The coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa may evade the protection provided by Pfizer/BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study in Israel found, though its prevalence in the country is very low and the research has not been peer reviewed.
The study, released on Saturday, compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine, against the same number of unvaccinated patients with the disease.
It matched age and gender, among other characteristics.
The South African variant, B.1.351, was found to make up about 1% of all the COVID-19 cases across all the people studied, according to the study by Tel Aviv University and Israel's largest healthcare provider, Clalit.
Kandodo had used 613,000 kwacha worth of COVID-19 funds for a foreign trip, Chakwera said, adding that even though he had since repaid the money his actions meant it was not available for its intended purpose when it was needed.
Kandodo told Reuters he was shocked by the decision but declined to comment further until Monday.
Chakwera promised to curb corruption when he took office in June last year, bringing his Malawi Congress Party out of opposition for the first time in 26 years.
He said there would be more arrests related to the audit, that civil servants would be made to repay stolen funds and that he would commission further audits into coronavirus-related spending and the use of funds in other areas like infrastructure.
But among patients who had received two doses of the vaccine, the variant's prevalence rate was eight times higher than those unvaccinated - 5.4% versus 0.7%.
This suggests the vaccine is less effective against the South African variant, compared with the original coronavirus and a variant first identified in Britain that has come to comprise nearly all COVID-19 cases in Israel, the researchers said.
"We found a disproportionately higher rate of the South African variant among people vaccinated with a second dose, compared to the unvaccinated group. This means that the South African variant is able, to some extent, to break through the vaccine's protection," said Tel Aviv University's Adi Stern.
The researchers cautioned, though, that the study only had a small sample size of people infected with the South African variant because of its rarity in Israel.
They also said the research was not intended to deduce overall vaccine effectiveness against any variant, since it only looked at people who had already tested positive for COVID-19, not at overall infection rates.
Pfizer(PFE.N) declined to comment on the Israeli study.
Pfizer and BioNTech(22UAy.DE) said on April 1 that their vaccine was around 91% effective at preventing COVID-19, citing updated trial data that included participants inoculated for up to six months.
They have been testing a third dose of their shot as a booster, and have said they could modify the shot to specifically address new variants if needed.
In respect to the South African variant, they said that among a group of 800 study volunteers in South Africa, where B.1.351 is widespread, there were nine cases of COVID-19, all of which occurred among participants who got the placebo. Of those nine cases, six were among individuals infected with the South African variant. read more
Some previous studies have indicated that the Pfizer/BioNTech shot was less potent against the B.1.351 variant than against other variants of the coronavirus, but still offered a robust defence.
VARIANT IS NOT WIDESPREAD
While the results of the study may cause concern, the low prevalence of the South African strain was encouraging, according to Tel Aviv University's Stern.
"Even if the South African variant does break through the vaccine's protection, it has not spread widely through the population," said Stern, adding that the British variant may be "blocking" the spread of the South African strain.
Almost 53% of Israel's 9.3 million population has received both Pfizer doses. Israel has largely reopened its economy in recent weeks while the pandemic appears to be receding, with infection rates, severe illness and hospitalizations dropping sharply.
About a third of Israelis are below the age of 16, which means they are still not eligible for the shot.
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RUSSIA’S Sputnik V shot is less effective against the South African COVID-19 variant but still does better than other vaccines, the lead scientist behind it was quoted as saying on Friday.
“With regards to the ‘South African’ variant, the effectiveness of the antibodies produced by Sputnik V, like all other vaccines, against it declines,” Alexander Gintsburg said in an interview with the Interfax news agency.
He said that Sputnik V was tested against the British and South African variants, as well as the original strain, first detected in China’s Wuhan province, by laboratories in the United States. The labs used blood samples collected from people vaccinated with Sputnik V in Argentina, Gintsburg said.
Underlining that Russian researchers played no part in the lab tests, Gintsburg said that the results in trials of Sputnik V against the Wuhan strain confirmed what his team at Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute found.
“It has also been shown that of all the vaccines currently in use in the world, Sputnik V… is best at neutralising the ‘British’ variant well,” Gintsburg said.
Though the antibody response against the South African variant was less intense, the decline was significantly smaller than the drop other vaccines showed, Gintsburg was cited as saying.
Source - Thomson Reuters Foundation
STEPHANIE NEBEHAY
THE COVAX vaccine facility has delivered nearly 38.4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to 102 countries and economies across six continents, six weeks after it began to roll out supplies, according to a statement yesterday.
The programme offers a lifeline to low-income countries, in particular, allowing them in the first instance to inoculate health workers and others at high risk, even if their governments have not managed to secure vaccines from the manufacturers.
But there have been some delays, the GAVI vaccine alliance and World Health Organization said in a statement.
Reduced availability of delayed some deliveries in March and April, and much of the output of the Serum Institute of India, which makes the AstraZeneca vaccine, is being kept in India, where daily infections surpassed 100,000 for the first time on Monday.
The Caribbean island of St. Lucia became the 100th country to receive vaccines through COVAX. Iran, also battling a record rate of infection, is another recent recipient.
The 102 countries reached so far include 61 benefiting from a mechanism essentially financed by donors.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Monday called it a “travesty” that some countries still did not have enough vaccines to begin inoculating health workers and the most vulnerable.
GAVI said last month that it planned to deliver 237 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine – which has been produced at cost for a few dollars a dose, and does not require the advanced refrigeration of some other coronavirus vaccines – to 142 countries by the end of May.
“COVAX may be on track to deliver to all participating economies in the first half of the year, yet we still face a daunting challenge as we seek to end the acute stage of the pandemic,” GAVI chief executive Seth Berkley said in the statement.
Nonetheless, COVAX still expects to deliver at least 2 billion doses this year 2021 and to diversify the offering beyond the AstraZeneca/Oxford and Pfizer/BioNTech shots it is currently supplying.
Source- Thomson Reuters Foundation
THE World Bank estimates that Africa would need about $12 billion for COVID-19 vaccines and their distribution to attain sufficient levels of vaccination coverage to interrupt virus transmission, according to a new paper by the bank and the IMF.
The paper argued for a further extension of the Group of 20’s debt service moratorium through year-end, noting the continued high liquidity needs of developing countries and their deteriorating debt sustainability outlooks.
It said the amount of money Africa needed to interrupt transmission of the virus was about the same as the total amount of official debt service payments already deferred by 45 of the poorest countries participating in the G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI).
Source - Thomson Reuters Foundation