A woman passes a closed souvenir stand and government messages in a phone booth on Oxford Street in London.
Photographer: Chris J. Ratcliffe / Bloomberg
Photographer: Chris J. Ratcliffe / Bloomberg
The UK coronavirus strain, which has caused concern worldwide, has picked up another mutation that appears to make the virus more resistant to vaccines.
Scientists identified the mutation in 11 different sequences of the new strain, Public Health England said in an updated report Monday report. The findings came from a dataset of more than 200,000 sequences.
The mutation is present in variants that have emerged in South Africa and Brazil, and is believed to help the virus resist vaccines and antibody therapies – and infect people who have previously fought Covid.
The move is “a worrying development,” said Julian Tang, professor and clinical virologist at the University of Leicester, in observations on the UK Science Media Center. The “guarantees from recent studies that show that mRNA vaccines still offer optimal protection against the original UK variant may no longer apply”.
It is not clear whether the mutation occurred on its own or after a recombination process with one of the South African or Brazilian variants, a process common with influenza viruses, but not with coronaviruses, according to Tang.
The fact that the mutation appeared on British soil suggests that restrictions on travel to limit the movement of people from South Africa may not be sufficient, according to Sam Fazeli, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Instead, there is an increasing need for vaccine manufacturers to design updates for their vaccines that target the new strains.
Last week, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax Inc. announced results of late-stage clinical tests that showed that their respective vaccines were somewhat less effective in South Africa.
The increase in new strains of coronavirus led to requests for vaccinations from people more quickly before the mutations spread. Pharmaceutical companies say they are working on booster doses that can increase the potency of their vaccines against new mutations.
The disclosure of the new mutation comes at a time when the virus is in general decline in the United Kingdom, which on Monday reported the lowest number of new daily cases since December.
(Updates with analyst comments in the sixth paragraph)