Coronavirus outbreaks in the city where a Brazilian variant emerged suggest it may be able to dodge vaccine-triggered immunity, scientists say. The coronavirus variant that’s circulating in Brazil is becoming more concerning, both for infectiousness and for severity of disease. COVID-19 vaccine effective against new variant in Brazil April 9, 2021: UF investigators participate in the first study to determine that the CoronaVac vaccine is 50% effective at preventing COVID-19 in Manaus, Brazil where the P.1 variant is widespread. A woman in São Paulo eyes the syringe about to be used to give her a shot of Sinovac’s COVID-19 vaccine. That work is a top priority, according to infectious disease expert Jason Andrews at Stanford University, who works with the Brazilian research team and is a co-author on the preprint. LONDON (Reuters) - Existing vaccines may protect against the Brazilian variant of the coronavirus, according to a University of Oxford study which also highlighted how a … But the new study has not yet collected enough severe cases to calculate effectiveness, Croda says. Although 50% effectiveness is far below the greater than 90% real-world protection of COVID-19 vaccines made with messenger RNA (mRNA), it may still be good enough to curb the disease’s spread within Brazil; vaccines with that level of efficacy in a clinical trial qualify for emergency use in many places and meet the World Health Organization’s threshold, as well. Are they more contagious? “So it gives us really good confidence that this vaccine will protect against the Brazil variant,” Ramers said. CoronaVac was shown to be 50% effective in preventing illness 14 days after administration of the first dose in its two-dose schedule. The VEBRA-COVID consortium includes researchers from Brazil and international partners, which include the Pan-American Health Organization, University of Florida, and Stanford University. 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New variants of COVID-19 are behaving like new viruses and may derail vaccine hopes. In recognition of this threat, the World Health Organization has declared P.1 a “variant of concern.”, “This variant has not only created a public health emergency in Brazil but is a threat to other countries in South America and beyond,” said Albert Ko, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health who works extensively in Brazil and a co-author of the study. The inactivated vaccine, CoronaVac, proved effective in combatting COVID-19 in the city of Manaus, Brazil, where the highly transmissible P.1 variant emerged and has devastated the local population, researchers from Brazil and the Yale School of Public Health have found. The variant, which was first identified in Brazil, has the potential to lower the effectiveness of some vaccines approved for use in Canada. Some … Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation. Another COVID-19 variant was detected in Brazil by their scientists. The mutated virus is likely to be driving a recent COVID-19 resurgence in Brazil—the country currently has up to 60,000 new cases per day. In the positive group, 18.6% were vaccinated; in the negative group, the proportion was 24.4%. Research Coronavirus COVID-19 vaccine. It is the first study to evaluate the effectiveness of a COVID-19 vaccine in places where P.1, often referred to as the “Brazilian variant,” is widespread. Still, these preliminary findings are encouraging because the city has been ravaged by P.1—which is widely known as the Brazilian variant of SARS-CoV-2. The overall death toll from COVID-19 is close to 337,000 (second only to the United States) and Brazil recently recorded more than 4,000 deaths in a single day. Using the unvaccinated people as a reference, the researchers calculated the risk of infection by SARS-CoV-2 14 days after the first dose. The mutant virus now accounts for 75% of all positive test results in the city, where the health system is collapsing because of COVID-19. Laboratory studies that assess whether vaccine-induced antibodies can neutralize SARS-CoV-2’s infectivity have raised concerns that the variant could escape the immune protection conferred by vaccines. Could there be a super-variant that evades vaccines? A study published Monday by the New England Journal of Medicine found that the Pfizer-BioNtech COVID-19 vaccine was able to "efficiently" neutralize the Brazil variant The authors’ conclusion that the vaccine protects against the variant rests on assuming it makes up most of the positive cases, he notes. “National leaders and the global community need to secure the needed vaccine supply and deploy them as quickly as possible, in addition to implementing sound public health prevention, to preempt the impending humanitarian crisis.”. The latest info on the Brazilian, South African and UK variants of coronavirus, including if they’re more deadly, and how they respond to vaccines. “This is a natural property of doing a trial in a highly previously infected population,” he says. Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding at the Federation of American Scientists, however, cautions that the new study did not sequence SARS-CoV-2 in the people with positive PCR tests to make sure their infections were caused by the P.1 variant. In many cities, the health care system has collapsed and been unable to care for people who are sick and dying. Vaccines do a good job of protecting us from coronavirus, but fear and confusion about the rise of variants have muddled the message. “This is a critically important finding for it tells us that ramping up vaccination will turn the tide against the devastating resurgence we are experiencing in Brazil due to the spread of the P.1 variant.”. Croda and his colleagues will continue to analyze the effectiveness of various COVID-19 vaccines against P.1 and other variants with larger groups of people. COVID-19 has killed more than 340,000 Brazilians. The study’s preliminary results, not yet peer reviewed, were posted to a preprint server yesterday and are the first to assess the effectiveness of the vaccine made by Sinovac Biotech in an area flooded with the P.1 variant. Your browser is antiquated and no longer supported on this website. On the other hand, Feigl-Ding says, measuring vaccine effectiveness in Brazil may produce artificially low results because there is a high risk that people have some immunity because of previous contact with the virus. Brazil on Sunday recorded 1,803 new Covid-19 deaths, as a large study found that a Chinese vaccine that has become the linchpin in the country's vaccination campaign is … Russia’s COVID-19 defense may depend on mystery vaccine from former bioweapons lab—but does it work? Here are answers to common questions. As potentially more dangerous coronavirus variants spread worldwide, scientists and clinicians have raced to discover how well the available COVID-19 vaccines protect against the mutant strains. CoronaVac contains inactivated whole copies of SARS-CoV-2, in contrast to many other COVID-19 vaccines, including the mRNA vaccines, which just present the spike protein of the virus to the immune system. That was seen in two dose efficacy trials conducted in Brazil and other countries and is typical of COVID-19 vaccines. CoronaVac contains inactivated whole copies of SARS-CoV-2, in contrast to many other COVID-19 vaccines, including the mRNA vaccines, which … Moreover, CoronaVac likely offers far greater protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and death than against milder cases of COVID-19. An aggressive Covid-19 variant called P.1 has spread from the Amazon to other parts of Brazil and has now been identified in U.S. cases. A study of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine published in March determined that it was highly effective at neutralizing the variant found in Brazil. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science. That real-world protection is about the same level clinical trials saw with two doses of CoronaVac against the standard, or “wild type,” pandemic coronavirus in the country, suggesting the variant’s mutations have not increased SARS-CoV-2’s ability to evade vaccine-evoked immune responses. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. All rights Reserved. Then, the researchers checked the proportion of vaccinated and unvaccinated people in both groups. BRAZIL has uncovered a new Covid variant which combines 18 mutations as it was warned the nation's out of control outbreak could become a biological disaster. This can lead to different strains of the virus with different characteristics. The P.1 variant was first identified in Manaus in December 2020 and has rapidly spread throughout Brazil and globally, including the United States. In the next 2 weeks, they plan to look at data from Sao Pãulo, where more than 7 million people have been vaccinated with CoronaVac or AstraZeneca’s vaccine. “The majority of people in the study had only received their first vaccine dose. In addition to Brazil, CoronaVac has been authorized and used in China, Chile, Bolivia, Mexico, Turkey, and Indonesia. Data will continue to be collected over the next few weeks to determine CoronaVac’s effectiveness after the second dose. The CoronaVac study involved medical data from 67,718 health care workers from Manaus, a city in the Amazon region that is the epicenter of the P.1 variant. Some … The scientists identified 786 people with apparent COVID-19 symptoms, whom they divided into two groups of 393 each: those who tested positive and negative for the virus. 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