A mutation of the Covid-19 virus was discovered in South Africa and announced in December 2020. Similar to the UK mutation that India has been dealing with this year, the South African strain (501Y.V2) is more transmissible. However, it also affects the younger population more.
What is this variant and what does this mean for the countrys efforts to vaccinate the population against Covid-19? Take a look:
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LOS ANGELES (CNS) - Beginning next week, Angelenos will no longer need an appointment to get a COVID-19 test -- not to be confused with vaccine -- at Los Angeles sites, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Thursday.
"Since we became the first big city in America to offer universal testing, free to everyone with or without symptoms, we've tested more times than there are people in the city of Los Angeles, over four million tests across 14 city-run sites, 136 nursing facilities and over 150 mobile sites we've set up around the city," Garcetti said during his COVID-19 briefing.
People seeking a test starting next week will be able to show up to any testing site Monday through Saturday between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. While people wait in line, they'll be able to register for test, and all they need to bring is their insurance information or identification if they don't have insurance.
Garcetti did not specify which day next week appointment-free testing will begin.
People wanting to plan in advance can still sign up for an appointment in advance.
Appointments can be made at and a list of testing sites is available at corona-virus.la/covid-19-testing.
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How will the storage requirements of the Pfizer vaccine affect the programme?
The vaccine must be storedat -70C to be effective, meaning it can only be delivered to GPs with the facilities to keep it at that temperature.
It will be difficult to administer in care homes.Deputy chief medical officer professor Jonathan Van-Tam said: This is a complex product. It is not a yoghurt that can be taken out of the fridge and put back in several times.
It is understood the vaccine batches are being broken down into doses of 75, in order to give the vaccine toelderly residents and staff in homes with more than 50 beds to avoid wastage.
The Oxford vaccine does not need to be stored in such cold conditions - it can be kept at temperatures between 2C and 8C.
This means it is moremobile than the Pfizer jab and therefore more easily deployed into care homes of varying sizes and into private homes for individual doses.
Experts believe the Oxford jab will be easier to deploy beyond formal healthcare settings, in part because it does not need to be stored at such cold temperatures as the other approved vaccine.
Vaccine MinisterNadhimZahawi said that 8am-8pm inoculations will continue for those in the over-80s age group, but as more people in other age groupsbegin to receive the vaccine, "it becomes much more convenient for people to go late at night and in the early hours".
Mr Zahawi expected the scheme to be in operation in hospitals around London, and 50 vaccination centres, by February.
Additionally, three hospitals in Birmingham began offering 24-hour vaccinations for health and social staff from the night of Jan 20.
Offering vaccinations overnight will speed up the rollout, and allow the Government to reach their goal of vaccinating 32 million people - 60 per cent of the UK adult population by spring, which was announced on Jan 11.
The EU has threatened to block exports of the Pfizer vaccine following a row with the vaccine company, AstraZeneca.
On Jan 26, Brussels decided to impose tighter controls on exports afterreacting with furyto the news that AstraZenecawill deliver 50 million fewer doses to the EUthan it had expected.
The EU has said that it will "take any action required to protect its citizens", leading ministers to worry that the delivery ofPfizer vaccines to the UK will- at best - be delayed by extra paperwork.
This led the Governmentto say on Jan 31that it can "absolutely guarantee" its programme of delivery of the Covid-19 jab,amidthe row with the EU over vaccine supplies, with International trade secretary Liz Truss confirming that "contractual supplies won't be disrupted."
Two of the first NHS staff to get the jab suffered allergic reactionsandtheMedicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency warned the vaccine should not be administered topeoplewith a history of significantallergic reactions.
However, ProfStephen Powis said that this was common for new vaccines and the staff haverecovered well.
The South African variant and the Brazilian variant have threatened to undermine the vaccine and testing gains of recent months.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is expecting some vaccine tweaks to be needed as it has already begun to look at how quickly an altered jab could be approved, and Matt Hancock has said he is "very worried".
As of Feb 10, 141cases of the South Africa Covid-19 variant have been identified in the UK. Due to some cases not being linked to travel,door-to-door testing will take place in some parts of England.
This comes as scientists have found that theKent coronavirus variantis mutating to mimic theSouth African variant,which could render current vaccines less effective.
It was announced on Feb 7 that studies of the Oxford University-AstraZeneca jab have shown that itdoes not protect against mild and moderate infection of the South African variant.
However, vaccines against new coronavirus variants should be ready by October, the team behind theOxford University/AstraZeneca jabhas said.
On Jan 25, Moderna Inc announced that its vaccine was effective against the Kent and South African variants. Deliveries of the vaccine will take place in the spring.
Britain is also on the brink of approving a fourth coronavirus vaccine, after a jab trialed in the UK was shown to be highly effective against the Kent variant in what the Health Secretary hailed as a breakthrough.
Sixty million doses of the Novavax jab have been secured by the UK,which Mr Zahawi was himself injected with as part of the trial, which was shown to be 89.3 per cent effective in preventing coronavirus in participants.
Professor Paul Heath, the Novavax Phase 3 trial chief investigator, said he believed that vaccines could be adapted "at pace" to target new variants of coronavirus after the Novavax jab was found to be effective against the Kent variant.
Crucially, it was shown to be highly effective in preventing infection from the Kent variant whichBoris Johnson said on Jan 22 could be up to 30 per cent more deadly than the original.
Prof Neil Ferguson, who sits on Nervtag, the Government's virus advisory committee, said the latest data showed up to 13 in 1000 people aged 60 who contract the variant strain could die, compared with 10 in 1000 who caught the original variant.
"It is a realistic possibility that the new UK variant increases the risk of death, but there is considerable remaining uncertainty," Prof Ferguson told ITV.
The professor said the data available on the new variant is patchy, but there is a "signal" that there is a "1.3-fold increased risk of death".
However, most promisingly, on Jan 16, The Telegraph exclusively revealed that Britain would have the capacity to vaccinate the entire nation against new coronavirus strains within four months, once a new super-factory opens this year.
The government is currently looking to the future, and Boris Johnson has said that elderly and vulnerable people in the UK may have a coronavirus vaccine every year, similar to the roll-out of the annual flu jab.
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All other regions of England have given their first dose to more than nine in ten of the over 80s, with London a distinct outlier. After the first two months of the vaccination programme only four in five (81 per cent) of over 80s had been given their first dose in the capital.
But in terms of second jabs, London has now fully vaccinated the highest proportion of over 80s - at 14 per cent - affording that smaller number of people greater protection.
The lowest is in the Midlands - at 9.2 per cent - static from the week prior.
Proportionally, more people in their 70s have now received a first vaccination, with close to full coverage in most regions, based on exceeding 2019 estimates.
Among younger age groups, almost one in six people under 70 have now received their first jab in the North West, with more than one on ten having received their first dose in every English region.
All of the doses given so far have been forthe Government's first set of priority groups - atotal of 32m people that includes everyone over the age of 50 as well as all frontline workers and people with underlying conditions that make them highly vulnerableCovid-19.
The nine groups are below - and it isthe people within the first four groups, comprising 15m people, that the Government is aiming to offer doses to by mid-February:
When asked how the Government will identify which key workers need the vaccine more urgently, the Health Secretary shared that 99 per cent of deaths are in the top nine groups of the JCVI guidelines. After that, the goal is to reduce transmission and get back to normal as soon as possible.
Scotland has now given out over 1m first doses.
In Wales, over 800,000first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine havenow been given.
Read more:From transmission to efficacy, the Oxford, Pfizer and other Covid vaccines compared
A fast pace of dose givingso far means the UK stands relatively strong in the international rankings of vaccinations.
So far the UK is ranked 4th in the world, according to statistics compiled by Our World in Data, a team of statistical researchers based in Oxford.
A team at the Mayo Clinic health system looked at more than 31,000 people across four states who had received at least one dose of either vaccine -- and found their vaccines were upwards of 80% effective in preventing infection 36 days after the first dose.
Vaccine efficacy was 75% 15 days after the first dose, and appeared 89% effective from 36 days after the second dose, according to the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.
More than 59 million vaccine doses have so far been administered in the US, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, said Friday that the US is unlikely to achieve herd immunity for the virus before the winter.
"We know Covid is really seasonal, so when the next winter rolls around, we need to have a much higher level of protection to stop Covid in its tracks than we are likely to achieve," he said.
Herd immunity doesn't take effect until 80% or more of the population has immunity, either through infection or vaccination. And the new variants may complicate the picture, Murray said. If people can be reinfected with the new variants, the pandemic may take off again.
Though officials hope to have vaccines widely distributed by the end of the summer, President Biden said Friday that issues like weather, mutating strains and manufacturing delays make it hard to nail down a timeline.
Too risky to give single doses, Fauci says
One way to protect more people quickly, some experts suggest, is to prioritize administering first doses of the vaccine.
"Would that really be a problem, because if we could do that, we could vaccinate a lot more high-risk people, quickly...Everybody needs a second dose, but I think we can do it in a way that's still safe and get a lot more people protected," Jha told CNN's Poppy Harlow.
But Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Friday that a single-dose plan would be too risky.
Fauci said he worried that if large numbers of people got a single shot and had less than optimal immune responses, they could be exposed to the virus and start incubating viral mutations. In theory, new variants could arise, he said.
"We will stick with the scientifically documented efficacy and optimal response of a prime followed by a boost with the mRNA vaccines," Fauci told a White House briefing.
Jha, for his part, said he agreed that everybody needed a second dose, "I think the question is, right now we wait four weeks between first and second dose. What if we went six weeks or eight weeks or 10 weeks -- not much longer than that."
School can reopen no matter the virus' spread, CDC director says
In the hopes of returning to some sense of normalcy, a priority to many families and officials has been allowing students to resume in-person learning.
And CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Friday that given the right precautions, schools may open no matter how much virus is spreading in the community.
As of Tuesday, CNN analysis indicated about 90% of children live in so-called red zones under the CDC's guidance -- meaning there is a high level of community spread of the virus. But even in those conditions, schools can safely reopen if they take precautions, Walensky told a White House briefing.
The CDC has said schools can reopen if they make sure they are mitigating the risk of spread with universal mask use, measures to keep children and staff six feet apart, frequent cleaning and disinfection and testing and contact tracing.
The CDC director's assurances came as Fauci announced that the US should have vaccine safety data for high school-age kids by the beginning of the Fall.
Companies are just starting tests of younger age groups but have been testing their vaccines on 12- to 17-year-olds, Fauci told a White House briefing. Safety data for younger children will likely not be available until early next year, he said.
Vaccine hesitancy not an excuse for inequities
Meanwhile, vaccine trials and distribution have shed light on inequities in the medical field.
People of color have been vastly underrepresented in US-based vaccine trials for the last decade, according to a new study released Friday by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Harvard, Emory and other institutions.
The study found that White people made up the majority, or 78%, of participants in trials conducted between June 2011 and June 2020.
The study, published in the JAMA Network Open, comes as the nation grapples with a pandemic that has disproportionately impacted people of color. Health care leaders are working to combat vaccine distrust among Black and brown people, saying the shot is the key to preventing further devastating in their communities.
But that hesitancy should not be an excuse for officials to explain away racial disparities in vaccination, Fauci said.
"It's that we've got to really extend ourselves into the community to get the access to minority populations that they don't have," Fauci said in an interview with MSNBC.
CNN's Christopher Rios, Amanda Sealy, Lauren Mascarenhas, Kevin Liptak, Maggie Fox, Nicholas Neville and Nicquel Terry Ellis contributed to this report.
Jefford and Carly Humes are seen outside their home in Highland Park on Feb. 15, 2021. Carly, who received the vaccine on Chicago's South Side, said that it was essential she get the vaccine because she has to teach in-person each day and lives with her parents, who are both in their 70s and have serious health conditions. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)
If you know where to look, you can see COVID-19 vaccines starting to save lives in the United States.
Its not in the overall case numbers, though those have been steadily dropping across the United States for weeks. Epidemiologists say there could be a few reasons for that decline: were past the holiday seasons surge and people changed their behavior in response to the winter spikes. And by now, many people have antibodies against the virus because of a previous infection. But vaccines probably arent a driving factor in that drop not enough people had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 when the decline started, and vaccination rates are still relatively low.
Some groups of people, though, have high enough rates of vaccination that the benefits are starting to show. Connecticut was one of the first states to finish vaccinations in long-term care facilities and nursing homes. All residents who wanted a vaccine got their first dose by January 8th, and most were fully vaccinated by the end of January.
The impact was dramatic. At the end of 2020, around 400 nursing home residents in Connecticut were testing positive each week, and around 100 were dying. In the week ending February 2nd, when most were fully vaccinated, there were 101 cases and 35 deaths down nearly 80 percent from the month before.
I have to believe its having an impact, Keith Grant, senior system director for infection prevention at Hartford HealthCare, told the Hartford Courant at the start of February. At that time, trends were just starting to show declines in nursing home cases and deaths. Since then, things have continued to improve.
Overall case trends in Connecticut are going down as well, which contributes to the decline in nursing homes. But the drop is steeper for that group than for the state as a whole.
Other groups of people in the US, including health care workers and other essential workers, are also starting to be fully vaccinated. The shots are already protecting them, as well. A team of researchers looked at around 30,000 vaccinated people with health records with the Mayo Clinic Health System, who the researchers noted should mostly be health care workers and residents in long-term care facilities. The rates of COVID-19 in that group started to flatten a few weeks after their first doses, while rates in a group of similar but unvaccinated people continued to climb.
These victories are still only in subsets of the population. But even though vaccinations may not be driving down overall case numbers quite yet, we could start to see their impacts on hospitalizations and deaths soon. Older adults, who are the most likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19, are among the first groups getting vaccinated across the country. Higher percentages of that group have received shots than in the population at large. As that number ticks up, hospitalizations could start to fall, even if younger people are still getting sick.
Experts point to the 75 to 80 percent threshold as the point when enough people would be vaccinated that the spread of COVID-19 would start to stall out. Still, the vaccines could start flattening overall trends in the US much sooner than that. One modeling study found that if even just 40 percent of the population is vaccinated, cases would fall and hospitalizations and deaths would drop by between 60 and 70 percent.
That isnt showing up in the data quite yet, and its still critical to stick to the COVID-19 prevention measures that are actually driving the US case numbers down: masks, avoiding gatherings, and so on. But there are flickers of hope from the pockets where most people are vaccinated, and eventually, those will start to expand.
Leyda Valentine, a research coordinator, takes blood from Lisa Taylor as she participates in a COVID-19 vaccination study at Research Centers of America in Hollywood, Fla., in August 2020. Joe Raedle/Getty Images hide caption
Leyda Valentine, a research coordinator, takes blood from Lisa Taylor as she participates in a COVID-19 vaccination study at Research Centers of America in Hollywood, Fla., in August 2020.
Tens of thousands of people who volunteered to be in studies of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are still participating in follow-up research. But some key questions won't be easily answered, because many people who had been in the placebo group have now opted to take the vaccine.
Even so, there's valuable information to be had in the planned two-year follow-up studies. And that motivated Karen Mott, a 56-year-old job counselor who stuck with the continuing study.
"I've been taking prescription medicine for the last 25 years," she says, referring to antiseizure drugs she takes. In order to show those drugs worked, people previously volunteered to take them when they were still experimental, "so I felt it was my way of giving back."
Mott, who lives in the Overland Park, Kan., got a strong reaction to the second shot, so she correctly surmised she had received the Moderna vaccine, not the placebo. She was sad to read that one of the volunteers in the placebo group did die of COVID-19.
"I keep thinking about that. Why am I one of the lucky ones?" she says. "And I think that makes me feel like, I need to keep providing the information that we need."
So, when the clinic called her in January and offered to reveal her actual vaccine status it was an easy call for her. She agreed to keep participating in the two-year follow-up study.
Participants provide periodic nose swabs and saliva samples, to see if they've been infected. They also give blood so scientists can better understand how the vaccine is providing protection.
Mott was one of about 650 volunteers who took the experimental Moderna vaccine at a company called Johnson County Clinical Trials in Lenexa, Kan. Dr. Carlos Fierro, who runs the study there, says every participant was called back after the Food and Drug Administration authorized the vaccine.
"During that visit we discussed the options, which included staying in the study without the vaccine," he says, "and amazingly there were people a couple of people who chose that."
He suspects those individuals got spooked by rumors about the vaccine. But everybody else who had the placebo shot went ahead and got the actual vaccine. So now Fierro has essentially no comparison group left for the ongoing study.
"It's a loss from a scientific standpoint, but given the circumstances I think it's the right thing to do," he says.
People signing up for these studies were not promised special treatment, but once the FDA authorized the vaccines, their developers decided to offer the shots.
Dr. Steven Goodman, a clinical trials specialist at Stanford University, says losing those control groups makes it more difficult to answer some important questions about COVID-19 vaccines.
"We don't know how long protections lasts," he says. "We don't know efficacy against variants for which we definitely need a good control arm and we also don't know if there are any differences in any of these parameters by age or race or infirmity."
Scientists may be able to infer some of this, for example if it becomes evident that vaccinated people commonly fall ill after exposure to virus variants. Further safety information is also being collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as the FDA, based on the experience of millions of people who have now taken the shots.
But clinical trials that include a placebo group are the surest and most definitive ways to gather information about vaccine effectiveness. "I think over time we'll get that data," Fierro says, even without a placebo group.
Scientists have already collected data from the vaccine studies that could help them identify how individuals' immune systems have responded to vaccination. That could eventually let them identify immune system features, called correlates of protection, that could strongly indicate vaccine effectiveness.
But because the best evidence comes from a controlled study, Goodman is thinking about how those could be conducted ethically, now that there are effective vaccines available.
One option is to identify people who are in groups that are not currently eligible for a vaccine, as is happening now with children. Another option is to conduct studies in other parts of the world, where vaccines simply aren't available. But that raises ethical issues, as well: Why not provide those countries vaccine, rather than recruiting them for a study?
"But the fact is we do have an unfair world and there are inequities in global health and financing," Goodman says. So, offering people a chance to participate in a study could be ethical. "The countries themselves may demand it," he says, as they work to understand the risks that virus variants pose to their populations.
Another option is to run a study in which all participants get vaccinated, but not right away. After two months, for example, people would get a second treatment either the real vaccine if they originally got the placebo, or vice versa. One key here, Goodman says, is that nobody should know which was which. That way people wouldn't change their behavior, which itself could influence the outcome of a trial because people who know they are vaccinated might take greater risks.
The appearance of virus variants "may really scramble things up because there may be certain variants where the efficacy of all vaccines might be so low that we're basically back to zero," Goodman says. "We might have to go back to placebo-controlled trials. It's hard to know."
That's the worse-case scenario. The vaccines currently in use in the United States seem to work well against the variant first seen in the United Kingdom and appear to offer at least partial protection from the variant identified first in South Africa, but more evasive new variants could emerge in the months and years to come.
Fierro sees another possibility. Perhaps in a year or two the existing vaccines will have proven so effective that COVID-19 becomes not much more than a nuisance. Under those circumstances, the risk of participating in a study that has a placebo option would be low enough to be acceptable, say, for young people who have not yet been vaccinated.
You can contact NPR Science Correspondent Richard Harris at rharris@npr.org.
Both of the authorized COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. are nearly as effective at preventing infections with SARS-CoV-2 in the real world as they were in clinical trials, according to new research conducted by the Mayo Clinic. The study, which was published Thursday as a preprint, found that both COVID-19 vaccines had an effective rate of 88.7% in the roughly 62,000 people included in the retrospective analysis. It also found that people who had been vaccinated had lower hospitalization rates if they did get sick. The vaccine developed by BioNTech SE BNTX, +2.70% and Pfizer Inc. PFE, -0.35% had an efficacy rate of 95.0% in the Phase 3 clinical trial, while Moderna Inc.'s MRNA, +3.05% vaccine reported an efficacy rate of 94.1% in its late-stage study. Both are mRNA-based vaccines that require two doses and received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration in December. The slightly lower effectiveness rate is likely due to the fact that the vaccination was initially only open to two groups of people who are at high risk for contracting the virus: health care workers, and nursing-home residents. Over the past 12 months, shares of BioNTech have soared 249.3%, Pfizer's stock is up 0.7%, and Moderna shares have rallied 796.2% The broader S&P 500 SPX, -0.19% is up 16.3%.
We just want our employees to know how important they are to us. Thats the primary reason we set up this clinic was to help our staff in our schools, our frontline workers who are working everyday with our children, said Superintendent Joseph Eiland.
