COVID-19 vaccine
COVID-19 vaccineiStock

A recently discovered strain of the coronavirus can evade vaccine-induced immunity, a new study has found, potentially rendering it a threat to billions of vaccinated people worldwide.

Countries around the world have implemented mass-vaccination campaigns in a bid to drive down the number of serious cases of the coronavirus and to curb deaths.

Thus far, three billion people have been fully vaccinated against the virus, with millions more having received partial vaccination.

While the vaccines in circulation were developed on the basis of the first strain of the virus detected, the vaccines have thus far been found to be largely effective in at least preventing serious illness in the face of the Delta variant of the virus.

A new strain, however, appears to be highly effective at evading the antibodies created by the vaccines, which are specifically targeted to respond to the spike protein on the exterior of the COVID virions.

The variant, A.30 – also known as A.VOI.V2 – has been discovered in patients in Angola and Sweden, and is believed to have originated in Tanzania.

According to a study by researchers in Germany released this week by the UK-based journal Natural, the new variant is “heavily mutated”, including mutations to the virus’ spike protein, which allow it to evade antibodies created in response to vaccines based on previously identified strains of COVID.

“A.30 exhibits a cell line preference not observed for other viral variants and efficiently evades neutralization by antibodies elicited by ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 or BNT162b2 vaccination,” researchers wrote.

Aside from being able to evade vaccine-induced immunity, the study claimed, the new variant also appears to be better able to spread through the body beyond the lungs.

“Collectively, our results suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 variant A.30 can evade control by vaccine-induced antibodies and might show an increased capacity to enter cells in a cathepsin L-dependent manner, which might particularly aid in the extrapulmonary spread.”

Despite the study’s findings, however, the authors speculated that vaccine-induced immunity might still offer some protection.

“Nevertheless, heterologous ChAdOx1 nCoV-19/BNT162b2 vaccination, which was previously shown to augment neutralizing antibody responses against VOCs compared to corresponding homologous vaccinations, might offer robust protection against the A.30 variant.”