A Covid-19 variant spreading in India is more contagious and it is feared it could be dodging some vaccine protections, contributing to the country’s explosive outbreak, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist said. In an interview with AFP, Soumya Swaminathan warned that “the epidemiological features that we see in India today do indicate that it’s an extremely rapidly spreading variant”. Swaminathan, an Indian paediatrician and clinical scientist, said the B.1.617 variant of Covid-19, which was first detected in India last October, was clearly a contributing factor to the catastrophe unfolding in her homeland. “There have been many accelerators that are fed into this,” the 62-year-old said, stressing that “a more rapidly spreading virus is one of them”. The WHO recently listed B.1.617 — which counts several sub-lineages with slightly different mutations and characteristics — as a “variant of interest”.

Source: The Nation May 10, 2021 08:08 UTC