The virus has mutated.

What is this mutation ?

Will it affect our vaccination strategy ?

A virus is a ghost. 

Ghosts are supposed to be souls without a body.

They are always in search of a body to fulfil their aim. So is this virus. It is physically only a strand of RNA at the core. It does not have a cell. It needs a full fledged cell to multiply and take its own generation forward in the evolution. 

Therefore viruses are always on the look out for a cell which they would overtake. They would use the cellular machinery of the cells they infect to print fresh copies of their RNA. The cell dies and these new copies of RNA would come out  and infect fresh cells. The host suffers viral fever and virus multiplies in number in this course. The virus is in hurry to copy and the process makes a lot of typos. Yes a lot of typing errors. These changes in the viral genome are called Mutations. They are inherent part of viral growth. In 99.9% time they are insignificant and go unnoticed.

Each cell has a tight cell wall that is meant to protect the cellular integrity. But there always are chinks. Cells must import glucose and oxygen for their own survival. Our Covid virus has spikes on its surface. It goes on knocking at all possible cells to gain entry. All of them are locked. Sometime in November, in the city of Wuhan one covid virus discovers that it can open the locks of the human lung cells with its spike. Soon this message goes viral among the SARS community. Lo and Behold in 10 months 10 million humans get infected releasing million time that number of viruses into this world. The purpose is served. Covid viruses are now prospering and propagating at the cost of home sapien species.

But then home sapiens are the second  most intelligent species on the earth after the virus. They pick up the virus in a lab, read the code for spike on it. It is only a matter of months before they take a wax copy of it and can come out with duplicate copies of the entire spikes in their lab. Every cell has powerful immune system to defend such fancy attack by nomads like SARS virus. The immune system pours out antibodies that stand guard against the locks the virus picks. The antibodies are bouncers in front of locks and do not allow the virus to enter. But the cell gets infected in the course and suffers injury. It must survive the attack to prepare antibodies against such virus.

But sapiens have developed technology to develop antibodies against the virus without getting infected. They would inject the duplicate copies of the viral spikes into humans. This will develop exact anti image of the spike protein which would neutralise the spike end of the invading virus. This is one of the most intelligent concept developed by Edward Jenner and is popularly known as Vaccination.

Can the virus change the spike protein on its surface ?

The logical answer is why not ? It can produce brand new spikes by mutation. Our vaccines will be useless against such mutant viruses.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened in UK and South Africa. Two such mutations affecting infectiousness of Covid virus has been picked up. The question arises- Will they be more lethal ? Will they evade our vaccines?

Genomic Surveillance–

 Simply counting the numbers infected by PCR is not sufficient. Nations are supposed to analyse 10% of all viral samples for gene sequence and publish their gene sequence so that the mutations can be picked up early. While the rate of genomic surveillance in UK is 10% US has published only 0.3% sequences till date. The fact remains that such gene studies are not necessary for immediate  treatment of the covid patients. Hence most nations are not interested. But it is much more significant when such variant strains replace the existing strains. They can be more lethal, more infective or can develop resistance to our therapy. 

Theobald Smith is one of the founding fathers of microbiology. One century ago he had postulated the law of Declining Virulence. “A virus is a parasite.” He had postulated that,” It is in its own interest that a virus infection should not kill the host. As time passes the man and virus should have peaceful coexistence.” This is known as the Law of Declining Virulence. 

Accordingly it has been seen that our present variant strains of the virus are more infective than the previous one. But it is not more lethal. That being said, when the number of infections will increase, the number of deaths are going to increase even though the fatality rate does not change.

What it may not be capable of ?

It can not change the route of infection. It will not be air borne or blood borne all of a sudden. It will remain a droplet infection but the viral load will be more after each infection. already there is a drop of average Ct value in the UK and South Africa variants. That will increase the chance of infection. The South African strain seems to be more virulent than the UK strain.

At least three mutations have been noted at the spike proteins. Both the mRNA vaccines and our Oxford vaccine target this part of the virus. Only time will tell how much immunogenicity will be affected in these 3 vaccines due to such mutations. Like the Influenza vaccine, we may have to modify our vaccine agent every now and then as per the mutations encountered in the virus. 

That will be a pretty costly affair for developing nations.

Epilogue

The virus has mutated as predicted. It is now difficult to keep track of all the true reports of mutations than the numerous fake ones. WHO has started a unique naming scheme- applying greek alphabets; The UK variants is named as Alpha, to the variant first described in India as Delta.

As on 24 June, 2021 the Delta variant have been found in 80 countries. Delta plus patients have been found in nine countries- USA, UK, Portugal, Switzerland, Japan, Poland, Nepal, China, Russia, India. Delta plus is endowed with increased transmissibility and an inherent capability to escape our vaccines.

Third wave of the Covid-19 is expected to ride the delta plus Virus.