South Africa is looking at ways to deploy AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine after temporarily putting on hold plans to roll it out to healthcare workers, government advisers have said.

The government had planned to start rolling out one million doses of the AstraZeneca shot later this month, but trial data published after they had arrived showed the vaccine offered minimal protection against mild-to-moderate disease caused by the country's dominant coronavirus variant.

“AstraZeneca may well have a place, it may well have a significant place. This is only a suspension, not turfing it out,” Professor Barry Schoub told Reuters. “We have got in South Africa a problem with the variant, it all hinges on that.”

Schoub said a number of options were being looked at for the AstraZeneca shots, including whether they could be used in combination with another vaccine, to see whether one dose “either the prime or the booster with the AstraZeneca may work well synergistically with another vaccine”.