Indian Covid variant can duck antibodies, but vaccine blunts sting: Study

MUMBAI: Covid-19’s so-called ‘Indian variant’ has a “modest” ability to “escape” the antibodies developed by vaccines, but it can, at best, cause moderate illness among those who have got the shots, scientists from India and the UK have found, establishing that “vaccination is still protective for the majority of people”.
The B.1.617 mutant, first isolated in Vidarbha three months ago, is now detected across India and 40 other countries.It was initially called the ‘double mutant’ variant for possessing mutations E484Q and L452R that are known to evade the protective layer of antibodies caused by vaccination. The B.1.617 was recently named a variant of concern because of its high transmissibility by WHO.

Scientists from India’s INSACOG — the consortium of 10 elite national laboratories — and UK’s Cambridge University wrote in a research paper, ‘SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617 — emergence and sensitivity to vaccine-elicited antibodies’, that there is a possibility some people could get infected with the variant despite vaccination, but the infection would be mild.

The paper, in pre-print stage, holds the B.1.617’s modest ability to dodge antibodies responsible for its high infectivity and transmissibility that fuelled the second wave in India.
“The data go some way in explaining the dominance of this variant in a partially immune population, but highlights that vaccination is still protective for the majority of people,” said Gupta Lab, the Twitter handle of Ravi Gupta from the University of Cambridge’s department of medicine and author of the new study.
Dr Anurag Agrawal, director of the Delhi-based Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology and a co-author of the paper, told TOI the most important point is that “vaccines protect against B.1.617”. “There is an immune escape, but not of a high degree,” he added. Late on Monday, another scientist, Vinod Scaria, from the institute tweeted B.1.617 is unlikely to be a major immune escape variant.
A month ago, US scientist Anthony Fauci had said Covaxin was effective against the new variants. On Tuesday, Agrawal said vaccine efficacy against the variants has been established. “Our CSIR labs have shown Covishield’s effectiveness, while NIV Pune has shown that Covaxin is effective,” he said. The latest paper studied the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness against B.1.617.
The Indian government was for months hesitant to label B.1.617 as the cause of the “ferocious” second wave, but it is now established that the Maharashtra variant has played a role. European scientists have said the variant was at least six times as infective as the UK variant B.1.1.7. The UK health authority has named B.1.617.2, which is closely linked to B.1.617, as a variant of concern.