Novavax COVID-19 Vaccine Works, But Less So Against Variantshttps://apnews.com/article/novavax-covid-19-vaccine-works-b12421678bb74d840f8c7da6b7d8ce6bNovavax Inc. said Thursday that its COVID-19 vaccine appears 89% effective based on early findings from a British study and that it also seems to work — though not as well — against new mutated versions of the virus circulating in that country and South Africa.
The study of 15,000 people in Britain is still underway. But an interim analysis found 62 participants so far have been diagnosed with COVID-19 – only six of them in the group that got vaccine and the rest who received dummy shots.
The infections occurred at a time when Britain was experiencing a jump in COVID-19 caused by a more contagious variant. A preliminary analysis found over half of the trial participants who became infected had the mutated version. The numbers are very small, but Novavax said they suggest the vaccine is nearly 96% effective against the older coronavirus and nearly 86% effective against the new variant. The findings are based on cases that occurred at least a week after the second dose.
Scientists have been even more worried about a variant first discovered in South Africa that carries different mutations. Results from a smaller Novavax study in that country suggests the vaccine does work but not nearly as well as it does against the variant from Britain.
The South African study included some volunteers with HIV. Among the HIV-negative volunteers, the vaccine appears 60% effective. Including volunteers with HIV, overall the protection was 49%, the company said. While genetic testing still is underway, so far about 90% of the COVID-19 illnesses found in the South African study appear due to the new mutant.
... More concerning is what the study showed about a totally different question — the chances of people getting COVID-19 a second time, said the leader of the South African study, Shabir Madhi of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Tests suggested that nearly a third of study participants had been previously infected, yet rates of new infections in the placebo group were similar.
“Past infection with early variants of the virus in South Africa does not protect” against infection with the new one, he said. “There doesn’t seem to be any protection derived.”--------------------------------------------
South Carolina Health Officials Detect First-Known U.S. Covid Cases of More Problematic Variant from South Africahttps://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/01/28/south-carolina-health-officials-detect-first-known-us-covid-cases-of-more-problematic-variant-from-south-africa.htmlThe first Covid-19 cases in the U.S. of a new, highly contagious strain of the virus first found in South Africa have been detected in South Carolina, according to state health officials.
The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control said the strain, known as B.1.351, was found in two adults with no history of travel or connection to one another.
The state's own public health lab later "identified a separate case of the same variant" in a sample tested on Monday, the South Carolina Department of Health said in a statement
Early findings published in the preprint server bioRxiv, which have yet to be peer reviewed, indicate that the B.1.351 variant can evade the antibodies provided by some coronavirus treatments and may reduce the effectiveness of the current line of available vaccines. On Monday, Moderna said its vaccine might be less effective against the B.1.351 strain and that it's developing a so-called booster shot to guard against that variant "out of an abundance of caution."
... According to the WHO, the B.1.351 strain has now been identified in in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, the French Indian Ocean region of Mayotte, Zambia and 24 other non-African nations. As of Monday, Coronavirus infections in the region have grown by 50% since Dec. 29 when compared with the previous four weeks, the WHO said. Covid-19 deaths have also been on the rise, roughly doubling over that same period.
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Variant COVID Among Triggers for Grim Surge in Manaus, Brazilhttps://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/01/variant-covid-among-triggers-grim-surge-manaus-brazilIn one of the most puzzling and worrisome developments in the pandemic, scientists are racing to explain what's happening in Manaus, Brazil, a city of 2.2 million at the edge of the country's rainforest that is experiencing a second explosive outbreak, even though the first one was so bad it was thought to have produced herd immunity.
As the situation deepens in Manaus, overwhelming the city's health system again, researchers from Brazil and the United Kingdom yesterday said four possibilities might explain the recent dramatic resurgence, including variant SARS-CoV-2 viruses that arose in Brazil. They published their analysis yesterday in
The Lancet.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00183-5/fulltextThe city's outbreak last spring stunned the world with images of dead bodies in the streets, people buried in cardboard caskets, and mass graves at local cemeteries.
Seroprevalence studies over the summer estimated that 76% of Manaus residents had been infected, above the basic 67% herd immunity threshold.However, a new surge that began in December has overrun the health system again, which prompted pleas for other countries to help by sending oxygen supplies.
Doctors on the frontlines say the second surge overwhelmed hospitals much faster than the first outbreak and that the patients are arriving at hospitals sicker, leading some to suspect that a new variant is circulating that isn't just more transmissible, it may also be more lethal, according to the
Washington Post. Noaldo Lucena, MD, an infectious disease specialist at the Tropical Medicine Doctor Heitor Vieira Dourado in Manaus, told the Post. "This isn't a feeling. It's a fact."
... In the Lancet report, experts said four factors may be at play, some possibly related. First, scientists might have overestimated the attack rate for the first surge, and infections might have been below the herd immunity threshold. Second, immunity in people infected in the first wave may have waned by December, which they said wouldn't fully explain the resurgence.
Another factor could be circulation of SARS-CoV-2 variants, some of which originated in Brazil, that evade immune response from earlier infection with the original virus. And as a fourth possibility, the variants circulating in the second wave might be more transmissible than the virus that fueled the first surge.
The authors referenced the discovery of the P.1 variant in Manaus, which started showing up in December with frequent detections. Though little is known about the variant, it shares mutations with variants from the United Kingdom and South Africa that may make it more transmissible.
The latest epidemiologic update from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) had more details about local transmission of P.1 in Manaus, which appears to be based on an analysis of sequencing data by a team based at the Center for Arbovirus Discovery, Diagnostics, Genomics, and Epidemiology (CADDE) Genomic Network and posted on Jan 12 at Virological.org.
The researchers wrote that the P.1 variant wasn't even detected in Manaus until after November, and that in December it made up 52.2% of genotyped samples. In January, the proportion spiked to 85.4%. They also saw a rise of the P.2 variant in December, which was at 25.4% but has since declined to 6% in January.
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