Additional booster vaccines against the coronavirus will be needed in the future, said a leading British scientist who is studying the virus. A booster is an extra injection that enhances or renews the effect of a previous vaccine. Reinforcements will be needed because the coronavirus continues to change or mutate.
Sharon Peacock is head of COVID-19 Genomics UK, COG-UK. She said that countries should work together to fight the virus.
“We would always have to have reinforcement doses; immunity coronavirus doesn’t last forever, ”Peacock told Reuters.
She added that scientists were already changing the vaccine to fight the virus variants how they are found.
Peacock, a professor at the University of Cambridge in Britain, said she was sure that regular reinforcement shots would be needed to deal with future variants. However, she said that booster doses can be developed and administered to people over time.
Peacock created COG-UK exactly a year ago with the help of the British government’s leading scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance. The group is made up of public health experts and scientists from several British universities. Now it contains more information about the genetics of the virus than anywhere else in the world. At locations across Great Britain, COG-UK scientists have sequenced more than 349,000 genomes of the virus in a worldwide effort of about 778,000 genomes.
There are three main variants of the coronavirus, which were first identified: Great Britain, known as B.1.1.7; Brazil, known as P1; and South Africa, known as B.1.351.
Peacock said he is more concerned with the South African variant. Not only does it spread more easily, but it also has a change in a genetic mutation that can decrease immunity. This genetic mutation is known as E484K.
With 120 million boxes of COVID-19 worldwide, it is becoming difficult to keep track of all the different variants and names. So Peacock’s teams are thinking in terms of “mutation constellations,” she said. “Constellation”, in this case, means a group of people or things that are similar in some way.
She explained that scientists are thinking “about which mutations or constellations of mutations will be biologically important and different combinations that may have slightly different biological effects”
Peacock added that she and other experts had to accept that they are wrong about some of their COVID-19 predictions.
“One of the things that the virus taught me is that I can be wrong quite regularly – I have to be quite humble in the face of the virus of which we still know very little, ”she said.
“There may be a variant that we have not yet discovered.”
The coronavirus has killed 2.65 million people worldwide since it started in China in late 2019.
There will be other pandemics in the future. Peacock hopes that scientists will take advantage of what they have learned from the coronavirus and be better prepared for the next global health crisis.
I’m Susan Shand.
Reuters news agency reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it to learn English. Ashley Thompson was the publisher.
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Words in this story
to transform – v. Tto make (a gene) change and create an unusual trait in a plant or animal
regulater – adj. happening repeatedly at the same time or in the same way
immunity – n. the power to avoid being affected by a disease
dose – n. the amount of medication to be taken at once
variant – n. different in some way from others of the same type
sequence – v. a group of things that come one after another
humble – adj. not considering himself better than the others
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