The European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced on Wednesday that it has asked all developers of Kovid-19 vaccines to assess whether their product is effective against novel coronovirus mutations, to publish new guidelines for them.
The Amsterdam-based organization said in a statement, “The agency is developing guidelines for manufacturers making changes to the existing Covid19 vaccine to combat new variants of the virus. Recently several variants of coronovirus have been revealed. Infectiousness And its ability to avoid previous infections or immune responses induced by the vaccine. EMA “has asked all vaccine developers to study whether their vaccine could provide protection against new variants,” she said.
The agency thus asked the laboratories to “provide relevant data” regarding identified mutations in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil. The EMA argued, “There are apprehensions that some of these mutations may, to varying degrees, affect the ability of vaccines to protect against infection and disease.”
But “a reduction in protection against mild forms of the disease (…) does not necessarily translate into a reduction in protection against severe forms,” she asserted. The EMA has so far approved three vaccines in the European Union, which are the German-American duo BioNotech-Pfizer, American Modern and Swedish-British AstraZeneca, along with the University of Oxford. The World Health Organization on Wednesday recommended the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, including the countries where the variants exist, while a study on Sunday suggested the “limited” effectiveness of this product against the Southern version-afferican. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna estimated in late January that their own vaccines were effective against British and South African variants.
