There are worries that as the COVID-19 virus mutates, it could become resistant to
the current vaccines and spread in all new ways.
So with variants popping up in places like India, the UK, South Africa and Brazil.
What does that mean for the future of COVID-19? Will it ever truly be over? And
will we need to get booster shots, alongside our yearly flu shots
indefinitely?
Variants are actually very common in the world of micro organisms. For viruses, the
term "variant" is used to describe a strain that is genetically distinct from the original.
As in the case of all living things, viruses mutate and evolve, and the traits that get
selected for over time, what we call natural selection, are the traits that allow the virus
to survive better, so it can survive better by infecting more people and replicating
more, it can survive better by evading our immune responses really our defenses
against the virus, and our counter attack against the virus.
I'm Dr. Celine Gounder. I'm an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at the
NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital.
Of course better survival for viruses is not always ideal for us.
Some of those mutations, make the virus, more efficient in terms of how well it infects
us, it might cause more severe disease, and it can also make the virus evade our
immune systems, whether that's our immune response to infection or it could
just be an immune response to the vaccine.
And this is what people are worried about if the virus mutates in a way that makes it
spread more quickly or cause more dangerous symptoms, it can also be
different enough for a vaccine to no longer be effective against. What makes a virus
variant fit into one of these concerning categories is all about where the mutation
is and how it changes the shape of the viruses proteins.
So when we vaccinate you, you develop an immune response specifically antibodies
that recognize the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and you can think of the
immune response to SARS-CoV-2 as sort of like two interlocking puzzle pieces. Your
antibody is one puzzle piece and you have the virus as another puzzle piece.
These puzzle pieces that Dr. Gounder is talking about are how your body
recognizes any virus. It learns what the virus's proteins look like, so that it can flag
it the next time it comes around, so the vaccine is just mimicking your body's
natural immune response, although we should note that in this case,
the vaccine triggered response is more reliable because it is more robust and
durable.
As the SARS CoV-2 virus mutates, the virus side of the puzzle piece changes shape,
and your antibody puzzle piece may not fit in with that virus puzzle piece anymore.
And so your immune system in a sense is not able to see the virus. And this is how
the virus mutates to where it can get around your immune system.
This is why virologists are keeping such a close eye on the variants, they need to
know if these are the ones that can invade the current vaccines.
So far we've been very lucky, all of the vaccines we have are effective against the
variants, but it's really important that scientists, doctors, continue to do
surveillance so really testing looking for new emerging variants to make sure that
our vaccines remain effective, and many of the companies are already developing
second generation, or you could think of them as booster vaccines, in case the virus
continues to mutate and it will.
So while current vaccines are allowing our worlds to finally reopen, the areas that have
limited access to those vaccines are also the places that have a higher likelihood of
developing variants that could eventually evade them.
So the more people who are infected with a virus, the more opportunities the virus has
to replicate and with each replication to mutate. And so when you let the virus
spread like wildfire that is when you see more variants emerge.
Ah yes, yet another good reason to get yourself vaccinated as soon as you can and
as for the question of whether we'll have to get a booster COVID shot every year like the
flu shot, Dr Gounder says that that's an inaccurate comparison because the two
viruses mutate in completely different ways.
The genetic code of the coronaviruses is really one long strand of genetic code. In
the case of influenza viruses, their genetic code is in eight different segments or
strands, they can swap whole strands whole chunks of their genetic code and
that's what allows them to mutate much more dramatically. In the case of
coronaviruses they mutate really with just one letter changes in their genetic code
here and there. So after jumping species from animals to humans, the SARS-COV-2
virus has been mutating a lot, but it's likely to level off and slow its rate of mutation
way down.
So we do you anticipate that we might need booster shots or next generation
situation where we're going to need yearly booster shots forever the way we do for
the flu.
Finally some good news. 0:05:04.012,1193:02:47.295 vaccines for COVID in the next couple of years here but we don't think this is a
My advice is to get whatever vaccine, you can get now, because the longer you wait,
during that window while you're waiting, there's a very high chance that you could still
be exposed and infected, and the whole point of getting vaccinated is really
to protect you from that so get what you can now and if there's something better
down the line, you know, then at that point you can get that next generation vaccine,
but something in the future is not going to protect you right now.