Following a flurry of data suggesting the first generation of COVID vaccines may not be as effective against certain COVID mutations, particularly a mutant strain first identified in South Africa, new "research" is suggesting patients may not even need a second dose of Pfizer's COVID-19 jab - or at least it could be delayed "in order to cover all priority groups as the first one is highly protective," according to two Canada-based researchers, who made the statement in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Even so, new lab study has just been released Thursday suggesting that the Pfizer-BioNTech jab "stimulated lower levels of neutralizing antibodies" against the SA mutant, and that the variant could reduce the efficacy of the jab by as much as two-thirds.
All of this comes as the UN turns up the pressure on its push for a global vaccination program, via the WHO and its Covax initiative, presumably.
But according to the doctors writing in the NEJM, the Pfizer jab had an efficacy of 92.6% after the first dose, Danuta Skowronski and Gaston De Serres said, based on an analysis of the documents submitted by the drugmaker to the FDA.
Pfizer responded by saying alternative dosing regimens of the vaccine had not been evaluated yet and that the decision resided with the health authorities. As one might imagine, there are "differences of opinion" as to what should be done, as some experts claim that the efficacy data so far is enough to justify a "flexible" dosing schedule. We guess sometimes "the science" isn't always conclusive. In their letter, the doctors mentioned above the efficacy data would justify second-jab delays to increase supplies. Meanwhile, another group of doctors wrote into th NEJM to share more results showing the Moderna jab is also less effective against the South African variant.
As supplies of the vaccines remain stretched incredibly thin worldwide, the EU earlier this week clinched a deal for hundreds of millions more doses of the Pfzier and Moderna jabs. But even in the US, officials are looking for reasons to allow a delay in the second "booster" jab, as politicians like Joe Biden scramble to meet their promises on vaccination numbers.
Even the US CDC, which warned Britain against experimenting with intervals weeks ago, is now considering offering the exact opposite advice.
Meanwhile, vaccinemakers are already developing next-gen shots that they say will offer more protection against the COVID-19 variants.
A new mutant strain of COVID-19 that has been dubbed “501.V2” has gotten completely out of control in South Africa, and authorities are telling us that it is an even bigger threat than the “Super COVID” that has been causing so much panic in the United Kingdom. Of course viruses mutate all the time, and so it isn’t a surprise that COVID-19 has been mutating. But mutations can become a major issue when they fundamentally alter the way that a virus affects humans, and we are being told that “501.V2” is much more transmissible than previous versions of COVID and that even young people are catching it a lot more easily. That is potentially a huge concern, because up until now young people have not been hit very hard by the COVID pandemic.
The new mutant, called 501.V2, was announced in Cape Town last Friday and is believed to be a more extreme variant than Britain’s new Covid strain which has plunged millions into miserable Christmas lockdowns.
Cases in South Africa have soared from fewer than 3,000 a day at the start of December to more than 9,500 per day, with the mutant accounting for up to 90 percent of those new infections.
If this same pattern happens elsewhere as this new mutant strain travels around the globe, then “501.V2” could eventually almost entirely replace all of the older versions of COVID.
Authorities are optimistically telling us that the recent vaccines that have been developed will “likely” work against this new variant, but the truth is that they will not know until testing is done.
And if the vaccines don’t work against “501.V2”, we could be back to square one very rapidly.
For now, countries all over the globe are banning flights from South Africa in a desperate attempt to isolate this new version. The UK, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey and Israel are among the nations that have banned those flights, but so far the United States is not on that list.
So people that are potentially carrying this new version of COVID continue to enter the U.S. on a daily basis.
Two cases of a new, “more transmissible” COVID-19 variant linked to South Africa have been identified in the UK, the health secretary has said.
Both cases are contacts of people who travelled from South Africa over the last few weeks, Matt Hancock said at a Downing Street news conference.
If the new vaccines are effective against “501.V2”, authorities believe that they already have the long-term answer to this new variant.
But if those vaccines don’t work, this pandemic could be entering a far more deadly new phase.
And of course we are hearing about more problems with these new vaccines on a daily basis. Thousands of adverse reactions have already been reported to the CDC, and more reports continue to pour in as more people get the shots. Here is one example from New York City…
A health care worker in New York City had a serious adverse reaction to a coronavirus vaccine, officials said on Wednesday.
New York City Health Commissioner David Chokshi said during a news conference that the unidentified worker experienced a “significant allergic reaction” to the vaccine. He added that the worker was treated for the reaction, and is in stable condition and recovering.
We should not be surprised that there are major issues with experimental mRNA vaccines that are based on entirely new technology that were rushed into production without proper testing.
And of course there are tens of millions of Americans that will never take any mRNA vaccine that literally “hijacks your cells” under any circumstances.
On the other hand, most of the U.S. population seems to think that these new vaccines will bring this pandemic to an end, but if they don’t work against new mutant versions of the virus that won’t be true at all.
It is so important to take a balanced view of these things.
Unfortunately, when it comes to COVID most people fall into two camps.
The first camp is totally freaked out because they think that COVID is about the worst thing that could ever happen to the United States and they tend to favor extremely draconian measures to prevent the spread of the virus.
But the truth is that the COVID pandemic pales in comparison to other great pandemics throughout human history. The Black Plague and the Spanish Flu Pandemic each killed at least 50 million people. As for the COVID pandemic, the global death toll has not reached the 2 million mark even if the official numbers are accurate. If a pandemic of this nature is freaking people out so much, what is going to happen when a truly killer plague is unleashed in our society?
The second camp either thinks that the pandemic is greatly exaggerated or that the virus doesn’t even exist at all. Even though hordes of people are catching the virus all around us, many out there continue to deny the reality of this crisis.
I simply do not understand that. So many people that I know around the country have gotten the virus, and that includes quite a few big names. For example, the following is an excerpt from an article in which Daisy Luther shares what her experience with COVID was like…
Days 3-5: Over the next three days, chills and fever were almost constant. My joints and muscles hurt. Getting up to go to the bathroom felt like an expedition up a mountain. I was tired and winded. I had very little appetite and even less of an inclination to cook food so I existed mostly on peanut butter and crackers and leftover soup. I was absolutely exhausted and so cold that I shivered violently when I got out from under my bed piled high with blankets. I had super-weird dreams. My cough worsened, my head hurt, and my throat was still mildly sore.
I drank lots of water and electrolyte beverages. My thirst remained unquenchable regardless of how much I drank. I took vitamins (C, D3) and took Zinc supplements. These are my regular supplements but I doubled that.
Days 6-9: The line to get a test at the local clinic was long and filled with people who were coughing up a lung. There was no way I’d be able to stand in that line for an hour, as sick as I felt. Besides, I figured if I didn’t have Covid, I’d get it standing in the line so I opted not to be tested.
This part made me think of the worst case of the flu I ever had, except intensified by about four times. It was terrible.
I usually let a fever run its course but by Saturday I felt so awful that I gave in and began treating symptoms. My normal temp is in the 96s and my temperature throughout these days stayed between 101-103. I staggered ibuprofen and acetaminophen, and I also used a mild muscle relaxant and my Ventilyn inhaler. The meds didn’t get rid of my fever but reduced the chills to a tolerable level. I slept almost around the clock, waking up for a couple of hours here and there to check on website stuff. Fortunately, I have a wonderful team who kept things running for us. One day blurred into the next and I considered going to the doctor again, but couldn’t muster the energy. I felt like if I just got a little more sleep I’d be okay.
My cough was getting far worse and now my ribs and abdominal muscles hurt. It was a deep painful cough that caused me to clutch my chest every single time inhaled deeply.
So to summarize, yes the COVID pandemic is real, but it is not the end of the world.
More people are going to get sick, and some will suffer intensely, but the vast majority of those that get the virus will survive.
If you want to wear a mask, then wear a mask.
If you don’t want to wear a mask, then don’t wear a mask.
We should be free to make our own choices, and we should also be free to experience the consequences for those choices.
Unfortunately, there are way too many people out there that think that they have the right to censor and control what we say and what we do, and that trend is likely to only get worse as our society continues to spin out of control in the years ahead.
The latest COVID-19 mutated strain - This is what Dr. Samadi thinks will happen
During a live briefing this afternoon, Mr Johnson has introduced a fourth tier to his lockdown system that will push London, the south east and the east of England into the top bracket for Christmas. Tier 4, which will be introduced on Sunday morning, will include a strict ban on the mixing of households and advice against travelling internationally. Mr Johnson said the new variant strain of the virus which causes Covid-19 may be up to 70 percent more transmissible and could increase the R value by 0.4
Mr Johnson said that when the virus changes its method of "attack", so the country must change its method of "defence".
He added there was "no alternative open to me."
He Johnson added: "When the science changes, we must change our response.
"Christmas this year will be different, very different, but we must be realistic."
He added that by acting now, the public will give itself a "better chance of protecting their lives and see them at future Christmases".
In Tier 4, people should not mix with anyone outside their own household, although support bubbles will remain in place.
In Tiers 1-3 in England the rules allowing a maximum of three households to mix will be restricted to Christmas Day only.
Mr Johnson added that people will be asked to stay at home and work from home if they can, not enter or leave Tier 4 areas, not stay away from home overnight and can only meet one person from another household outside in a public space.
He also said that non-essential retail, indoor gyms and leisure facilities in these areas will close.
The Prime Minister said: "I know how much emotion people invest in this time of year, and how important it is, for instance, for grandparents to see their grandchildren, for families to be together.
"So I know how disappointing this will be."
Boris Johnson announced new measures for London and south east areas (Image: COBRA)
Chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance then spoke after Mr Johnson, where he said the new variant of COVID-19 has 23 different changes from the previous strain, with some of those "causing concern".
He said the new strain has a "significant" increase in transmissibility.
He added the evidence shows it "moves fast" and is becoming the "dominant variant".
But Sir Patrick also warned there is no evidence it is more deadly, which means the coronavirus vaccines should still be effective against the virus.
The Government's latest graphs showed the number of hospital admissions in London and South East rising (Image: COBR)
During the briefing, England's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty added people considering leaving Tier 4 areas now should unpack their bag and stay at home.
He said: "My short answer would be 'please unpack it at this stage.'"
Prof Whitty said: "If they were to go with this new variant, unwittingly, to an area that has a low prevalence and starts this being seeded even more outside the high prevalence areas that would be a significant risk to the area they went to.
"That is the reason we are really keen that people do not go from these areas."
He indicated that Tier 3 and Tier 2 restrictions had proven ineffective at controlling the new variant.
If the new variant spread "none of them would be able to hold things with Tier 3 and Tier 2 elsewhere".
The Prime Minister explained how cases had risen over the last two weeks (Image: COBR)
England's chief medical adviser said the UK has put the World Health Organisation (WHO) on alert about the mutant strain.
He said Britain had informed the global body that it had concluded the mutant strain could spread more quickly.
Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt warned the situation was on a "knife-edge" with infections rising and hospital admissions on the increase.
The latest development comes after Mr Johnson refused to rule out a third national lockdown for England - a move he has previously been deeply reluctant to contemplate.
Caroline Wheeler of the Sunday Times backed up Ms Kuenssberg's tweet, writing: “Christmas cancelled for London, South East and East, as areas moved into new Tier 4 with ‘stay at home’ message by law.
“Christmas bubbles only allowed for Tiers 1 - 3 on Christmas Day with “stay local message”.
“International travel not advised. Latest plan.”
A Government source claimed the virus is spreading at "an alarming rate" in the capital and the south east of England.
Mr Johnson held emergency talks with his Cabinet minister on Saturday to discuss the crisis.
The latest tiering changes in England - which came into force on Saturday morning at one minute past midnight - mean 38 million people are now living in Tier 3, 68 percent of the population of England.
Coronavirus map UK (Image: EXPRESS)
Those areas moving into the highest tier are Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Hertfordshire, most of Surrey, Peterborough, Hastings and Rother on the Kent border of East Sussex, and Portsmouth, Gosport and Havant in Hampshire.
Bristol and North Somerset have moved down from Tier 3 to Tier 2 while Herefordshire drops into Tier 1 - even though the county's public health director raised concerns about the relaxation.
Britain reported 28,507 new COVID-19 cases on Friday and 489 deaths, with the reproduction "R" number estimated to be between 1.1 and 1.2, meaning the number of cases is rapidly increasing.
The Prime Minister will hold a news briefing at 4pm (Image: GETTY)
On Friday Mr Johnson said he hoped England would not need a third lockdown after Christmas.
Throughout this week he had been resisting calls from Labour to rethink his "Christmas bubble" plan.
The policy will for the mixing of up to three households between December 23 and 27.
Mr Hunt, who now chairs the Commons Health and Social Care Committee, said that if the Prime Minister did not want to change the regulations, he should at least consider issuing stricter guidance.
He told BBC Radio 4: "It is a very difficult, finely-balanced judgment.
"The biggest worry is what happens indoor in family gatherings and that's where the risks do increase."
"I think they can be clearer about what is and isn't advisable because it would be an enormous tragedy if we had a spike in deaths at the end of January/February because we took our foot off the pedal this close to having a vaccine."
Wales and Northern Ireland have already announced fresh lockdowns once Christmas is over while the Scottish Government has said the option "remains on the table".
Much of the the latest focus is on the South and East of England where the new variant is thought to be most prevalent.
On Friday, the NHS in Kent announced it was suspending non-urgent hospital procedures.
They said it was treating double the number of patients it had at the peak of the first wave in April.
The PM is set to ban household mixing in multiple areas for Christmas (Image: GETTY)
A further 339 people who tested positive for coronavirus have died in hospital in England, bringing the total number of confirmed deaths reported in hospitals to 46,122, NHS England said on Saturday.
Patients were aged between 44 and 100. All except 13, aged between 64 and 95, had known underlying health conditions.
The deaths were between November 5 and December 18.
Eighteen other deaths were reported with no positive Covid-19 test result.
London is facing Tier 4 for Christmas (Image: GETTY)
Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) tweeted: “Failing to act decisively now, will mean further suffering.
“We must keep asking ourselves ‘are we doing enough, are we acting quickly enough’.”
The Labour Party said they though the tiering system had failed to curb the virus’s spread.
Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s health spokesman: “It has been apparent for some days that the virus is again out of control in parts of the country.
Thousands of people rushed to leave London (middle) on Saturday night after Prime Minister Boris Johnson revealed the city and a third of England will be thrust into the newly-created Tier 4.
It sparked panic and commuters scrambling to get out of the capital (pictured right top and bottom, people at train stations and busy roads leading out of London) . The draconian bracket will see non-essential shops shut, and travel restrictions including a 'stay at home' order for Christmas Day itself - even though Mr Johnson (left) insisted just days ago that it would be 'inhuman' to axe five-day festive 'bubbles'.
Christmas plans for millions of Londoners were thrown into doubt by the Prime Minister's announcement, with many planning on travelling out of the capital during the relaxation of coronavirus measures between December 23 and 27. But with the planned relaxation cancelled, and the new rules coming into force from midnight, people were tonight scrambling to get out of London while they still could.
Scientists have been hard at work unraveling the mysteries of SARS-CoV-2 since January, when Beijing finally shared a mapped genome with the global scientific community (though early research also filtered out via the British journal "The Lancet"). At this point, scientists around the world have examined hundreds of thousands of viral samples from around the world. They've compared and contrasted their genetic code, and they've identified what appears to be an important pattern.
That is: the earliest version of the virus that spread in Wuhan is not genetically identical to the iteration that went on to conquer Europe and the US.
According to a Bloomberg report comparing the findings from four non-peer-reviewed studies, it appears that a notable mutation of the virus that emerged broadly and early during its global campaign helped render COVID-19 more infectious in later iterations than it was during the early weeks of the outbreak, raising fears that the virus could continue to evolve in a way that eludes scientists working on a vaccine, or simply makes the virus more deadly.
At least four laboratory experiments suggest that the mutation makes the virus more infectious, although none of that work has been peer-reviewed. Another unpublished study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory asserts that patients with the G variant actually have more virus in their bodies, making them more likely to spread it to others.
The mutation doesn't appear to make people sicker, but a growing number of scientists worry that it has made the virus more contagious.
"The epidemiological study and our data together really explain why the [G variant's] spread in Europe and the U.S. was really fast," said Hyeryun Choe, a virologist at Scripps Research and a lead author of an unpublished study on the G variant's enhanced infectiousness in laboratory cell cultures. "This is not just accidental."
Another team of researchers described the feeling of shock when they realized just how much more effective this mutation made the virus in terms of its ability to break into human cells.
Neville Sanjana, a geneticist at the New York Genome Center and New York University, was trying to figure out which genes enable SARS-CoV-2 to infiltrate human cells. But in experiments based on a gene sequence taken from an early case of the virus in Wuhan, he struggled to get that form of the virus to infect cells. Then the team switched to a model virus based on the G variant.
"We were shocked," Sanjana said. "Voilà ! It was just this huge increase in viral transduction." They repeated the experiment in many types of cells, and every time the variant was many times more infectious.
The mutation in question is known as D614G, or just "G" for short. So far, the "G" mutation has been found in roughly 70% of the half a million or so samples that have uploaded to a shared database for scientists around the world. This has convinced many scientists of its significance, especially because the mutation occurs in a part of the genome that governs the infamous "spike" protein that gives the virus its name ("corona" = crown in Latin) and is believed to enable it to infiltrate human cells.
"I think that slowly we're beginning to come to a consensus," said Judd Hultquist, a virologist at Northwestern University.
And although it won't help the quest for a cure, understanding the role of these mutations is critical for understanding how the virus works. This, in turn, would allow scientists to track mutations and help them discern which might enhance the virus's capability to destroy human life.
"Understanding how transmissions are happening won't be a magic bullet, but it will help us respond better," Sabeti said. "This is a race against time."
Though, to be sure, even with all the research that's been done so far, scientists can't say much, if anything, for certain about the mutation. There may be other explanations for the G variant's dominance in the global pandemic: perhaps biases in where genetic data are being collected has led it to be overrepresented in samples, or quirks that led the "G" variant to dominate in particularly susceptible populations.
"The bottom line is, we haven't seen anything definitive yet," said Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Remember that the next time you hear Trump, Dr. Fauci or the White House "vaccine czar" discuss the possibility of having a vaccine available by year end, or next time you see a country contract to buy millions of doses of Gilead's remdesivir, just keep this in mind.
Posts
