Vaccine won't protect you from all the COVID variants

A recent study shows that vaccines are not able to keep you safe from different variants of COVID.

Recently, I came across a publication Multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants escape neutralization by vaccine-induced humoral immunity on CELL, a top journal of “Biochemistry & Molecular Biology”.

In this work, the authors evaluated the neutralization potency of 99 individuals that received one or two doses of either BNT162b2 (manufactured by Pfizer) or mRNA-1273 (manufactured by Moderna) vaccines against pseudoviruses representing 10 globally circulating strains of SARS-CoV-2. For these who are not very familiar with the terminology, a good neutralization means that the vaccine is efficient to the virus.

However, the results show that five of the ten pseudoviruses, harboring receptor-binding domain mutations, including K417N/T, E484K, and N501Y, were highly resistant to neutralization. This suggests that even both of these vaccines demonstrated >94% efficacy at preventing COVID in phase III clinical studies performed in late 2020 in multiple countries, they won’t be as effective to certain COVID variants.

Regardless, we should all get the vaccine if possible as it still protects us from some of the virus. Moreover, the current vaccines may provide clinical benefit against variants that exhibit poor cross-neutralization by reducing COVID disease severity. The most important thing is that we should still keep the masks on and wash hands regularly even after we get the vaccine.

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中文一句话版

最近，一篇发表在生物学顶级期刊《细胞》上的文章指出，现有的辉瑞以及莫德纳疫苗虽然在第三期临床实验上被证实有超过94%的有效率，但是对于个别的变异病毒体可能是无效的。