12-26-2020, 09:52 AM
It looks like the variant in the UK is called B.1.1.7. Here’s what William Haseltine, PhD, chair and president of the global health think tank, ACCESS Health International wrote on CNN, “Opinion: Here’s what’s worrying about the coronavirus variant” with a link to this paper, “Preliminary genomic characterisation of an emergent SARS-CoV-2 lineage in the UK defined by a novel set of spike mutations”
He says, “this new variant tells us important things about the virus: it can adapt to become more easily transmissible and may be able to become more difficult to neutralize and may possibly be able to outsmart the vaccine to a small extent.”
The paper concludes, “We report a rapidly growing lineage in the UK associated with an unexpectedly large number of genetic changes including in the receptor-binding domain and associated with the furin cleavage site. Given (i) the experimentally-predicted and plausible phenotypic consequences of some of these mutations, (ii) their unknown effects when present in combination, and (iii) the high growth rate of B.1.1.7 in the UK, this novel lineage requires urgent laboratory characterisation and enhanced genomic surveillance worldwide.”
He says, “this new variant tells us important things about the virus: it can adapt to become more easily transmissible and may be able to become more difficult to neutralize and may possibly be able to outsmart the vaccine to a small extent.”
The paper concludes, “We report a rapidly growing lineage in the UK associated with an unexpectedly large number of genetic changes including in the receptor-binding domain and associated with the furin cleavage site. Given (i) the experimentally-predicted and plausible phenotypic consequences of some of these mutations, (ii) their unknown effects when present in combination, and (iii) the high growth rate of B.1.1.7 in the UK, this novel lineage requires urgent laboratory characterisation and enhanced genomic surveillance worldwide.”