A professor at Oxford University in the U.K., Sir John Bell, declared with utter confidence that the Covid-19 vaccines are effective for the new strains which are witnessed in the past few days.
Focusing on the strain of COVID-19 which is widely circulating in the U.K., Bell has been a lot positive about the vaccines. Since the detection of the new strain, it has been widely spotted in California and Colorado.
Bell, who helped oversee Oxford’s vaccine development in partnership with AstraZeneca put forth, “Given the level of disease in the U.K. with the new variant … we’re going to have lots of examples of people who have had the vaccine who get exposed to the virus, and we’ll be able to tell pretty quickly about whether the vaccine is indeed protective against that strain.”
The U.K. government has approved the emergency usage of the vaccine since; it had issued the limited clearance to Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine. The government has initiated studies to officially determine whether the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine protects against the new virus strain.
Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned people against the new strain found in Great Britain and South Africa as the strain might also be circulating in America.
RNA technology—a new approach that uses genetic material to provoke an immune response has been included in the development of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Bell is affirmative for these vaccines to be efficient against the latest coronavirus mutant. Along with the positive outlook, Bell has declared that only immunogenicity studies will be conducted to make sure the vaccine sparks an immune response.
A former Food and Drug Administration commissioner who serves on Pfizer’s board of directors, Dr. Scott Gottlieb said, “Some viruses like flu evolve their surface proteins very quickly, and that’s why we need a different flu vaccine every season.”
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