British Health Minister Matt Hancock says he is “incredibly concerned about the South African variant” as cases increase in the country.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said the new COVID-19 variant identified in South Africa poses a greater risk than the highly infectious variant in the UK.
“I am incredibly concerned about the South African variant, which 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 is even more of a problem than the new variant of the United Kingdom ”.
Hancock said Britain needs to tighten restrictions in some areas of the country to cope with the rapid spread of a new variant of the coronavirus after increased cases in recent weeks.
On Sunday, nearly 55,000 new cases were reported, and in total more than 75,000 people in the country have died with COVID-19 during the pandemic, the second highest toll in Europe and the sixth worst in the world.
Both Britain and South Africa have discovered new variants in coronavirus in recent months.
Meanwhile, the political editor of the ITV network, citing an unidentified scientific adviser to the British government, said scientists were not fully confident 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’ for the South African variant COVID-19 is that they are not confident that vaccines will be as effective against it as they are for the UK variant. United, “Robert Peston, ITV’s political editor, 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 “ear” protein that the virus uses to infect human cells.
It has also been associated with a higher viral load, i.e., a higher concentration of virus particles in patients ’bodies, possibly contributing to higher levels of transmission.
John Bell, a regimental professor of medicine at Oxford University who is part of the government’s vaccine working group, said on Sunday he believed vaccines would work with the British variant, but said there was a “big question mark”. “on whether it would work in South Africa.
He told Times Radio that if the vaccine did not work in the South African variant, the shots could be adapted and that would not take a year.
“It can take a month or six weeks to get a new vaccine,” he said.
On Monday, Britain began vaccinating its population with the COVID-19 trait developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, promoting a scientific “triumph” that puts it at the forefront of the West to inoculate 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 shot, although Russia and China have been inoculating their citizens for months. .
Just under a month after Britain became the first country in the world to deploy the vaccine developed by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech, dialysis patient Brian Pinker, 82, was the first to be shot. in Oxford at AstraZeneca at 07:30 GMT Monday.
Britain, facing one of the worst economic successes of the COVID crisis, has put in arms more than a million vaccines against COVID-19, more than the rest of Europe, said Health Secretary Hancock.
“This is a triumph of British science that we have managed to get where we are,” Hancock told Sky News. “At first, we saw that the vaccine was the only long-term way out.”