We're Not Hunting Hard Enough For Variants

virus news today. Snafi made an unusual deal to produce millions of doses of the Fighter and bio Ntech coronavirus vaccine. The French drugmaker set in a statement today it will give bio n Tech access to a production facility in Frankfurt, which will start to deliver doses this summer. The deal will produce more than one million doses for the European Union. Sanafi's own effort to develop a COVID vaccine has stumbled. The deal with bio n Tech allows Europe to make

up for some of the loss. The pact also raised hopes that more pharma giants would throw their manufacturing and distribution weight behind the few coronavirus shots that have proved effective. A standoff between the EU and drugmaker Astra Zenica over vaccine delivery delays turned from bitter to chaotic on Wednesday, with the two sides disagreeing over whether a call to discuss drug delivery would take place. Later, both confirmed that

talks will in fact resume as planned. It was just the latest in a series of clashes between the EU and the drugmaker. Finally, the Biden administration said it intends to increase orders for the two approved vaccines by the US government will order one hundred million more doses each of Fiser and Moderna's coronavirus vaccines. It will also speed

up shipments to states, at least temporarily. And now for today's main story, the US is struggling to monitor COVID nineteen variants, a key part of watching for the emergence of dangerous mutations that might spread quickly, evade vaccines, or kill more infected people. Currently, the US ranks thirty second in the world for the number of tests it's done

to detect mutations per one thousand good cases. I spoke to health reporter Kristin V. Brown, who reports that other countries like the UK have established robust nationwide surveillance programs to identify new covid genomes and track the spread of existing ones. The emergence of specific variants of COVID nineteen have been known for a while now, and obviously scientists always knew they were a possibility. But let's talk a bit about what mutations of viruses can do. How do

they impact how infectious of viruses? And you know, the big question, will they impact the efficacy of a COVID nineteen vaccine? So viruses muta It's just something that viruses do, you know. That's why the flu vaccine is a different shot every year. So it might seem like a kind of arcane thing, right, Why does this variant that it's just a little bit different from another version of COVID nineteen matter? But it actually could potentially matter a lot

depending on what the mutation in the virus is. So the current mutations that hob scientists concerned have to do with the way the virus actually gets into a person's body, and that is why they believe that these variants might be more contagious. But that could also potentially interfere with therapies that are being developed um or vaccines. Right, there's a big question right now, about whether these emerging variants might interfere with the efficacy of the vaccines that we're developing.

And so you know what has specifically the US been doing to track, identify, or even sequence these known variants of COVID nineteen. So you brought up sequencing. How you detect these variants is through genetic sequencing, Right. You have to be taking samples from patients and you know, running them through this machine that can decode the viruses genome and tell you, okay, is this virus significantly different from other ones that we know are commonly circulating in the population.

So the UK and many other countries have established really really robust genetic surveillance programs to sort of be on the hunt for this. The US does have a program, but it is not as robust as many other nations. At the time that we're talking, the US, I believe, ranks thirty second in the world for the number of

sequences is completing per thousand COVID cases. And that's behind, you know, countries like the UK and Iceland that are really known for their genomic capabilities, but it's also behind countries that you don't really think of as leaders in that space. Like Latvia and Senegal. And so you know, we know that about two hundred thousand people in the US are testing positive for COVID nineteen every single week, But are these tests being used to track or as

you mentioned, sequence these COVID variants. This week, the CDC told me that the US is sequencing about three thousand COVID nineteen samples every week. To put things in perspective, right now, the UK is sequencing about ten percent of its COVID cases and that number, that three thousand number, puts the US at less than point five. So we are not sequencing very much of the virus at all. And I mean, scientists have said that this effectively leaves

us flying blind. We do not know what mutations of the virus might be out there are that pose a threat to to US and to our pandemic response. I mean, is this something that we're seeing in the US because of say a lack of interest on the federal level. What's some of the reasons here that the US is is so lagging in this regard. It's kind of complicated why the US has not had a robust sequencing program. So, like many things in this pandemic, the nature of our

country has mean this a bit more complicated. Right, we have fifty different states. Things happen at federal level, at state level, local level, and that's what we've we've seen with sequencing efforts. It's happening at a constellation of public labs, of private labs, of academic labs, and there's not really a national program that connects all these things. So if you're a lab that wants to contribute to this effort, you have to figure out how do you get patient samples?

You know, Script Research Institute, for example, they told me that they were able to get their program to do this work up and running because they already had a good relationship with the local health authorities, with the Sandy County. So it's a little bit of serendipity that has allowed these operations to to get up and running. And the lack of a national program that sets up protocols like where do you get the samples, how do you uh,

what format does the data come in? All of that has made it harder to have a robust national effort in the US. And as we see the first days of the Biden administration, is this something that the administration has prioritized that we'll be seeing more sequencing going forward. So the Biden administration has said that it plans to prioritize this. It plans to up the number of samples that are getting sequenced every week, But we haven't seen

any concrete plans discussed yet. And I think it's going to be a really big challenge because, as I mentioned, it is a constellation of efforts that are public, private, local, uh statewide that are is doing this sequencing, and you have to figure out a system that can connect all of those things, and that will be a kind of gargantuan task. What are some of the additional benefits or the importance to this genetic sequencing, I mean specifically for

other diseases beyond COVID nineteen. One thing that this pandemic has shown that I think is actually really sort of awesome is that sequencing can be a really powerful tool. Right.

We saw very early in the pandemic. I believe it was in January we saw the first full genome of this virus published That allowed us to very quickly demonstrate how this virus had moved around the world, you know, what countries that had traveled from, and that allowed us to create policies that helped make our response more more intelligent and more efficient. Right, And I think that going forward, that same idea can be applied to many things. It

can help us more intelligently respond to superbugs. It could help us respond to other future emerging zoonotic threats like COVID nineteen. It can help us to detect people are concerned about bio terror. It could help us detect potential bio terror threats too. So I mean, this technology is really important and has great potential to help us respond to future threats to our national security. That was Kristin V.

Brown And that's it for our show today. For coverage of the outbreak for one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by top foreheads Magnus Henrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Kristin V. Brown.

Original music by Leo Sedrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's out of podcasts. Thanks for listening, Alo,