While research on emerging coronavirus variants is underway, an expert warned that it is ‘not magical’, and measures to mitigate the current spread will still work against the new strain. Mutations are also not outside the norm for a virus, especially not one with such a large spread in the community, said dr. Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the John Hopkins Center for Health Safety and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in a media conference Thursday.
‘What we see with SARS-CoV-2 is not unexpected,’ she said during the ‘COVID-19 variants: what it means for testing and vaccinations, achieving herd immunity and accelerating transmission. ‘. She added that the country needs to scale up successive efforts to better detect mutations.
“I want to emphasize that these variants are not magic,” Gronvall said. “Many of the things we did during this pandemic will continue to work when it comes to these variants.”
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The diagnostic tests developed to detect the initial strains will also continue to work, she said, adding that if there is a “threat to testing ability”, the FDA will monitor it and notify producers and consumers. will set.
“We are also encouraged that the FDA – approved vaccines will continue to be effective,” she said. “There is a lot of data emerging about the efficacy of the vaccine against these variants, and a lot of laboratory data that does not give the full picture. We continue to monitor the situation. At least for the vaccines currently using emergency authorization, it appears it still has to be very protective. ‘
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Dr. Andy Pekosz, co-director of the John Hopkins Center of Excellence for Flu Research and Surveillance and Professor and Vice-Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, added that the driving force behind the variants is the large number of coronavirus cases in the community.
‘We must also realize that case numbers are one of the things that [are] increases the likelihood that this virus will develop mutations that make it more transmissible, “he said. If it had a chance of 1 in a million, we rolled the dice 900,000 times because we could not control things out there. Controlling case numbers will be the most important thing we do to reduce the likelihood of more variants. ‘
Pekosz also said that the threat of another increase in cases due to an emerging variant could be reduced by an accelerated and concentrated vaccination effort, which, coupled with infection rates, would provide a high level of immunity.
“I think the vaccine and the national infection provide enough immunity that we are not going to see a large number of cases of the new variant,” he said. “They can reduce the rate at which the numbers drop, but I think everything I’ve seen so far about immune responses suggests that these variants are still susceptible to the immunity caused by vaccine or infection.”
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Nevertheless, he said that immunity caused by the COVID-19 vaccine is both stronger and longer than one left by previous infection.
“Both types of immune responses will help us, but we really want to focus on getting the vaccination campaign going, because it’s the stronger immunity and the longer lasting immunity,” he said.