Researchers said Thursday that the novel coronavirus vaccines have worked well to defeat several COVID-19 variants circulating throughout the country right now, according to CNN.
Researchers — who published their findings in the medical journal Cell — said people who got Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were protected against more transmissible COVID-19 variants, CNN reports.
- The researchers said they found more evidence of variants in nose swabs of people who tested positive for COVID-19 compared to older mutations of the virus. This suggests the variants are more contagious.
But the vaccines still seem to be working to prevent severe cases. Researchers said there needs to be more research done to see the full extent of the vaccine’s impact on the virus variants.
- “Earlier identification and monitoring of the variant might have guided focused contact tracing efforts by public health to slow its spread, as well as enabled more timely investigation of its potential significance,’” the researchers said, according to CNN.
There’s another example of how vaccines are working against the variants. For example, two studies suggested that people who received Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were protected from serious illness and death from the variant in New York, according to The New York Times.
- The studies suggested the antibodies created by those two vaccines were “only slightly less potent at controlling the variant than the original form of the virus,” per The New York Times.
That said, researchers at Texas A&M University found that a new Texas variant might be resistant to COVID-19 antibodies, which I wrote about for the Deseret News. Of course, the new Texas variant was only discovered in one person.
- “We do not at present know the full significance of this variant, but it has a combination of mutations similar to other internationally notifiable variants of concern,” Global Health Research Complex chief virologist Ben Neuman said in a statement. “This variant combines genetic markers separately associated with rapid spread, severe disease and high resistance to neutralizing antibodies.”