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Count 2020 as a lucky year. This may sound odd given that the world grappled with a pandemic that has killed close to 1.8 million people and crippled many countries’ economies. The “luck†relates to the more than 90% efficacy of the two vaccines — Pfizer Inc-BioNTech SE’s shot and Moderna Inc’s candidate — that gained emergency approval after thorough clinical analysis. Enormous leaps in science and technology helped make this happen and could well speed the end of the pandemic. And more vaccines are on the way. Unfortunately, there is a risk that this early success leads to complacency.
The virus responsible for Covid-19 disease — Sars-CoV-2 — is mutating, as viruses do all the time. This happens randomly. Sometimes the changes give one variant a slight advantage over its peers, but often they make no difference from an immunological standpoint. Over time, though, it is likely that mutations may develop that are less sensitive to the protection provided by vaccines. It is for this reason that a global, coordinated surveillance effort is required to make sure that we are on top of the way the virus is changing. Sadly, this does not seem to be happening.
The UK is far ahead in this surveillance effort, led by the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium, a group
of scientists who have analysed the full genome of more than 150,000 Sars-CoV-2 viruses isolated from infected individuals. This gargantuan undertaking helped them identify 1,777 changes in the virus’s proteins, including the so-called B.1.1.7 variant, whose seeming ability to transmit more effectively has worried experts and forced stay-at-home measures and travel restrictions in the UK. The variant is impressive in that it harbours more mutations, 23 in total, than has ever been seen before in a single virus, with eight of them in the spike protein — the protruding rod-like structure that decorates the outside of the virus and is targeted by the majority of vaccines, including Pfizer’s and Moderna’s. While there is no hard evidence yet that this variant is more resistant to existing vaccines, it raises concerns.
I was worried about the possibility of “escape†mutations occurring once vaccinations had been rolled out broadly, but it appears these changes are happening even in the absence of widespread inoculations. The problem is, while we have a handle on the types of changes happening in the UK, we don’t know how many other variants are circulating in the European Union, US and Asia because the data isn’t being tracked adequately. This needs to change if we are to effectively manage the virus.
—Bloomberg