As vaccination programs against Newcastle pneumonia are being launched around the world, more infectious variants of the virus are emerging one after another. U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced Wednesday (17) the results of a study, said the vaccine developed with German technology biotechnology company BioNTech, the South African variant of the virus to produce antibody protection, or the general new coronavirus greatly reduced by two-thirds.
Pfizer will discuss with regulators whether it needs to develop a new vaccine or enhanced dose for the Variant virus.
Pfizer, BioNTech and the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) collaborated to collect blood samples from 20 vaccine subjects to test the status of three genetically modified new coronaviruses, one of which was a fully mutated South African variant and the remaining two were partially mutated.
It was found that the vaccine produced only one-third as many neutralizing antibodies to the South African variant as to the most common original version of the virus. However, since there is no standard measure of the level of antibodies needed to deal with the new coronavirus, it is not clear whether the reduced level of antibodies will affect the effectiveness of the vaccine against the virus.
Pei-Yong Shi, a UTMB biochemist and molecular biologist, speculates that this may be due to the fact that the vaccine stimulates an immune response that is already much higher than the level needed to protect the body from the virus, but he still believes that Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine is protective against the South African variant of the virus.
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