LONDON – The dominant variant of coronavirus in the UK is becoming increasingly resistant to vaccines, scientific experts have warned.
Two British scientists warned on Wednesday that the virus variant first identified in Kent had acquired the same E484K mutation on its top protein that makes it the South African variant. so worrying for experts.
Public health authorities are monitoring two emerging variants in the UK. The first of these two home-grown varieties was found mainly in Bristol and the south-west of the country, where experts confirmed 15 cases, six more in other parts of England. The second variant is located in Liverpool and the Northwest, with a group of 42 cases confirmed so far.
Sharon Peacock, CEO and President of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK), told POLITICO in an interview that this is of “great concern” because the mutation was associated with vaccine immunity and reinfection in South Africa.
“Our home-grown variant develops this mutation on numerous occasions, probably through a process of natural selection,” she said. “If the virus benefits from a certain mutation, then it is likely to persist in the population and spread. This is becoming a major concern in the country. ”
At a press conference in Downing Street on Wednesday, the chief scientific adviser to the British government, Patrick Vallance, said that “it is not surprising” that the Kent version has evolved in this way and that it will happen elsewhere.
“Getting this variant makes it a little more likely to look different from the immune system, so we have to be careful about that,” Vallance said. “We need to stay on top and continue to test the effects of the vaccine in that situation.”
Peacock said the British government’s approach to border controls, which will become stricter on Monday, is “generally good” as testing people on arrival, as well as sequencing the genome of positive cases, will allow the UK to understand how in which the virus could move to other parts of the world.
But she warned that strict border controls would not provide full protection to the British population, as “there is a likelihood of non-border control in the UK”, as is the case in Bristol.
Helping others
The Peacock-led consortium offers sequencing of the entire genome of coronavirus samples to the National Health Service and the British government. British experts are currently sequencing 27,000 genomes a week, but that number will continue to rise, she said, as British experts also share their tools and data in an attempt to increase the capacity of other countries.
Peacock said a total of 26 countries in Asia, Europe and Africa had so far joined the UK, although he declined to name any. “The basics for being able to do the sequencing are pretty much there in a lot of well-resourced places,” she said.
The president of the consortium added: “It’s a matter of how you form a network, and that’s really related to cooperation and collaboration and joining the whole system, from patient to test, to sequence generation and then back to public health. . It’s a pretty complicated business to set up. ”
The entire sequencing process, from testing a patient with COVID-19 to interpreting the sequencing data, currently takes about five days at the SANGER Institute in Cambridge and a little longer at the regional laboratories. “We are constantly working on our time of change right now,” Peacock said. “For an effective investigation of the outbreak, you must have the response tested within 36 hours,” she said.
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