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The pandemic originated in China, and at the time of the first wave, virus samples reflected this in a well-traced way. In the cases examined, the structure and genetics of the virus were largely the same outside of China, which did not change at first.
However, this is no longer the case today. The vast majority of infections are caused by an altered gene compared to the original virus and, more importantly, by a virus with an amino acid or protein structure. In the second and in some cases the third wave of the epidemic, a mutant virus is spreading listening for the D614G code.
The new extremely fast propagating variant differs from the original not only in its structure but also in its properties:
it can multiply faster in the human respiratory tract and infects more effectively.
The course of the disease is not (yet) significantly different, but its spread, as we hear and see every day, has accelerated significantly. This, of course, also raises fundamental questions about the efficacy of vaccines developed to prevent the virus from scratch: Their development began very rapidly, practically immediately after science and the pharmaceutical industry established the genetic makeup of the virus.
The question really is, if the virus has mutated since then, and this mutation has been significant enough to fundamentally affect the course of the infection and the epidemic, has the effectiveness of vaccines against it also changed?
Donald Trump, for example, had a good chance of recovering from the latter in a surprisingly short time. Just take the example of the influenza virus: unlike many vaccines, it does not provide lifelong protection against influenza. This is largely due to the heterogeneity of the virus and its extremely fast mutation rate. Therefore, strains of the virus in vaccines must be replaced almost every year, and sometimes entirely new variants are developed, such as during the 1968 flu pandemic, which killed millions of people.
So what about the Covid-19 pathogen, a new type of coronavirus, scientifically known as SARS-CoV-2? Will you have to get vaccinated against it every year? Or more often?
The answer now, and the emphasis here is now, is against the mutant that has already mutated and is now dominant.
vaccines that are currently being developed (and that are already made with steam power) appear to be protected.
A joint development between Pfizer in the US and BioNTech in Germany, which is already being vaccinated in the UK and ongoing for millions, has generated antibodies in the people in the study that may also bind to the protein of mutated coronavirus peak. This protein is responsible for the virus attaching itself to and entering human cells, which is why vaccines are primarily targeted for this purpose.
The company’s developers are already emphasizing that their technology could change the vaccine at any time if a newer version of the virus appeared, which is no longer protected against the vaccine we are now producing.
This will certainly be true for the vaccine, another close-to-license vaccine, developed by Moderna in the United States, as it relies on a fundamentally similar solution, that is, it delivers part of the virus’s hereditary material (RNA) to the body. Responsible peak protein, which the immune system recognizes and against which it produces antibodies. And these protect us from a real viral infection.
Most other vaccines work on a different but fundamentally similar principle: the University of Oxford and the British AstraZeneca, the Belgian Janssen vaccine and the Russian Sputnik also deliver the hereditary coronavirus, more precisely part of it, but not directly, but to one using another much less harmful virus.
The Chinese way is significantly different: the vaccine from the Sinovac factory delivers the entire coronavirus to our body in destroyed form.
This can be important because our immune system not only produces antibodies against a particular viral protein, the aforementioned spike protein, but also against all components of the coronavirus.
Therefore, in principle, even if the tip protein mutates, there is still the possibility of neutralizing the virus with other antibodies. In addition, viruses that contain the whole virus are generally not only involved in the production of antibodies, but also in the so-called can also provoke a stronger response in the field of cellular immunity. The Chinese manufacturer manufactured a vaccine on the same principle in 2006 against the then H5N1 bird flu, which also threatened a pandemic.
Top image: A researcher is investigating a coronavirus vaccine developed jointly by the Swedish-British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford at the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford on November 23, 2020. MTI / AP / University of Oxford / John Cairns
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