COVID strain in South Africa shows enormous resistance to original virus antibodies

Durban, South Africa – The race to vaccinate people against COVID-19 has been made even more urgent by the urgency of new, more contagious variants of the coronavirus. CBS News had rare access to a lab in South Africa studying one of the more disturbing new strains virus, which appears to have at least some resistance to the antibodies that vaccines create in the human body to repel the virus.

Virus hunters at Durban’s high biohazard laboratory are on the trail of the mutant strain that is spreading at breakneck speed in South Africa. The virus has mutated to attach to human cells more easily, no longer making the disease fatal, but helping it to spread much more easily.

“We believe we are going through a new pandemic with this variant which not only transmits much faster, but also potentially has less neutralization,” geneticist Tulio de Oliveira told CBS News.

De Oliveira discovered the new variant after seeing a dramatic increase in infections in November. His colleagues in the highly secure laboratory developed a living culture of the strain to speed up their research.

Alex Sigal is Principal Investigator at the African Institute for Health Research and the German Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology. He says the new strain discovered in South Africa appears to have the ability to significantly reduce the effectiveness of antibodies in people infected with the original version of the virus.

“Ten times as much would be conservative,” he tells CBS News, but “you can also have a complete knockout,” meaning a person’s natural defenses against the original strain of the virus could prove to be useless against the variant in South Africa.

This means that people infected in the first wave might have little protection against the new strain, and even more troubling, it could make some vaccines less effective.

“It is clear that we have underestimated this virus,” he says. “On the other hand, there is no evidence yet that vaccines will be affected, and people should definitely continue to vaccinate because it is the solution to this pandemic.”

At the country’s central laboratory, scientists point out that immunity is only part of the picture. Data on the effectiveness of vaccines against the new strain won’t be available for a few weeks, but in the future vaccines may need to be changed from time to time to protect against mutant strains – just like the vaccine. annual flu shot has been. for years.