February 4, 2021

expert reaction to comments made by Nadhim Zahawi that there are 4,000 variants of SARS-CoV-2

Speaking to reporters, Health Minister Nadhim Zahawi stated that there are “about 4,000 variants around the world of Covid now.”

Dr David Matthews, Reader in Virology, University of Bristol, said:

“4,000 variants is not unexpected.  Variants refers to a combination of mutations together and many variants will disappear as quickly as they appear.  I believe the variants that do spread are being driven by the virus ‘getting comfortable’ in its new host (humans) rather than primarily a response to immunity.

“Most mutations at this stage will not be in response to people being immune – though that will likely happen in future.  This highlights the need to keep monitoring the virus, especially when most people are vaccinated – this is something the UK is leading the world on through the excellent COG-UK consortium.

“Variants are always interesting from a scientific point of view but people don’t need to worry too much right now because as long as the vaccines prevent severe illness, that is the most important thing.”

Dr Julian Tang, Honorary Associate Professor/Clinical Virologist, University of Leicester, said:

“The UK only sequences about 5-10% of all positive SARS-COV-2 samples – and these are just the UK samples – as you can see from their reports here: https://www.cogconsortium.uk/data/

“Other countries sequence much less than this – and of course there will be many infected cases that have not even been sampled, let alone sequenced – so the 4000 figure – whether applied to the number of SARS-COV-2 mutations or variants may be a gross underestimate – but most of these mutations will be harmless/neutral.

“Some idea of those variants present in sequenced samples globally can be found here: https://www.gisaid.org/

“Unfortunately, the UK does not have 50% of the world’s sequencing industry (China may be able to lay a more realistic claim to this – including their Beijing Genomics Institute – BGI) but yes, the UK has produced about 50% of the sequences freely available on that GISAID database, which is not the same thing.

“We can’t know that we have a library of “all variants” – does this mean just all variants known to the UK, just based on their sequencing of <10% of all possible positive samples in the UK – and far far less than this for all possible samples worldwide?  Clearly this is not ‘all variants’.

“Nobody can predict how the virus will change based on the variants we know about now.  We cannot predict in advance how the virus will change and then to design a vaccine for that future variant, so that claim is wrong too.  There is really no need for such over-hyped statements potentially giving false confidence like other claims/statements that we have been hearing throughout this COVID-19 pandemic – which are just misleading.”

Prof Ravi Gupta, Professor of Microbiology at the University of Cambridge, said:

“The vaccine minister is not referring to variants as we have come to know them, rather he is referring to individual mutations.  The number of mutations has little actual relevance as many mutations emerge and disappear continuously.  Scientists are using ‘variants’ to describe viruses with mutations that are transmitting in the general population – there aren’t 4,000 of those.”

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

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