BEIJING (Reuters) – There is no sign that new variants of the coronavirus will affect the immunological impact of a vaccine that China has just authorized for public use, a disease control official said on Friday.
The shot by an affiliate of state-owned Sinopharm was approved on Thursday, a day after news of the first case imported from China of a variant spreading into Britain. [L1N2JB039]
“You don’t have to panic,” Xu Wenbo, an official at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told state television.
“The mutated variant, compared to the previous mutated variants … has no obvious change so far in its ability to cause disease,” he added.
He said that no impact of the variants on the immunological effect of the vaccine was detected.
The variant that British scientists called “VUI – 202012/01” includes a genetic mutation in the “spike” protein, which could theoretically result in an easier spread of COVID-19.
Xu added that the virus protein mutation would not affect the sensitivity of most Chinese COVID-19 tests that target the virus’s nucleic acids, which carry genetic information.
(Reporting by Roxanne Liu and Ryan Woo; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)