Covid, Ciccozzi: “Risk of a new variant that escapes vaccines”

“We know that the virus changes all the time, so the more we give it the chance to infect the more it could mutate and become unassailable by the vaccines we have now.” The alarm was raised by Massimo Ciccozzi, director of the Medical Statistics and Epidemiology Unit of the Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, to the microphones of the broadcast ‘Italy has awakened’ on Radio Cusano Campus. “It is part of the evolutionary path of the virus”, he explains, adding: for this “we must circulate it as little as possible, vaccines – he remembers – help us in this”. “Vaccines still protect us 98% from serious illness. On infection, on the other hand, the latest data from Israel say that the Delta variant decreases the effectiveness of the double dose of Pfizer to 64%,” says the expert. The Delta variant “according to the ISS is over 30-35% of presence in Italy. It is not a homogeneous diffusion throughout the country, there are regions – underlines Ciccozzi – that have more cases and others less. low disease we can track people, circumscribing the outbreaks and controlling them. For now we are fine, obviously this variant is much more contagious and if the virus continues to circulate it will become dominant “.” Probably “Sars-CoV-2” will be our travel companion until it becomes a human coronavirus. It will adapt more and more to us and maybe we will have to get a vaccination every year as with the flu “, Ciccozzi also said adding:” Third dose? We still do not have studies on antibody titers – recalls Ciccozzi – after the second dose of vaccine. Until we have these data, we will not be able to know if, how and when to do the third “anti-Covid” dose.