The Virus Variant Spreading in Britain May Make Vaccines Less Effective, Study Shows nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The variant, known as B.1.1.7, first came to light in December. Researchers determined that it had rapidly become more common across the United Kingdom in just a couple of months.
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A year ago, in January, when John Mascola heard that a new coronavirus had been detected in an animal market in Wuhan, China, he left everything at his desk on the fourth floor of the US government’s Vaccine Research Center and walked up one flight of stairs to the office of a longtime colleague, Nicole Doria-Rose. Felicitously, Mascola, who is the center’s director, had been working on ways to immunize people against coronaviruses. A vaccine against this new bug, soon to be known as SARS-CoV-2, was the first priority, the only surefire way of halting the growing pandemic. Mascola and Doria-Rose, an immunologist, go way back. And they hoped there was another approach that might also contribute to the cause, one they’d been chasing for more than a decade. They wanted to find a monoclonal antibody.
CDC researchers back U.S. school re-openings but with strict COVID-19 regulations
The global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to unfold. Since its causative virus – severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) – was first detected in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, it has spread to over 191 countries and territories. So far, over 100 million cases have been reported, and 2.1 million have lost their lives. In the U.S., the numbers are especially sobering; to date, 25.5 million have been infected and over 425,500 have died.
As the U.S. continues to grapple with surging cases and the complex logistics of mass vaccination, is the country in a position to fully re-open its schools for in-person learning? Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) think so – notwithstanding a few very important caveats.