South Africa To Start First COVID-19 Vaccine Trial

South Africa will begin the first COVID-19 vaccine trial in Africa this week. The vaccine, known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, was developed by the Oxford Jenner Institute and it is already being evaluated in Britain, where 4,000 participants have signed up for the trial.South Africa has set out to vaccinate 2,000 people with the vaccine. Fifty of the candidates have HIV. “We began screening participants for the South African Oxford 1 Covid-19 vaccine trial last week, and the first participants will be vaccinated this week,” University of Witwatersrand (Wits) vaccinology professor Shabir Madhi told a virtual press conference.