As the British coronavirus variant occupies countries’ pandemic plans due to its increased transmissibility, other mutations to the Sars-CoV-2 are provoking concern among scientists who are scrambling to work out if they will still respond to vaccines.
Although research into the new variant is limited, a Brazilian study this month looked at a patient who had recovered from Covid-19 only to become reinfected with the new, mutated strain. With E484K, as with the British variant, the mutation occurs on the virus’ spike protein, which allows it to bind more easily with human cell receptors, potentially heightening its infectiousness.“They should all be effective at the moment but we worry about further mutations occurring on top of these ones,” he told AFP.Pfizer and German partner BioNTech said last week that their vaccine was effective against the N501Y mutation found on the British virus variant, known as B117.
But the British variant has shown in several studies to be up to 70 percent more infectious than normal virus strains.New vaccines? Lead researcher Rino Rappuoli, an immunologist at pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline, told AFP that the current spike protein mutations should not pose a problem for existing vaccines, however.
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