Scientists are not entirely confident that Covid-19 vaccines will work on a new variant of the coronavirus found in South Africa, the ITV’s political editor said on Monday, citing an unnamed British government scientific adviser.
Britain and South Africa have discovered new, more infectious variants of the coronavirus in recent weeks, which has spurred an increase in cases. British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Monday that he is now very concerned about the thread found in South Africa.
Scientists like BioNTech’s CEO, Ugur Sahin, and John Bell, a professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, said they are testing vaccines on the new variants and say they can make the necessary adjustments in about six weeks.
“According to one of the government’s scientific advisers, the reason for Matt Hancock’s ‘incredible concern’ about the South African variant of Covid-19 is that they are not as confident that vaccines will be as effective against it as they are for the UK variant, ”said ITV political editor Robert Peston.
Public Health England said there is currently no evidence to suggest that vaccines will be effective against the new strain. The health ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report.
The richest countries in the world have started to vaccinate their populations to protect themselves against a virus that killed 1.8 million people and crushed the global economy.
There are currently 60 candidate vaccines in tests, including those already being launched by AstraZeneca and Oxford, Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, Sputnik V from Russia and Sinopharm from China.
This helped lift global financial markets, but the discovery of new variants has given new alarm.
Scientists say the new South African variant has multiple mutations in the important “spike” protein that the virus uses to infect human cells.
It has also been associated with a higher viral load, which means a higher concentration of viral particles in the patients’ bodies, possibly contributing to higher levels of transmission.
Bell, from Oxford, who advises the government’s vaccination task force, said on Sunday that he thought vaccines would work in the British variant, but said there was a “big question mark” about whether they would work in the South African variant.
He told Times Radio that the injections can be adapted and “it can take a month or six weeks to get a new vaccine”.
Sahin of BioNTech told Spiegel in an interview published on Friday that his vaccine, which uses messenger RNA to instruct the human immune system to fight the coronavirus, must be able to deal with the variant first detected in Britain. .
“We are testing whether our vaccine can also neutralize this variant and we will soon know more,” he said.
Asked how to deal with a strong mutation, he said it would be possible to adjust the vaccine as needed within six weeks – although it may require additional regulatory approvals.