South London hospitals are recruiting volunteers to help test a Covid-19 vaccine that could work better against the South African variant.
Oxford University and AstraZeneca are looking for about 1,865 volunteers from across the UK, South Africa, Brazil and Poland to try a new booster vaccine based on their previous effort, with changes that researchers hope will make it more effective against the South African (Beta) variant.
Some 800 of these volunteers will take part at King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’s in south London. Volunteers can only apply if they have had a double dose of AstraZeneca, Pfizer or Moderna, with their last vaccine at least three months before.
The trial will start in August, with initial results to be published later this year.
Elka Giemza, manager of the King’s Clinical Research Facility said: “While the UK’s vaccine rollout programme has been very successful, some currently available C-19 vaccines may not be as effective against new variants of the Sars-Cov-2 virus, such as the Beta variant which is prevalent in South Africa but has also been detected in the UK. It is important that we develop effective vaccines against these new variants”.
Professor Andrew Ustianowski,the clinical lead of the UK’s Covid-19 vaccination programme, said: “Throughout the pandemic the UK has demonstrated its expertise in clinical vaccine research, consistently supported by the fantastic efforts of tens of thousands of study participants. The latest booster study from Oxford/AstraZeneca is just one of the latest, world-leading steps in our battle to tackle the virus and one of the variants of concern. We are calling on the general public once again to work alongside researchers to help recruit to this study and help gather the data we need on the new vaccine.”
Anyone interested in taking part in this and future booster vaccine studies can register their interest to be contacted by visiting nhs.uk/researchcontact.
Pfizer is also developing a booster shot for its own vaccine that it hopes will be more effective against the South African variant.
The South African variant first appeared in the UK earlier this year. It is more infectious than the earlier version of the disease that first spread in the country. The dominant strain of Covid-19 in the UK is the Delta – or Indian – variant.