CDC ramps up research on variant from India

Federal Health officials are ramping up their surveillance of the highly transmissible COVID-19 variant first identified in India as experts warn that under-vaccinated areas in the U.S. could become hot spots for the mutation.

While U.S. cases attributed to the B.1.617 variant currently sit below 1%, the growth rate remains unclear due to the small sample size. Meanwhile, one science group said the strain could be as much as 50% more transmissible than B.1.1.7, the variant that emerged from the U.K. That mutation was first seen in the U.S. in late December, and is now dominant nationally.

A just-released U.K. study found the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE vaccine was “highly effective” against a form of the B.1.617 variant two weeks after the second dose, affirming preliminary data from Phase 3 clinical trials. Still, the mutation has arrived in the U.S. at a time when anti-pandemic measures are loosening and around 60% of the population isn’t yet fully vaccinated.

“From everything I can tell the vaccines are highly effective against this variant,” said Samuel Scarpino, a co-founder of Global.health, an organization that tracks COVID cases and variants internationally. “But there are some states in the U.S. with quite low vaccination coverage putting them at risk for potential outbreaks.”

The B.1.617 variant that has devastated India was first detected in the U.S. between late February and late March of this year. On May 4, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention designated B.1.617 as a variant of interest. It is now studying whether to escalate its standing to a variant of concern, said Jade Fulce, a CDC spokesperson.

Currently, the CDC has classified eight variants of interest, three of which are forms of the B.1.617 strain, according to the CDC website. The agency says these variants are “predicted to affect” transmission, diagnostics, therapeutics, or immune escape, but still have limited prevalence or expansion in the U.S. or in other countries.

There are five variants of concern listed by the CDC. This category covers those that show “evidence of impact” on diagnostics, treatments or vaccines along with increased transmissibility and/or disease severity.

Local health agencies are urged to report these cases to the CDC, who will also report them to the World Health Organization. The designation will also spur efforts to control the variant’s spread and, potentially, development of new diagnostics or the modification of vaccines or treatments.

So far, according to the CDC’s Fulce, there is “insufficient data to evaluate with a high degree of confidence whether these lineages are variants of concern.”

Agency efforts to determine variant classification include reviews of the latest case percentages, as well as laboratory, epidemiological and clinical research data, according to Jasmine Reed, another CDC spokesperson. The CDC also is in touch with global partners, including the WHO, to share data and coordinate genomic surveillance and characterization of variants, Reed said.