A variant of the coronavirus spreading in New York City, the American epicenter of the virus last spring, may be more resistant to vaccines, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
Variant B.1.526 is detectable in samples dating from at least November. Researchers at Caltech and Columbia University conducted studies on the variant, although neither has yet been peer-reviewed or published.
Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University who was not involved in any of the studies, told the Times that he considered the variant more worrying than another detected in California.
“It is not particularly happy news,” said Nussenzweig. “But knowing about it is good, because then maybe we can do something about it.”
The California and New York variants are distinct from one believed to have originated in Britain, which is set to become the most common form of the virus in the United States in late March.
The Columbia researchers said they found that patients with the virus mutation were an average of six years older and had a higher risk of being hospitalized. Patients were grouped geographically in neighborhoods in northern Manhattan, such as Inwood and Washington Heights, but there were also cases in other neighborhoods and parts of the metropolitan area.
“We see cases in Westchester, the Bronx and Queens, lower Manhattan and Brooklyn,” David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, told the newspaper. “So it seems to be widespread. It is not a single outbreak. “
Overall, the variants do not appear to be fully resistant to vaccines, Andrew Read, an evolutionary microbiologist at Penn State University, told the Times.
“These things are a little less controlled by the vaccine, but they are not orders of magnitude down, which would scare me,” he said. Overall, Read said, the need to change vaccines to account for new strains “is not a major concern compared to not having a vaccine,” he said. “I would say the glass is three-quarters full, compared to where we were last year.”