Pfizer Vaccine is Only Slightly Less Effective Against Key South African Mutations, Study Finds

NEW YORK (AP) – Pfizer Inc and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine appeared to lose only a small amount of effectiveness against a virus engineered with three key mutations of the new variant of the coronavirus found in South Africa, according to a laboratory study conducted by the American pharmaceutical.

The study by Pfizer and scientists from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), which has not yet been peer-reviewed, showed a less than double reduction in antibody titer levels, indicating that the vaccine likely it would be effective in neutralizing a virus. with the so-called E484K and N501Y mutations found in the South African variant.

The https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.27.427998v1 study was conducted with blood drawn from people who had received the vaccine. Its findings are limited because it does not analyze the full set of mutations found in the new South African variant.

While these findings do not indicate the need for a new vaccine to address the emerging variants, Pfizer and BioNTech are prepared to answer whether a SARS-CoV-2 variant shows evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine escapes immunity, said the companies. .

Scientists are currently engineering a virus with the full set of mutations and expect to see results from that in about two weeks, according to Pei-Yong Shi, study author and professor at UTMB.

The results are more encouraging than another non-peer-reviewed study by Columbia University scientists earlier Wednesday, which used a slightly different method and showed that the antibodies generated by the injections were significantly less effective against the South African variant.

One possible reason for the difference could be that Pfizer’s findings are based on a designed coronavirus, and the Columbia study used a pseudovirus based on the vesicular stomatitis virus, a different type of virus, said Shi of UTMB. He said he believes the pseudovirus finding needs to be validated against the real virus.

The study also showed even better results against several key mutations of the highly transmissible British variant of the virus. Shi said they were also working on a virus engineered with the full set of mutations from that variant.

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