Sarah Gilbert, Team Leader, "Oxford": Developing a vaccine to confront the South African variable by the fall ... the Oxford vaccine
Sarah Gilbert, the British researcher and head of the Oxford University team to develop the Corona vaccine, said that the virus variant that appeared in South Africa seems to reduce the effectiveness of the current vaccines, but scientists are working on a new vaccine designed to combat this variable and will be ready by the fall.
Professor Sarah Gilbert told the BBC's Andrew Marr Program that the vaccines were "extremely adaptive" and the researchers were already working on a version to target the newly discovered species.
This came after a study found that the Oxford vaccine, AstraZenka provided weaker protection against the South African variant but could still provide severe protection from infection and reduce the chances of hospitalization.
Meanwhile, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has urged companies that employ more than 50 employees and have to come to work to apply for regular rapid tests for Covid-19.
The government said it hoped to "normalize testing in the workplace in both the public and private sectors" to detect more asymptomatic cases of the virus.
And the Minister of Health said last week that more than 10 million people in Britain had received the first dose of the vaccine against Corona disease, describing it as a major event.
Britain intends to vaccinate all over the age of 70, the most vulnerable groups and workers in the front lines of the disease, such as health care workers, by mid-February.
"This is a big and important event in our national efforts to combat this virus," Hancock said on Twitter. Government data showed that 10 million 21,471 people received the first dose and 498,962 received the second dose.
Britain was the first country to approve the use of the Pfizer-Biontec and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines, which allowed it to start vaccination early, and concluded supply agreements with manufacturers in the early stages of manufacturing, which enabled it to avoid some of the supply problems that disrupted other European vaccination programs.
