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British Health Minister Matt Hancock says he is “incredibly concerned about the South African variant” as cases in the country increase.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said that the new COVID-19 variant identified in South Africa is a greater risk than the highly infectious UK variant.
“I am incredibly concerned about the South African variant, and that is why we took the steps we did to restrict all flights from South Africa,” Hancock told BBC Radio on Monday.
“This is a very, very important problem. […] and it’s even more troublesome than the new UK variant. “
Hancock said the UK needs to tighten restrictions in some areas of the country to cope with the rapid spread of a new variant of the coronavirus after cases spiked in recent weeks.
On Sunday, there were almost 55,000 new cases and in total more than 75,000 people in the country died from COVID-19 during the pandemic, the second highest figure 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 ITV network’s political editor, citing an unidentified scientific adviser to the British government, said that scientists were not entirely sure that COVID-19 vaccines would work in 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 sure that the vaccines will be as effective against it as they are for the variant. from the UK, ”ITV political editor Robert Peston said 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, the royal professor of medicine at Oxford University who is part of the government’s vaccine task force, said Sunday that he thought the vaccines would work on the British variant, but said there was a “big question mark” on whether it would work. in the South African.
He told Times Radio that if the vaccine did not work in the South African variant, the injections could be adapted and that would not take a year.
“It could take a month or six weeks to get a new vaccine,” he said.
On Monday, Britain began vaccinating its population with the COVID-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, touting a scientific “triumph” that places it at the forefront of the West in vaccinating 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 implement the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, although Russia and China have been vaccinating their citizens for months.
Just under a month since Britain became the first country in the world to launch the vaccine developed by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech, 82-year-old dialysis patient Brian Pinker was the first to receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca injection. at 07:30 GMT on Monday.
Britain, dealing with one of the worst economic impacts of the COVID crisis, has already armed more than a million COVID-19 vaccines, more than the rest of Europe combined, Health Secretary Hancock said.
“It is a triumph of British science that we have managed to get to where we are,” Hancock told Sky News. “From the beginning, we saw that the vaccine was the only long-term way out.”
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