Vaccines developed against Covid-19 were largely ineffective against the virus variant found in South Africa, said Dr. Shankar Chetty, a leading doctor in South Africa.
Dr. In South Africa, Chetty said vaccines “didn’t really help prevent people from getting infected”. However, they have succeeded in preventing people from developing serious infections. (Representative image)
South Africa had a very slow vaccination campaign and one of the reasons is that Covid-19 vaccines have proven largely ineffective against the variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus found in the country, said Dr. Shankar Chetty, who has treated Covid-19 patients in Port Edward, South Africa.
Dr. Chetty attended a Doctors’ Roundtable on India Today TV and spoke about the South African experience of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. He responded to a question on whether mass vaccination is a better strategy to contain the pandemic than aiming for lockdown.
“In South Africa our vaccination campaign has started very slowly. Obviously, vaccines have shown that they are not really effective against the stresses observed in South Africa. But we have to be careful with vaccination,” said Dr. Chetty.
When he spoke about the first wave of Covid-19 in South Africa, he said at the time that the government had imposed a very strict lockdown. But it did not apply equally to all sections of society. “The virus quickly spread to the lower socio-economic sectors who live in informal settings and have no means of isolating themselves from one another.”
However, by the time the second wave hit the country, the introduction of vaccines had begun.
“We have found that a large percentage of our black population has developed herd immunity (after infection). Now research is emerging that this herd immunity produced by infection is long-lasting. I think we need to look at the vaccines and consider whether we should vaccinate those who have developed immunity and reserve the shots for those who have not, “said Dr. Chetty.
He added that in South African experience, vaccines “didn’t really help prevent infection”. However, he added that vaccines did manage to prevent people from developing serious infections.
“I think as variants of the virus mutate we will have breakthrough infections even in countries where massive vaccination campaigns have been very effective,” he said.
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