Corona Daily 203: The Discovery of the UK Variant: Part Final

Professor Andrew Rambaut, who received the email from South Africa, is in charge of fitting the mutations on the evolutionary tree.

A week before that, he had noticed many genomes, mostly from Britain, with something unusual. He called Dr Ravindra Gupta to his computer to take a look. Dr Gupta is an Indian-origin HIV biologist listed by Time Magazine as one of 100 most influential people in 2020. He has a bouquet of medical degrees from Cambridge, Harvard and Oxford. He teaches at the University of Cambridge, and as luck would have it, is visiting faculty at a research institute in Durban, South Africa.

When Dr Gupta looked at the computer screen, he saw a “wow moment”. At that time, impending vaccine authorization was the biggest news, and here was a new avatar with 23 mutations, 17 of them causing changes in the protein. This rattled him.

It was as shocking as seeing a cousin with dark hair and brown eyes, on a family tree that exclusively has blond members with blue eyes.

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If Mr Covid Virus is a storyteller, he definitely loves dramatic irony.

On 2 December, Boris Johnson boasted that UK was the first country in the world to authorize a covid vaccine for humans. The poor fellow needed some antidote of good news against Brexit.

Things happened at a breakneck speed after that announcement. On 4 December, South African scientists presented to the WHO the findings about the new variants. On 8 December, the British genomicists and public health officials concluded there was a new UK variant. On 11 Dec. Neil Ferguson, the leading epidemiologist, not-so-fondly called Professor Lockdown, became very concerned and warned Johnson about the new variant. He recommended a strict lockdown. On 19 Dec. professor Rambaut released a paper about the new variant. On 22 Dec. government scientists proposed a strict lockdown including closure of schools to suppress the new variant.

Boris Johnson, so close to his Brexit dream, feeling largehearted, allowed people to gather for Christmas. He postponed the England-wide lockdown to 4 January.

Within a month of becoming the first country to approve a vaccine, UK was in the throes of the new variant. Earlier UK said the variant was only more transmissible. This week Boris Johnson said it is deadlier as well, perhaps 10%-30% more.

Today, it is spread to more than 50 countries, including Argentina which was added this week. USA scientists have predicted that by the end of March the UK variant will be the key variant in the USA.

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The variants from South Africa and Brazil are a particular threat to immunization efforts, because they both contain a mutation associated with a drop in the vaccine efficacy. A South African team analyzed 4000 different mutations to find those that would make the vaccines useless. South Africa and Brazil variants have the biggest impact.

Another team in Durban took serum, the antibody-containing blood sample, from six covid ex-patients. In all cases, the neutralizing power of the antibodies had substantially weakened, which left the scientists extremely worried.

In the UK, Dr Gupta and his team have demonstrated evidence of a reduced antibody response against the UK variant among individuals, age group 64-85, three weeks after they received the Pfizer vaccine. Though reductions were expected, more data from real life will be needed before concluding anything about the impact on vaccination.

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Next few months are critical to find out how worried we should be about the new variants. It is better to take extraordinary steps to suppress the variants where possible. Israel, probably the most successful country in vaccine implementation, on Friday tightened its lockdown. It discovered cases of the UK variant. Every day, Israel now witnesses 8000 new cases, and the rate of spread is rapid.

Today, Hancock, UK’s health secretary, said UK is a long, long, long way from easing restrictions. UK has extended its national lockdown till 17 July. That shows the level of threat posed by the new variants.

Ravi