It was first spotted in Colorado in late December, said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the chief medical adviser to President Biden.
“Since then, it has been detected in 50 jurisdictions in the United States, and it now probably accounts for about 20 to 30% of infections in this country. And the number is increasing,” Fauci said.
“It is worrying that the spread with this particular variant documented in the UK is increasing by about 50%, and that the disease will increase severely if infected with this variant,” he said.
But vaccines seem to protect well against B.1.1.7, and treatments like monoclonal antibodies also seem to work against this particular variant, Fauci said.
That makes it more important than ever to get people vaccinated quickly, he said.
‘The way we can counter 1.1.7, which is a growing threat in our country, is to do two things: to get as many people vaccinated as quickly and as quickly as possible with the vaccine we know works against ‘this variant and lastly, to implement the public health measures we are talking about all the time … masking, physical distance and avoiding congregations, especially indoors,’ he said.
Vaccines apparently protect against B.1.1.7 variant
The three vaccines that have so far obtained emergency approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration appear to protect people well from B.1.1.7.
There is less evidence about the vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine arm, although it has been tested in the US after B.1.1.7 began circulating.
Both BioNTech and Moderna helped coordinate several tests of their vaccines against the variants.
Ugur Sahin of BioNTech and colleagues tested blood from 40 volunteers immunized with the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine against versions of the B.1.1.7 variant in the laboratory.
Virus can cause more mutations
What they did worry about was if more mutations were obtained by the virus. Several variants are of concern to doctors, including the B.1.351 variant first seen in South Africa and the P.1 variant now common in Brazil. Both carry a mutation known as E484K that appears to significantly evade the body’s immune response.
“Concerned, we have shown that there are several B.1.1.7 series in the UK that contain E484K, with early evidence of transmission as well as independent acquisitions,” they wrote.
Several experiments indicate that the B.1.351 and P.1. variants, the immune response elicited by vaccines, as well as by single monoclonal antibody treatments, which use the laboratory-designed immune system proteins to enhance immune response, can be much more easily evaded.
Not many experiments have been done with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that was recently granted, but it has been tested in the US after B.1.1.7 started spreading; in South Africa B.1.351 was already the most common variant; and in Brazil after P.1 became widespread.
Although it was less effective against moderate diseases in South Africa and Brazil than in the USA, it strongly protected people in clinical trials against serious diseases, hospitalizations and deaths.
Viruses mutate all the time, and some mutations have taken hold in variants that originated in the US, especially in California and New York. The changes they make contain some of the changes that make the B.1.351 and P.1 variants so much more dangerous than B.1.1.7. So says Fauci and the CDC it makes it even more important to get as many people vaccinated as possible before these variants can spread.