The race between variants and vaccines is heating up.
I think what we learned early on as we started to see variance emerge was there was the potential that this could happen, right? This
was either marks heads the FDA Center for biologics evaluation and research he said in a webcast recently the Food and Drug Administration is already thinking about how to Fast Track new versions of existing vaccines. If coronavirus variants make the old versions less effective.
Of mRNA it's very convenient
because basically all you do is change a computer program and you can change the vaccine.
He said some vaccines could be tweaked with relative ease and the FDA wouldn't have to require a new round of large clinical
trials. We would intend to try to be pretty Nimble with this so that we get these variants covered as quickly as possible because it is clear that they can spread pretty quickly.
And in fact just this week scientists reported evidence of at least seven homegrown
Aryans here in the US that's in addition to variance from Brazil South Africa and the UK so far, there's no indication that any of these variants would require a new vaccine,
you know that a line is crossed. If you see people who are fully immunized with these vaccines that nonetheless when in fact with the variant or being hospitalized
FDA advisor, dr. Paul
offit, that's when the line gets crossed and that the date that has not
happened consider this so far.
Vaccines have stayed one step ahead of new coronavirus variants with Scientists. Don't know how long that will last from NPR. I'm ADI Cornish. It's Tuesday, February 16th.
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for our Black History Month special series The seismic influence and complicated Legacy of Marcus
Garvey listen now to the through-line podcast from NPR.
It's consider this from NPR and at the moment one of the more worrisome coronavirus variance is the one that's emerged from the UK because there's evidence. It creates more virus in a person's nose and respiratory tract making it more transmissible. You very quickly start infecting many many many more people than you would have beforehand and mahad Croft is an epidemiologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland. The UK variant does appear to be deadlier according to
Scientists and that's a reversal from earlier assessments. But the fact that it's more transmissible might be an even bigger problem, perhaps counter-intuitively to some people. I think that transmissibility is probably the worst of these two
scenarios
because if something is more transmissible than you just get it into a larger population by the end of March the UK variant is expected to become the dominant form in the US but tracking its spread will not be easy.
We many regions are still severely under sampled. And unfortunately, the odds are that there are more lineages in our midst. It's sort of like a constellation of small variance
Von Cooper with the University of Pittsburgh told NPR that the u.s. Is not doing a great job tracking viral variance with genomic
sequencing elsewhere around the world with the UK really leading the way in terms of the numbers of genomes that they've seen.
It's just in fact in Australia nearly half of all cases have been sequenced in the United States work around 40th among countries.
Currently Cooper said basically the u.s. Hasn't had a coherent National strategy for doing the kind of scientific detective work needed to identify new variants. The CDC says they're working on it.
So over the last three weeks or so. We've increased our sequencing about tenfold
CDC director Rochelle will in skis
said in a recent briefing the government plans to ramp up sequencing even more over the next several weeks, which means you'll probably be hearing about even more variants in the future. So as we look more we're certainly going anticipate we might find more as at the beginning of this week. The agency had catalogued more than a thousand cases of the UK variant across 40 US states.
While scientists watch for emerging varian's there's also a worry that covid vaccines themselves could drive the coronavirus to mutate but NPR Science correspondent Richard Harris reports, that's not cause for alarm not yet. Anyway,
you may have heard that bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics and in a worst-case scenario render the drugs useless.
Something similar can also happen with vaccines though with less serious consequences. This worried has arisen mostly in the debate over whether to delay a second vaccine shot. So more people can get the first shot quickly Paul be nage a Howard Hughes investigator at the Rockefeller University says that Gap would leave people with only partial immunity for longer than necessary. They might serve as sort of a breeding ground for the virus to acquire new.
That's because the virus is always mutating. And if one happens to produce a mutation that makes it less vulnerable to the vaccine that virus could simply multiply in a vaccinated individual. But even if that happens that's only one step in the process. What's really unclear and really quite important for the virus to evolve is whether those people that having been vaccinated and infected whether they have sufficient levels of virus replication to pass the virus on
on to other people if the vaccine keeps virus levels low even mutated virus has the infected person won't produce enough to spread to other people. Unfortunately at the moment scientist can't answer the most basic questions about this process. How much does the virus actually replicate inside a person who has been vaccinated with either one dose or two. And how effective is That vaccine at limiting infection enough so that the virus levels stay low and prevent the spread to other people Andrew read it.
State University says whatever the answers may be vaccine resistance or Escape as it's called isn't nearly as scary as bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics. I know everybody's worried about it, but I would say history tells us that vexing the Skype does not erode to 0 does not arrays vaccine protection the vaccine may become less potent. But in other cases where this has happened it still works. It's often got very strong anti-disease properties. So you get less sick, even with the with the viruses that are around and this evolutionary pressure is
present for any vaccine that doesn't completely block infection. So it's not just an issue for people who are between their initial shot and a booster many vaccines apparently including the covid vaccines do not completely prevent a virus from multiplying inside someone even though these vaccines do prevent serious illness. I do think there are a lot of options here for trying to deal with any Evolution should it occur one thing that helps is that dozens of vaccines are being developed and more than half a dozen or already in use one of the great things about having a lot of vaccine options.
We might end up with a population which is heterogeneous lie back so you might get the AstraZeneca and I'm going to get one of the MRNA ones that'll really help into the spread of mutants that are good at any one of those a virus that has evolved to get around one vaccine is likely to be stopped by another and that will limit the spread of mutant strains drug makers are also keeping a close eye on mutants and are already formulating new vaccines will be more effective. If it turns out the original vaccines we can too much Paul be Notch says this is not a crisis. We're not going
to fall off a cliff tomorrow in terms of vaccine efficacy what we're likely to see as a slow steady erosion of efficacy over perhaps quite a long period of time being our says to slow this evolutionary process as much as possible. It's important to slow the spread of the virus right now. So people who get vaccinated are at lower risk for getting infected in the first place
and pure science.
Fondant, Richard Harris.
Scientists are trying to learn more about coronavirus barians by studying the case of one extraordinary covid-19 patient in this patient was a 45 year old man who was admitted to a Boston hospital last spring doctors at Brigham and Women's Hospital treated him. He got better and he was discharged but his infection never went away.
This is a extraordinary individual who was readmitted over the subsequent five months.
For recurrence of his covid infection and severe pneumonia.
Dr. Jonathan Lee one of the doctors who treated the man says he was not a so-called long hauler a person who clears their covid infection but has lingering After Effects sometimes for months. This manly says had living growing virus in his body for a hundred and fifty four days.
That is one of the remarkable aspects of this case and in fact
He was highly infectious even five months after the initial diagnosis.
We spoke to NPR Science reporter. Mike Lane do clef. Who picks up the story from here. These says the man's immune system wasn't working. Normally. He was taking immunosuppressive drugs for a chronic illness. So his body couldn't fight off the virus very well, but Lee also wondered if perhaps the virus was taking advantage of this unusual situation was so much time inside the man the virus might have the
Ready to test out different versions of itself and find more infectious versions. So Lee and his colleagues begin to examine the viruses
jeans. I was
shot shocked because of virus was mutating very quickly inside the man's body. These mutations allowed it to evade his immune system to escape detection by
antibodies when I saw the virus and the viral sequence. I think I knew then that this that we're dealing with something completely different the potentially very
a
important completely different because the virus had a whole collection of mutations not just one or two, but more than 20 scientists had never seen this before during the whole pandemic. The in is team published the findings in the New England Journal of Medicine the report didn't even make big news. That was November 20 20 then about a month
later a new coronavirus variant causing International concern
is NPR's David Green reported scientist this
December detected new genetic variants of the virus one in the UK one in South Africa and then later when in Brazil guess what these variants have in common with the virus in the Boston
patient a sudden collection of multiple mutations in a combination. That is
worrisome. That's Jeremy Lubin. He's a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He says these new variants look remarkably similar to the virus Lee and his colleagues found in their patient.
They aren't the same but they share important characteristics. They both have about 20 mutations and they have ones that make the virus more contagious in. So right now Lubin says one hypothesis is that the new variants the one from the UK South Africa and Brazil arose inside people like the Boston patient people with these long-term infections and who are immunocompromised because their immune system was not
working in. Normally, they could not eliminate.
Nate the virus and over time the virus and acquired a collection of mutations that otherwise did not been seen before
in other words the virus use this long term infection as a testing ground to try out different mutations and see which one's evade the immune system become more infectious and eventually spread more easily around the
world
science reporter. Mike Lane do clef. Who's been on top of
This variant story for NPR for more of her work. We've got some links in our episode notes.
It's consider this from NPR. I'm ADI Cornish.
