The decision by South Africa to suspend a massive deployment of the Oxford / AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine after a study showed that it offers reduced protection against the South African variant is only a temporary delay ‘and contains a new roll-out strategy, the head of the South African Covid -19 advisory committee said on Monday.
“This is only a temporary delay, but the way we are going to implement it is going to be different in that we are following a two-step approach,” epidemiologist Salim Abdool Karim told Times Radio.
During an information session on Sunday, Karim said that ‘if it turns out that the vaccine is not effective in reducing hospitalizations, we will have to offer those individuals another effective vaccine – either a stimulant of the vaccine … or’ must give another vaccine. So we can still move on with our implementation, but we need to do it … wisely by following a quick approach. ‘
He stressed that the reason for this approach is because “we do not really know what the answer to serious diseases is.”
Early data released on Sunday indicate that two doses of the Oxford / AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine offer only ‘minimal protection’ against mild and moderate Covid-19 against the variant first identified in South Africa.
Viral neutralization to variant, called B.1.351, has been “significantly reduced” compared to the previous coronavirus strain, Oxford University said in a news release. The efficacy of the vaccine against severe Covid-19, hospitalization and death has not been evaluated.
Karim further explained on Monday that South Africa will only do the mass vaccination of the vaccine once they are “confident” that it will reduce hospitalization in 100,000 individuals infected with the variant that was first identified in the country.
The first step is to vaccinate probably about 100,000 individuals and then determine what the hospitalization rates are. “Once we are confident that hospitalization rates are low with the AstraZeneca vaccine, we will continue to roll out the remaining million doses we have,” Karim said.
“If it turns out that the hospitalization figures are not as low as we would like, we will of course stop and not roll out AstraZeneca further – so that’s the plan.”
South Africa’s vaccination program has been delayed by two to three weeks, Karim added, saying this is how long they expect it to take before the Johnson & Johnson vaccine arrives in the country.
“With each vaccine that we are going to roll out, we can consider it a two-step process. It is a step-by-step introduction of each vaccine,” Karim explained.
However, the country also reports that the current million doses of Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine expire in April.
The vaccine should have a six-month expiration date, a health department official said during an information session on Sunday – but the dose of Oxford / AstraZeneca that South Africa received from the Serum Institute of India earlier this month. by with an expiration date of April which we only identified on arrival. ‘
Dr Anban Pillay of the Department of Health said the department is awaiting response after asking the Serum Institute for an extension on the date, if possible, or the exchange of shares. ‘
The Minister of Health in South Africa, dr. Zweli Mkhize, said during the Sunday briefing that the vaccines Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer / BioNTech Covid-19 will be available to health workers for the next four weeks and that they will investigate the expiry of Oxford / AstraZeneca. date issue and said there should be “no wastage”.