‘Vaccines should be tweaked to tackle COVID19 variants’

With the emergence of new COVID19 variants, Doctors Association Kashmir (DAK) Wednesday said COVID19 vaccines should be tweaked to tackle new mutated versions of the novel coronavirus.

“We need to modify the existing COVID19 vaccines to deal with the new variants,” DAK President and influenza expert DrNisar-ul-Hassan said in a statement issued here.

   

“Currently, three COVID19 variants – South African variant, Brazilian variant and UK variant are circulating in the human populations which appear to spread more swiftly than the original strain,” he said in the statement. “Some of these variants have been found to evade the effectiveness of the existing vaccines that have been developed against the original strain of the novel virus.”

Dr Hassan said that a study from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg had showed that the Oxford vaccine had significantly reduced efficacy against the South African variant.

“An inability to protect against variant strains may severely limit the strategic benefit of vaccines containing only the original strain,” he said. “In order to have long term efficacy against COVID19, it may be necessary for vaccines to include multiple variants of the novel virus. This strategy is routinely applied against influenza and all formulations in recent years have included three to four variant forms. Vaccines containing only one variant may induce little or no protection against variant strains that are already circulating among highly mobile human populations.”

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