COVID strain in South Africa shows great resistance to antibodies of the original virus

Durban, South Africa – The race to vaccinate people against COVID-19 has become even more urgent with the emergence of new, more contagious variants of coronavirus. CBS News had rare access to a laboratory in South Africa studying one of the newest worrying strains of the virus, which appears to have at least some resistance to the antibodies that vaccines create in the human body to ward off the insect.

Virus hunters in the high-risk biohazard laboratory in Durban are on the trail of the mutant strain that spreads at high speed across South Africa. The virus has mutated to bind more easily to human cells, making the disease no longer deadly, but helping it to spread much more easily.

“We believe that we are experiencing a new pandemic with this variant, which not only transmits much faster, but also potentially has less neutralization,” said genetic scientist Túlio de Oliveira to CBS News.

Oliveira discovered the new variant after seeing a dramatic increase in infections in November. His colleagues in the highly secure laboratory developed a living culture of the strain to accelerate their research.

Alex Sigal is a senior researcher at the Africa Health Research Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany. He says 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 would be conservative,” he told CBS News, but “you can also have a complete knockout,” which means that a person’s natural defenses against the original strain of the virus may prove useless against the variant in South Africa .

This means that those infected in the first wave could have little protection against the new strain and, even more worrying, it could make some of the vaccines less effective.

“It’s clear that we underestimate this virus,” he says. “On the other hand, there is still no evidence that vaccines will be affected and, certainly, people should continue to vaccinate because that is the solution to this pandemic.”

In the country’s central laboratory, scientists emphasize that immunity is only part of the picture. Data on the effectiveness of vaccines against the new strain will not be available for a few weeks, but in the future, vaccines may have to be adjusted from time to time to protect against mutant strains – just as the annual flu vaccine has been. for years.