British coronavirus variant acquires mutation that could weaken vaccine defense

“Our mission must be to stop its spread completely and to break these chains of transmission,” British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Tuesday.

The continued emergence of new variants could make it more difficult to fight the pandemic and suggests that vaccines will need to be regularly updated to account for changes in the virus.

“The existing variants of concern will increasingly acquire new mutations,” said Sharon Peacock, a doctor who is director of Covid-19 Genomics UK, a mutation watchdog group. “This will lead to a constellation around the original variant,” she said, and a puzzle of increasing complexity for health officials.

The additional mutation, known as E484K, is one of variants that have caused powerful new waves of infections in South Africa and Brazil. Scientists believe it protects the virus from antibodies triggered by vaccines or previous Covid infections by changing the shape of the virus’s spike protein.

Researchers say they have found 11 people around the southwest city of Bristol infected with the UK’s more transmissible B.1.1.7 variant which also carries the E484K mutation. They also found 32 cases in Liverpool of an older version of the virus which also acquired the additional mutation.

The additional mutation, identified by genomic testing, appears to have occurred independently in both the UK variant and its predecessor, as there is no known link to international travel among the cases and they do not appear to be linked to a single infection.

Scientists who have studied the mutation say this is likely part of the reason why some Covid-19 vaccines appear to be less effective against the South African variant and why antibodies triggered by a previous Covid-19 infection might not prevent them. people getting sick again from the new version.

Recent clinical trials in South Africa have shown that the not yet authorized injections developed by Novavax Inc.

and Johnson & Johnson were less effective at preventing Covid-19 there compared to clinical trials in the US and UK

Modern Inc.

and Pfizer Inc.

said that based on lab studies, they expect their vaccines to always work against variants with the E484K mutation. Moderna and Novavax said they are already working on updating their vaccines to better combat the South African variant.

However, scientists in South Africa have said the variant has mutations in addition to E484K that appear to help the virus escape antibodies.

In both South Africa and Brazil, variants with the E484K mutation have emerged in areas that suffered from some of the highest numbers of Covid-19 cases during the country’s first waves of infections.

This is why some experts believe the mutation is the result of the virus circulating in a population where a large proportion of people already have Covid-19 antibodies from a previous fight. In laboratory experiments, the mutation also appeared when the virus was subjected to sustained pressure from antibodies that were not strong enough to neutralize it.

Genome sequencers found all 11 instances of the new variety of B.1.1.7 on January 26, when they looked back through their library of 214,000 coronavirus sequences. During the pandemic, they sequenced 5 to 10% of positive cases.

Separately, they identified 105 UK cases of the South African variant, all but 11 linked to travelers from the country.

On Monday, the government announced it would send teams to test residents in eight districts, including three in London and stretching from Merseyside in the north to Surrey in the south and east and west to Kent and Birmingham, where these 11 southern cases An African variant was found.

Public health officials say they are trying to get the South African variant under control in a way they couldn’t do with the new B.1.1.7 variant when it was first spotted in the south-east of England in November. This variant is now dominant in all new cases of the virus and has contributed to an increase in hospitalizations that has pushed the country’s national health service to its limits.

The number of Covid-19 cases in the UK has fallen since a nationwide lockdown that began on January 4, with the seven-day average of cases declining by around 30% during the week through February 1 by compared to the previous week. The number of people hospitalized with the virus has also started to decline after reaching levels nearly double the peak of the first wave in April. From around 39,000 by mid-January, it had fallen to 34,783 people by January 28.

Some 9.6 million people have been vaccinated, including 90% of people aged 80 or over, according to the government.

Write to Joanna Sugden at [email protected] and Gabriele Steinhauser at [email protected]