Scientists warn that Brazil’s uncontrolled outbreak of coronavirus could threaten the global fight to end the pandemic.
The P1 variant, the most infectious and intoxicating vaccine, that appeared there, has already become dominant in most states in the country, and there is no sign of it slowing down.
“This information is an atomic bomb,” Dr. Roberto Kraenkel, a biological mathematician at Brazil’s Covid-19 Observatory, told the Washington Post.
“I am amazed at the levels [of variants] Found. The media doesn’t get what that means. All the worrying variants are more transmissible … and that means an accelerated phase of the epidemic. Disaster.’
The variant has already been identified as the cause of 15 cases in nine U.S. states.
Fortunately, rising vaccination rates and falling daily infections in the United States are helping to curb their outbreak, but this is not the case in Brazil, where ICUs are on the verge of full capacity while chaotic vaccine implementation struggles to gain ground.
“No country will be safe if not all countries have controlled their outbreaks,” Dr. Denise Garret, vice president of applied epidemiology at the Sabin Vaccine Institute in Washington state, told DailyMail.com.
The coronavirus is spreading “out of control” in Brazil, resulting in a more infectious and anti-holiday variant known as P1, which has spread to at least 20 countries (pink). As long as the outbreaks erupt in South America, the rest of the world may still be vulnerable to new mutants, experts warn.
In the United States, the P1 variant has not yet become widespread, but if it does, it has the potential to reinfect hundreds of millions of people who are not vaccinated, even if they have had COVID-19 before. Only one new case has been detected this month, but it is likely to change
“We can vaccinate anything we want in the US and achieve herd immunity, but as long as we have uncontrollable outbreaks in other countries, the borders will remain open.
“In countries like Brazil where there are no restrictions and the virus is weak, it is really a breeding ground for variants”
All viruses mutate all the time.
Like cancer, the more they spread and make copies of themselves, the more they mutate and the more significant the mutations.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, slowly began to mutate significantly.
But variants began to appear worldwide in late 2020, as growing cases in most countries gave the virus many opportunities to mutate.
And the way this developed in Brazil was particularly ripe for dangerous variants.
The country had already gone through horrible early waves. Antibody testing suggested that approximately 76 percent of the highly successful city of Manaus became infected in October, following the first wave of the pandemic there.
This should have given three-quarters of the Amazon city natural immunity to reinfection.
P1 has been detected in at least nine states in the United States, but is assumed to be an underestimation, due to the poor genomic sequencing used to find variants.
It was not like that.
Manaus was stunned by a second wave of infections in January. The devastation reached a new high point, with 100 million people dying a day in the city of two million.
The PI variant was discovered there in December and probably fueled the high rate of infections and, even worse, reinfections observed in the city.
Laboratory studies and real-world data suggest that mutations at a location known as E484K help the variant avoid antibodies triggered by a previous infection with previous variants or vaccines designed to protect against them.
“Immune pressure” encourages these types of mutations.
When viruses face an immunity that prevents them from hijacking the cellular machinery for copying, only strains that have mutations that make them less affected by vaccines survive.
And then they thrive.
“This new strain escapes immunity and starts again and is now the predominant lineage in Brazil,” Dr. Garrett said.
Of the American cases of the P1 variant, he said, “Apparently they are low, but make no mistake, this variant is more transmissible” and is likely to be more widespread than the test has captured.
The good news, says Dr. Garrett, is that vaccines appear to work against the Brazilian variant, contrary to initial warnings.
Natural immunity to previous infection seems less resilient to the variant challenge.
And with only 10 percent of Americans fully vaccinated, hundreds of millions of Americans (including the 29 million who have already had COVID-19) could still be vulnerable to the P1 form of the virus.
“It ‘s a matter of time if there are no control measures. Here [in the U.S.] the good news is that we are vaccinating, and we are vaccinating quickly, because we need to vaccinate as many people as possible to try to control it, and so far it seems that these variants are not escaping the vaccine, not for serious illness and hospitalizations “Dr. Garret said.
But there is no guarantee. The virus is evolving rapidly and … if it continues to evolve in other countries, it may finally be here.
“What happens in other countries has a real effect in other countries.”
According to her, this is the strongest case for an equitable distribution of vaccines worldwide.
“I understand the nationalism of vaccines (countries want to vaccinate their populations first), but if there is no equitable distribution, there will always be a threat as long as they are countries where the outbreak is still weak, there will always be a threat for the world. ‘