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Scientists are not entirely sure that Covid-19 vaccines will work in a new variant of the coronavirus found in South Africa, ITV’s political editor said on Monday, citing an unidentified scientific adviser to the British government.
Both Britain and South Africa have discovered new, more infectious variants of the coronavirus in recent weeks that have led to an increase in cases. British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Monday that he was now very concerned about the thread found in South Africa.
Scientists including BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin and John Bell, a royal professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, have said they are testing the vaccines on the new variants and say they could 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 Covid-19 is that they are not as sure that the vaccines will be as effective against it as they are for the variant of the UK, ”said ITV political editor Robert Peston.
Public Health England said there is currently no evidence to suggest that the vaccines will not be effective against the new strain. The Health Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report.
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 currently 60 candidate vaccines in testing, including those already being rolled out at AstraZeneca and Oxford, Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, Russia’s Sputnik V, and China’s Sinopharm.
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.”
BioNTech’s Sahin told Spiegel in an interview published 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 in six weeks, although it might require additional regulatory approvals.
