Nature.Com published a thought piece on January 21, 2021 we thought was our duty to share. And this is despite it challenging our current thinking about COVID-19 immunity. The article – see link below – reviews the impacts of variants, and asks are these changes in antibody activity important? Especially when we view them in the context of the South African variant.
A ‘Tsunami of Lab Studies’ Raises Concerns Among Scientists
Danny Altmann is an immunologist at Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College London and an expert in these matters. ‘Some of the data I’ve seen in the last 48 hours have really scared me’ he admitted to Nature.Com. That’s because of emerging evidence that some variants could reduce the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.
However, the lens is still blurred, since the new studies only examined antibodies’ capacity to ‘neutralize’ variants in laboratory tests. And therefore information is not yet available on the broader functioning of the immune response. ‘So are these changes really important,’ asks virologist Paul Bieniasz at Rockefeller University in New York City. Then he answers his question by adding ‘I really don’t know’.
What If These Changes in Antibody Activity Were Important?
The concerns Danny Altmann raises center on the South African virus. Tulio de Oliveira is a bio-informatician at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. He links the concerns to the Eastern Cape spike which spread across South Africa and into neighboring territories over the holiday period.
Nature.Com explains this mutant contains changes that appear to have weakened antibody activity fighting to repel it. South Africa’s Eastern Cape province was also hit hard during the first wave. This leads researchers to wonder whether the new variant is able to elude previously-established immune responses.
Penny Moore is a virologist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She led a team that confirmed the new South African variant is capable of blunting older immunity. However, it’s still not clear what the implications are for herd immunity. And how important these changes in antibody activity could become.
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Preview Image: South Africa Daily Cases
