The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that the South African variant Covid-19, which has just been detected in South Carolina, had already reached the point of spreading the community in the US
“I think one of the worrisome things is that we know that these two people did not know each other and that they did not travel to South Africa, so it is presumed, at this point, that there was a community spread of that lineage,” the director, Rochelle Walensky , said Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s “TODAY” program.
Walensky said that the sequencing of the virus was “extended” under the new administration, meaning there is more chance of getting a new strain.
The fact that the South African variant was detected on Thursday does not mean that it has just arrived, because the United States has lagged far behind other countries in tracking changes in the virus by sequencing its genetic code.
Moderna announced this week that its vaccine appears to be less effective against the South African variant, although officials said the antibodies remained above protective levels. A Pfizer study, which has not been peer-reviewed, found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is only slightly less effective against the South African strain.
Meanwhile, an experimental coronavirus vaccine developed by the biotechnology company Novavax is 89.3% effective in preventing Covid-19, but only 49.4% effective against the South African strain.
“It has always been our concern that when viruses mutate and develop strains and dominant strains, they generally do so to some advantage for the virus,” said Walensky. “This can happen when our vaccines don’t work as well.”
Still, she said, “even a vaccine with a 50-60 percent effectiveness is a strong tool in our toolbox to fight this pandemic,” noting that scientists are already working on engineering vaccines based on existing ones that ” would be more potent against these deformations. “
