The African Union’s disease control body has said that it is not “walking away” from AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, after trial data showed it had greatly reduced efficacy against the coronavirus variant dominant in South Africa.

Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director John Nkengasong told a news conference that more work needed to be done to understand how the vaccine worked against the more contagious 501Y-V2 variant first identified in South Africa late last year.

Nkengasong said the Africa CDC would be doing its own evaluations of the AstraZeneca vaccine across multiple countries and that no countries had said they would not be using the vaccine.