Study on the JJJ vax, shows good T cell response, should be somewhat effective against variants.
The research was fairly straightforward. Scientists took blood from volunteers who had received the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine and looked at the levels of neutralizing antibodies, the kind that prevent a virus from entering cells.
"What we showed is that the neutralizing antibodies are reduced about fivefold to the B.1.351 variant," says Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Under the new nomenclature proposed by the World Health Organization, B.1.351 is now called Beta. It first appeared in South Africa.
And it's that last immune response, the T-cell response, that Barouch says is critically important. Because T cells, particularly CD8 T cells, play a crucial role in preventing illness.
"Those are the killer T cells," Barouch says. "Those are the types of T cells that can basically seek out and destroy cells that are infected and help clear infection directly."
They don't prevent infection; they help keep an infection from spreading.
"The T-cell responses actually are not reduced — at all — to the variants," Barouch says. It's not just the Beta variant, but also the Alpha and Gamma variants.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-sho ... t-variants
If I recall correctly, JJJ was about 50% effective against Beta in SA, which isn't great but better than nothing.
Doesnt say how it would do against Delta.
I am wondering about multiple vax boosters, one AZ, one mRNA, one JJJ, one sputnik, etc. Would that give broader coverage against these new more virulent variants? Or do we need specific shots tailored to each variant?