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While COVID-19 vaccines are likely to become effective against the South African coronavirus variant – according to an infectious disease expert – the former head of the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said the strain could ” avoid “other countermeasures, including drug antibodies.
The South African variant of the virus, known as 501Y.V2, has raised serious concerns and the strain has previously been described as more infectious than the COVID-19 virus identified at the start of the pandemic. In South Africa, it quickly became dominant in the coastal areas of the country.
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Former FDA commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb told CNBC’s Shepard Smith on Tuesday that the strain appears to escape immunity from recovering plasma and a previous infection.
“The South African variant is of great concern right now as it appears to be able to avoid some of our medical countermeasures, particularly antibody-based drugs,” Gottlieb said, referring to evidence from Bloom Lab .
The variant involves mutations in the spike protein, including E484K, although the lab said the changes “reduce neutralizing activity, they don’t ablate it.”
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Gottlieb stressed that rapid vaccination is crucial amid the worrying strain, which has already been identified in Austria, Switzerland, Japan, France, Zambia and the UK, according to a CNBC report.
“The vaccine can become a safety net against these variants that are really taking hold in the United States, but we need to step up the pace of vaccination,” said the former chief of the FDA.
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A senior World Health Organization official said on Tuesday that there was no indication the virus was more or less transmissible than the distinct mutated strain detected in the UK.
“There is no indication that the 501Y.V2 variant has increased transmissibility compared to the UK variant,” Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO COVID-19 Technical Officer, said in a briefing, noting that many studies underway in South Africa examine the variant. circulation and transmissibility in modeling and neutralization studies. “But there is no evidence that it is more or less transmissible than the variant of concern that has been identified in the UK.”
That said, the UK Health Secretary warned on Monday that the variant of the coronavirus first detected in South Africa was a “very important problem” and posed more risk than others.
“My concern is that it seems equal [easier] to pass only the new variant that we have seen here, and obviously it has been a huge challenge to control the new variant in the UK, ”said Hancock, noting that two cases of the South African variant have been detected in the UK – United, Monday.
Fox News’ Alexandria Hein and Madeline Farber contributed to this report.
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