South Africa coronavirus variant 'more of a problem' than the one in UK, says official

British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Monday that the newvariant of coronavirus in South Africa is ''more of a problem'' than the mutation found in the UK.

Both Britain andSouthAfricahave discovered new, more infectious variants in the coronavirus in recent weeks that have driven a surge in cases.

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“I’m incredibly worried about the South African variant, and that’s why we took the action that we did to restrict all flights from South Africa,”Hancock said in an interview with the local media.

“This is a very, very significant problem ... and it’s even more of a problem than the UKnew variant.”

The new strain, called the 501.V2 Variant, was first discovered in South African province Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape

Scientists are not fully confident that COVID-19 vaccines will work on a new variant of the coronavirus found inSouthAfrica. They fear that it is more contagious than other versions of the virus.

Scientists including BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin and John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford, have said they are testing the vaccines on the new variants and say they could make any required tweaks in around six weeks.

Public Health England said there was currently no evidence to suggest that vaccines will not be effective against the new strain. The health ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report.

The world's richest countries have started vaccinating their populations to safeguard against a virus that has killed 1.8 million people and crushed the global economy.

There are currently 60 vaccine candidates in trials, including those that are already being rolled out from AstraZeneca and Oxford, Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, Russia's Sputnik V and China's Sinopharm.

That has helped to lift global financial markets, but the discovery of the new variants has raised a fresh alarm.

Scientists say the newSouthAfrican variant has multiple mutations in the important "spike" protein that the virus uses to infect human cells.

It has also been associated with a higher viral load, meaning a higher concentration of virus particles in patients' bodies, possibly contributing to higher levels of transmission.

Oxford's Bell, who advises the government's vaccine task force, said on Sunday he thought vaccines would work on the British variant but said there was a "big question mark" as to whether they would work on theSouthAfrican variant.

He told Times Radio that the shots could be adapted and "it might take a month or six weeks to get a new vaccine".

BioNTech's Sahin told Spiegel in an interview published on Friday that their vaccine, which uses messenger RNA to instruct the human immune system to fight the coronavirus, should be able to cope with the variant first detected in Britain.

"We are testing whether our vaccine can also neutralise this variant and will soon know more," he said.