“We don’t know if the vaccines cover it.”

Published on: 12/20/2020 1:51 PM

“It is not known whether the immune response produced by vaccines also covers this variant” of the coronavirus. To tell Adnkronos is the virologist Andrea Crisanti, commenting on the new more aggressive variant of Covid that is spreading in the southeast of England and that has also been detected in Denmark, the Netherlands and Australia. “We have to check if this variant is already in Italy and then give resources to the laboratories to carry out the sequencing. The more it spreads, the more illness and death it causes, it is evident”, explains Crisanti.

The new variant “appeared this summer in Spain and in fact has a higher R0 than the others,” explains the virologist and professor of microbiology at the University of Padua. It is not known whether the immune response produced by the vaccines also covers this variant “. a question for which there is still no answer ”. However, such a thing has already happened, explains the virologist, “with the Shanghai variant that supplanted the Wuhan one.” What is happening, therefore, “is normal” says Crisanti, who specifies: “It is not that we should not be alarmed but rather that we must try to understand what is happening, how much this variant is spreading with respect to the other, if it is more virulent and yes vaccine problems, all questions to which we have no answer. “