New Covid variant ‘spreading rapidly’ in New York City and could BEAT vaccines, researchers warn
A NEW Covid-19 variant is “spreading rapidly” in New York City and could beat vaccines, researchers warn.
The new variant, called B.1.526, is spreading rapidly in the Big Apple and researchers fear it may carry a mutation that may weaken the effectiveness of vaccines.
The new variant first appeared in samples collected in November, and by February it accounted for about one in four viral sequences appearing in a database shared by scientists.
One study, which was posted on Tuesday, was published by a group at Caltech, the other by researchers at Columbia University, which is not public yet.
However, neither study has been published in a scientific journal, but the results suggest that the variant’s spread is real, experts said.
Researchers at Caltech discovered the rise of the B.1.526 variant by scanning for mutations in thousands of viral genetic sequences in a database called GISAID.
“There was a pattern that was recurring, and a group of isolates concentrated in the New York region that I hadn’t seen,” Anthony West, a computational biologist at Caltech, told the New York Times.
West and his colleagues found two versions of Covid increasing rapidly, one is the E484K mutation seen in South Africa and Brazil, which is thought to help the virus partially dodge the vaccines.
The second version is another mutation called S477N, which may affect how tightly the virus binds to human cells.
“It’s not particularly happy news,” Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University, told the Times.
“But just knowing about it is good because then we can perhaps do something about it,” Nussenzweig, who was not involved in the new research, added.
As of Wednesday, the United States has confirmed about 2,000 cases of the more contagious UK variant, which is expected to become the more dominate form of the coronavirus in the nation by the end of March.
In New York City, there have been 59 confirmed cases of the UK variant, a second confirmed case of the South African variant was detected in Nassau County.
More to follow…
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