NIH scientists are studying whether Covid-19 vaccines will provide the same level of protection against new strains of the virus as they do against earlier strains, the agency’s lead scientist on coronavirus said.
At the same time, Kizzmekia S. Corbett, scientific lead for the coronavirus vaccines team at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said she’s “not as alarmed as the media would have us think” by the emergence of the new strains.
The discovery of new strains of the SARS-Cov-2 virus from South Africa and the United Kingdom have raised concern about their impact on the pandemic. The newer strains appear to transmit more easily but aren’t more severe in that they don’t make people any sicker than the other strains.
There needs to be a have fundamental scientific understanding around each of the these genetic variations, and those studies are already happening at the National Institutes of Health, said Corbett, who made her comments…