Vaccine experts are worried that the coronavirus variant first detected in South Africa last month could be resistant to the COVID-19 vaccines currently in distribution.
“We do not know definitively how much the vaccine is effective against [the South African mutation] … and Pfizer tested only one mutation, and that is not enough,” Israeli Health Ministry Central District Officer Ofra Havkin told the Jerusalem Post.
The mutated form of the coronavirus was first detected in December by a network of laboratories in South Africa. The scientists concluded that the new variant from South Africa, which has now reached at least six other countries, has multiple mutations in the virus’s spike protein, the main target for the antibodies produced after vaccination.
Investigations into the variant’s resistance to vaccines are ongoing. Preliminary findings released Friday from Pfizer and scientists from the University of Texas Medical Branch showed that the shots “neutralized the virus with the mutation as well as they neutralized virus without the mutation.”
The network of scientists in South Africa could not say definitively that the variant is more severe or contagious than others. However, the scientists said the mutation’s ability to attach to cells easily suggests that it “may be associated with increased transmissibility.”
It is likely that the South African variant has already spread in the United States, according to Dr. Shabir Madhi, director of the South Africa Medical Research Council’s Vaccines Research Unit.
“I think it is just a matter of time before it’s identified,” given how quickly it has spread to a handful of other countries, Madhi told the Washington Examiner. “But based on experience in the U.K. as well as South Africa, this particular variant seems to, over a short period of time, become the dominant variant.”
A highly transmissible coronavirus variant from the United Kingdom has already been identified in eight states among people without a history of travel, signaling that the virus has been transmitted from person to person. While researchers cannot yet conclude that the mutated virus causes more severe cases of COVID-19, they fear that another surge in cases will be hard to tamp down until large swaths of the most vulnerable populations are immunized.
The vaccine rollout is off to a rocky start, though, with the Trump administration falling short of its goal of administering 20 million shots by the end of 2020. So far, roughly 8 million doses have been given to priority groups, such as healthcare workers and long-term care residents, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To date, more than 90 million total infections have been reported globally, with about 22.5 million infections reported in the U.S. alone. Nearly 2 million deaths due to COVID-19 have been confirmed worldwide, with more than 375,000 of those fatalities occurring in the U.S.
