A vaccine against coronavirus: how the medication efficacy will affect the new strains

Author

Natalia Myronova

New strains of coronavirus that have recently been discovered spread faster than previously known varieties. has collected information on whether they will affect the efficacy of vaccines.

Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine

The Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine has been shown to be effective against two mutated strains, The Hill reports.

Preliminary research by Pfizer and the University of Texas Medical Branch reports that no additional vaccine is needed.

The study was carried out on the basis of blood tests of vaccinated patients. However, the data obtained are limited, since the study did not consider the effect of the vaccine on the entire range of mutations typical for one or another new coronavirus variant.

However, the vaccine was reported to be slightly less effective against mutations in the variant first discovered in South Africa compared to other mutations.

"The companies believe that the small differences in viral neutralization observed in these studies are unlikely to lead to a significant reduction in vaccine efficacy," the statement says.

Novavax vaccine

American company Novavax Inc. has stated that its vaccine against COVID-19 demonstrated an efficacy of more than 89%, reports Interfax-Ukraine.

Novavax Inc. (...) has announced today that NVX-CoV2373, its protein-based COVID-19 vaccine contender, has demonstrated 89.3% efficacy in phase III of clinical trials conducted in the United Kingdom (UK)," the statement says.

However, in a separate trial in South Africa, where there is another COVID-19 strain, the vaccine was only 49.4% effective. At the same time, it is noted that among trial participants who did not have HIV, the effectiveness was about 60%.

AstraZeneca vaccine

The AstraZeneca vaccine is recommended for people between the ages of 18 and 64, Die Welt reports, citing data from the Vaccination Committee (Stiko) of the Robert Koch Institute in Germany.

AstraZeneca disagrees with the findings. It is reported that data are not yet available to evaluate the vaccine efficacy for people over 64 years old.

The European Union should receive up to 400 million doses of AstraZeneca. The company received an advance payment of 336 million euros as part of the deal. But on January 22, 2021, AstraZeneca unexpectedly announced that, due to a lack of production capacity, it would not be able to supply the vaccine to the EU in the required volumes until the end of March. It will provide 60% less. The company was accused of not going to supply the required amount of vaccines to the EU, despite the fact that the UK will receive the drug in full. The European Commission suspects that supply disruptions may be due to the fact that AstraZeneca will give part of the vaccines intended for EU countries to the UK and other non-EU countries.

Контекст. В ближайшее время Украина получит первую партию вакцины против коронавируса. Объем от 200 тыс. доз поставит глобальный фонд COVAX.

Context. In the near future, Ukraine will receive the first batch of coronavirus vaccine. The amount of 200 thousand doses will be supplied by the global fund COVAX.