The COVID-19 variant, first detected in the UK and South Africa and now distributed worldwide, is not a current threat to the efficacy of the first vaccines, but mutations will be closely monitored because ‘it could be a problem’, says Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, to Axios.
The whole picture: Vaccinations are underway, although it is starting slowly. The return to the normal goal depends on achieving 70% -85% herd immunity in the population, says Fauci. Although there are concerns about the mutations that could bypass the vaccines, he says it is a bigger problem for certain treatments than for vaccines.
What is happening: Viruses mutate frequently, but often the changes are small and do not causing problems with treatments or vaccines. Public health officials have been closely monitoring SARS-CoV-2 variants.
B.1.1.7 no longer looks virulent or the effect of the vaccine, based on what British doctors say, Fauci says.
- B.1.1.7 is more transmissible because it binds more easily to the ACE2 receptor, which penetrates the virus into cells.
- It insists on the need for faster vaccinations, says Carlos del Rio, a leading professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine.
- “If the R-zero goes from 2.5 to 2.9 in a totally naive population, after 10 cycles of transmission, instead of 9,000 people who are infected, you have infected 42,000 people,” warns del Rio.
The 501.V2 variant is ‘a little more about the possibility of interfering with some of the monoclonal antibodies,’ based on preliminary findings, Fauci says.
- Monoclonal antibody treatments are specifically targeted to one specific region of the virus and “if the mutation is at that epitope, it can prevent the effect,” he says.
- Vaccines, on the other hand, “cause a polyclonal reaction against various aspects of the vein protein,” Fauci points out. “For something to really bypass the effectiveness of the vaccine, there must be many mutations that are all in the right places. ‘
What they are looking at: Scientists follow the strains and test them against the vaccines.
- “If it does not affect the vaccine, it is good to go. If it does, you need to make small changes to the vaccine to circumvent the changes that occur in the mutations,” says Fauci.
- With the “plug-and-play” nature of the mRNA vaccines, it is much easier to change the composition of those vaccines, he adds.
- And because there is now a huge amount of data on the mRNA-based vaccine platform, “it’s likely that the FDA will consider it a voltage change, which is not necessary to start from the first one,” he says.
The conclusion: “You always have to take these things seriously, follow them closely and hope that there will be no problem. But if there is, you have to adapt to it,” says Fauci. “And now we have the technology to do that pretty easily.”