India’s situation amid the coronavirus pandemic worries the entire world. While several countries have been rallying to help the country breaking records in contaminations, the world is also worried about the threat from the Indian variant, the double mutant said to have originated this boom in cases. Is there a vaccine strong enough to stop it?
This Wednesday April 28, 2021, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin has hosted an online press brief. He was reassuring as for the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine on the Indian variant. “The Indian variant presents mutations that we have already studied and against which our vaccine acts, which makes us confident” he said. He also added the mRNA vaccine has been tested on over 30 variants and the immune response was enough, the German startup claimed.
More recent data tend to confirm the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is effective against the worrying coronavirus variants. A study conducted in Qatar and released in The New England Journal of Medicine this Wednesday May 5, 2021 shows people who have been fully vaccinated with this vaccine are 75% less likely to catch the South African variant than those who have not been vaccinated. The study grants the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine a 89.5% effectiveness rate against the UK variant, and almost total protection against severe coronavirus.
