HYDERABAD: A war of words broke out on Twitter after Bharat Biotech’s SARS-CoV-2 project lead Raches Ella questioned the findings of a recent comparative study of the immune responses evoked by Covishield and Covaxin in healthcare workers.
The study, conducted on 515 healthcare workers (425 Covishield & 90 Covaxin recipients) and recently uploaded on preprint server MedRxiv, said that Covishield recipients were found to have a higher sero-positivity rate and average rise in anti-spike antibody (ASA) than those who got Covaxin.
While Ella pointed out limitations in the study in a string of tweets late on Monday night, the lead researcher, Kolkata-based endocrinologist Awadhesh Kumar Singh objected to Ella pointing fingers at their study when Covaxin’s phase 3 results were yet to be published.
Other Twitterati too weighed in on the debate with many of them demanding that Bharat Biotech publish Covaxin’s phase 3 results before trying to point out shortcomings in studies conducted by others.
The spat was sparked off when Ella, who also heads business development & advocacy at Bharat Biotech, expressed surprise at researchers and media coming to conclusions based on non-peer-reviewed work on his Twitter handle.
“Limitation 1: Spike-based IgG’s are not appropriate when evaluating Covaxin, which induces broad antibody responses to Spike, N, and M.
Recommend live virus neutralization,” he said.
“Limitation 2: Past history of Covid was based on verbal response and not by a pre-vaccination IgG test.
The study fails to account for asymptomatics (predominant presentation of Covid) and introduces misclassification bias.
SARS-CoV-2 naïve participants may not be naïve after all,” he pointed out.
“The Lancet recommends authors refrain from actively seeking media attention for articles that are not peer-reviewed.
If contacted by the press, authors clearly need to state these are preliminary findings that have not been peer-reviewed,” he tweeted while tagging the study’s lead author Dr AK Singh.
Singh tweeted: “Brother, whole country is getting vaccinated even without a preprint phase 3 results – lest forget published one.
We owe a sincere gratitude to Bharat Biotech but that does not mean one should raise finger on others effort.
Of course, we will produce published results finally!” Singh also defended the study by pointing out that to understand the difference between the two vaccines only ASA would help in this case.
“AZ vaccine being a spike particle can’t induce NC and M Ab then what is point in doing that? It’s a well-known fact that CMI (cell mediated immunity) is least with whole virion vaccines but Big Q is why whole virion V induces less ASA?” he tweeted.
Ella then responded to Singh pointing out that he was “not raising fingers, merely citing limitations that have a bearing on the study outcome.
Salute your efforts as well.
Phase 3 will be out very soon.”