UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock says he is “incredibly concerned about the South African variant” as cases are increasing in the country.
UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said the new COVID-19 variant identified in South Africa poses a greater risk than the highly contagious UK variant.
“I am incredibly concerned about the South African variant, which is why we have taken the action we have taken to restrict all flights from South Africa,” Hancock told BBC Radio on Monday.
“This is a very, very big problem […] and it is even a bigger problem than the new variant in the UK. “
Hancock said Britain needs to tighten restrictions in some parts of the country to address the rapid spread of a new variant of the coronavirus after cases have spiked in recent weeks.
On Sunday, there were nearly 55,000 new cases and a total of more than 75,000 people in the country died with COVID-19 during the pandemic – the second highest toll in Europe and the sixth worst in the world.
Both Great Britain and South Africa have discovered new variants in the corona virus in recent months.
Meanwhile, the ITV Network’s political editor, referring to an unidentified UK government scientific adviser, said scientists were not completely sure that 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 COVID-19 variant is that they are not as confident that the vaccines will be as effective against it as they were for the British variant. ”ITV political editor Robert Peston said Monday.
Scientists say the new South African variant is different from other variants 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, meaning a higher concentration of virus particles in patients’ bodies, possibly contributing to a higher rate of transmission.
John Bell, the Regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford who is part of the government’s vaccine task force, said on Sunday he thought vaccines would work on the British variant, but said there was a “big question mark” as to whether it would work. . on the South African.
He told Times Radio that if the vaccine didn’t work on the South African variant, the shots could be adjusted and it wouldn’t take a year.
“It can take a month or six weeks to get a new vaccine,” he said.
Britain began vaccinating its population with the COVID-19 shot developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca on Monday, praising a scientific “triumph” that puts it at the forefront of the West in its 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 roll out the Oxford AstraZeneca shot, even though Russia and China have been vaccinating their citizens for months.
Just under a month since Britain became the first country in the world to market the Pfizer-developed vaccine and German BioNTech, dialysis patient Brian Pinker, 82, first received the Oxford AstraZeneca injection on Monday at 7:30 am GMT.
Britain, which is struggling with one of the worst economic blows of the COVID crisis, has already fired more than a million COVID-19 vaccines – more than the rest of Europe put together, Health Minister Hancock said.
“That’s a triumph of British science that we’ve managed to get to where we are today,” Hancock told Sky News. “We saw from the start that the vaccine was the only way out in the long term.”