The coronavirus has killed six fully vaccinated people in the Seychelles, which is suffering heightened Covid-19 infections despite inoculating a greater proportion of its people than any other nation.
Of those, five had taken Covishield, a version of the AstraZeneca Plc vaccine made in India, and one had been given Sinopharm, Jude Gedeon, the island nation’s public health commissioner said at a press conference on Thursday. Covishield has mainly been reserved for people over 60 in the Seychelles. All of those who died had serious underlying conditions, he said.
The rise in infections, which surged at the beginning of May and has remained at elevated levels ever since, is likely due to the arrival of the highly-transmissible delta variant, which was first identified in India, Gedeon said.
Seychelles is the world leader in vaccination rates, having fully vaccinated 68% of its 98,000 people. For comparison, Israel, a country lauded for its vaccination success, has fully vaccinated 59% of its population, according to Oxford University’s Our World in Data. The world average is 11%.