Posted on Jun 9, 2021
New Evidence Suggests COVID-19 Vaccines Remain Effective Against Variants
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https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/09/ [login to see] /new-evidence-suggests-covid-19-vaccines-remain-effective-against-variants
The emergence of new and more infectious variants of the coronavirus has raised a troubling question: Will the current crop of COVID-19 vaccine prevent these variants from causing disease?
A study out Wednesday in the journal Nature suggests the answer is yes.
The research was fairly straightforward. Scientists took blood from volunteers who had received the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine and looked at the levels of neutralizing antibodies, the kind that prevent a virus from entering cells.
"What we showed is that the neutralizing antibodies are reduced about fivefold to the B.1.351 variant," says Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Under the new nomenclature proposed by the World Health Organization, B.1.351 is now called Beta. It first appeared in South Africa.
"That's very similar to what other investigators have shown with other vaccines," he says. "But what we also showed is that there's many other types of immune responses other than neutralizing antibodies, including binding antibodies, FC functional antibodies and T-cell responses."
The emergence of new and more infectious variants of the coronavirus has raised a troubling question: Will the current crop of COVID-19 vaccine prevent these variants from causing disease?
A study out Wednesday in the journal Nature suggests the answer is yes.
The research was fairly straightforward. Scientists took blood from volunteers who had received the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine and looked at the levels of neutralizing antibodies, the kind that prevent a virus from entering cells.
"What we showed is that the neutralizing antibodies are reduced about fivefold to the B.1.351 variant," says Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Under the new nomenclature proposed by the World Health Organization, B.1.351 is now called Beta. It first appeared in South Africa.
"That's very similar to what other investigators have shown with other vaccines," he says. "But what we also showed is that there's many other types of immune responses other than neutralizing antibodies, including binding antibodies, FC functional antibodies and T-cell responses."
New Evidence Suggests COVID-19 Vaccines Remain Effective Against Variants
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