Dr. Pei-Yong Shi, professor and John Sealy Distinguished Chair in Innovations in Molecular Biology at University of Texas Medical Branch, is the senior author of a new study that shows the Pfizer vaccine neutralizes the Brazilian variant.
Shi studied blood from the vaccinated and compared them against the variants.
“The results found from the U.K. and Brazilian variants, the vaccinated blood equally inhibit those two compared variants with the original virus, ” said Shi. “In contrast, the South African strain that the antibodies from the vaccinated individual dropped its the activity by two-thirds.”
As for the Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Shi considers the South African strain “a major concern,” but stresses that all three vaccines inhibit the virus below a dangerous threshold.
The benefits of breastfeeding infants include reducing risk for type 1 diabetes, asthma, gastrointestinal infections, and severe lower respiratory disease.
The entire world had been waiting for months for a vaccine against COVID-19. But now that we have them, how effective are they with these new variants of the coronavirus discovered in the UK and South Africa that spread more rapidly. Pfizer and BioNTech just published some results of a study done here at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston where scientists looked at this new variant. They ran some tests and compared them to human.