COVID Vaccine vs New Variant: Will It Work?

We cough, and we have a fever, sometimes even body aches. This is the new XFG variant, nicknamed “Frankenstein“, which now dominates Covid-19 contaminations. A variant of the Omicron family, more transmissible than its predecessors, but which would not cause more serious forms.

Vaccination of people at risk

Is the vaccine offered from this Tuesday effective against this variant? According to Dr Pascal Crépey, professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Public Health, in Rennes, “this vaccine remains a priori effective against this strain, not necessarily very effective against the infection, an effectiveness which lasts a very long time against the infection therefore the fact of being infected and falling ill, but a priori it retains a certain effectiveness against serious forms and falling very ill or even being hospitalized. This is what fully justifies vaccination, particularly for people at high risk. You have the over 65s, among the under 65s, people who suffer from chronic illnesses, but also pregnant women, people suffering from obesity and people who stay in follow-up care establishments, etc.”

People at risk, aged over 65, people with a chronic illness, pregnant women, are therefore invited to be vaccinated. But for Dr Crépey, it is not useless for other audiences: “what we know is that a person who does not have symptoms, who does not cough, who does not sneeze, will transmit less. We can say that there will still be, thanks to vaccination, due to this reduction in symptoms, an impact on transmission.

A useful vaccination for those around you

Vaccination is essential for people who are at risk of developing severe forms, but it may also be of interest to people who are less at risk, and who either want not to get sick, or not to risk contaminating people around them who would be at risk. If you have people around you who are at risk of developing serious illnesses, you need to get vaccinated.”

The flu killed 17,000 people last winter in France and the vaccination rate was very low: 3% of those under 18 at risk were vaccinated last winter, 27% of 18-64 year olds, and 54% of those over 65.

Dr Crépey hopes for awareness and a vaccine rebound because “the flu is not a trivial disease, it kills several thousand people each year in our territory and causes a significant hospital overload which is all the more problematic since there is Covid-19 since there are two epidemics or even three, if we take into account bronchiolitis… Three different viruses which circulate in populations every winter and have a significant public health impact.”

And soon the vaccine against H5N1?

Attention is also focused on another virus, H5N1, the avian flu virus. We “since the 2000s, there have been just under a thousand cases of people infected with this virus and who were infected directly by contact with birds, explains Dr Pascal Crépey. The chains of transmission stop immediately, however it is not impossible that this virus will one day manage to mutate and become transmissible from person to person. This is not what we also need to prepare for in terms of research and public health actors to limit the consequences of this type of phenomenon.”