COVID-19 variants first detected in the UK and South Africa and now circulating worldwide are not a current threat to the effectiveness of the first vaccines, but the mutations will be closely monitored because “they could be a problem,” NIAID Director Anthony Fauci tells Axios.
The big picture: Vaccinations are underway, albeit with a slow start. Fauci states that the recovery of the normal goal depends on achieving the immunity of the herd between 70% and 85% in the population. While there are some concerns about mutations that can elude vaccines, he says they pose more of a problem for certain treatments than for vaccines.
What is happening: Viruses mutate frequently, but often these changes are small and not cause problems with treatments or vaccines. Public health officials have been closely following SARS-CoV-2 variants.
B.1.1.7 The effect of the vaccine does not appear to be more virulent or obvious, according to British doctors, Fauci says.
- B.1.1.7 is more transmissible because it binds more easily to the ACE2 receptor, which is how the virus enters cells.
- This drives the need for faster vaccinations, says Carlos del Rio, a distinguished professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine.
- “If the R-zero goes from 2.5 to 2.9 in a totally naive population, after 10 cycles of transmission, instead of 9,000 infected people, you have 42,000 infected people,” warns del Rio.
The 501.V2 variant Fauci says “it’s a little more worrying about the possibility of interfering with some of the monoclonal antibodies.”
- Treatments with monoclonal antibodies are precisely targeted to a specific region of the virus and “if the mutation is found in this epitope, this could obviate the effect” of the treatment, he says.
- Vaccines, on the other hand, “induce a polyclonal response against multiple different aspects of ear protein,” Fauci notes. “For anything to really prevent the vaccine from being effective, it has to have a lot of mutations that are in the right places. ”
What are they looking at? Scientists are tracking strains and testing them for vaccines.
- “If it doesn’t affect the vaccine, it’s good to go for it. If you do, you’ll have to make some minor modifications to the vaccine in order to avoid the changes that occur in the mutations,” Fauci says.
- With the “plug-and-play” nature of mRNA vaccines, it is much easier to alter the composition of these vaccines, he adds.
- And since there is now a lot of data on the mRNA-based vaccine platform, “it’s likely that the FDA will consider it just a strain change, which doesn’t require starting with the square,” he says.
The summary: “You always have to take these things seriously, follow them closely and hope there are no problems. But if there are, you have to adjust to them,” Fauci says. “And now we have the technology to do it quite easily.”