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While research into emerging coronavirus variants is ongoing, an expert has warned that they are “not magic” and that measures in place to mitigate the current spread will still work against the new strains. Mutations are also not out of the ordinary for a virus, especially one with such a high community spread, said Dr Gigi Gronvall, senior researcher at the John Hopkins Center for Health Security and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public. Health. a press conference on Thursday.
“What we are seeing with SARS-CoV-2 is not unexpected,” she said during the briefing “COVID-19 variants: what they mean for tests and vaccines, achieving immunity herd and reduce transmission “. She added that the country needs to step up its sequencing efforts to better track mutations.
“I want to stress that these variations are not magic,” said Gronvall. “A lot of the things we have done throughout this pandemic will continue to work when it comes to these variants.”
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The diagnostic tests that have been developed to detect the original strains will also continue to work, she said, adding that if there are “threats to testing capacity,” the FDA is monitoring and will notify manufacturers. and consumers.
“In addition, we are encouraged that vaccines that have FDA emergency use clearance continue to be effective,” she said. “There is a lot of data coming out on the effectiveness of the vaccine against these variants and a lot of lab data that doesn’t give the full picture, we continue to monitor the situation. At least for the vaccines which are currently used in emergency authorization, they still seem very protective. “
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Dr Andy Pekosz, co-director of the John Hopkins Center of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance and professor and vice-chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, added that the driving factor behind the variants is the high number of coronavirus cases in the community.
“We also have to understand that the number of cases is one of the [are] increasing the likelihood of this virus acquiring mutations that make it more transmissible, “he said.” If it’s a one in a million chance, we let the dice roll 900,000 times because we didn’t been able to control the cases there. Controlling the number of cases will be the most critical thing we do to reduce the likelihood of more variants.
Pekosz also said the threat of a further increase in cases from an emerging variant can be mitigated through an accelerated and focused vaccination effort, which, coupled with infection rates, would provide a high level of immunity.
“I think the vaccine and the national infection provide enough immunity that we are not going to see a large number of cases of new variants appear,” he said. “They may slow down the rate at which the number of cases is decreasing, but I think everything I’ve seen so far on immune responses suggests that these variants are still susceptible to vaccine-induced immunity or l ‘infection.”
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Still, he said the immunity induced by the COVID-19 vaccine is both stronger and longer lasting than that left by a previous infection.
“Both types of immune responses will help us, but we really want to focus on getting the vaccination campaign started and getting started, because that’s stronger immunity and longer lasting immunity,” he said. declared.
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