Read on Twitter
Research from Israel has NOT found any vaccine-resistant coronavirus variants in the population. They compared the prevalence of different variants in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations and found no difference. https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/B1ItnyySd
Some people catch the coronavirus despite being vaccinated or recovered (95% effective isn't 100%). The researchers checked to see if those people were disproportionately catching some vaccine-resistant variant. They weren't.
Israel's coronavirus cases are >90% B.1.1.7 "British" variant. Genetic sequencing has found dozens of SA variant cases too. The Brazilian P1 variant, the New York variant and the Nigerian variant have been detected in small numbers.
So there ARE variants, including E484K variants, in the community. It's early days but so far they don't appear to be gaining any advantage from the vaccination programme, which suggests the vaccines are stopping them too.
Meanwhile, Israel's Covid-19 traffic light system now has NO "red" towns and just seven orange towns, with test positivity 0.9% nationally as virus rates collapse.
Well, this is science and new research can change the picture. The bad news: Israel now has some evidence of immune escape by the South African variant. https://www.timesofisrael.com/real-world-israeli-data-shows-south-african-variant-better-at-bypassing-vaccine/
paper here (thx @jburnmurdoch). They looked at positive test by PCR, not symptomatic or serious cases. The numbers are also very small. But it does look like B.1.351 is probably escaping some vaccine-induced immunity. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.06.21254882v1.full.pdf
The researchers behind that study think that maybe the vaccine takes longer to be effective against B.1.351, perhaps more than two weeks from the second dose, but still might ultimately work against it. https://twitter.com/SternLab/status/1380922933665792001
