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The first one million COVID-19 vaccine doses, developed by AstraZeneca and supplied by India’s Serum Institute, touched down last week.

Shortly thereafter, while we waited for the various checks to take place before it would be distributed, the national government launched its electronic vaccination data system (EVDS).

At that stage in the vaccine timeline, it looked like everything was going reasonably well. Our frontline healthcare workers would be first in line for the jab, and things would progress from there, according to the three-phase rollout plan.

A week later, and that plan seems to have fallen apart.

The lead investigator in the Oxford/AstraZeneca trial, Professor Shabir Madhi, said that there were “disappointing results” showing that the vaccine did not work well against the COVID-19 variant 501Y.V2, which was first identified in South Africa.

The co-chairperson of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19, Prof Salim Abdool Karim, makes a compelling argument for why we shouldn’t call it the South African variant, so 501Y.V2 it is.

Per The Daily Maverick, the vaccines that arrived last week are also expiring faster than anticipated. While it was initially assumed that they would last into the middle of the year, they are set to expire in April.

Back to Madhi, who headed up a study of 2 000 adults between the ages of 18 and 65 without underlying comorbidities. The research team found that the new variant exhibited some resistance to the antibodies produced by an immune response to infection with the initial coronavirus that hit us last year.

When they tested the vaccine in the laboratory against the variant, they realised that the antibodies produced by the AstraZeneca vaccine were not active against it.

Right now, 90% of positive cases of COVID-19 in South Africa have been caused by 501Y.V2.

For the vaccine to be successful, Madhi says, it would have had to show 60% efficacy.

“Unfortunately, viruses mutate. Sometimes this is by accident. But often the reason is that the virus wants to become more adept to infect the host.”

“In a country like South Africa where as many as 30% of the population were infected during the first wave the virus was under pressure. It had to evolve to ensure its survival,” Mahdi said. “It is a way to become evasive to immune responses.”

South Africa is also set to receive the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which Professor Glenda Gray, the president of the Medical Research Council and the principal investigator for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, says has been proven to protect against severe disease and death in cases of infection with 501Y.V2.

“The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has proven to be effective. We are doing an implementation study. Everyone will be vaccinated and then we will monitor what happens,” he said.

“A single shot can stop hospitalisation and death. We want to protect our healthcare workers. The quickest way to bring this vaccine out is to use this programme.”

There are also studies on the go that are looking into combining the Johnson & Johnson and the AstraZeneca vaccines.

Professor Karim says that for now the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine will be put on hold. Instead, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be administered to healthcare workers.

You can read the Daily Maverick’s full article, with more from Madhi and Karim, here.

[source:dailymaverick]