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LONDON (Reuters) – It is not yet clear whether the world needs a new set of vaccines to fight different variants of the novel coronavirus but scientists are working on new ones so there is no reason for alarm, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group said on Tuesday.

South Africa has paused a planned rollout of AstraZeneca’s vaccines after data showed it gave minimal protection against mild infection among young people from the dominant variant there, stoking fears of a much longer battle with the pathogen.

AstraZeneca and Oxford University aim to produce a next generation of vaccines that will protect against variants as soon as the autumn before the Northern Hemisphere winter, AstraZeneca’s research chief said this month.

“There are definitely new questions about variants that we’re going to be addressing. And one of those is: do we need new vaccines?,” Andrew Pollard, Chief Investigator on the Oxford vaccine trial, told BBC radio.

“I think the jury is out on that at the moment, but all developers are preparing new vaccines so if we do need them, we’ll have them available to be able to protect people.”

Vaccines are seen as the swiftest path out of the COVID-19 crisis which has killed 2.33 million people and turned normal life upside down for billions.

Researchers from the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Oxford said in a prior-to-peer analysis that the AstraZeneca vaccine provided minimal protection against mild or moderate infection from the South African variant among young people.

TARGET POPULATION

Protection against moderate-severe disease, hospitalisation or death could not be assessed in the study of around 2,000 volunteers who had a median age of 31 as the target population was at such low risk, the researchers said.

“I think there’s clearly a risk of confidence in the way that people may perceive you. But as I say I don’t think that there is any reason for alarm today,” Pollard said.

“The really important question is about the severe disease and we didn’t study that in South Africa, because that wasn’t the point of that study, we were specifically asking questions about young adults.”

The so-called South African variant, known by scientists as 20I/501Y.V2 or B.1.351, is the dominant one in South Africa and is circulating in 41 countries around the world including the United States.

Other major variants include the so-called UK variant, or 20I/501Y.V1, and the Brazilian variant known as P.1.

An analysis of infections by the South African variant showed there was only a 22% lower risk of developing mild-to-moderate COVID-19 if vaccinated with the AstraZeneca shot versus those given a placebo.

If vaccines do not work as effectively as hoped against new and emerging variants, the world could be facing a much longer – and more expensive – battle against the virus than previously thought.

“As long as we have enough immunity to prevent severe disease, hospitalisations and death then we’re going to be fine in the future in the pandemic,” Pollard said.

Pollard said the South African government was right to look at how it deployed the AstraZeneca vaccine because the original plan was to use it in young adults – particularly healthcare workers – who were not expected to get severe disease.

“It needs a relook at how best to deploy the vaccine,” Pollard said.

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Local and federal authorities are investigating after an attempt Friday to poison the city of Oldsmar’s water supply, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said.

Someone remotely accessed a computer for the city’s water treatment system and briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye, by a factor of more than 100, Gualtieri said at a news conference Monday. The chemical is used in small amounts to control the acidity of water but it’s also a corrosive compound commonly found in household cleaning supplies such as liquid drain cleaners.

The city’s water supply was not affected. A supervisor working remotely saw the concentration being changed on his computer screen and immediately reverted it, Gualtieri said. City officials on Monday emphasized that several other safeguards are in place to prevent contaminated water from entering the water supply and said they’ve disabled the remote-access system used in the attack.

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office is investigating, along with the FBI and the Secret Service, Gualtieri said. Oldsmar is located in Pinellas.

Nobody has been arrested, Gualtieri said, though investigators have some leads. They do not know why Oldsmar was targeted, he said. He added that other area municipalities have been alerted to the attack and encouraged to inspect the safeguards to their water treatment systems and other infrastructure.

Though some cities obtain water through Pinellas County, Oldsmar provides water directly to its businesses and roughly 15,000 residents, Gualtieri said. The computer system at the water treatment plant was set up to allow authorized users to remotely access it for troubleshooting.

A plant operator was monitoring the system at about 8 a.m. Friday and noticed that someone briefly accessed it. He didn’t find this unusual, Gualtieri said, because his supervisor remotely accessed the system regularly.

But at about 1:30 p.m. the same day, Gualtieri said, someone accessed the system again. This time, he said, the operator watched as someone took control of the mouse, directed it to the software that controls water treatment, worked inside it for three to five minutes and increased the amount of sodium hydroxide from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million.

The attacker left the system, Gualtieri said, and the operator immediately changed the concentration back to 100 parts per million.

“At no time was there a significant adverse effect on the water being treated,” the sheriff said. “Importantly, the public was never in danger.”

Even if the operator hadn’t caught it, he said, it would have taken more than a day for the water to enter the water supply.

“The protocols that we have in place, monitoring protocols, they work — that’s the good news,” said Oldsmar Mayor Eric Seidel. “Even had they not caught them, there’s redundancies in the system that would have caught the change in the pH level.

“The important thing is to put everyone on notice,” he said. “There’s a bad actor out there.”

Sen. Marco Rubio also addressed the attack in a tweet Monday, saying it “should be treated as a matter of national security.”

The Sheriff’s Office learned of the attack and began investigating Friday evening, Gualtieri said. Investigators don’t yet know whether the attack originated within or outside Pinellas County, Florida or the United States. If the attacker is apprehended, he said, they’ll face state felony charges and possibly federal charges.

Contact with sodium hydroxide can kill skin and cause hair loss, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Ingestion can be fatal.

Gualtieri said he didn’t know what physiological effects would result from the concentration dialed up in the attack. Nor was it immediately apparent whether a similar attack had ever happened in the U.S. In 2007, the water of a town in Massachusetts was accidentally treated with too much lye, causing burns and skin irritation among people who showered with it.

“I’m not a chemist,” Gualtieri said. “But I can tell you what I do know is … if you put that amount of that substance into the drinking water, it’s not a good thing.”

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AP- The rise of more contagious variants of the coronavirus is threatening an encouraging trend of falling COVID-19 cases across the USA..

New U.S. cases of COVID-19 on Sunday dropped below 100,000 for the first time since November, a hopeful sign after a brutal post-Thanksgiving period that saw cases, hospitalizations and deaths spike.

Health officials are urging the public and governors not to ease up on precautions despite the somewhat improved situation, given that measures like wearing a mask and distancing from others are even more important when the virus is more contagious.

In addition, while the trend is going in a positive direction, the levels of cases, hospitalizations and deaths are still much higher than either of the previous peaks in the spring and summer of last year.

There were 96,000 new cases on Sunday, according to the COVID Tracking Project, down from a peak of almost 300,000 in early January. But that is still far above any level experts would consider a goal. It is still higher than the peak of cases over the summer, for example, which was around 75,000 cases per day.

Around 3,000 people are dying every day from the virus, and around 80,000 are in the hospital with COVID-19.

Still, the positive trend has spurred some governors to start loosening restrictions.

In Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) last week lifted the mask mandate and distancing restrictions on restaurants and bars.

While that is perhaps the most drastic recent move, other states have been taking more gradual steps to ease back. Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced that indoor dining can return at 25 percent capacity in New York City ahead of Valentine’s Day.

Asked about Iowa’s decision, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky on Monday urged states not to lift precautions, in part citing the rise of new variants of the virus.

“We still have this emerging threat of variants, and I would just simply discourage any of those activities,” she said. “We really need to keep all of the mitigation measures at play here if we’re really going to get control of this pandemic.”

Highlighting the threat of a more contagious variant of the virus first identified in the United Kingdom, a study released Sunday found that the variant is doubling every 10 days in the U.S. and will likely become the dominant strain in many states by March.

Because the variant is 35 to 45 percent more transmissible, experts warn its rise could lead to a sharp spike in cases and hospitalizations.

“We certainly do expect to see a spike in cases” on the current trajectory, said Karthik Gangavarapu, a researcher at the Scripps Research Institute and one of the authors of the study. “We still don’t know how much of a spike it will be.”

Ramping up genomic sequencing to keep track of the prevalence of different variants, as well as additional contact tracing efforts from local public health departments aimed at slowing the spread of the UK variant, could both help in the fight, Gangavarapu said.

Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, issued a warning by pointing to the example of Ireland, which was hit hard by the new variant. It peaked at 132 new cases per 100,000 people in early January. “US has never seen numbers like that. Only the Dakotas had infection rates that high,” Jha wrote on Twitter.

Jha added he is “optimistic about late spring and summer,” given that vaccines will be more widely available by then, but he said the next few weeks are more worrisome.

While there are not enough available vaccines to immunize everyone in the next couple of months, and there are logistical challenges in getting shots into millions of arms, the faster the vaccination campaign can go, the more any spike from the new variant will be blunted.

Encouragingly, the vaccines appear to work well against the UK variant.

But another variant, first identified in South Africa, is more concerning based on the initial data. The results so far have suggested some dropoff in how well vaccines work with the South African variant. That variant has also been found in the U.S., but is less prevalent so far.

Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, wrote that the recent improving trends are likely due to a continued recovery from the post-holiday peak, when a surge in travel and indoor gatherings led to spikes.

“Now is not the time to let our guard down,” he wrote on Twitter. “We’re making progress with vaccines, but variants are coming.”

Tags South Africa United Kingdom CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Rochelle Walensky Andrew Cuomo Coronavirus COVID-19 Vaccines

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