ABOVE: Cape Town, South Africa, in April, 2020. The variant was first discovered in the Eastern Cape province and reported by the country’s health department on December 18.
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Scientists are testing if COVID-19 vaccines will protect against newly identified UK and South African SARS-CoV-2 variants, both of which contain an unusual number of mutations compared to other variants of the coronavirus. These mutations are concentrated mainly in the segment of the virus’s genome that codes for the spike protein, which the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines each build immunity to.
This additional research comes as British health secretary Matt Hancock says he is more concerned about the South African variant, known as 501.V2, as it relates to vaccine efficacy than the UK variant, known as B.1.1.7.
“One of the reasons they know they’ve got a problem is because, like us, they have an excellent genomic scientific capability ...
