Thread by @DrEricDing

BREAKING—UK health minister gives new warning—that the other new South Africa 🇿🇦 #SARSCoV2 strain could be more infectious than even the new UK B117 strain.

🇬🇧 advisor says scientists not fully confident #COVID19 vaccines would work on new 🇿🇦 variant.🧵
aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/4/…

2) “I’m incredibly worried about the South African variant, and that’s why we took the action that we did to restrict all flights from South Africa,” Hancock told BBC Radio on Monday.”

“This is a very, very significant problem... it’s even more of a problem than UK new variant.”

3) “ITV network’s political editor, citing an unidentified scientific adviser to the British government, said scientists were not fully confident that COVID-19 vaccines would work on the new South African variant...”

4) “According to one 🇬🇧 govt’s scientific advisers, reason for Matt Hancock’s ‘incredible worry’ about 🇿🇦 #COVID19 variant is that they are not as confident the vaccines will be as effective against it as they are for UK’s variant,” ITV’s editor Robert Preston said on Monday.

5) “Scientists say the new South African variant is different from others circulating in the country because it has multiple mutations in the important “spike” protein that the virus uses to infect human cells.”

6) “It has also been associated with a higher viral load, meaning a higher concentration of virus particles in patients’ bodies, possibly contributing to higher levels of transmission.”

7) “John Bell, the regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford who sits on the government’s vaccine task force, said on Sunday he thought vaccines would work on the British variant but said there was a “big question mark” as to whether it would work on the 🇿🇦 one.

8) “He told Times Radio that if the vaccine did not work on the South African variant the shots could be adapted and that would not take a year.
“It might take a month or six weeks to get a new vaccine,” he said.

9) here is my earlier thread 🧵 on the South African variant, in which 2/3 mutations have shown reduced sensitivity to antibodies. But there might be new data that we haven’t seen yet.

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1340517608643317761

10) Corroboration of the concern by many other UK scientists... quotes from BBC and Reuters reporting in this thread 🧵

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1346241016836272129