The South African variant is unlikely to completely nullify the COVID vaccines, says a scientist

JOHANNESBURG, Jan. 5 (Reuters) – A variant of the coronavirus first discovered in South Africa is unlikely to completely nullify the immunizing effects of vaccines, a researcher who studied it told Reuters.

British scientists on Monday expressed concern that COVID-19 vaccines may not protect against the variant identified by South African genomics scientists that has spread internationally.

Richard Lessells, infectious disease expert at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, which was central to identifying the variant known as 501Y.V2, said he saw the comments were not based on new data, but on shared information.

“They express the same concerns that we expressed when we first released this information that the pattern of mutations caused us concern,” Lessells said Tuesday.

South African researchers are studying the effects of mutations in the variant, including whether natural immunity from exposure to older variants protects against reinfection by the new variant.

Preliminary results from those studies could 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 that the virus uses to infect human cells.

One is in a site believed to be important for neutralizing antibodies, and not found in another coronavirus variant discovered in Britain, Lessells said.

“Why we’ve been a bit cautious about raising concerns about the (effectiveness of) vaccines is that for many of the vaccines they elicit a fairly broad immune response,” he said.

That broad response could target different parts of the spike protein, not just one, he added.

“Therefore, we think that while these mutations may have any effect, they are very unlikely to completely nullify the effect of the vaccines,” Lessells said.

South Africa’s Ministry of Health acknowledged questions from Reuters, but did not immediately respond. The country has recorded more than 1.1 million COVID-19 cases and more than 30,000 deaths, most of them in the African continent.

Public Health England has said there is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines would not protect against mutated coronavirus variants.

BioNTech chief 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)