Originally Posted by
monogroover
Reuters piece on this here:
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-h...fa87000190d7e4
Brief version: AZ believes that their vaccine provides less defence against mild illness caused by the SA variant, but that it "could protect against severe disease, given that the neutralising antibody activity was equivalent to that of other COVID-19 vaccines that have demonstrated protection against severe disease."
So: a good chance that it will keep SA variant-infected people out of hospital, but not necessarily prevent them spreading the disease to others.
Originally Posted by
PickleB
Have the manufacturers of any of the other vaccines run and reported on similar trials?
They have now.
Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have reduced effectiveness against South African variant:
The two coronavirus vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna appear to be highly effective against the more transmissible variant of the virus first detected in Britain, according to new reports in the New England Journal of Medicine, in a potential boost to vaccination efforts around the globe.
The vaccines, however, showed a decreased ability to neutralize the strain now dominant in South Africa, worrying some researchers and prompting Pfizer to announce it was taking necessary steps to develop a booster shot or updated vaccine.
The new findings add to wider concerns about the South Africa variant, which recently showed significant resistance to the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University in a small-scale trial. Those results spurred South Africa’s government to scrap the vaccine in favor of the single-dose shot produced by Johnson & Johnson.