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While humans are still waiting for a prick with a coronavirus vaccine, endangered black-footed ferrets in Colorado have already received their vaccinations.
One hundred and twenty of the ferrets (Mustela nigripes), Once thought to be completely extinct, have been vaccinated with an experimental COVID-19 veterinary vaccine, according to Associated Press.
Ferrets are very susceptible to dying from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Mink, a close cousin of ferrets, have already been found to contract coronavirus in fur farms and, alarmingly, In nature. This is dangerous because each time the virus is transmitted between humans and animals, it has a greater chance of developing mutations.
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“For highly contagious respiratory viruses, it’s really important to consider the animal reservoir,” said Corey Casper, a vaccinologist and executive director of the Infectious Diseases Research Institute in Seattle. Colorado Public Radio (CPR). “If the virus returns to the animal host and mutates, or changes, in such a way that it could be reintroduced into humans, then humans would no longer have that immunity. That worries me very much.”
Black-footed ferrets are native to the grasslands of the northern Great Plains. They were once believed to be extinct, but some individuals were rediscovered in Wyoming in 1981, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Thanks to a captive breeding and release program, there are an estimated 370 black-footed ferrets in the wild.
Due to these low numbers and the susceptibility of ferrets to coronaviruses, conservationists feared that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic would threaten this fragile recovery. Scientists from National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center near Fort Collins, Colorado, they began injecting an experimental vaccine into their captive breeding population in late summer. The vaccine is different from those approved so far in humans. It uses a purified segment of the vaccine, the spike protein, and an adjuvant chemical that promotes the immune response instead of the mRNA platform used by human coronavirus vaccines.
The center has already completed the inoculations, leaving 60 ferrets unvaccinated in case something goes wrong with the vaccine, according to CPR.
So far, the vaccinated ferrets appear healthy and tests show antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in their blood. However, it is not yet clear whether the vaccine actually protects against the disease, because those efficacy trials have not yet been completed in ferrets. The efficacy trials are the equivalent of the Phase 3 human trials that recently allowed the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to receive Emergency Use Authorization (USA) from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“We can do these kinds of things experimentally in animals that we can’t do in humans,” Rocke told CPR.
Originally posted on Live Science.
