Study: Mutation Cuts Vaccine Protection To One-Third (FT)

Coronaviruses with mutations from the variant first identified in South Africa lower the immune protection offered by one of the most widely used Covid-19 vaccines, a study reported on Tuesday has found. Yang Liu and Pei-Yong Shi of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and their colleagues engineered several variants of Sars-CoV-2, including one containing the same spike-protein mutations as the B.1.351 variant that emerged in South Africa. "To analyse effects on neutralisation elicited by [the vaccine] we engineered … mutations from the B.1.351 lineage into USA-WA1/2020, a relatively early isolate of the virus," the researchers wrote. The data was published in a preliminary report in the New England Journal of Medicine and a summary appeared in Nature magazine on Tuesday. Antibodies elicited by the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine neutralised the virus only one-third as effectively as they did a strain lacking those mutations.