By Elishya Perera
LONDON (CU)_The world faces about 4,000 variants of COVID-19, although not many of these mutations have yet been identified, Britain says.
However, according to the British Medical Journal, of this large number of variants, only a very small minority of mutations are likely to change the virus in a considerable way, thereby decreasing the effectiveness of vaccines, and therefore researchers have begun exploring the mixing of doses of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca shots in order to respond to them.
“It’s very unlikely that the current vaccine won’t be effective on the variants whether in Kent or other variants, especially when it comes to severe illness and hospitalisation,” British Vaccine Deployment Minister Nadhim Zahawi told Sky News.
“All manufacturers – Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Oxford-AstraZeneca and others – are looking at how they can improve their vaccine to make sure that we are ready for any variant – there are about 4,000 variants around the world of COVID now.”
Moreover, experts point out that not all these mutations have yet been discovered since they may have originated from countries in which don’t have the capacity to spot them as they arise.
“We talk about the UK variant and South African variant and Brazil variant — but the irony is it’s probably just that these are the countries that have advanced sequencing capacity and [the variants] may well have emerged elsewhere but we simply won’t know it. And there may be others,” Public Health England spokesperson Ruairidh Villar said.
It is reported that the United Kingdom has “the largest genome-sequencing industry” and therefore, the British government has announced plans to expand its sequencing work to countries that can’t do their own.
“It’s trying to find those countries that don’t have the capacity to sequence themselves, [or have] very low capacity, to improve our global awareness of mutations that could have absolutely devastating public health impacts,” Villar said.
Meanwhile, Britain on Thursday (Feb 4), launched a trial to assess the immune responses generated if doses of the vaccines from Pfizer and AstraZeneca are combined in a two-shot schedule. The trial will examine the immune responses to one dose of each vaccine, with intervals of four and 12 weeks, and initial data of the trial is expected to be generated around June.
According to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine, since COVID-19 was first detected in Wuhan, China in late 2019, 105 million infections and 2.268 million virus-induced deaths have been reported worldwide.
Israel is currently the frontrunner on vaccinations per head of population, followed by the United Arab Emirates, Britain, Bahrain, the United States and then Spain, Italy and Germany.
