As more coronavirus variants are being found in different parts of the world, including the Bay Area, researchers are learning more about how vaccines are impacted.
“There’s a lot of good news in these vaccine trials,” said Dr. Alex Greninger, Assistant Professor of the Clinical Virology Lab at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
Several vaccines, including the Johnson & Johnson and Novavax vaccines which have yet to be approved by the FDA, have been shown to be less effective against a variant that emerged in South Africa. But Dr. Greninger says that does not make them useless.
“They still would be protective, and we’ve even seen that in the Johnson and Novavax trials, we’re preventing severe illness.”
Many experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci say that even vaccines that are less effective against new variants are still expected to reduce a person’s risk of getting seriously ill.
Dr. Greninger says the introduction of new variants actually makes it more important to get people vaccinated.
“We’ve got to get as many people vaccinated across the world as fast as possible because the thing that determines mutation in viruses is the number of viruses out there, the amount of replication cycles it goes through. So every single time it does that it has an opportunity to make a change.”
Harmful mutations usually manifest in one of two ways.
“One is the sort of adaptation to humans or increased transmission, and the other one is ability to evade certain parts of the immune system,” he said. “We now fully expect that the virus will continue to pick up mutations that will potentially allow it to spread better.”
The FDA could approve the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as soon as this month.