WHO warns against letting guard down
GENEVA: The arrival of Covid-19 vaccines should not tempt countries to relax efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic, top World Health Organization officials said on Friday, citing concern that Brazil’s epidemic could spread to other countries.
“We think we’re through this. We’re not,” Mike Ryan, WHO’S top emergency expert, told an online briefing. “Countries are going to lurch back into third and fourth surges if we’re not careful.” Record Covid-19 deaths have been reported in Brazil this week and its hospital system is on the brink of collapse, driven partly by a more contagious variant first identified there.
On a global level, Covid-19 case
MIKE RYAN,
WHO’S top emergency expert
numbers reversed a six-week downwards trend last week despite the delivery of millions of doses of vaccines in recent weeks, WHO data showed.
“Now is not the time for Brazil or anywhere else for that matter to be relaxing,” Ryan added. “The arrival of vaccines is a moment of great hope but it is also potentially a moment where we lose concentration.”
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the epidemic
in Brazil as “very, very concerning” and warned of a possible regional spillover.
“If Brazil is not serious, then it will continue to affect all the neighbourhood there and beyond,” he said.
‘Astrazeneca effective against Brazil variant’
Preliminary data from a study conducted at the University of Oxford indicates that the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Astrazeneca
is effective against the P1, or Brazilian, variant, a source with knowledge of the study told Reuters on Friday.
The data indicates that the vaccine will not need to be modified in order to protect against the variant, which is believed to have originated in the Amazonian city of Manaus, said the source, who requested anonymity as the results have not yet been made public.
The source did not provide the exact efficacy of the vaccine against the variant. They said the full results of the study should be released soon, possibly in March.
Early results indicated the Astrazeneca vaccine was significantly less effective against the South African variant, which is similar to P1. South Africa subsequently paused the use of the vaccine in the country.
The information comes as a plasma study published ahead of peer review on Monday suggested the Coronavac Covid-19 vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech may not work effectively against the Brazilian variant. Responding to a request for comment, Fiocruz, which sent the samples that formed the basis of the Astrazeneca vaccine study, told Reuters it did not have any information on the study, as it was being led by Astrazeneca and the University of Oxford.
The P1 variant (also known as 20J/501Y.V3) is among the factors that epidemiologists believe is contributing to a rise in cases and deaths, and there has been concern in the scientific community about the variant’s resistance to vaccines.