JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – The new COVID-19 variant identified in South Africa could steal antibodies that attack it in blood plasma treatments from previously recovered patients and reduce the effectiveness of the current vaccine line, scientists said on Wednesday.
Researchers are struggling to determine whether vaccines currently being developed around the globe are effective against the so-called 501Y.V2 variant, identified by South African genomics experts late last year in Nelson Mandela Bay.
“This lineage presents the complete escape from three classes of therapeutically relevant monoclonal antibodies,” wrote the team of scientists from three universities in South Africa working with the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) in a paper published in the journal bioRxiv.
“Furthermore, 501Y.V2 shows a substantial or complete escape of neutralizing antibodies from convalescent plasma COVID-19,” they wrote, adding that their findings “highlight the prospect of reinfection … and may foreshadow the reduced efficacy of current vaccines based on peak. ”
The 501Y.V2 variant is 50% more infectious than its predecessors, South African researchers said this week. It has already spread to at least 20 countries since it was reported to the World Health Organization in late December.
It is one of several new variants discovered in recent months, including others found for the first time in England and Brazil.
The variant is the main driver of South Africa’s second wave of COVID-19 infections, which reached a new daily high of more than 21,000 cases earlier this month, well above the first wave, before falling to about 12,000 per day.
Convalescent blood plasma from previous patients has not been shown to be effective when administered to critically ill patients requiring intensive COVID-19 therapy, but is approved in several countries as an emergency measure.
British scientists and politicians have expressed concern that vaccines that are currently being implemented or under development may be less effective against the variant.
The newspaper said it remains to be seen how effective the current 501Y.V2 vaccines are, which would only be determined by large-scale clinical trials. However, the results showed the need to design new vaccines to deal with the evolving threat, he said.
Reporting by Tim Cocks; Montage by Peter Graff