Answer:
From the beginning of the year, we've been tracking this virus and we know that it's gone through a lot of changes and there've been variants before. Now this particular time there have been two particular variants that have been reported to WHO. One was identified in the UK and one was identified in South Africa. They do have one change in common, we call it the N501Y mutation. But otherwise the two are different. And the reason there's concern is that both of these variants were associated with an increase in the number of cases in both of these countries.
And scientists have now studied this and have found that these variants do tend to spread faster, they're more transmissible or more infectious. So that's the worrying part. However, so far, they do not seem to cause more severe illness or a higher death rate or any sort of different clinical manifestations.
They seem to behave pretty much as the previous viruses were behaving and cause a pretty similar kind of disease.
Vismita Gupta-Smith
Soumya, a number of countries are rolling out vaccines as we speak. Do these vaccines protect us from these variants? And is this something that is kept in mind when vaccines are being manufactured?
Dr Soumya Swaminathan
Yes, this is a very important point that vaccine developers keep in mind. And as you know, we have some vaccines, like measles, which you don't need to change at all. You make the vaccine, it works pretty much all the time. But you also have vaccines like against the influenza virus, where you have to change the structure of the vaccine every year, based on the circulating strains and WHO coordinates this global network that actually identifies which strain should be used every year.
Now for SARS-CoV-2 we're still learning, we're still observing and our knowledge is evolving. But at this point in time, most scientists believe that the vaccines that are currently in development and a couple that have been approved should provide protection against this variant and other variants because these vaccines elicit a fairly broad immune response, a host of antibodies and cell-mediated immune responses.
And so a couple of changes or mutations in the virus should not make these vaccines ineffective. But right now there are studies going on in labs around the world to actually confirm that. And in the small possibility that perhaps these are less effective against one or both of these variants, nowadays the way vaccines are developed, it will be possible actually to also change the composition of the antigens and the vaccines quite quickly.
