London – British scientists say the rapidly spreading COVID-19 variant, first discovered in the south of England, is evolving in a way that could make it exist vaccines less effective against it. The United Kingdom has been closely monitoring the mutations in the Crown virus for months, leading the world in tracking changes in the virus’s genetic code.
Authorities in England are trying to test everyone over the age of 16 in many neighborhoods where some cases of another worrying variant have been found, the first detected in South Africa. But while Britain is rushing to find and stop this highly infectious strain, scientists have found that the UK variant appeared to mutate in a way that mimics South African.
The discovery has raised concerns about the ongoing evolution of the virus, which some evidence suggests may cause resistance to vaccines which is deployed worldwide.
“The virus, over time, got better,” said Sharon Peacock, who heads a national network of British scientists who track transformations more closely than anywhere else in the world, she explains. CBS News correspondent Roxana Saberi.
For the coronavirus, says Peacock, “it’s a matter of natural selection. It’s the survival of the fittest.”
She tells CBS News that her COVID-19 Genomics UK team scans every day in labs across Britain to detect any new mutations, which “really gives us a barcode for the virus”.
This hunt is based on both robots and human researchers analyzing thousands of COVID-19 samples, mapping mutations in the virus’s genetic code.
In November, they detected something alarming: mutations, many of the virus’s flagship proteins, that allowed it to adhere to cells more strongly, making it much more contagious.
While it could be expected that 10 people infected with the old variants of the virus would transmit them to 13 more people, ten people carrying the new variant discovered in Kent, south-east London, could infect about 20 of them.
“This is really important,” says Peacock, “because there are more people who can get sick, and therefore more people are likely to die simply from the burden of the disease.”
Quickly dubbed the “UK variant,” the new variety has been around ever since swept around the world, which caused the US and many other nations to tighten their travel restrictions. Now, Germany and Austria are forcing anyone who ventures into most public places to wear medical-grade masks, not just fabric coatings, and the UK has imposed a blockade nationwide.
Scientists in the UK say that as COVID-19 continues to mutate, the rest of the world should also do more genetic sequencing and The United States needs to catch up. At present, less than 1% of coronavirus samples in the US are being sequenced, compared to around 10% in the UK, meaning many dangerous mutations can be lost.
Peacock says it is “very likely” that COVID-19 variants in the U.S. are more widespread than is currently known, “and I think sequencing will be vital to detecting it.”
Ravi Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology at Cambridge University, tells CBS News that vaccines will likely need to be redesigned later this year to adapt to new mutations. A senior researcher at pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca said Wednesday that this work would be done “as soon as possible.”
“We are working very hard and we are already talking not only about the variants we need to do in the labs, but also about the clinical studies we need to do,” Mene Pangalos told a media briefing. “We want to try to have something ready for fall, so this year.”