Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Recent frenzies of trading around small fry stocks such as GameStop have drawn attention to a practice that every generation of brokers and dabblers discovers.

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And stories about plastic in the oceans have abounded in recent years, from fast garbage patches on the surface to tiny bits of it in the water.

But the stuff that makes it to the darkest depths researchers have learned is actually being put to use.

First up though.

South Africa has halted its rollout of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine just a week after the country received its first million doses.

It seems the vaccine offers limited protection against a new variant of the coronavirus that's now dominant in the country.

Saleem Abdul Kareem, co-chair of South Africa's Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19, spoke to a World Health Organization briefing yesterday.

We don't want to end up with a situation where we have vaccinated a million people or two million people with a vaccine that may not be effective in preventing hospitalization and severe disease.

In total, more than 1.2 billion coronavirus vaccine doses have been allocated for the consent, but it's not clear when all those jobs will arrive.

The longer any region remains unvaccinated, the greater the chance that more variants arise.

Vaccines though can be tweaked, and a formulation of the Oxford vaccine targeted at the South African variant could be going into arms by autumn.

What scientists cannot address is the long run damage to Africa, both in human and in economic terms.

So far, the continent seems to have been spared from the worst-case scenarios predicted early on in the pandemic, but the longer term picture remains bleak.

In many ways, the impact of the pandemic in Africa is worse than it appears on the surface or in the official numbers.

Kinley Samen is one of our Africa correspondents, based in Dakar.

It is the case that having a young population has, to some extent, protected the continent from the virus.

Fewer Africans are known to have died from it than Americans or Europeans, but the true scatter of infection death is really hard to gauge.

A study in Sudan recently showed that perhaps only 2% of all the COVID deaths were recorded in the official tele.

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