Regular Booster Vaccines are the Future in the Battle against Covid-19

People will need regular booster shots against the new coronavirus due to mutations that make it more transmissible and more likely to evade immunity, the head of the British initiative to sequence genomes told Reuters. of the virus.

The coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million people worldwide since it emerged in China in late 2019, mutates once every two weeks, slower than influenza or HIV, but enough to require adjustments. in vaccines.

Sharon Peacock, who heads COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK), which has sequenced nearly half of all novel coronavirus genomes mapped so far globally, said international cooperation is needed in the battle of “cat and cat. mouse “with the virus.

“We have to appreciate that we will always have to have booster doses; immunity to coronavirus does not last forever,” Peacock told Reuters on the campus of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, a nonprofit organization, outside Cambridge.

“We are already adjusting vaccines to deal with what the virus is doing in terms of evolution, so variants are emerging that have a combination of increased transmissibility and the ability to partially evade our immune response,” he said.

Peacock said he was confident that regular booster shots, such as for influenza, would be needed to deal with future variants, but that the speed of vaccine innovation meant those boosters could be developed at a good pace and delivered to the population.

COG-UK was created by Peacock, a Cambridge professor, exactly one year ago with the help of the British government’s top scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, as the virus spread across the world to Britain.

The consortium of academic and public health institutions is now the world’s most in-depth source of knowledge on the genetics of the virus: At sites in Britain, it has sequenced 349,205 virus genomes from a global effort of around 778,000 genomes.

At the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s intellectual front line, hundreds of scientists, many with PhDs, many working voluntarily and some listening to heavy metal or electronic beats, work seven days a week to map the growing family tree of the virus in search of of worry patterns.

Three main variants of the coronavirus, which were first identified in Great Britain (known as B.1.1.7), Brazil (known as P1) and South Africa (known as B.1.351), are under particular scrutiny.

Peacock said she was most concerned about B.1.351.

“It’s more transmissible, but it also has a change in a genetic mutation, which we refer to as E484K, which is associated with lowered immunity, so our immunity against that virus is lowered,” Peacock said.