UK’s Kent virus variant becoming more resistant, scientists warn

LONDON — The dominant coronavirus variant in the U.K. is becoming more resistant to vaccines, scientific experts have warned.

Two leading scientists in the U.K. warned Wednesday that the variant of the virus first identified in Kent has acquired the same E484K mutation on its spike protein that makes the South Africa variant so worrying for experts.

Public health authorities are keeping two emerging U.K. variants under close watch. The first of these two home-grown variants has mostly been found in Bristol and the South West, where experts have confirmed 15 cases, with a further six in other parts of England. The second variant is localized in Liverpool and the North West, with a cluster of 42 cases confirmed so far.

Sharon Peacock, executive director and chair of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK), told POLITICO in an interview that this is of “great concern” because such mutation has been associated with immunity to vaccines and re-infection in South Africa.

“Our home-grown variant is developing that mutation on numerous occasions probably through a process of natural selection,” she said. “If the virus gets advantages from a particular mutation, then that’s likely to persist in the population and expand. That is becoming of great concern in the country.”

Speaking at a Downing Street press conference on Wednesday, the U.K. government’s Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance said “it is not surprising” that the Kent variant has evolved in this way and that it will happen elsewhere as well.

“In getting that variant it does make it slightly more likely to look different to the immune system so we need to watch out for it,” Vallance said. “We need to keep on top and need to keep testing the vaccine effects in that situation.”

Peacock said the U.K. government’s approach to border controls, which will become stricter from Monday, is “good overall” because testing people after arrival, as well as genome sequencing of positive cases, will allow the U.K. to understand how the virus might be mutating in other parts of the world.

But she warned stringent border controls will not offer full protection to the British population because “there’s a probability that variants will arise in the U.K. unrelated to border control,” as is happening in Bristol.

Helping others

The consortium led by Peacock offers whole-genome sequencing of coronavirus samples to the National Health Service and the British government. British experts are currently sequencing 27,000 genomes per week but this figure will continue to increase, she said, while U.K. experts are also sharing their tools and data in a bid to increase other countries’ capacity.

Peacock said a total of 26 countries in Asia, Europe and Africa had so far engaged with the U.K.’s work, although she declined to name any. “The building blocks for being able to do sequencing are pretty much there in many places that are well-resourced,” she said.

The consortium chair added: “It is a question of how you form a network, and that’s really to do with cooperation and collaboration, and stitching together the whole system from patient to test through to sequence generation and then back to public health. That’s quite a complicated business to put together.”

The whole sequencing process, from the moment a COVID-19 patient is tested, to the sequencing data being interpreted, currently takes about five days at the SANGER Institute in Cambridge and a little longer at regional labs. “We are constantly working on our turnaround time at the moment,” Peacock said. “For effective outbreak investigation you really need to have the testing-to-answer within 36 hours,” she said.

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