other research has suggested that P.1 may spread more easily and appears more capable of reinfecting those who have already recovered from previous bouts of COVID-19.
Those findings have prompted questions of how well current vaccines can work against the variant.The new research, published March 8 in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that the Pfizer vaccine’s ability to neutralize the P.1 variant was "roughly equivalent" to its effect on the original, less contagious strain of the coronavirus from last year.Researchers engineered versions of the virus that contained the same mutations found in the spike protein of the P.1 variant.