from johannesburg, helen rees. is a member of the south african ministerial advisory committee for covid and covid vaccine. from brazzaville, dr. richard mihigo, coordinator of the immunization and vaccine development program at the world health organization. and from paris, john johnson, vaccination and epidemic response reverend at doctors without borders. thank you all for joining us. helen, your country has stepped in criticizing vaccine inequality globally, but at the same time, we are seeing the same pattern, which is wealthy nations hoarding hundreds of millions of d doses which they possibly will not be using. how do you see this disconnect? helen: i think the disconnect is obvious, and we just heard president macron make statements from france's point of view that they are beginning to understand that, and recognizing that from a global health perspective this makes absolutely no sense at all. the african union, as you said, has made very strong statements about this. in the 2009 pandemic flu, the african

the same time continue studies to understand better how to use astra zeneca early i spoke to dr helen rees who's a member of south africa's ministerial advisory committee for conveyed in the cove in 1000 vaccine she explains how health authorities will use a study in their planning. so this was a very important study it was a small number of people and it was a young cohort which meant that just in terms of the natural history not many of them were anyway going to get severe disease that means the only thing that it could show was that there's only there's very limited impact on prevention of mild or moderate disease but there weren't severe cases so the question is could this vaccine still have an impact on severe cases and the other question being asked is can the vaccine be tweaked to be responsive to the variance of the answer is yes to that and the 3rd question being asked is can this vaccine be combined with another vaccine so that you have $22.00 different vaccines that do what we call prime and boost so you stimulate the immune system at 2 different points in time and you do it wit