South Africa halts use of AstraZeneca vaccine

"The clinical trial participants who were evaluated were relatively young and unlikely to become severely ill, making it impossible for the scientists to determine if the variant interfered with the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine’s ability to protect against severe Covid-19, hospitalizations, or deaths."

"South African health officials said they would inoculate health workers in the coming weeks with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which has strong efficacy in preventing severe cases and hospitalizations caused by the new variant."

So: some encouraging news, and some discouraging news.

An ideal vaccine design should include different viral peptides, instead of just the whole spike protein. And one should also remove epitopes that mimic human proteins, both to increase efficiency and avoid rare autoimmune episodes.

I criticized this design internally at the Department of Medicine in Oxford, where I work, and I was silenced due to the political implications my statement had.

Sadly all vaccines share the same design, or no design at all. Hopefully the others may stimulate a broader repertoire of T cells, due to adjuvant and/or delivery differences, and this can lead to some epitope spreading thus remaining effective.