Chinese Communist pneumonia (COVID-19) virus mutation.
A global pandemic of the Chinese Communist virus (Wuhan pneumonia) appears to be escalating in its ability to attack humans. Recently, researchers across the United States have found a worrisome variant strain from New York that threatens to reduce the effectiveness of the vaccine.
According to the New York Times, two research teams have found that a new version of the coronavirus (a Chinese communist virus) is spreading rapidly in New York and carries a worrisome mutation that could reduce the effectiveness of the vaccine.
The new variant, called B.1.526, first appeared in samples collected in New York last November (2020). By the middle of this month (February), it accounted for about a quarter of the virus sequences present in a database shared by scientists.
A study of the new variant, led by a team at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), was released online Tuesday (Feb. 23). Another related study was published by researchers at Columbia University.
Caltech computational biologist Anthony West and his colleagues found two new versions of the B.1.526 variant with increasing frequency: one with the E484K mutation seen in South Africa and Brazil, which is thought to help the virus partially evade the effects of the vaccine; and another with a mutation called S477N, which may affect how well the virus binds to human cells.
By mid-February, the two together accounted for about 27 percent of the sequences stored in New York City’s virus repository, Dr. West said.
Researchers at Columbia University took a different approach. They did sequencing of 1,142 samples from patients at medical centers. They found that 12 percent of the infected patients were infected with variants containing the E484K mutation.
The researchers found that the E484K and S477N mutations were present in more than a quarter of the samples in the study, the report said.
Neither study was peer-reviewed. Experts say the results obtained by the two different research groups are consistent, suggesting that the variants are indeed spreading.
Rockefeller University immunologist Michel Nussenzweig, PhD, told the media that the New York strain was more concerning to him than the variant that is spreading in California.
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