BERLIN – European authorities are offering a coronavirus vaccine to every adult in an Austrian district plagued by a surge in infections to determine how effective the vaccine is against the variant first found in South Africa.
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The city of Innsbruck in Tyrol, Austria, which is struggling to contain the coronavirus variant first found in South Africa.
Starting next week, everyone aged 16 and over in the Schwaz district, near the western Austrian city of Innsbruck, will be eligible for free shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, as part of the unique effort to learn more about the fight of the variant.
The study in Austria is part of a much broader effort to answer an important question as the virus mutates and new variants emerge: Do vaccinations designed last year work against more recent mutations? If not, scientists will continue to develop new versions of the vaccines.
Laboratory studies have shown that some vaccines that work well against earlier variants are less effective – although they still offer significant protection – against the variant known as B.1.351, which was first found in South Africa in December and the dominant one there has become.
Real tests of these findings are still needed, and some combinations of variants and vaccines have not yet been tested, not even in laboratories.
Authorities in the Schwaz district, in the state of Tyrol, on Thursday called on residents to report for their vaccinations by March 8, so that enough doses can be ordered and delivered for the study. More than 20,000 residents, about a third of all eligible, registered in the first 24 hours, authorities said.
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Tyrol’s shops and ski resorts, now almost empty, were under pressure more than a year ago, leading to the spread of the pandemic.
Earlier this week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen agreed to award 100,000 extra doses of the vaccine to Austria in exchange for a multinational team of scientists collecting data on the mass vaccination in Tyrol. The region has seen one of the worst outbreaks of the variant in Europe and the Chancellor of Austria, Sebastian Kurz, is pushing the European Union for extra doses to stop its spread.
“Our goal is to be able to stop the South African variant on a large scale,” Günther Platter, the governor of Tyrol, announced on Wednesday. “We want to protect people from this variant.”
The pilot program in Austria is the first type of vaccination targeted at a specific region in the European Union, where the roll-out of vaccines has left Member States far behind some other rich countries. About 6 percent of the block’s residents received at least one shot, compared to 16 percent in the United States, 31 percent in Britain and 55 percent in Israel.
“From a scientific point of view, this is an incredibly important study where we can learn a lot,” said Dr. Herwig Kollaritsch, a member of the Austrian Immunization Commission, said in an interview with the public broadcaster ORF.
“It will also be beneficial for Pfizer, which is legal because these vaccines have not been on the market for very long and are gaining more knowledge every day that helps us understand how we can best use them,” said Dr. Kollaritsch said.
But the success of the project depends on everyone being willing to participate. Officials hope to fire shots on March 11.
Dr. Kollaritsch said it would take about a month before the full effect of the vaccine took hold. Teams of scientists from Austria and abroad will monitor how well the vaccine infection works with the variant, a scenario that has not yet been clinically tested, he said.
Since February, thousands of police and border patrol officers have secured the state border, ensuring that anyone leaving, even traveling to other regions in Austria, can show a test that he is not infected. Communities have been provided with test kits to encourage widespread testing as part of detecting efforts to prevent the spread of the virus.
The state has seen the number of infections with the B.1.351 variant drop from 200 per day in early February to 88 on Wednesday, as the overall infection rate in the state continues to fall.
Beware of the threat posed by the variant, the German government closed its border with Tyrol last month and disrupted international travel on one of Europe’s most important north-south arteries, disrupting traffic and angering the authorities in Brussels.
The region is one of Austria’s hardest hit by the coronavirus. The first cases of contamination in the country were detected in the capital of Innsbruck in February 2020. The following month, a superspreader event was spotted at the Ischgl ski resort, where authorities later determined that many Europeans contracted the virus while on holiday. , and then took it home.
Christopher F. Schuetze reports from Hanover, Germany
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