Bloomberg: South Africa To Speed Up Plans To Use J&J Covid Shot

Bloomberg: South Africa To Speed Up Plans To Use J&J Covid Shot
South Africa will temporarily halt the rollout of AstraZeneca Plc’s vaccine and accelerate its supply of shots from Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer Inc. after a trial showed the shot had limited efficacy against a new variant of the virus first identified in the country late last year. The South African arm of the trial found that the shot from Astra and the University of Oxford had only 22% efficacy against mild and moderate illness, according to lead researcher Shabir Madhi on Sunday. There was no conclusive data showing whether the vaccine protects against severe illness, mainly because of the relative youth of the 2,000 trial participants, he said. (Naidoo and Bax, 2/7)