month or six weeks to get a new vaccine,” he said.
Britain began vaccinating its population on Monday with the COVID-19 shot developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, promoting a scientific “triumph” that puts it at the forefront of the West in inoculation against the virus.
Britain, which is rushing to vaccinate its population faster than the United States and the rest of Europe, is the first country to launch the Oxford-AstraZeneca coup, although Russia and China have been inoculating their citizens for months.
In less than a month since Britain became the first country in the world to launch the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech in Germany, 82-year-old dialysis patient Brian Pinker was the first to receive the Oxford shot. -AstraZeneca on Monday at 07:30 GMT.
Britain, which is facing one of the worst economic successes in 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.
“This is a triumph of British science that we have managed to get to where we are,” Hancock told Sky News. “Right from the start, I saw that the vaccine was the only way out in the long run.”