Are New Omicron Subvariants a Threat? How Scientists are Keeping Watch

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Are New Omicron Subvariants a Threat? How Scientists are Keeping Watch
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In South Africa, a network of researchers are studying whether new lineages BA.4 and BA.5 escape immunity from COVID-19 vaccines and prior infections

Speckled guineafowl drift into the garden where Tulio de Oliveira sits as he describes two new members of the growing Omicron family of SARS-CoV-2 coronaviruses. Called BA.4 and BA.5, the subvariants are now growing in prevalence in South Africa, where the virologist leads one of the world’s strongest genomic surveillance programmes for SARS-CoV-2, at the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

At the same time, researchers are grappling with how to communicate their concerns and the uncertainty about variants openly, while not provoking unnecessary government policies and anxiety. Late last year, when de Oliveira’s team detected the original Omicron, countries including the United States and the United Kingdom invoked travel bans against South Africa. The bans failed to prevent the variant’s spread, but severely damaged the already struggling South African economy.

In addition to the accumulating sequences from South Africa, a relatively small number of BA.4 sequences have been uploaded to the data platform GISAID from Botswana, Belgium, Denmark and the United Kingdom in the past two weeks, and BA.5 has shown up from China, France, Germany and Portugal. At the time, Lee was relieved that the mutation was vanishingly rare in real life, suggesting that it hindered the virus in some way. Only about 50 of the nearly 10 million SARS-CoV-2 sequences in GISAID contained the mutation, so Lee felt assured that the antibody treatment would still be broadly useful. But with the rapid rise of BA.4 and BA.5 in South Africa, it seems that the coronavirus has evolved so that the mutation no longer holds it back, Lee explains.

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