[ad_1]
The world’s richest countries have started vaccinating their populations to protect themselves against a virus that has killed 1.8 million people and crushed the global economy.
There are now 60 candidate vaccines in testing, including those already being rolled out at AstraZeneca and Oxford, Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, Sputnik V from Russia, and Sinopharm from China.
That has helped boost global financial markets, but the discovery of the new variants has sparked a 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 virus particles in the body of patients, possibly contributing to higher levels of transmission.
Oxford’s Bell, who advises the government’s vaccine working group, said Sunday that he thought the vaccines would work in the British variant, but said there was a “big question mark” as to whether they would work in the South African variant.
He told Times Radio that vaccines could be adapted and that “it could take a month or six weeks to get a new vaccine.”
Sahin from BioNTech said Spiegel in an interview published on Friday that his vaccine, which uses messenger RNA to instruct the human immune system to fight the coronavirus, should be able to cope with the variant first detected in Britain.
“We are testing whether our vaccine can also neutralize this variant and we will know more soon,” he said.
When asked about how to deal with a strong mutation, he said it would be possible to modify the vaccine as needed within six weeks, although it might require additional regulatory approvals.
Reuters
[ad_2]
