Vaccine Resistant?

[KhaoYai]

Three new variants of Covid 19 have been found in South Africa, one of them may have resistance to Covid 19 vaccines. Tests are being carried out to establish whether or not this is the case - hopefully not but its worrying.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-55531838

Edited January 5, 2021 by KhaoYai

[FarFlungFalang]

9 minutes ago, KhaoYai said:

Three new variants of Covid 19 have been found in South Africa, one of them may have resistance to Covid 19 vaccines. Tests are being carried out to establish whether or not this is the case - hopefully not but its worrying.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-55531838

Covid 19 vaccines have a lot of hope placed upon them and produced in record time the producers of the vaccines spout their effectiveness at 95%,I guess we'll see what happens in the real world.To me it's no surprise as viruses are very tough and adept at surviving.A bit of trial and error maybe needed.

[Patong2021]

The advantage of the mRna vaccine is the ease in which they can be changed to respond to virus mutation.

There is no need to panic, as vaccine makers deal with this every year with the flu vaccines. They make the  vaccine for the common strains in circulation. Until then, verify the vaccine efficacy and block travel from South Africa direct or indirect.  All foreign travel should be subject to mandatory PcR testing and self isolation  of 2 weeks.

[KhaoYai]

2 hours ago, Patong2021 said:

There is no need to panic, as vaccine makers deal with this every year with the flu vaccines. They make the  vaccine for the common strains in circulation.

I'm not panicking, I fully expected that the vaccine manufacturers will be able to 'tweak' the current vaccine to combat new strains.  However, this raises questions over delays; 1. Obvioulsy the time taken to carry out any modifications. 2. Depending on the extent of any modifications, will manufacturers need to carry out further trials and will governments require time to evaluate any trial results before passing the vaccine? 

 

Hopefully those 2 items won't need to be carried out but there is a third factor that will certainly slow the roll out of vaccinations - if only a little.  Patients will have to be tested to determine which variant they have before the corresponding vaccine will be given - unless of course, any modification retains its capability to immunise against the original strain - which is not the case with flu vaccines from what I understand.

 

According to this, full scale trials are unlikely to be required but clearly there will be some delays:

 

“We’re ready if we need to make another vaccine to approach it,” Bell added. He also noted that the development process to update vaccines will likely not require the same large-scale clinical trials conducted this year, only immunogenicity studies to make sure it sparks an immune response.

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/30/covid-vaccine-oxford-researcher-says-future-strains-can-be-protected-against.html

 

I sincerely hope that the ongoing investigations into the new strain found in South Africa establish that it does not offer resistance to the current vaccine.

[shdmn]

The creators of the Oxford vaccine say they can tweak it to work with resistant strains within about 6 weeks if they need to. So I'm not too worried although this would probably set things back somewhat.

Edited January 5, 2021 by shdmn