New Covid variants may pose problems for vaccines
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The study was posted on the website for KRISP, the Kwazulu-Natal Research Innnovation and Sequencing Platform. The other two studies were posted on a pre-print server.
In the study that had similar findings, blood was drawn from 44 people in South Africa who'd had Covid-19. Nearly all of their cases were confirmed to have occurred prior to September, which is before the variant was spotted in South Africa.
The researchers then looked to see whether their antibodies would fight off the new variant.
For about half of the 44 people, their antibodies were powerless against the new variant. For the other half, the antibody response was weakened, but not totally knocked out.
In the third study, done at Rockefeller University, researchers looked at blood from 20 people who had received either the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccine. Different mutations in the viruses did allow some escape from some types of antibodies, but the volunteers' immune systems threw an army of different types of antibodies at the viruses.
Emerging evidence suggests new coronavirus variant could be problematic for vaccines - CNN