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Comment by oytis | Hacker News Reader

Do these trials say anything about South African variant? That's the most important thing that needs to be clarified about AZ vaccine now.

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The most recent news continues to reinforce the idea that AZ is simply not effective at ALL against the B.1.351 SA variant, which is worrisome if it ends up dominating outside of South Africa.

Pfizer and Moderna both seem to show lower neutralizing antibody responses, but not nothing, and while there is some question of if "2/3rds less is enough," there's also some other significant considerations around the T-cell response that's triggered by those two and its robust effectiveness even against B.1.351. But not so much with AZ, which continues to show itself as ineffective against the variant: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/91658

If it is true, then in the long run AZ vaccine is close to useless. B.1.351 will just spread all over the world as quickly the original virus did, and we'll have to revaccinate with something else anyway. Which can also be complicated if something else is a viral vector vaccine too.

I understand they are already modifying the vaccine to handle the B.1.351 variant so all that will be needed is a third booster shot for people who have already got the AZ vaccine.

In the UK we vaccinate for whatever variants of the flu are circulating every year, Corona is going to be the same. I've heard experts widely state that since the pandemic started.

While it's certainly not a good sign, you have to consider the huge error bars on the statistics in that study, and the fact that nobody in that study (both in treatment group and control group) caught severe COVID-19 that would require hospitalization and/or died, so there's no data at all yet on whether it's effective in preventing hospitalization and/or death.

That is the exact same study that was reported on weeks ago. There isn't any new information and that study is flawed. You can refer back to discussions on it from weeks ago.

Sadly there isn't strong data about hospitalizations and death for the SA variant. AZ is clearly less likely to stop you from getting the virus, testing positive, and having a mild to moderate case. But that is actually acceptable if you're highly protected from hospitalization and death -- we've turned it into the common cold.

There are no known cases of the 501.V2 variant in either Chile or Peru, and the US has only had 143 cases by now. Besides, the trials were probably done months ago. If I’m not wrong, the Chilean one started in December.

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