Could an Israeli mutation undo Israel’s mass vaccination campaign?

So said the National Coronavirus Information and Knowledge Center on Saturday night in a paragraph in a nine-page report on mutations.

The result was a frenzy of headlines and panic.

The world has already learned over the weekend that the British variant, which spread like wildfire across Israel, can be more deadly than originally thought.

However, so far, “there is no significant mutation in Israel,” said the head of Public Health Services, Prof. Sharon Alroy-Preis, to KAN News on Sunday morning.

But she added that “wherever there is a virus, mutations can occur”.

“Think if you had to make handwritten copies of the genome – there is a high likelihood of a typographical error,” explained Prof. Jonathan Gershoni, from the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research, Tel Aviv University. “So, when printing books or copying documents, typos are common and understandable, the same is true when replicating a genome. But we call these types of mutations, and the virus that carries these mutations is a mutant or variant. ”

LEVY-LAHAD said that most changes are “silent” and have no effect on virus proteins or anything else. But sometimes these “typos” can have a profound effect, said Gershoni. For example, “My wife is tough” vs “My life is tough” – the two phrases have a different letter, but very different meanings.

Mutations can increase the ability of a virus to become more infectious, can make the virus more pathogenic or make it less susceptible to neutralizing antibodies stimulated or induced by vaccination, said Gershoni. On the other hand, he said that some mutations can make the virus less efficient and, ultimately, make it disappear.

Immunization could theoretically accelerate the evolution of a virus, said Levy-Lahad.

“Until coronavirus, one of the main health problems was that many germs became resistant to antibiotics because many of them had been administered to the population, often unnecessarily, and the germs found a way to become resistant to these antibiotics. The germs that manage to resist become more prevalent because they will prevail ”, he explains.

“If someone who is immunized can still get some level of infection, then by chance there will be variants that can resist the antibodies you have thanks to the vaccination.”

She said: “Basically, it’s a numbers game. If you have a lot of sick people and a lot of immunized people – and if the immunization doesn’t completely rule out the infection – then, simply because you have a lot of people who can transmit the coronavirus and many hosts in which it can evolve, the variant can be created. “

But she said it doesn’t mean it will happen.

The KNOWLEDGE Center report warned that this hypothetical “Israeli mutation” could give the virus some potential to escape the immune response caused by vaccination. Therefore, it can spread faster within the population – especially considering the fact that children are not getting the vaccine.

But Levy-Lahad said the situation is not so black and white – that this is not an “all or nothing phenomenon”.

“It may be, for example, that immunization does not completely eradicate the infection, but reduces the rate of serious illness by 2% [one in 50] to one in 1,000 – it will still have a big impact, ”she said.

She added that the flu vaccine is an example of a vaccine that needs to be updated because the virus mutates.

“I don’t know if anyone has demonstrated that this is a result of the vaccination rate,” said Levy-Lahad.

However, she said the fear of mutations is an argument for following Ministry of Health regulations and reducing infection.

Furthermore, as Gershoni emphasized, while Israel has no control over how random mutations occur, the country has control over how to reduce infection rates.

“Regarding Israel’s uniqueness or not, we must remember that, of the countries with the highest number of vaccinated people, we are the fifth. The United States is leading with 21 million people vaccinated, an infection rate of 77,000 people per million and well over 150,000 total infections per day, ”said Gershoni.

“The number of infections in Israel due to the blockade is gradually falling – and I hope it will continue to fall,” he said. “It is our responsibility to do what we can to prevent escape mutations while increasing the vaccination campaign to ensure the safety of our population.”

With replication, there is a direct relationship between how many copies are being made at any given time and the mutations that will accumulate, said Gershoni. If the infection rate is low, the number of mutations tends to be relatively small. Whenever the rate of infection increases, there will be an increase in errors.

“What really worries me when people make these announcements, as if there is an Israeli mutation, is that they play the game of people who say it is useless to be vaccinated or that it really is not necessary,” Levy-Lahad emphasized.

“Vaccination is the best thing we have now.”