Dr. Fauci said today that the United States needs to speed up its vaccination efforts, following news that two of Covid’s new vaccines – Johnson & Johnson and Novavax – have been found to be less effective against South Africa’s new variant of Covid. new variant was first detected in the United States yesterday, in two unrelated people in South Carolina.
From Business Insider:
It [Dr. Fauci] spoke at a conference call held by the National Institutes of Health to discuss data on the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine. J&J said its vaccine was 66% effective in preventing moderate and severe cases of COVID-19 in general, but less effective in South Africa, where a variant of the virus is spreading. Novavax said on Thursday that its coronavirus vaccine was also less effective against this coronavirus variant.
And from The Washington Post:
The Novavax data surprised and disappointed the scientists, who said it was the last sign that the new mutation-laden variants pose a challenge to vaccine manufacturers and complicate the battle to crush the pandemic. The company’s results provide the first glimpse of how any coronavirus vaccine protects against two mutant versions of the virus that quickly became dominant in the UK and South Africa and spread across the world.
“The South African variant looks like it will be a much more complicating factor than we expected,” said Peter Jay Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, which is developing a different coronavirus vaccine and said his team has already designed one against the South African variant.
The Novavax vaccine was highly effective – 89 percent – in a trial in which the variant first identified in the UK, known as B.1.1.7, was highly prevalent. But its effectiveness dropped to 49 percent in a smaller, less definitive trial in South Africa, where the vast majority of infections were of a different variant that is spreading there, known as B. 1,351.
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are also less effective against the new variant.
“It is really a warning for us to be agile and able to adjust, as this virus will certainly continue to evolve and mutate,” said Dr. Fauci. “The best way to prevent a virus from evolving is to prevent it from replicating, and this is done by vaccinating people as quickly as possible.”
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