The US Government has said that there isn’t any strong evidence that the new strain of Coronavirus being reported in the UK and some other European countries is more contagious
According to an American government official, the US is conducting studies to learn more about the new strain.
Moncef Slaoui, chief advisor to the US Operation Warp Speed vaccine program, added he expected that lab experiments would show the new strain would respond to existing vaccines and treatments.
He said “There is no hard evidence that this virus is actually more transmissible, (but) there is clear evidence that there is more of it in the population. It may be just seeding happened in the shadows and we’re seeing now a surge, or maybe it has higher transmissibility. What’s clear is it’s not more pathogenic. On the question of contagiousness, in order to determine cause and effect, experiments would need to be carried out on animals in which they are co-housed and deliberately infected. This would show the level of viral load required to infect another animal which is very likely the expected outcome. The spike protein is the three-dimensional surface molecule the virus uses to invade human cells and is what gives the microbe its crown or “corona” like appearance. The chances that a single mutation would alter all these regions at once are extremely low. Whether someday, somewhere, a virus may turn out to escape the protective response produced by the vaccine is impossible to exclude, so we have to remain absolutely vigilant.”