London – British scientists say fast-spreading COVID-19 first discovered in southern England is evolving in a way that could make it exist vaccines less effective against it. The UK has been following the mutations closely coronavirus for months, leading the world in tracking changes in the virus’s genetic code.
Authorities in England are trying to test all those over 16 in many neighborhoods where several other worrying cases have been found – the one first detected in South Africa. But even as Britain struggles to find and stop that highly infectious strain, scientists have found that the UK version seems to be moving in a way that mimics the South African one.
The discovery raised concerns about the ongoing evolution of the virus, suggesting some evidence can lead to resistance to vaccines being carried out all over the globe.
“The virus is getting better over time,” said Sharon Peacock, who leads a national network of British scientists who monitor transformations more closely than anywhere else in the world, CBS News correspondent Roxana Saberi said.
For the coronavirus, Peacock says, “it’s a matter of natural selection. It’s the survival of the fittest.”
She tells CBS News that her team at COVID-19 Genomics UK hunts every day in laboratories in the UK for any new mutation, which “really gives us a barcode for the virus”.
This hunt is based on both robots and human researchers analyzing thousands of COVID-19 samples, mapping mutations in the virus’s genetic code.
In November, they noticed something alarming: mutations, many of the virus’s peak protein, that allowed it to cling to cells more tightly, making it much more contagious.
While 10 people infected with the old variants of the virus could be expected to transmit it to another 13, 10 people carrying the new variant discovered in Kent, south-east London, could infect about 20.
“That’s really important,” says Peacock, “because more people can get sick, and therefore more people can die simply because of the burden of the disease.”
Quickly called the “British version”, the new strain has appeared ever since swept all over the world, causing the United States and many other nations to restrict their travel restrictions. Germany and Austria are now mandating anyone who ventures into most public places to wear medical-grade masks, not just cloth overlays, and Britain has imposed a nationwide blockade.
Scientists in the UK say that as COVID-19 continues to move, the rest of the world needs to do more genetic sequencing – and The US has something to recover. Currently, less than 1% of coronavirus samples in the US are sequenced, compared to about 10% in the UK, which means that many dangerous mutations can be missed.
Peacock says it is “very likely” that COVID-19 variants in the US will be more widespread than is currently known, “and I believe that sequencing will be vital in detecting this.”
Ravi Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Cambridge, tells CBS News that vaccines will likely have to be redesigned by the end of this year to adapt to new mutations. A senior researcher for the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca said on Wednesday that the work will be done “as soon as possible”.
“We are working hard and we are already talking not only about the options we need to do in the laboratories, but also about the clinical trials we need to conduct,” Mene Pangalos said during a media briefing. “We aim to try to have something ready by the fall, so this year.”