AstraZeneca jab could be 'limited' on Covid variant
Early trials suggest the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine offers limited protection against gentle disease caused by the South Africa variant.
But the firm stated it believed the vaccine could protect against severe disease caused by the considerably more transmissible coronavirus variant.
The preliminary findings from a tiny study greater than 2,000 people have not yet been peer-reviewed.
More than 100 cases of the Southern Africa variant have been within the UK.
The preliminary findings, first reported by the Financial Times and verified by AstraZeneca, advise the vaccine offers limited protection against gentle and moderate disease due to the variant.
The study is because of be published on Monday.
A good spokesman for AstraZeneca said that they had not but been able to properly establish if the jab would prevent extreme disease and hospitalization caused by the South Africa variant because those mixed up in review had predominantly been young, healthy adults.
But the company expressed self-assurance that the vaccine would offer safety against serious cases, since it produced neutralizing antibodies similar to those of other coronavirus vaccines.
The University of Oxford told Reuters news agency it had been working with AstraZeneca to "optimize" the pipeline in vaccine production if it had a need to adjust to a change in the virus.
It has said a fresh vaccine to job against mutated variants of the virus could possibly be ready to deploy found in the autumn if needed.
Dr Michael Head, a good senior research fellow in global health in Southampton University, said that if the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was less protective against mild disease but prevented extreme disease this would "still be a fairly good outcome".
"I don't think we need to come to be too alarmed by [the reported findings] up to now but we do have to see the full research to work through what the implications really are," he told the BBC.
It comes after the company about Saturday said its vaccine provided great safeguard against the variant initially discovered in Kent, which is currently dominant in the UK.
Current vaccines were designed around previous versions of coronavirus, but scientists believe they should still work against the new ones, although it is not yet clear how very well against different mutations.
Experts mention vaccines could possibly be redesigned and tweaked to end up being a better meet for new variants in a matter or weeks or months if necessary.
