Reacción a "Reaction to the discovery of a new sarbecovirus in Russian bats resistant to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines"

Research on potential zoonoses is part of the "One Health" strategy, can provide knowledge on the biology of the virus and allows us to monitor the potential risks we face. The occurrence of sarbecovirus in different bat populations across the globe is well known, but it is no less important to study it.

This work, with a good sampling and sequencing methodology previously published, characterises two coronaviruses structurally and antigenically. Its relevance is to show the potential ability, especially of one of the viruses, to infect human cells and the impact it may have on population immunity in the case of species jumping of these viruses.

It also opens up an interesting field of work, which is already underway on the new SARS-CoV-2 variants and their relationship with human receptors, in which other routes of virus entry and the use of other proteases for processing the spicule are assessed. Potential findings of new receptors in bats may help to improve our understanding of cell entry in humans.

As the only weak point, and understanding the difficulty that this entails, I would stress that these results must be taken into account, but handled with caution, as they are carried out with pseudoviruses and not complete viruses. Cultivating bat viruses can be very difficult, but it would have been a perfect cherry on top of this work, which indicates that we must continue to monitor the viruses we find in bats because information always allows us to make better decisions.