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By Reuters 
9h ago
Johannesburg – The new variant of Covid-19 identified in South Africa may evade the antibodies that attack it in treatments that use blood plasma from previously recovered patients and may reduce the effectiveness of the current line of vaccines, scientists said Wednesday.
Researchers are racing to establish whether the vaccines that are currently being rolled out around the world are effective against the so-called 501Y.V2 variant, identified by South African genomics experts late last year in Nelson Mandela Bay.
“This lineage exhibits a complete escape from three classes of therapeutically relevant monoclonal antibodies,” wrote the team of scientists from three South African universities working with the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) in an article published in the journal bioRxiv.
“Furthermore, 501Y.V2 shows a substantial or complete leakage of neutralizing antibodies in convalescent Covid-19 plasma,” they wrote, adding that their findings “highlight the possibility of reinfection … and may herald the reduced efficacy of the current peak-based vaccines. ”
The 501Y.V2 variant is 50% more infectious than previous ones, South African researchers said this week. It has already spread to at least 20 countries since it was reported to the World Health Organization in late December.
It is one of several new variants discovered in recent months, including others that were first found in England and Brazil.
The variant is the main driver of the second wave of Covid-19 infections in South Africa, which reached a new daily peak above 21,000 cases earlier this month, well above the first wave, before falling to about 12,000 per day.
Convalescent blood plasma from previous patients has not been shown to be effective when administered to critically ill patients requiring intensive care for Covid-19, but is approved in several countries as an emergency measure.
British scientists and politicians have expressed concern that vaccines that are being deployed or in development may be less effective against the variant.
The document said it remained to be seen how effective current vaccines were against 501Y.V2, which would only be determined through large-scale clinical trials. But the results showed the need to design new vaccines to deal with the evolving threat, he said.
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