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Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/202...virus-variant/
We could know soon whether vaccines work against a scary new coronavirus variant
A trial of Johnson and Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine in South Africa may hold clues to the future of the covid-19 pandemic.
by Antonio Regalado archive page
January 23, 2021
Salim Abdool Karim was at a cricket match on December 26, Boxing Day, when he made the mistake of looking at his email. He had received a new report and the news wasn’t good. A heavily mutated coronavirus spotted in South Africa appeared to allow the virus to bind more tightly, and more easily, to human cells.
Karim, an epidemiologist and lead covid-19 adviser to the South African government, knew what the report meant. It could explain a drastic change in covid-19 in his country, where rising case numbers were turning every province red.
“It simply went up, up, up, and up, into the equivalent of an Everest,” Karim says.
The rise in cases in South Africa has been linked to a new, highly mutated form of the covid-19 virus. And it's just part of a wider pattern being seen around the world. Over the last month, weary researchers racing to understand new variants in Africa, Brazil, and the United Kingdom have pumped out a series of alarming reports on preprint servers, websites, and in official reports, describing a coronavirus that is changing in ways that appear to let it shrug off lockdowns, avoid antibodies, and retake cities, like London or Manaus, that already suffered through big first waves.
Indeed, in a few short weeks the perception among some scientists of the coronavirus has gone from a static, slow-changing virus that’s easily walloped by vaccine technology to something more like a terrorist shapeshifter that could put a decisive end to the pandemic out of sight.
Will vaccines still work?
Most the world’s attention has been on a so-called British variant of the covid virus; it seems to spread faster than the original version and has appeared in dozens of countries, including the US. On Friday, January 22, the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, said government advisers warned this strain may also be more deadly, killing the infected about 30% more often.
Faster spreading, more deadly, versions of the coronavirus can still be dealt with using masks and social distancing. But the variant in South Africa, called 501Y.V2 and first described by gene sleuths on December 22, not only spreads faster but, alarmingly, also appears to evade antibodies from the blood of people previously infected by covid-19, and, in theory, could also lessen the effect of vaccines, society’s main hope of curbing the global outbreak.
Such lab evidence of “immune escape” makes the variant in South Africa “much more concerning” than the one in the UK, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaking at his first press conference under the new Biden administration on January 21. “The real question that people are quite clearly interested in is: What is the impact on the vaccine?” Fauci said.
What Fauci didn’t mention is that we could have a real-world answer to that question as soon as next week thanks to a large vaccine trial that recruited thousands of South Africans between September and December, just as the dangerous variant spread widely.
That vaccine, from Johnson and Johnson, has been widely anticipated because it’s given as single shot and is easily stored, making it easier to get into arms than the super-cooled, two-dose messenger RNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer authorized in the US last month.
Now, though, the J&J trial may unexpectedly answer the big question of whether vaccines will protect against the 501Y.V2 variant in South Africa or not. That could be determined if data show the shot is less effective in South Africa than it has been in the US, where part of the trial occurred.
“It will be wonderful if it has equal efficacy against the South Africa strain. If it doesn’t, that is telling us something,” says Lawrence Corey, a virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who leads the operations center for the COVID-19 Prevention Network, which coordinates vaccine trials financed by the US government.
Corey estimates that 7,000 South Africans joined the trial, and since it took place as the new virus spread, “most of the study in South Africa will be measuring the efficacy against the variant.”...
We could know soon whether vaccines work against a scary new coronavirus variant
A trial of Johnson and Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine in South Africa may hold clues to the future of the covid-19 pandemic.
by Antonio Regalado archive page
January 23, 2021
Salim Abdool Karim was at a cricket match on December 26, Boxing Day, when he made the mistake of looking at his email. He had received a new report and the news wasn’t good. A heavily mutated coronavirus spotted in South Africa appeared to allow the virus to bind more tightly, and more easily, to human cells.
Karim, an epidemiologist and lead covid-19 adviser to the South African government, knew what the report meant. It could explain a drastic change in covid-19 in his country, where rising case numbers were turning every province red.
“It simply went up, up, up, and up, into the equivalent of an Everest,” Karim says.
The rise in cases in South Africa has been linked to a new, highly mutated form of the covid-19 virus. And it's just part of a wider pattern being seen around the world. Over the last month, weary researchers racing to understand new variants in Africa, Brazil, and the United Kingdom have pumped out a series of alarming reports on preprint servers, websites, and in official reports, describing a coronavirus that is changing in ways that appear to let it shrug off lockdowns, avoid antibodies, and retake cities, like London or Manaus, that already suffered through big first waves.
Indeed, in a few short weeks the perception among some scientists of the coronavirus has gone from a static, slow-changing virus that’s easily walloped by vaccine technology to something more like a terrorist shapeshifter that could put a decisive end to the pandemic out of sight.
Will vaccines still work?
Most the world’s attention has been on a so-called British variant of the covid virus; it seems to spread faster than the original version and has appeared in dozens of countries, including the US. On Friday, January 22, the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, said government advisers warned this strain may also be more deadly, killing the infected about 30% more often.
Faster spreading, more deadly, versions of the coronavirus can still be dealt with using masks and social distancing. But the variant in South Africa, called 501Y.V2 and first described by gene sleuths on December 22, not only spreads faster but, alarmingly, also appears to evade antibodies from the blood of people previously infected by covid-19, and, in theory, could also lessen the effect of vaccines, society’s main hope of curbing the global outbreak.
Such lab evidence of “immune escape” makes the variant in South Africa “much more concerning” than the one in the UK, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaking at his first press conference under the new Biden administration on January 21. “The real question that people are quite clearly interested in is: What is the impact on the vaccine?” Fauci said.
What Fauci didn’t mention is that we could have a real-world answer to that question as soon as next week thanks to a large vaccine trial that recruited thousands of South Africans between September and December, just as the dangerous variant spread widely.
That vaccine, from Johnson and Johnson, has been widely anticipated because it’s given as single shot and is easily stored, making it easier to get into arms than the super-cooled, two-dose messenger RNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer authorized in the US last month.
Now, though, the J&J trial may unexpectedly answer the big question of whether vaccines will protect against the 501Y.V2 variant in South Africa or not. That could be determined if data show the shot is less effective in South Africa than it has been in the US, where part of the trial occurred.
“It will be wonderful if it has equal efficacy against the South Africa strain. If it doesn’t, that is telling us something,” says Lawrence Corey, a virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who leads the operations center for the COVID-19 Prevention Network, which coordinates vaccine trials financed by the US government.
Corey estimates that 7,000 South Africans joined the trial, and since it took place as the new virus spread, “most of the study in South Africa will be measuring the efficacy against the variant.”...