The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that the South African Covid-19 variant, which has just been detected in South Carolina, has already reached the point of community spread in the US.
“I think one of the issues is that we know that these two people did not know each other and that they did not travel to South Africa. The suspicion is that at this stage there is a spread of the community,” director , Rochelle Walensky, Savannah Guthrie told NBC’s “TODAY” program.
Walensky said the order of the virus has been ‘increased’ according to the new administration, meaning there is more chance of catching a new strain.
The fact that the South African variant was detected on Thursday does not mean that it has just arrived because the USA has lagged far behind in detecting changes in the virus by sequencing its genetic code.
Moderna announced this week that its vaccine appears to be less effective against the South African variant, although officials have said antibodies remain above protective levels. In a Pfizer study, which was not evaluated by a peer, it was found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is only slightly less effective against the South African strain.
Meanwhile, an experimental coronavirus vaccine developed by biotechnology company Novavax is 89.3 percent effective in preventing Covid-19, but only 49.4 percent effective against the South African strain.
“It has always been our concern that when viruses mutate and develop their strains and dominant strains, they usually do so to benefit the virus,” Walensky said. “It could come in the voice of our vaccines not working so well.”
Still, she said: “even a vaccine with an efficacy of 50-60 percent is a powerful tool in our toolbox to fight this pandemic,” pointing out that scientists are already working on engineering vaccines based on existing , which ‘more powerful against these tribes. ‘
