Scientists warn that Brazil’s uncontrolled outbreak of the coronavirus could end the global battle for the pandemic.
The more contagious P1 variant that fades the vaccine, which has emerged there, has already become dominant in the majority of the country’s countries, and there is no sign that it is slowing down.
“This information is an atomic bomb,” Dr. Roberto Kraenkel, a biological mathematician at the Covid-19 Brazil Observatory, told the Washington Post.
‘I’m surprised by the levels [of variants] found. The media does not understand what this means. All the variants of concern are more communicable … and that means an accelerated phase of the epidemic. N ramp. ‘
The variant has already been identified as the cause of 15 cases in nine U.S. states.
Fortunately, rising vaccination rates and declining daily infections in the US are helping to stem its outbreak – but this is not the case in Brazil, where ICUs are on the brink of full capacity while the chaotic vaccination of substances is struggling to gain ground.
“No country will be safe if not all countries have controlled their outbreaks,” said Dr. Denise Garret, vice president of applied epidemiology at the Sabin Vaccine Institute in Washington state, told DailyMail.com.
Coronavirus spreads ‘uncontrolled’ in Brazil, giving rise to a more contagious, vaccine-numbing variant known as P1, which has spread to at least 20 countries (pink). As long as the outbreak in South America continues, the rest of the world could still be vulnerable to new mutants, experts warn
In the US, the P1 variant should not yet be widely distributed, but if it does, it could re-infect hundreds of millions of people who have not been vaccinated – even if they had COVID-19 before. Only one new case was detected this month, but that is likely to change
‘We can vaccinate as much as we want in the US and achieve herd immunity, but as long as we have outbreaks that are uncontrollable in other countries, the borders will still be open.
“In countries like Brazil where there are no restrictions and the virus is loose, it is a breeding ground for varieties.”
All viruses mutate, all the time.
Like cancer, the more they spread and make copies of themselves, the more they mutate – and the more important the mutations become.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has actually started to mutate slowly.
But variants began to emerge around the world by the end of 2020, as most countries in most countries had the chance to mutate.
And it was especially ripe for dangerous varieties as it unfolded in Brazil.
The country has already gone through terrible early waves. Antibody tests suggested that about 76 percent of the hard-hit city of Manaus was infected in October, after the first wave of the pandemic there.
It should have given three-quarters of the city in the Amazon natural immunity to reinfection.
The P1 has been detected in at least nine U.S. states, but is widely accepted as a countdown, due to sparse genomic sequences used to find variants
It did not.
Manaus was stunned by a second wave of infections in January. The devastation has reached a new high, with 100 people dying every day in the city of two million.
The PI variant was discovered there in December and probably fueled the high infection rate, and even worse, reinfections in the city.
Laboratory studies as well as actual data suggest that mutations to a site known as E484K help the variant to evade antibodies caused by previous infection with older variants or vaccines designed to protect against it.
‘Immune pressure’ encourages these types of mutations.
When viruses are confronted with immunity that prevents them from hijacking cell machinery to copy themselves, only strains that have mutations survive that are less affected by vaccinations.
And then they thrive.
“This new tribe is escaping immunity, and it’s starting all over again and now it’s the dominant generation in Brazil, ‘says Dr Garrett.
Regarding American cases of the P1 variant, she said: ‘It is apparently low, but make no mistake, this variant is more transmissible’, and was probably more widely distributed than it was tested.
The good news, says dr. Garrett, is that vaccines seem to work against the Brazilian variant, contrary to early warnings.
Natural immunity to previous infection seems less resilient to the challenge of the variant.
And with just 10 percent of Americans fully vaccinated, hundreds of millions of Americans – including the 29 million who already had COVID-19 – could still be vulnerable to the P1 form of the virus.
‘It’s only a matter of time before there are no controls. Here [in the U.S.] the good news is that we are vaccinating, and we are vaccinating fast, because we have to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible to try to control it, and so far it seems that these variants do not escape the vaccine, otherwise serious diseases and hospitalizations, ‘said dr. Garret said.
“But there is no guarantee. The virus develops rapidly and … if it continues to develop in other countries, it could eventually be here.
“What happens in other countries has a significant effect on other countries.”
According to her, this is the strongest case for fair distribution of vaccines around the world.
‘I understand the nationalism of vaccines – countries want to vaccinate their populations first – but if there is no fair distribution, there will always be a threat, as long as these are countries where the outbreak is still raging walk, there will always be a threat to the world. ‘