Could an Israeli mutation cancel Israel’s mass vaccination campaign?

This is what the Coronavirus National Information and Knowledge Center said on Saturday evening in a paragraph of a nine-page report on mutations.

The result was a frenzy of headlines and panic.

Already, the world learned over the weekend that the British variant, which has spread like wildfire across Israel, may be deadlier than originally thought.

However, to date, “there is no known significant Israeli mutation,” Public Health Chief Prof. Sharon Alroy-Preis told KAN News on Sunday morning.

But she added that “wherever there is a virus, mutations can develop.”

“Think about whether you should make handwritten copies of the genome – there is a very high probability of getting a typographical error,” explained Professor Jonathan Gershoni of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at the University of Tel. Aviv. “So while in printing books or copying documents, typos are common and understandable, so is the replication of a genome. But we call these typos mutations, and the virus carrying these mutations is a mutant or a variant. “

LEVY-LAHAD said most of the changes are “silent” and have no effect on virus proteins or anything else. But sometimes those “typos” can have a profound effect, Gershoni said. For example, “My wife is hard” or “My life is hard” – the two expressions have a different letter but very different meanings.

The mutations could increase a virus’s ability to become more infectious, could make the virus more pathogenic, or could make it less sensitive to neutralizing antibodies stimulated or induced by vaccination, Gershoni said. On the other hand, he said that certain mutations could make the virus less effective and ultimately make it go away.

Vaccination could theoretically speed up the course of a virus, Levy-Lahad said.

“Until the coronavirus, one of the main health problems was that many germs had become resistant to antibiotics because many had been administered to the population, often unnecessarily, and the germs found a way to become resistant to these antibiotics . The germs that manage to gain resistance become more predominant as they will prevail, ”she explained.

“If someone who is immune can still get a certain level of infection, then by chance there will be variants that can resist the antibodies you have from the vaccination.”

She said, “Basically it’s a numbers game. If you have a lot of sick people and a lot of people vaccinated – and if the vaccination doesn’t completely rule out infection – then just because you have a lot of people who can transmit the coronavirus and a lot of hosts in which it can evolve, the variant could be created. “

But she said that didn’t mean it would happen.

The KNOWLEDGE Center report warned that this hypothetical “Israeli mutation” could give the virus some potential to evade the immune response elicited by vaccination. So it could spread more quickly among the population – especially when you take into account that children don’t get hit.

But Levy-Lahad said the situation is not so black and white – that it is not an “all or nothing phenomenon”.

“For example, vaccination may not completely eradicate the infection, but it lowers the rate of severe disease by 2% [one in 50] to one in 1000 – that will still have a huge impact, ”she said.

She added that the flu shot is an example of a vaccine that needs to be updated because the virus mutates.

“I don’t know if anyone has shown this to be the result of the vaccination rate,” Levy-Lahad said.

However, she said fear of mutations is an argument to follow Department of Health regulations and reduce infection.

Additionally, as Gershoni pointed out, while Israel has no control over how random mutations occur, the country controls how to reduce infection rates.

“When it comes to whether or not Israel is unique, it must be remembered that among the countries with the greatest number of vaccinated, we are fifth. The United States leads with 21 million people vaccinated, an infection rate of 77,000 people per million and well over 150,000 total infections per day, ”said Gershoni.

“The number of infections in Israel due to the lockdown is gradually decreasing – and we hope to continue to do so,” he said. “It is our responsibility to do what we can to prevent mutations from escaping while increasing the vaccination campaign to keep our people safe.”

With replication, there is a direct relationship between the number of copies made at any one time and the mutations that will build up, Gershoni said. If the infection rate is low, the number of mutations tends to be relatively low. Every time the infection rate is improved, there will be an increase in errors.

“What really worries me when people make these announcements, like there will be an Israeli mutation, is that they play into the hands of those who say that there is no point in getting the vaccine or that it’s really not necessary. Levy-Lahad pointed out.

“Vaccination is the best thing we have right now.”