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 said the new COVID-19 variant identified in South Africa was at greater risk than the highly contagious British variant.
“I am incredibly concerned about the South African variant, which is why we have taken the action to restrict all flights from South Africa,” Hancock told BBC Radio on Monday.
‘This is a very, very important problem […] and this is an even bigger problem than the British new variant. ‘
Hancock said Britain needed to step up restrictions in some parts of the country to tackle the rapid spread of a new variant of the coronavirus after cases increased in recent weeks.
On Sunday, there were almost 55,000 new cases and in total 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 Britain and South Africa have discovered new variants in the coronavirus in recent months.
Meanwhile, the political editor of the ITV network, citing an unidentified British government scientific adviser, said scientists were not 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’ about the South African COVID-19 variant is that they are not so confident that the vaccines against it will be as effective as for the British variant. not, ”ITV political editor Robert Peston said on Monday.
Scientists say the new South African variant differs from others spread in the country because it has multiple mutations in the important “spike” protein that the virus uses to infect human cells.
It is also associated with a higher virus load, which means a higher concentration of virus particles in the bodies of patients, possibly contributing to higher levels of transmission.
John Bell, the regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, who sits on 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 going to work. on the South African one.
He told Times Radio that if the vaccine did not work on the South African variant, the shots could be adjusted and that it would not last a year.
“It can take a month or six weeks to get a new vaccine,” he said.
Britain on Monday vaccinated its population with the COVID-19 shot developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, which is a scientific ‘triumph’ that puts the West at the forefront of vaccinating the virus.
Britain, which is in a hurry to vaccinate its population faster than the United States and the rest of Europe, is the first country to adopt the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot, although Russia and China have been vaccinating their citizens for months.
Less than a month after Britain became the first country in the world to develop the vaccine developed by Pfizer, and the German BioNTech, dialysis patient Brian Pinker (82) first had the Oxford-AstraZeneca on Monday at 07:30 GMT shot.
Britain, which is facing one of the worst economic hits of the COVID crisis, has already put more than a million COVID-19 vaccines in its arms – more than the rest of Europe, the health minister said. Hancock, said.
“It’s a triumph of British science that we were able to get where we are,” Hancock told Sky News. “In the beginning, we saw that the vaccine was the only long-term way out.”