COVID strain from South Africa has a huge resistance to antibodies to the original virus

Durban, South Africa – The race to vaccinate people against COVID-19 has been made even more urgent by the urgency of new, more contagious variants of coronavirus. CBS News rarely had access to a South African lab studying one of the new strains more worrying of the virus, which appears to have at least some resistance to the antibodies that vaccines create in the human body to protect against the bug.

Virus hunters in the Durban high-risk laboratory are hot on the trail of the mutant strain that is spreading at breakneck speed in South Africa. The virus has moved to attach more easily to human cells, making the disease not more deadly, but helping it to spread much more easily.

“We believe we are going through a new pandemic with this variant that not only transmits much faster, but also has a lower neutralization potential,” genetic scientist Tulio de Oliveira told CBS News.

De Oliveira discovered the new variant after noticing a dramatic increase in infections in November. His colleagues in the highly secure laboratory have developed a living strain culture to accelerate their research.

Alex Sigal is a principal investigator at the African Institute for Health Research and the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany. He says the new strain discovered in South Africa appears to have the ability to significantly reduce the effectiveness of antibodies in people infected with the original version of the virus.

“It’s ten times conservative,” he told CBS News, “but you can have a complete knockout,” which means that a person’s natural defense against the original strain of the virus could prove useless against the variant. from South Africa.

This means that those infected in the first wave may have little protection against the new strain and, even more worryingly, may make some of the vaccines less effective.

“It’s clear we underestimated this virus,” he says. On the other hand, there is still no evidence that vaccines will be affected and certainly people should continue vaccination, as this is the solution to this pandemic.

At the country’s central laboratory, scientists point out that immunity is only part of the picture. Data on how effective vaccines are at the new strain will not be available for several weeks, but in the future vaccines may need to be modified from time to time to protect against mutant strains – as is the annual flu vaccine years.