Can an Israeli mutation undo Israel’s mass vaccination campaign?

So the Coronavirus National Information and Knowledge Center argued Saturday night in one paragraph of a nine-page report on mutations.

The result was a frenzy of headlines and panic.

The world has learned over the weekend that the British variant, which has spread like wildfire across Israel, could be more deadly than initially thought.

To date, however, “no significant Israeli mutation is known”, said prof. Sharon Alroy-Preis, head of public health services, told KAN News on Sunday morning.

But she added that “wherever a virus is, mutations can develop.”

“Think if you had to make handwritten copies of the genome – there is a very high probability that you have a typing error,” said prof. Jonathan Gershoni of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at Tel Aviv University explains. ‘While typing errors are common and understandable in printing books or copying documents, the same is true when repeating a genome. But we call the typing error mutations, and the virus with the mutations is a mutation or variant. ‘

LEVY-LAHAD said most of the changes are ‘quiet’ and have no effect on the virus proteins or anything else. But sometimes these ‘typos’ can have a big impact, Gershoni said. For example, “My wife is tough” versus “My life is tough” – the two phrases have one letter but very different meanings.

Mutations can increase a virus’ ability to become more contagious, make the virus more pathogenic, or make it less susceptible to antibodies stimulated or induced by vaccination, Gershoni said. On the other hand, he said that some mutations may make the virus less effective and eventually lead to a decrease.

Immunization could theoretically accelerate the evolution of a virus, Levy-Lahad said.

‘Until the coronavirus, one of the major health issues was that many germs became resistant to antibiotics because many were given in the population, often unnecessarily, and germs found a way to gain antibiotic resistance. “Those germs that succeed in creating resistance become more dominant because it will gain the upper hand,” she explained.

“If someone who has been vaccinated can still get some infection, there will happen to be variants that can resist the antibodies you have thanks to the vaccination.”

She said: ‘It’s basically a numbers game. If you have many sick people and many people who have been vaccinated – and if the vaccination does not completely rule out the infection – then it is simply because you have many people who can transmit coronavirus and many hosts in which it can develop, the variant can be created . ”

But she said that did not mean it would happen.

THE KNOWLEDGE CENTER’s report warned that this hypothetical ‘Israeli mutation’ could offer the virus some potential to evade the vaccine-induced immune response. It can therefore spread faster within the population – especially in light of the fact that children do not get a period.

But Levy-Lahad said the situation was not so black-and-white – that it was not an ‘all-or-nothing’ phenomenon.

‘It could be, for example, that the vaccination does not completely eradicate infection, but it does reduce the rate of serious diseases by 2% [one in 50] to one in 1000 – it will still have a big impact, ”she said.

She added that the flu vaccine is an example of a vaccine that needs to be updated because the virus mutates.

“I do not know that anyone has shown that this is due to the vaccination rate,” Levy-Lahad said.

However, she said that fear of mutations is an argument to follow the regulations of the Ministry of Health and reduce the infection.

Moreover, as Gershoni emphasized, while Israel has no control over how random mutations occur, the country does have control over how to reduce the infectious dose.

“As far as the uniqueness of Israel is concerned, we must remember that we are fifth of the countries with the most vaccinations. “The United States leads with 21 million people being vaccinated, an infectious rate of 77,000 people per million and more than 150,000 total infections per day,” Gershoni said.

“The number of infections in Israel due to the exclusion is gradually decreasing – and hopefully it will continue to do so,” he said. “It is our responsibility to do what we can to prevent escape mutations while increasing the vaccination campaign to ensure the safety of our population.”

With replication, there is a direct relationship between how many copies are made at a given time and the mutations that are going to accumulate, Gershoni said. If the rate of infection is low, the number of mutations tends to be relatively small. Each time the infection rate increases, the errors will also increase.

‘What I worry about when people come out with these announcements, such as that there is going to be an Israeli mutation, is that they are playing into the hands of the people who say that it is of no use to be vaccinated, or that it really is not. is not necessary. , ”Levy-Lahad emphasized.

“Vaccination is the best thing we currently have.”