Mutation, vaccine, antigen and PCR20 Dec 2020 08:32
Hopefully people will recognise the importance of the discussions we’ve had on this board over the last few months around mutations.
I thought it would be good to put this into perspective with regard to testing.
Mutations will eventually create a variant that overcomes the vaccine. The very act of vaccination will create a positive selection pressure on variants that overcome the vaccine. It’s irresponsible not to consider this.
What does this mean with regard to testing?
Testing will not go away, we need very good granularity on how the virus is spreading.
Antigen tests use the same process as antibodies, they detect a surface feature on the outside of the virus, generally the spike protein. Mutations can invade the immune response by changing this protein structure. Same for antigen tests. What’s not widely considered is a mutation variant can also make antigen tests less sensitive.
That’s why PCR based tests and other molecular tests are so important. They are developed (should be) to regions that don’t change and therefore are less susceptible to variant changes.
Bottom line, testing is here to stay, mutations make antigen tests potentially open to failure, molecular tests like the GDR test and NCYT are the best change of surveillance and we need a lot of testing to keep the economy open.
The new variant shows it’s a matter of time before we will need a new vaccine. The virus will mutate faster than we can create new vaccine candidates. There’s a long way to go everyone, we need to be realistic about this and accept we have years of this ahead of us.
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