All mankind is following the development of the pandemic around the world with great interest. The discovery of a vaccine had given hope to the most pessimist, but it seems that it is not THE solution to end the pandemic.
According to Pr El Mustapha El Fahim, director of the functional genomic platform (CNRST) under the Ministry of Health, ” the vaccine is one weapon among many against Covid-19, and it cannot be trusted on its own. If the vaccine was 100% effective, it means that everyone who is vaccinated will acquire neutralizing antibodies. But to date, there is no vaccine that is completely effective ”, he said.
Since the start of the pandemic, several new variants of the coronavirus have appeared. In an interview with Hespress Ar, Pr El Fahim explains precisely how its variants emerge. He explains that “ when the virus reproduces itself, mutations occur. Knowing that the coronavirus is characterized by a number of characteristics, the first of which is that when mutations occur, it retains the mutation which qualifies it to multiply, adhere to receptors and easily enter the cells of the body. And if the genome doesn’t help it, it changes it « .
The second characteristic of the coronavirus, continues the specialist, is that the resulting mutations are made at the expense of the recipient organism. If the latter has normal antibodies, namely immunity, in addition to antibodies acquired through vaccination or antibodies acquired through drugs, the virus seeks to develop in order to escape all these antigens through mutations. .
For the Delta variant, which is almost dominant in the Kingdom, Pr El Fahim specifies that what distinguishes it from other variants, ” it is that it has acquired the capacity to integrate cells with unimaginable ease. If we compare it to the Alpha variant, we see that the amount of virus, which comes from the trachea (nose and throat), is 1000 times more than the Alpha mutant, which is why we find a huge viral load when we do laboratory analyzes“, He said.
This case means that the virus has multiplied in large quantities, says the specialist, and therefore the possibility of transmitting the infection to other people increases and can even go down very easily to the lungs. In this case, the immune system works to resist it, but the speed of spread of the virus precedes the speed of resistance of the immune system, underlines Pr El Fahim.
So what is the solution? According to Pr El Mustapha El Fahim, research is still underway to find other weapons to counter the phantom virus. Among its weapons, there is the nasal vaccine (discovered by the French research team BioMAP from the University of Tours and the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Editor’s note). This new vaccine, unveiled on September 9, would not only neutralize the current variants of the virus, but would also block contagiousness. It is administered twice by the nasal route, with a space of 3 weeks. The characteristic of this vaccine is that it has the capacity to cut the transmission between individuals, by acting directly on the nasal mucosa.
The second weapon, continues the specialist, remains the drug such as chloroquine, or special antibiotics on which Pfizer and other companies are working. For these drugs to be effective, they must be easy to use, believes Pr El Fahim, before concluding on this point that the most important weapon remains self-protection via the various tools to protect against the phantom virus (distancing, wearing a mask….).
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