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By Alexander Winning
JOHANNESBURG, Jan 5 (Reuters) - A variant of the coronavirus
first detected in South Africa is unlikely to completely negate
the immunising effects of vaccines, a researcher studying it
told Reuters.
British scientists expressed concern on Monday that COVID-19
vaccines may not be able to protect against the variant
identified by South African genomics scientists and which has
spread internationally.
Richard Lessells, an infectious disease expert at the
KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, which
played a central role in identifying the variant known as
501Y.V2, said his understanding was that the comments were not
based on any new data but on shared information.
"They are voicing the same concerns that we articulated when
we first released this information, that the pattern of
mutations did give us concern," Lessells said on Tuesday.
South African researchers are studying the effects of
mutations in the variant, including whether natural immunity
from exposure to older variants provides protection against
reinfection by the new variant.
Preliminary results from those studies may be ready by the
end of this week, Lessells said.
Scientists have identified more than 20 mutations in the
501Y.V2 variant, including several in the spike protein the
virus uses to infect human cells.
One of these is at a site that is believed to be important
for neutralising antibodies and is not found in another
coronavirus variant discovered in Britain, Lessells said.
"Why we've been a bit cautious about flagging out the
concern about the (effectiveness of) vaccines is that for many
of the vaccines they are thought to induce quite a broad immune
response," he said.
That broad response could target different parts of the
spike protein, not just one, he added.
"That's why we think that although these mutations may have
some effect, they are very unlikely to completely negate the
effect of the vaccines," Lessells said.
South Africa's health ministry acknowledged questions from
Reuters but did not give an immediate response. The country has
recorded more than 1.1 million COVID-19 cases and in excess of
30,000 deaths, the most on the African continent.
Public Health England has said there is no evidence to
suggest COVID-19 vaccines would not protect against mutated
coronavirus variants.
BioNTech chief executive Ugur Sahin said in an
interview last week that his company's vaccine, which uses
messenger RNA to instruct the human immune system to fight the
virus, should be able to protect against the British variant.
(Reporting by Alexander Winning
Editing by Joe Bavier and Alexander Smith)
