Meanwhile, the United States said it is not yet certain whether the new variant of the coronavirus discovered in Britain is more contagious, but it is conducting studies to learn more. Moncef Slaoui, chief advisor to the Operation Warp Speed vaccine program, added that he hoped laboratory experiments would show that the new strain would respond to existing vaccines and treatments. While several countries have closed their borders to Britain, Slaoui said the variant may have long been prevalent in the UK, but that scientists hadn’t started looking for it until now, creating the impression of an increase when it did. they made.
“There is no strong evidence that this virus is actually more transmissible, (but) there is clear evidence that there is more in the population,” said the vaccine scientist and former pharmaceutical executive. “It may be that the seeding happened in the shadows and now we are seeing an increase, or maybe it has a higher transmissibility.” “What is clear is that it is not more pathogenic,” he continued, meaning that it has not been shown to cause more serious disease.
On the issue of contagion, to determine cause and effect, experiments should be performed on animals in which they are co-housed and deliberately infected, he said. This would show the level of viral load required to infect another animal.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) had begun laboratory studies on the variant to determine whether antibodies against the more dominant strain of Covid-19 will be effective against it, Slaoui said. “Which is very likely the expected result,” he said.
The tests will use antibodies extracted from recovered patients, antibodies produced by vaccines and synthetic antibodies made in the laboratory, and would take a few weeks.
Slaoui added that he was optimistic that antibodies produced in response to the Covid-19 vaccines would continue to be effective, because they bind to various “epitopes” or regions of the spike protein.
The spike protein is the three-dimensional surface molecule that the virus uses to invade human cells and is what gives the microbe its crown or “crown” appearance. The chances of a single mutation disrupting all of these regions at once are “extremely low,” he said.
But he warned: “It is impossible to exclude whether one day, somewhere, a virus may escape the protective response produced by the vaccine, so we must remain absolutely vigilant.”
In related news, the NIH is also planning a clinical trial involving highly allergic people to see how they respond to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, Slaoui said. The move comes after several people in the United States and Britain had allergic reactions to the Pfizer vaccine.
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