Scientists are not fully confident that Covid-19 vaccines will work on a new variant of the coronavirus found in South Africa, ITV’s political editor said on Monday, citing an unidentified scientific adviser to the British government.
Both Britain and South Africa have discovered new, more infectious variants of coronavirus in recent weeks that have led to an increase in cases. British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Monday he was now very concerned about the chain found in South Africa.
Scientists such as BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin and John Bell, a Regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, have said they are testing vaccines for the new variants and say they could make the necessary adjustments in about six weeks. .
“According to one of the government’s scientific advisers, the reason for Matt Hancock’s ‘incredible concern’ for the South African variant Covid-19 is that they do not trust vaccines as effective as they are for the British variant,” he said. ITV political editor Robert Peston.
Public Health England said there is currently no evidence to suggest the vaccines will not be effective against the new strain. The health ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report.
The richest countries in the world have begun vaccinating their populations to protect themselves against a virus that has killed 1.8 million people and crushed the world economy.
There are currently 60 vaccine candidates in trials, including those already being deployed from AstraZeneca and Oxford, Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, Russia’s Sputnik V and China’s Sinopharm.
This has helped lift global financial markets, but the discovery of new variants has raised a new alarm.
Scientists say the new South African variant has multiple mutations in the important “ear” protein that the virus uses to infect human cells.
It has also been associated with a higher viral load, i.e., a higher concentration of virus particles in patients ’bodies, possibly contributing to higher levels of transmission.
Bell from Oxford, who advises the government’s vaccine working group, said on Sunday it thought vaccines would work with the British variant, but said there was a “big question” as to whether they would work with the South African variant. .
He told Times Radio that the shots could be adapted and “it may take a month or six weeks to get a new vaccine.”
Sahin, of BioNTech, told Spiegel in an interview published Friday that his vaccine, which uses messenger RNA to instruct the human immune system to fight the coronavirus, should be able to deal with the variant first detected in Britain.
“We are testing whether our vaccine can also neutralize this variant and we will know more soon,” he said.
Asked to deal with a strong mutation, he said it would be possible to modify the vaccine as required within six weeks, although it could require additional regulatory approvals.