7 ms·

Sputnik V vaccine-neutralization escape by SARS-CoV-2 Spike variants

65 points by pabo 5y ago

randomopining 5y ago
So essentially Sputnik is most likely useless against the South African variant?
- monocasa 5y ago
  My amateur reading of the paper: They say that there's a chance still it can reduce some of the symptoms and reduce the need for hospitalization of the South African variant (B.1.351), but it doesn't do a great job at preventing infections in the first place. > we determined that 8 out of 12 (75%) of serum samples from 12 recipients of the Russian Sputnik V Ad26 / Ad5 vaccine showed dose response curve slopes indicative of failure to neutralize rcVSV-CoV2-S: B.1.351. > Furthermore, we acknowledge that in vivo protective efficacy can be derived from Fc effector functions of antibodies that bind but do not neutralize.
- konart 5y ago
  Useless? No. Less efficient? Likely. I guess they will have to produce an updated version in nearest future.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
devit 5y ago
How bad is this result and the similar result on the AstraZeneca vaccine? Does it mean that the South African variant will almost certainly cause another pandemic in countries vaccinated with those (thus requiring a revaccination with an mRNA vaccine) or is there somehow a chance that the variant won't be prevalent?
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  I believe az had similar (bad) results which caused south africa to pause the rollout.
  - petre 5y ago
    Yup, except none of the recipients in the AZ study had severe cases.
    - Barrin92 5y ago
      the problem is of course that even if that's true, if the virus spreads asymptomatically the same mutation risk applies to the variant itself and at some point then we might up with something that again completely escapes immunity and vaccination. It's just evolution in action. Any variant that dodges the vaccine starts a new game of dice.
      - petre 5y ago
        Well, what's the alternative? Get covid19 and risk death or life long ill effects? The virus mutates anyway in healty individuals that develop mild cases. There's enough of a scadal with the AZ vaccine in the EU, people don't want to get vaccinated with it because of blood clots with in DIC 0.35/1M and CVST in 0.9/1M individuals[1] and fever for a day, the company has rebdand it as Vaxzevria in an attempt to reduce the fallout. The vaccination rollout is not going well in the EU, it was even criticised by the WHO as being too slow. Yet this vaccine works and can probably stop the pandemic and save lives along with the others. I took my chanches and got vaccinated with it a week and a half ago, instead of waiting for something better and risk getting covid in the meantime. I might have taken Sputnik V as well if nothing else was available. AZ at least seems to work, was proven at least on 1/4 of the UK population. Their cases seem to go down. I guess we'll see. 1. https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-vaccine-astrazeneca-benefits-still-outweigh-risks-despite-possible-link-rare-blood-clots https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-vaccine-astrazene...
    - amluto 5y ago
rediguanayum 5y ago
More commentary on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/milxvy/qualitatively_distinct_modes_of_sputnik_v/ https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/milxvy/qualitative... It basically echoes comments here, that there's a significant reduction in neutralization (and paper says several instances of no neutralization in some sera). Comments also says that the pre-fusion spike stabilization used on the mRNA vaccine and J&J (which otherwise similar to Sputnik as both use Adenovirus vector) seems to be the difference.
- kurthr 5y ago
  If you're interested in a fairly long discussion with the(?!) guy who developed the stabilized spike protein substitutions. Have a look at this TWiV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9S28_5AqUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9S28_5AqUA
abdullahkhalids 5y ago
What is the effect of taking multiple vaccines, with a few months of gap? Sputnik is available to me starting yesterday. If I take it now, will taking a different vaccine that is effective against the variants later on, give me immunity? Or will the new vaccines not do anything because the immune response has already happened?
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  No one knows, it hasn’t happened before and it would probably be hard in the past to just test continuous vaccinations indefinitely.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Flu shots are taken every year, so we do know the effects of those (it's okay). In this case it depends what kind of vaccine each one is.
- raducu 5y ago
  The only issue could be if you take Sputnik now and Sputnik V2 too soon, if they use the same viral vector in the future (you could develop antibodies to the adenovirus itself, afik Sputnik uses 2 adenoviruses for dose 1 and dose 2 for this exact reason) if the vector is different, they will both work(in the case of mRNA the vector is not an issue, afik). So if you're allowed to get another vaccine in a couple of months, take Sputnik now.
- amluto 5y ago
  It’s unknown. There is a phenomenon called “original antigenic sin” that may or may not apply. There’s also a potential issue with immunity to the vector.
- kurthr 5y ago
  Multiple vaccines have not been tested, but immunology suggests they would be safe (using the same adeno-virus would likely be less effective since your body would pre-empt spike production). One possible hypothesis for why Sputnik (which it self is a succession of two different adeno-virus laden spike protein generators) is less effective is that it (unlike Moderna, Pfizer, J&J) does not appear to use a stabilized Spike protein, which makes the immune response it generates more susceptible to this substitution. They key is what parts of the artificial vaccine spike you develop antibodies for, as to how effective the vaccine is for a variant since much of the active portion of the protein is unchanged. However, since both Moderna and Pfizer are testing mRNA "booster" vaccines specifically for the SA variant, you might just wait for that. They don't have an adeno-virus vector that could be pre-empted by immune response.
phreack 5y ago
The president of Argentina has just been diagnosed with Covid, with mild symptoms, after being vaccinated with both doses of Sputnik for over a month or two.
- m0llusk 5y ago
  There is speculation that Argentina may have failed to keep Sputnik V cold enough during distribution, so it is quite possible that the president and others recently vaccinated received degraded vaccine.
  - mromanuk 5y ago
    No, that’s just speculation or fake news [1]: the Sputnik V boxes can last up to 60hs without refrigeration 1: https://factual.afp.com/las-cajas-con-vacunas-sputnik-v-mantienen-la-cadena-de-frio-sin-precisar-refrigeracion-externa https://factual.afp.com/las-cajas-con-vacunas-sputnik-v-mant...
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    So how we should know is vaccine good or is it degraded? Any way of testing? Not all batches should or could be tested but you could do random sample testing.
- sz4kerto 5y ago
  Completely expected. That's why the efficacy is not 100%. We have people in hospital after 2 rounds of Pfizer.
nerdponx 5y ago
At this point, what is the cost-benefit of further vaccine development versus heavier investment in drugs and other therapies to reduce the severity of disease? There are a couple doctors in the US (particularly Peter McCullough) who make a case that we haven't invested enough in the latter and too much in the former. Naturally the anti-vax people seem to love these guys, so it's hard to find any kind of balanced analysis on it. Or do the numbers still work out to be "more pandemic, more full hospitals, many more dead" no matter how good the drug treatment gets?
- amluto 5y ago
  The cost vs benefit analysis is: do all of the above. The total amount spent on biotech related to Covid is negligible compared to the cost of Covid. Israel seems to understand this. Many other countries are orders of magnitude off in their analysis.
  - jariel 5y ago
    This is true, but this is not Israel's calculation, far from it. They are playing a zero-sum game of outbidding others so that they are 1st, no matter what. Countries like the UK that invested in supply chain efficiencies well ahead of vaccine validation, even as there was risk of the investment failing ... this was acting ahead. Almost every nation failed at this: we should have all been investing 10x what we did in anything to get the vaccines ready, even for those that ultimately failed because the $20B wasted on unneeded prep would have been less than the amount wasted in our current lock downs that could have been avoided were we already to have been vaccinated.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- hannob 5y ago
  A lot has been invested in drugs. Most of them don't work. The best that was found was Dexamethasone, which reduces mortality in severe cases significantly. Generally medication for viral infections seems to be hard. There isn't much good medication for other respiratory viral diseases. It doesn't look like a major breakthrough in drug treatment will happen. A vaccine can make the difference between "you get the disease" and "you don't get the disease and can't spread it to others". No drug comes remotely close to that.
wrongdonf 5y ago
If the herpes virus were new, spread around the entire world and infected 2/3 of people and resisted all of our efforts to eradicate it, would we panic? Should we panic? The idea of coexisting with a virus is not pleasant but it wouldn’t be the first time I guess.
ainar-g 5y ago
> […], we determined that 8 out of 12 (75%) of serum samples from 12 recipients […] showed dose response curve slopes indicative of failure to neutralize rcVSV-CoV2-S: B.1.351. I may be misreading this, as English is not my native language, but 8/12 is 66 % and not 75 %, no? Or does the “(75 %)” refer to something else?
- qzw 5y ago
  Off-by-one errors, they’re not just for programmers anymore.
amluto 5y ago
Someone needs to do exactly the same study (same methods, ideally same lab) on sera from people vaccinated with all the major vaccines. The lack of a valid comparison study is ridiculous.
- ObscureScience 5y ago
  I wouldn't say it's ridiculous. This is generally how a scientific study is done. One "object" per study. An article like this is not made to stand alone and should in general not be used for non-science purposes, such as policy-making. First order comparative studies (such as experiments) of course exists, but comparisons are generally done to my knowledge in meta-studies. For laypeople and policy makers we of course need comparisons and validations before we let them guide our choices.
  - amluto 5y ago
    I disagree. There is no way this can be meta-analyzed in a way that can reliably inform policy, and waiting until we discover (or not) which vaccines remain effective in the face of variants due to an outbreak in a vaccination is horrible public health and economic policy. To the contrary, the policy makers have access to insane amounts of money. The US has spent trillions overall due to Covid and billions on vaccine development. Paying the researchers or a different lab $1M to run an important study is a no-brainer. Or do it DARPA/DoD style: announce a list of studies that need doing, let people apply for grants to do them, and keep the list updated! The fact that researchers are bumbling around doing good quality science, getting nice publications, and failing to answer the right questions is an abject failure of science policy. edit: here’s your meta-analysis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7654888/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7654888/ This sucks. As the authors note, the individual studies were not usefully standardized and mostly can’t be compared. At the very least, the FDA could have said, as part of the initial Covid vaccination trial goals, that a specific set of identical measurements were required, and that all candidates were expected to make those particular measurements. Additional measurements would, of course, be welcome. This would have cost the public a grand total of $0. Maybe $500k for someone to write the thing down and take some feedback to make sure the list made sense, but that seems high.
codeulike 5y ago
Most of these studies just look at antibodies (because they are easiest to study) but all the indications are that T-cells from all vaccines will continue to work well (thus preventing serious disease) because T-cells are much more comprehensive in their recognition abilities. So covid will try and evolve to keep spreading but it will become less deadly as vaccination and natural immunity increase. So its destiny is to become a cold virus like the other human coronaviruses. https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1/status/1376928691473813512 https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1/status/13769286914738135... https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1/status/1366708675679764481 https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1/status/13667086756797644... https://twitter.com/profshanecrotty/status/1355262019562209282 https://twitter.com/profshanecrotty/status/13552620195622092...
- somewhereoutth 5y ago
  That is just speculation I'm afraid. There is much evidence that newer variants are more contagious, more virulent, and affect younger people more severely. Brazil's experience is instructive. Thankfully the fantastic results of the mRNA vaccines mean that we should be able to suppress Covid down to the levels of measles, if not eradicate it like smallpox.
  - codeulike 5y ago
    But it looks like none of those variants are going to be able to evade T-cells generated by existing vaccines or previous strains, thats my point.
    - raducu 5y ago
      The studies seem to suggest the existing antibodies produced by some vaccine are not effextive against some strains, is there any evidence T-cells will do better given the variant looks like a completely new virus to the immune system?
      - codeulike 5y ago
        Yes, lots of evidence. Look at my comment above.
Kliment 5y ago
This study is not particularly interesting as a measurement of vaccine effectiveness (because of the extremely low sample count of 12 patients). So don't read too much into the particular numbers. Instead, there's two useful and valuable results in it: 1. It gives us information on the mechanism that the variants are using for vaccine evasion - the E484K substitution which was the suspected mechanism for B.1.351 ("south african variant") was tested on its own and did not evade the vaccine-induced antibodies as effectively as the full B.1.351 mutation set. This tells us that there is some other mechanism in B.1.351 that makes it more successful at evading antibodies. This is important and valuable information. 2. It demonstrates a really fast, safe, and clever method of testing vaccine effectiveness against a new variant - what they did was to take an entirely unrelated virus, graft a modified S protein on it, expose it to blood serum from vaccinated patients, and then try to infect a cell culture with it. By counting infected cells compared to the same count without the serum exposure, you can measure how effective the neutralization is, without having to measure infection counts in a large population. This is awesome and can easily be done with other vaccines and any new variant that shows up, as long as it's sequenced, even if it doesn't have much prevalence in the population. In fact, you can use this method to test hypothetical variants that only exist in animal viruses or not at all, and be able to redeploy vaccines that are particularly effective against those in regions where they happen to emerge. This, to me, is the absolute highlight of this paper, and I suspect it will be extremely useful.

65 points by pabo 5y ago

randomopining 5y ago

So essentially Sputnik is most likely useless against the South African variant?

monocasa 5y ago
My amateur reading of the paper: They say that there's a chance still it can reduce some of the symptoms and reduce the need for hospitalization of the South African variant (B.1.351), but it doesn't do a great job at preventing infections in the first place. > we determined that 8 out of 12 (75%) of serum samples from 12 recipients of the Russian Sputnik V Ad26 / Ad5 vaccine showed dose response curve slopes indicative of failure to neutralize rcVSV-CoV2-S: B.1.351. > Furthermore, we acknowledge that in vivo protective efficacy can be derived from Fc effector functions of antibodies that bind but do not neutralize.
konart 5y ago
Useless? No. Less efficient? Likely. I guess they will have to produce an updated version in nearest future.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

devit 5y ago

How bad is this result and the similar result on the AstraZeneca vaccine? Does it mean that the South African variant will almost certainly cause another pandemic in countries vaccinated with those (thus requiring a revaccination with an mRNA vaccine) or is there somehow a chance that the variant won't be prevalent?

throwaway4good 5y ago
I believe az had similar (bad) results which caused south africa to pause the rollout.
- petre 5y ago
  Yup, except none of the recipients in the AZ study had severe cases.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    the problem is of course that even if that's true, if the virus spreads asymptomatically the same mutation risk applies to the variant itself and at some point then we might up with something that again completely escapes immunity and vaccination. It's just evolution in action. Any variant that dodges the vaccine starts a new game of dice.
    - petre 5y ago
      Well, what's the alternative? Get covid19 and risk death or life long ill effects? The virus mutates anyway in healty individuals that develop mild cases. There's enough of a scadal with the AZ vaccine in the EU, people don't want to get vaccinated with it because of blood clots with in DIC 0.35/1M and CVST in 0.9/1M individuals[1] and fever for a day, the company has rebdand it as Vaxzevria in an attempt to reduce the fallout. The vaccination rollout is not going well in the EU, it was even criticised by the WHO as being too slow. Yet this vaccine works and can probably stop the pandemic and save lives along with the others. I took my chanches and got vaccinated with it a week and a half ago, instead of waiting for something better and risk getting covid in the meantime. I might have taken Sputnik V as well if nothing else was available. AZ at least seems to work, was proven at least on 1/4 of the UK population. Their cases seem to go down. I guess we'll see. 1. https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-vaccine-astrazeneca-benefits-still-outweigh-risks-despite-possible-link-rare-blood-clots https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-vaccine-astrazene...
  - amluto 5y ago

rediguanayum 5y ago

More commentary on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/milxvy/qualitatively_distinct_modes_of_sputnik_v/ https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/milxvy/qualitative... It basically echoes comments here, that there's a significant reduction in neutralization (and paper says several instances of no neutralization in some sera). Comments also says that the pre-fusion spike stabilization used on the mRNA vaccine and J&J (which otherwise similar to Sputnik as both use Adenovirus vector) seems to be the difference.

kurthr 5y ago
If you're interested in a fairly long discussion with the(?!) guy who developed the stabilized spike protein substitutions. Have a look at this TWiV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9S28_5AqUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9S28_5AqUA

abdullahkhalids 5y ago

What is the effect of taking multiple vaccines, with a few months of gap? Sputnik is available to me starting yesterday. If I take it now, will taking a different vaccine that is effective against the variants later on, give me immunity? Or will the new vaccines not do anything because the immune response has already happened?

mensetmanusman 5y ago
No one knows, it hasn’t happened before and it would probably be hard in the past to just test continuous vaccinations indefinitely.
- astrange 5y ago
  Flu shots are taken every year, so we do know the effects of those (it's okay). In this case it depends what kind of vaccine each one is.
raducu 5y ago
The only issue could be if you take Sputnik now and Sputnik V2 too soon, if they use the same viral vector in the future (you could develop antibodies to the adenovirus itself, afik Sputnik uses 2 adenoviruses for dose 1 and dose 2 for this exact reason) if the vector is different, they will both work(in the case of mRNA the vector is not an issue, afik). So if you're allowed to get another vaccine in a couple of months, take Sputnik now.
amluto 5y ago
It’s unknown. There is a phenomenon called “original antigenic sin” that may or may not apply. There’s also a potential issue with immunity to the vector.
kurthr 5y ago
Multiple vaccines have not been tested, but immunology suggests they would be safe (using the same adeno-virus would likely be less effective since your body would pre-empt spike production). One possible hypothesis for why Sputnik (which it self is a succession of two different adeno-virus laden spike protein generators) is less effective is that it (unlike Moderna, Pfizer, J&J) does not appear to use a stabilized Spike protein, which makes the immune response it generates more susceptible to this substitution. They key is what parts of the artificial vaccine spike you develop antibodies for, as to how effective the vaccine is for a variant since much of the active portion of the protein is unchanged. However, since both Moderna and Pfizer are testing mRNA "booster" vaccines specifically for the SA variant, you might just wait for that. They don't have an adeno-virus vector that could be pre-empted by immune response.

phreack 5y ago

The president of Argentina has just been diagnosed with Covid, with mild symptoms, after being vaccinated with both doses of Sputnik for over a month or two.

m0llusk 5y ago
There is speculation that Argentina may have failed to keep Sputnik V cold enough during distribution, so it is quite possible that the president and others recently vaccinated received degraded vaccine.
- mromanuk 5y ago
  No, that’s just speculation or fake news [1]: the Sputnik V boxes can last up to 60hs without refrigeration 1: https://factual.afp.com/las-cajas-con-vacunas-sputnik-v-mantienen-la-cadena-de-frio-sin-precisar-refrigeracion-externa https://factual.afp.com/las-cajas-con-vacunas-sputnik-v-mant...
- mrkramer 5y ago
  So how we should know is vaccine good or is it degraded? Any way of testing? Not all batches should or could be tested but you could do random sample testing.
sz4kerto 5y ago
Completely expected. That's why the efficacy is not 100%. We have people in hospital after 2 rounds of Pfizer.

nerdponx 5y ago

At this point, what is the cost-benefit of further vaccine development versus heavier investment in drugs and other therapies to reduce the severity of disease? There are a couple doctors in the US (particularly Peter McCullough) who make a case that we haven't invested enough in the latter and too much in the former. Naturally the anti-vax people seem to love these guys, so it's hard to find any kind of balanced analysis on it. Or do the numbers still work out to be "more pandemic, more full hospitals, many more dead" no matter how good the drug treatment gets?

amluto 5y ago
The cost vs benefit analysis is: do all of the above. The total amount spent on biotech related to Covid is negligible compared to the cost of Covid. Israel seems to understand this. Many other countries are orders of magnitude off in their analysis.
- jariel 5y ago
  This is true, but this is not Israel's calculation, far from it. They are playing a zero-sum game of outbidding others so that they are 1st, no matter what. Countries like the UK that invested in supply chain efficiencies well ahead of vaccine validation, even as there was risk of the investment failing ... this was acting ahead. Almost every nation failed at this: we should have all been investing 10x what we did in anything to get the vaccines ready, even for those that ultimately failed because the $20B wasted on unneeded prep would have been less than the amount wasted in our current lock downs that could have been avoided were we already to have been vaccinated.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
hannob 5y ago
A lot has been invested in drugs. Most of them don't work. The best that was found was Dexamethasone, which reduces mortality in severe cases significantly. Generally medication for viral infections seems to be hard. There isn't much good medication for other respiratory viral diseases. It doesn't look like a major breakthrough in drug treatment will happen. A vaccine can make the difference between "you get the disease" and "you don't get the disease and can't spread it to others". No drug comes remotely close to that.

wrongdonf 5y ago

If the herpes virus were new, spread around the entire world and infected 2/3 of people and resisted all of our efforts to eradicate it, would we panic? Should we panic? The idea of coexisting with a virus is not pleasant but it wouldn’t be the first time I guess.

ainar-g 5y ago

> […], we determined that 8 out of 12 (75%) of serum samples from 12 recipients […] showed dose response curve slopes indicative of failure to neutralize rcVSV-CoV2-S: B.1.351. I may be misreading this, as English is not my native language, but 8/12 is 66 % and not 75 %, no? Or does the “(75 %)” refer to something else?

qzw 5y ago
Off-by-one errors, they’re not just for programmers anymore.

amluto 5y ago

Someone needs to do exactly the same study (same methods, ideally same lab) on sera from people vaccinated with all the major vaccines. The lack of a valid comparison study is ridiculous.

ObscureScience 5y ago
I wouldn't say it's ridiculous. This is generally how a scientific study is done. One "object" per study. An article like this is not made to stand alone and should in general not be used for non-science purposes, such as policy-making. First order comparative studies (such as experiments) of course exists, but comparisons are generally done to my knowledge in meta-studies. For laypeople and policy makers we of course need comparisons and validations before we let them guide our choices.
- amluto 5y ago
  I disagree. There is no way this can be meta-analyzed in a way that can reliably inform policy, and waiting until we discover (or not) which vaccines remain effective in the face of variants due to an outbreak in a vaccination is horrible public health and economic policy. To the contrary, the policy makers have access to insane amounts of money. The US has spent trillions overall due to Covid and billions on vaccine development. Paying the researchers or a different lab $1M to run an important study is a no-brainer. Or do it DARPA/DoD style: announce a list of studies that need doing, let people apply for grants to do them, and keep the list updated! The fact that researchers are bumbling around doing good quality science, getting nice publications, and failing to answer the right questions is an abject failure of science policy. edit: here’s your meta-analysis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7654888/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7654888/ This sucks. As the authors note, the individual studies were not usefully standardized and mostly can’t be compared. At the very least, the FDA could have said, as part of the initial Covid vaccination trial goals, that a specific set of identical measurements were required, and that all candidates were expected to make those particular measurements. Additional measurements would, of course, be welcome. This would have cost the public a grand total of $0. Maybe $500k for someone to write the thing down and take some feedback to make sure the list made sense, but that seems high.

codeulike 5y ago

Most of these studies just look at antibodies (because they are easiest to study) but all the indications are that T-cells from all vaccines will continue to work well (thus preventing serious disease) because T-cells are much more comprehensive in their recognition abilities. So covid will try and evolve to keep spreading but it will become less deadly as vaccination and natural immunity increase. So its destiny is to become a cold virus like the other human coronaviruses. https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1/status/1376928691473813512 https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1/status/13769286914738135... https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1/status/1366708675679764481 https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1/status/13667086756797644... https://twitter.com/profshanecrotty/status/1355262019562209282 https://twitter.com/profshanecrotty/status/13552620195622092...

somewhereoutth 5y ago
That is just speculation I'm afraid. There is much evidence that newer variants are more contagious, more virulent, and affect younger people more severely. Brazil's experience is instructive. Thankfully the fantastic results of the mRNA vaccines mean that we should be able to suppress Covid down to the levels of measles, if not eradicate it like smallpox.
- codeulike 5y ago
  But it looks like none of those variants are going to be able to evade T-cells generated by existing vaccines or previous strains, thats my point.
  - raducu 5y ago
    The studies seem to suggest the existing antibodies produced by some vaccine are not effextive against some strains, is there any evidence T-cells will do better given the variant looks like a completely new virus to the immune system?
    - codeulike 5y ago
      Yes, lots of evidence. Look at my comment above.

Kliment 5y ago

This study is not particularly interesting as a measurement of vaccine effectiveness (because of the extremely low sample count of 12 patients). So don't read too much into the particular numbers. Instead, there's two useful and valuable results in it: 1. It gives us information on the mechanism that the variants are using for vaccine evasion - the E484K substitution which was the suspected mechanism for B.1.351 ("south african variant") was tested on its own and did not evade the vaccine-induced antibodies as effectively as the full B.1.351 mutation set. This tells us that there is some other mechanism in B.1.351 that makes it more successful at evading antibodies. This is important and valuable information. 2. It demonstrates a really fast, safe, and clever method of testing vaccine effectiveness against a new variant - what they did was to take an entirely unrelated virus, graft a modified S protein on it, expose it to blood serum from vaccinated patients, and then try to infect a cell culture with it. By counting infected cells compared to the same count without the serum exposure, you can measure how effective the neutralization is, without having to measure infection counts in a large population. This is awesome and can easily be done with other vaccines and any new variant that shows up, as long as it's sequenced, even if it doesn't have much prevalence in the population. In fact, you can use this method to test hypothetical variants that only exist in animal viruses or not at all, and be able to redeploy vaccines that are particularly effective against those in regions where they happen to emerge. This, to me, is the absolute highlight of this paper, and I suspect it will be extremely useful.