Booster injections to prevent infections by coronavirus mutations will become the norm in the future, according to a leading UK genome expert.
“We have to recognize that we would always have to receive booster doses; immunity to coronavirus does not last forever,” Sharon Peacock, head of COVID-19 Genomics UK, said exclusively to Reuters. COG-UK, which was created by Peacock about a year ago in response to COVID-19 and is a consortium of academic and public health institutions, has sequenced some 349,205 virus genomes in a global effort of some 778,000 genomes. reported.
As with the annual flu vaccine, boosters for COVID-19 are likely to be needed to combat the variants of coronaviruses that may occur in the future, said Peacock.
“We are already adjusting vaccines to deal with what the virus is doing in terms of evolution – so there are variants emerging that have a combination of increased transmissibility and an ability to partially evade our immune response,” she added.
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Speaking of pre-existing variants of coronaviruses, Peacock said he is more concerned with B.1.351, which was first identified in South Africa.
“It is more transmissible, but it also has a change in a genetic mutation, which we refer to as E484K, which is associated with reduced immunity – so our immunity is reduced against this virus,” she told Reuters.
Existing coronavirus vaccines have also been shown to have reduced efficacy against the South African mutation, in particular, prompting Moderna, as well as Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, to create new vaccines to better combat variants. In February, Moderna announced that the COVID-19 vaccine recently developed to deal with the B.1.351 mutation is ready to be tested in humans in clinical trials.
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Speaking widely about the possibility of a future pandemic, Peacock also told Reuters that he expects another “worrying virus” to appear at some point. However, she noted, “What I hope is that, having learned what we have in this global pandemic, we are better prepared to detect it and contain it.”