Does Covid-19 Vaccine Protect Against Mu Variant?

It’s been almost 2 years, and the coronavirus infection isn’t showing any sign of going away anytime soon. Instead the virus itself has devised ways to become more virulent through mutations. And the latest mutant of concern is the “Mu Variant” of South America. All the vaccines that have been made to fight this pandemic were formulated before the inception of this variant. Now, the big question comes whether the covid-19 vaccines available can protect against this new Mu variant? Before we try to find the answer to this, let’s first understand briefly about how does a Vaccine work and how do the Variants come into being?

How do Vaccines work?

Vaccines are certain biological preparations that contain agents resembling a disease-causing microorganism. It is made from weakened or killed microorganisms or their surface proteins. Once inoculated into the body, the immune system recognizes it as a threat and destroys it, and also gets trained in such a way by generating antibodies that in case the immune system encounters the real organism in question in the future, it neutralizes the threat fast.

Covid-19 vaccines are no different. However different types of vaccines that we know are prepared by different methods, but the basic aim of all is to induce immunity to fight coronavirus infection. By different types I mean the biological materials used, for example, Pfizer is an mRNA vaccine (mRNA is something that is made by the virus while it is replicating), Covaxin is an inactivated Virus Vaccine (imagine it like it contains almost all the parts of the virus, only thing is the virus is dead that is used), and many different forms of vaccines are there, talking about how they are made is beyond the scope of this post.

How Variants are formed?

Like any living organism, viruses survive by replicating or multiplying. In doing so, viruses try to make a replica of the parent virus. But many a time minor variations occur. But sometimes these variations can occur in the genes or structures that are involved in, say infecting capabilities, and if in any case a virus is formed with modified or altered infecting abilities, thereby increasing its lethality, we can term it as a variant. And the Mu Variant is the latest one that’s out there. But as a matter of fact, there could be much more lethal variants out there perhaps, which even detected, are kept confidential by authorities, only to be unveiled later. Just like the Mu Variant, as sources have disclosed about it recently, although it has been out there infecting and killing people for months.

Does Covid-19 Vaccine protect against Mu Variant Infection?

Well, the answer is a tricky one. It will probably depend on the vaccine. Let’s say, a vaccine was made using the “X” Protein of the original coronavirus, but suppose in Mu Variant the X protein gets mutated to “X1”, then the vaccine might not offer protection, as the antibodies generated by that vaccine might detect the X protein of the virus, but fail to detect X1 Protein. Now let’s consider vaccines that used killed viruses. In this case, antibodies are formed against multiple components of the virus, if some component gets altered in the variant, some might be unaltered that might be detected by the antibodies produced by killed virus vaccines. However, WHO has said that preliminary data show reduced effectiveness of vaccines against this variant, but the type of vaccine in question has not been disclosed. It's too early to say if all types of vaccines will perform in the same inefficient way. So the best policy for protection from variants is by social distancing, rather than relying completely on vaccines.