According to Sir John, the continent had ‘no idea’ what was going on in terms of how strains were spreading, reports The Telegraph.
Hopeless response
Europe’s “hopeless” response to Covid-19 has meant Britain risks the South African strain “flooding in the back door” when travel resumes, making it impossible for vaccines to curb the spread of the virus, a leading member of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine team has said.
The third wave
Sir John Bell was speaking days after the Government attempted to pour cold water on concerns that a third wave of the virus could hit Britain when more people start traveling to different countries.
A major failure in Europe
The Oxford University’s regius professor of medicine and Government life sciences champion said a major failure in Europe was the lack of genome sequencing to tell which variants are spreading where.
He said the continent had “no idea what’s going on”. “They’re hopeless. Completely hopeless. It’s really not going well in Europe.”
France seeing a higher proportion of SA strain
Figures late last week suggested that France, in particular, was seeing a much higher proportion of the South African strain among its Covid-19 cases than Britain, of between 5 and 10pc, meaning as many as 3,000 cases.
In the UK, around 259 South Africa strain cases have been recorded.
Working of AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines
Whilst there is no definitive data yet on whether the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines work against the South African strain, experts believe the vaccines will be able to stop severe cases.
However, Sir John said the goal was to also reduce transmissions with moderate and mild disease, reducing the R-rate and ultimately leading the virus to die out.
AstraZeneca vaccine on SA Strain
“We think the AstraZeneca vaccine is pretty good at reducing transmissions, but not with the South Africa strain. And I think the same will be true with Johnson and Pfizer and everybody else.”
“I think our biggest risk in the UK will be that South Africa gets to us from the European continent, where there’s quite a lot of it now.”
He said the problem in having this virus spreading and being unable to curb mild and moderate disease was that “with so much virus milling around, you’ll get variants of all kinds popping up, and who knows, maybe they’ll lose fitness and it’ll all die out – but it could also get a lot worse”.
Growing concern over the strains in Europe
Among the science community last week, there was growing concern over the strains spreading in Europe, with Professor Neil Ferguson saying on Friday he was “optimistic with this one caveat that we do need to keep these variants of concern at bay”.
Sir John said vaccination efforts by countries would not be enough, however, arguing that purely “having everybody vaccinated [within your own country] doesn’t solve the problem”.
“Everyone’s got to take a deep breath and realise that we’re not there yet. We’ve got to lean into the global issue much more effectively, and get people vaccinated in the developing world and try to reduce transmissions everywhere.”
100 million doses under the Global Access scheme
He said AstraZeneca and Oxford were leading the way in offering this vaccine more globally and was on track to have provided almost 100 million doses under the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access scheme, compared to 1.4 million doses of Pfizer.
“I don’t think AstraZeneca has had the credit that they deserve, by agreeing at the beginning that this was a global problem, not just a problem for people who could pay a lot of money for vaccines.”
He said there were questions to be asked over the decision in EU countries to suspend the use of the vaccine earlier this month, going against the advice of regulators.
Agency reiterated the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine’s efficacy
“Now, they’re not gonna be able to give the AstraZeneca vaccine away. What’s going on there? AstraZeneca has really taken a beating over this stuff, and in my view, through no fault of their own.”Last week, the European Medicines Agency reiterated that the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine was “safe and effective”, prompting countries to lift their suspensions. The EU has used less than half of the 15 million AstraZeneca jabs it has stockpiled and has vaccinated less than a tenth of its population, compared to around half of all UK adults.
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Source: Telegraph
