However, with the exception of killed whole virus vaccines, all currently available vaccine designs only provide spike protein as the target immunogen, thus limiting T-cell immunity to spike epitopes.

Surprisingly, we found that the decreased in neutralization of B.1.351 strains was similar to that of distantly related coronaviruses, namely, SARS-CoV (43.8-fold for BNT162b2 and 33.5-fold for mRNA-1273) and WIV1-CoV (44.3-fold for BNT162b2 and 26.5-fold for mRNA-1273), suggesting that a relatively small number of mutations can medicate potent escape from vaccine-induced neutralizing antibody responses. These substantial differences in neutralization could not be explained by differences in spike protein expression (Figure S4B) nor in the amount of pseudovirus used in the assay (Figure S4C).

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