Emerging coronavirus strains may be stronger than existing vaccines
Scientists believe that the option in which the new strains of coronavirus will be stronger than the COVID-19 vaccine is a “real possibility.” Scientific advisers warn that such an outcome could set the battle against the pandemic back a year or even further.
Recent documents from the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) suggest that a new variant that does not fear the vaccine is a “real opportunity”.
According to The Guardian, SAGE members supported continued work on new vaccines that reduce infection and transmission to a greater extent than current vaccinations, and also called for laboratory research to predict the evolution of coronavirus variants.
With the emergence of a new variant of COVID-19, which is seen as one of the main dangers that could exacerbate the crisis again, prominent scientists have highlighted the risks. Professor Graham Medley, SAGE member and head of the government’s COVID Modeling Team, said this is “clearly something that planners and scientists should take very seriously as it will get us back on a long journey.”
“This is not much different from the planning that needs to be done between pandemics – a new option that could significantly overcome immunity would be essentially a new virus,” says Professor Medley. “The advantage is that we know we can create vaccines against this virus — and relatively quickly. The disadvantage is that we will revert to the same situation we were in a year ago, depending on how much the current immunity has affected the new variant. Let’s hope that evolution will go slowly, so that new options are emerging that can only partly evade the vaccine, and not in one big leap. “
Dr Mark Bagelin of Imperial College’s COVID-19 Response Team and member of the government’s SPI-M Modeling Team says preventing the importation of concerns with “moderate to high immune escape properties will be critical, as it could lead to future waves of whole orders of magnitude greater than those that have been up to now.
“It is unlikely that such a new virus will completely elude immunity from past infections or vaccines,” the expert said. – Some immunity must be maintained, at least in the most severe outcomes, such as death or hospitalization. Most likely, we will be able to update existing vaccines to include the emerging strain. But it will take months and means that we may have to reimpose restrictions if there is a significant risk to public health. The number of restrictions will be a political decision and should be proportional to the extent to which this virus can avoid the effects of current vaccines. “
British government sources said Public Health England and other organizations are monitoring the situation with rapid surveillance and sequencing of the virus genome. A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services said the vaccination program has built a “wall of protection”: “We are committed to protecting progress in vaccine deployment, and our world-leading genomics capabilities are at the forefront of global efforts to stay ahead of options: to date, more than half a million samples have been sequenced. “
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