Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
New, highly transmissible variants of Covid-19 “can reverse” the country’s pandemic control and can “undermine all of our efforts” against the disease if the virus is left to proliferate in different parts of the globe, said the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Wednesday.
Leading US health officials have warned in recent weeks that the emergence of highly contagious variants, particularly strain B.1.1.7 that emerged in the UK, could reverse the current trajectory of falling infections in the US and delay the country’s recovery. of the pandemic.
The problem is not limited to the United States. As the coronavirus spreads, it makes a large number of copies of itself, and each version is slightly different from the previous one, experts say. The more people are infected, the more likely they are to have problematic mutations.
“Even if you are not necessarily inclined to want to be part of the global health effort, we need it because all the efforts we are making, which we are making here in this nation, can be undermined in the blink of an eye from these emerging variants,” he said. CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the National Academy of Medicine and the American Public Health Association on Wednesday.
Scientists are not surprised by the emergence of the variants and reiterated that the vaccines currently available must still work against them, although they may not be as effective as they are against the original “wild” strain.
Moderna said on Wednesday that it had sent doses of a booster injection that specifically targets the spread of the variant in South Africa, known as strain B.1.351, to the National Institutes of Health.
“We know that this virus knows no geographical boundaries and dealing with that reality is more urgent than ever, given the rapid proliferation of Covid-19 variants that can reverse the progress that has been made to control this pandemic,” said Walensky.
The US is reporting a weekly average of around 71,562 new Covid-19 cases per day, a decline of 12% compared to the previous week and a significant drop since when the average new cases in the US peaked at around 250,000 cases per day in early January, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Although not all countries report similar declines, global cases of Covid-19 in the U.S. have fallen for six consecutive weeks since Sunday, according to the latest World Health Organization situation report published on Tuesday.
The decline is good news as countries rush to administer their initial doses of Covid-19 vaccines. Although some countries have administered vaccines since December, some are just beginning to receive the initial vaccines.
The first shipment of vaccines distributed through the World Health Organization’s COVAX program arrived in Ghana on Wednesday. Some experts have already said that the equitable distribution of the vaccine may be too late, as the wealthier nations have made their own agreements with vaccine manufacturers, requiring their initial dose supply.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has been a stark reminder of how we are interconnected as a global community,” said Walensky.
– Berkeley Lovelace Jr. and Natasha Turak of CNBC contributed to this report.