BEIJING (Reuters) – There are no signs that new variants of the coronavirus will affect the immune impact of a vaccine that China has just authorized for public use, a disease control official said on Friday.
The shooting by a subsidiary of the state-backed company Sinopharm was approved on Thursday, the day after the news of the first case imported by China of a variant that is spreading in Great Britain. [L1N2JB039]
“We don’t need to panic,” Xu Wenbo, an official with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told state television.
The mutant variant, compared to previous mutant variants … has no obvious change so far in its ability to cause disease, he added.
He said no impact of the variants was detected on the immune effect of the vaccine.
The variant that British scientists have called “VUI – 202012/01” includes a genetic mutation in the protein “spike”, which could theoretically lead to an easier spread of COVID-19.
Xu added that the mutation of the virus protein would not affect the sensitivity of most Chinese-made COVID-19 tests targeting the nucleic acids of the virus, which carry genetic information.
Reporting by Roxanne Liu and Ryan Woo; Edited by Andrew Cawthorne