Durban, South Africa – The race to vaccinate people against COVID-19 has become even more urgent due to the emergence of new, more contagious variants of coronavirus. CBS News had little access to a South African lab studying one of the new strains more worrisome of the virus, which appears to have at least some resistance to the antibodies that vaccines create in the human body to prevent error.
Virus hunters from the Durban High Risk Biological Laboratory are hot on the trail of the mutant strain that is spreading at breakneck speed across South Africa. The virus has mutated to attach more easily to human cells, making the disease no more deadly, but helping it to spread much more easily.
“We believe we’re going through a new pandemic with this variant that not only transmits much faster, but also has potentially less neutralization,” genetic scientist Tulio de Oliveira tells CBS News.
De Oliveira discovered the new variant after observing a dramatic increase in infections in November. His highly secure lab colleagues have developed a live culture of the strain to accelerate their research.
Alex Sigal is a senior researcher at the Institute for Health Research in Africa and the Max Planck Institute in Germany for Infection Biology. According to him, the new strain discovered in South Africa appears to have the ability to significantly reduce the effectiveness of antibodies in people infected with the original version of the virus.
“Ten times it would be conservative,” he tells CBS News, but “you can also have a full knockout,” meaning a person’s natural defenses against the original strain of the virus could prove futile against the South variant. africa.
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This means that those infected in the first wave may have little protection against the new strain and, even more worryingly, could make some of the vaccines less effective.
“Clearly we have underestimated this virus,” he says. “On the other hand, there is still no evidence that vaccines will be affected and certainly people should continue to be vaccinated because that is the solution to this pandemic.”
In the country’s central laboratory, scientists stress that immunity is only part of the picture. Data on the effectiveness of vaccines against the new strain will not be available for a couple of weeks, but in the future, vaccines may need to be modified from time to time to protect them from mutant strains. just like the annual flu vaccine. for years.