Worrying findings: A study conducted at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and published last night (Sunday) in the journal Cell Host & Microbe revealed that the South African mutation of the corona virus is more resistant to the Pfizer vaccine than other strains of the virus. In addition, it seems that similar to the British version it is more contagious than the original strain of the disease.
“We have seen a sevenfold decrease in the ability of the Pfizer vaccine to inhibit infection by the South African variant of the virus,” research leader Professor Ran Tauba of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Genetics at the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben-Gurion University told the Jerusalem Post. He said the study, which was published, said it did not take into account clinical data, but rather it analyzed blood taken from vaccinated patients. “We sampled blood taken from vaccinated people, and measured the ability of the antibodies to inhibit infection,” Tauba said. “The vaccine still worked against the mutation, but in a less effective way.”
The effectiveness of the corona virus vaccine is usually measured by the action of a number of indicators. Aside from preventing infection, the ability to prevent serious illness and death is also being considered, and for many experts the latter two are even more important than the former. To date, Pfizer’s vaccine has proven to be 95% or more effective in all three categories, at least against the original strain of the virus and the British mutation.
Because of the nature of the study, the researchers did not consider the clinical significance of the findings, or whether the lower effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing infection also translates into a lower ability to prevent severe symptoms or death, Taube said, noting: To that of the British. “
During the study, the researchers also found that antibodies formed in vaccinated people after two injections of the vaccine were at higher levels than in unvaccinated recoverers. The research team is now focusing on mapping other versions of the virus.
“The idea is to try to identify which unique mutation in the virus surge is responsible for each of the findings we’ve seen, which results in higher infection, which results in higher resistance to the vaccine and so on,” Taube said. “There are other versions that are incubating and evolving, and we hope to characterize each one in a systematic way.”