There is always the chance, though small, the authors write, that the virus could evolve resistance to a vaccine, what researchers call “viral escape.” They urge monitoring of vaccine effects and viral response, just in case. Neither bacteria nor viruses evolve resistance to vaccines as easily as they do to drugs, they wrote. Some vaccines, however, do drive viruses to evolve resistance, Kennedy and Read noted in their 2015 article. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have discovered a kind of mutation that hadn’t been seen in coronaviruses before and raises fresh concerns about the evolution of vaccine resistance. Instead of destroying the genetic recipe for a viral protein, the mutations snipped out one or more amino acids.

Source: bd News24 November 27, 2020 13:07 UTC