‘No need to panic,’ Chinese official said of coronavirus variants

BEIJING (Reuters) – There is no sign that new variants of the coronavirus will affect the immune impact of a vaccine that China has just cleared for public use, a disease control official said on Friday.

The shooting of a subsidiary of state-owned Sinopharm was approved on Thursday, the day after China’s first imported case of a variant spreading to Britain was announced. [L1N2JB039]

“Don’t panic,” Xu Wenbo, an official with the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said on state television.

“The mutated variant, compared to previous mutated variants … has no obvious change so far in its ability to cause disease,” he added.

He said that no impact of the variants on the vaccine’s immune effect was detected.

The variant that British scientists have named “VUI – 202012/01” includes a genetic mutation in the protein “spike”, which could theoretically lead to easier spread of COVID-19.

Xu added that the mutation in the virus’s protein would not affect the sensitivity of most Chinese-made COVID-19 tests that target the virus’s nucleic acids, which carry genetic information.