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South Africa has suspended plans to inoculate its front-line health care workers with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after a small clinical trial suggested that it isn’t effective in preventing mild to moderate illness from the variant dominant in the country. South Africa received its first 1 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine last week and was expected to begin giving jabs to health care workers in mid-February. The disappointing early results indicate that an inoculation drive using the AstraZeneca vaccine may not be useful. (Meldrum and Hui, 2/7)

The findings were a devastating blow to the country’s efforts to combat the pandemic. Scientists in South Africa said on Sunday that a similar problem held among people who had been infected by earlier versions of the coronavirus: The immunity they acquired naturally did not appear to protect them from mild or moderate cases when reinfected by the variant, known as B.1.351. (2/8)

Protection against moderate-severe disease, hospitalisation or death could not be assessed in the study as the target population were at such low risk, the researchers said. ... Professor Shabir Madhi, lead investigator on the AstraZeneca trial in South Africa, said the vaccine’s similarity to another produced by Johnson & Johnson, which reduced severe disease by 89%, suggested it would still prevent serious illness or death. “There’s still some hope that the AstraZeneca vaccine might well perform as well as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in a different age group demographic that I address of severe disease,” he told BBC radio. (Faulconbridge and Holton, 2/8)

South Africa’s health minister, Zweli Mkhize, said that while the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine was on hold, the country would accelerate the deployment of the J&J shot, of which it has ordered 9 million doses. That vaccine, which requires only one dose, was found to be 57% effective at preventing mild and moderate cases of Covid-19 in a recent clinical trial in South Africa and offered 85% protection against severe illness. (Steinhauser, 2/7)

Drugmaker AstraZeneca is racing to adapt its Covid-19 vaccine in the face of new variants of the virus, with the process becoming more urgent after a small-scale study found that it was less effective at protecting against the more virulent strain discovered in South Africa. The country said it would suspend the use of the shot in its vaccination program after a study, published Sunday and not yet peer-reviewed, found that the vaccine offered “minimal protection” against mild to moderate disease caused by the South African variant. (Ellyatt, 2/8)