Booster shots to prevent infections by coronavirus mutations will become the norm in the future, according to the leading genome expert in the UK.
“We need to realize that we will always have to have booster doses; immunity to coronavirus does not last forever,” Sharon Peacock, head of COVID-19 Genomics UK, told Reuters exclusively. COG-UK, created by Peacock about a year ago in response to COVID-19 and a consortium of public health and academic institutions, has followed up about 349,205 genomes of the virus from a worldwide effort of about 778 000 taken, the exhaust valve reported.
Just like the annual flu shot, boosters for COVID-19 will likely be needed to fight coronavirus variants that may occur in the future, Peacock said.
“We are already adapting the vaccines to deal with what the virus is doing in terms of evolution. So there are variants that have a combination of increased transmissibility and the ability to partially evade our immune response,” she said. added.
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Peacock said of the existing coronavirus variants that she was most concerned about B.1.351, which was first identified in South Africa.
“It is more transmissible, but it also has a change in a gene mutation, which we call E484K, which is associated with reduced immunity – so our immunity to the virus is reduced,” she told Reuters.
Existing coronavirus vaccines have also been found to reduce efficacy against the South African mutation, particularly Moderna, as well as Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, to create new vaccines to combat better variants. Moderna announced in February that the COVID-19 vaccine it recently developed to address the B.1.351 mutation is ready to be tested in human clinical trials.
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Peacock told Reuters in detail about the possibility of a future pandemic that at some point she expects another ‘virus of concern’ to emerge. However, she noted: “What I hope is that we will be better prepared to detect and contain it, after learning what we have in this global pandemic.”