COVID-19 new variants can hamper vaccine progress - CDC

 

With the rise of many variants of COVID-19, Centers for Disease control and prevention (CDC) has expressed its concern regarding progress of COVID-19 vaccination. As of now in March 2021, many countries are starting public vaccination, but the scientific society needs to keep a track of the emerging variants of COVID-19, since the available vaccines may not protect against the new variants.

CDC is a national public health institute in United states working under Department of Health and Human services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Its main goal is to protect public health and safety through the control and prevention of disease, injury and disability in the US and internationally. CDC has kept a track of progress of COVID-19 since the very beginning and warned the world about its various signs and symptoms. CDC has influenced and helped many countries to formulate their guidelines to tackle COVID-19 and in the past many other infective diseases.

The western countries, especially United States has been hit by COVID-19 severely. Moreover, as scientists are predicting that, now US may enter ‘potential fourth surge of COVID-19’ possibly due to emergence of the new highly contagious variants of COVID-19, CDC director, Dr Rochelle Walensky has cautioned the world about the same.

Dr Rochelle Walensky,
Director, CDC

As said by Dr Walensky, US is still recording 70,000 new cases a day (in February 2021), which is very high number. There were 2,000 deaths a day in the same period.

Dr Walensky states:

“Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases, with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained”

DO ALL THE NEW VARIANTS POSSESS A THREAT?

There are many different variants or versions of COVID-19 circulating, and more or less all of them can create a problem. But health experts are particularly concerned about a few. These include variants first detected in UK, South Africa and Brazil. These three variants are spreading more vigorously than the classic COVID-19.

Given this, Dr Walensky states she was “really worried” about the US “rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19”. If people do follow guidelines, “We have the ability to stop a potential fourth surge of cases in this country”.

In total US has recorded more than 28 million infections and 5,00,00 deaths related to COVID-19, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data. India has encountered 11 million cases so far according to this data.

NEW VARIANTS IN US

Among the COVID-19 cases 2,463 cases have been documented to be involved with new variants, according to CDC data. Most of these cases – at least 2,400 are from the UK variants. These are the documented cases. The true number of people infected by variants in the US is thought to be higher. However, scientists do believe current vaccines do offer some protection against the new variants as well.

But the CDC says, until more people are vaccinated, new variants do possess the capability to drive a spike in cases, threatening health systems already under strain. And with time chance of mutation and possibility of emergence of new variants are still there, and the current vaccines may not be effective against all of them.

WHICH COUNTRY IS AHEAD IN VACCINATING PEOPLE?

Israel lead the race with more than 90% of its people already vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccine. Next are UAE (United Arab Emirates) and UK (United Kingdom). US has covered 22% of its population. India has covered only frontline workers i.e. only 1% of its population. Of course, China and India lag behind in terms of percentage (because of large population), but in number of people vaccinated, they are doing quite well.

THE 3 VARIANTS IN DETAIL

·     UK or Kent variant- (also known as B.1.1.7)- now dominant in much of Britain, has spread in more than 50 countries and appear to be mutating again.

·     South Africa variant (also known as B.1.351)- has spread to at least 20 other countries, including UK.

·     Brazil variant (P1)- was detected in four travelers to Japan, also now found in UK.

It looks like UK is not coming out of this problem soon, unless it does something out of the box.

All the three variants have undergone changes to their spike protein- which is required for the viral entry by attaching to human cells. This has given them the extra edge by increasing ability to infect cells and spread.

The more a virus spreads, chances increase of it being mutated proportionately. Thousands of small changes have already been there in COVID-19 -most with little impact. These changes help the virus in surviving and reproducing. The successful variants can become the dominant type.

Mutation in COVID-19 increases with the increasing spread of the virus

CAN WE TWEAK THE VACCINES TO MATCH THE NEED?

Scientists are trying to modify the existing vaccines to cover all the emerging strains of COVID-19. So far COVAXIN (made by Bharat Biotech, INDIA) has claimed to be effective in preventing the UK variant along with the classic variant of COVID-19.

Experts are updating COVID vaccines regularly. The important ones will be closely studied and monitored.

The UK Government has announced a deal with biopharmaceutical company CureVac to develop against future variants, with a pre-order of 50 million doses.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

Scientists are doing their best. But people need to understand that we are not yet out of the pandemic. The governments are giving relaxation in lockdown policies just to revive the failing economy. But people still need to maintain preventive measures just like 2020. Otherwise 2021 will be no different from 2020.

“NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO STOP WEARING MASKS”….