Researchers at Columbia University warned that a Covid variant is “spreading rapidly” in the Big Apple and may be able to beat vaccines’ effects.
The strain, called B.1.526, was found in one of four viral sequences present in a database collected throughout the city.
Scientists said that like the mutation seen in the South Africa and Brazil strains, this newly discovered version had the ability to dodge, partially, the vaccines.
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“It’s not particularly happy news,” Rockefeller University immunologist Michel Nussenzweig said.
“But just knowing about it is good because do something about it.”
Nearly a thousand samples from the Columbia University Medical Center have been sequenced with 12 percent of the patients having the mutation E484K.
