West has ‘moral duty’ to follow UK lead and map virus variants

International partners must step up the fight to stop mutations spreading, says top genomic scientist

ONE of Britain’s leading genomic scientists has warned wealthy countries that they have a “moral duty” to follow the UK’s example in mapping new mutations of Covid-19 and prevent vaccineresistant variants emerging undetected.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Professor Sharon Peacock, director of the Covid-19 Genomics UK consortium (Cog-UK) which is sequencing the virus to identify new strains, says she is “very concerned” about the lack of international effort.

Britain is a world leader in viral sequencing, which has in recent months emerged as crucial in the global hunt for versions of the pathogen that are better adapted to infect humans and evade vaccines.

However, without international partners stepping up their own genome programmes, she warns of a situation where developing countries could become “a biological melting point for evolution and escaped mutants” which then rapidly spread across the globe.

Cog-UK has recently surpassed mapping its 250,000th Covid genome and last week managed 30,000 alone. Prior to the pandemic Public Health England sequenced 50,000 pathogen genomes in a single year.

According to Prof Peacock, Britain contributes 50 per cent of the global database GISAID, which provides open access to the genomic data of the virus.

While some countries such as Denmark – which has the capacity to map 10,000 cases a week – and South Africa are ramping up genome sequencing, others are lagging well behind.

It was reported last month that Germany has so far sequenced about 3,400 cases in the entire pandemic, although it has since published a draft government order requiring five per cent of all samples from positive tests to be sent for genome testing.

According to an article published this month in the British Medical Journal, the US only sequences fewer than one per cent of new samples while many countries, especially in Africa, have no genome sequencing capability at all.

Last Friday at the G7 meeting Boris Johnson pledged to donate the majority of the UK’s surplus vaccine supply to poorer countries and urged international partners to follow suit.

However, Prof Peacock, a professor of public health and microbiology at Cambridge University, says the lack of equity for sequencing data is an area of equal concern.

“I do think there is a moral duty on countries to support a combination of equitable vaccine access combined with an ability to see the sequence data,” she said.

“I believe every wealthy nation who can afford it should be doing it for their own people. If you vaccinate your people you want to be sure there isn’t a variant prevalent to limit effectiveness.”

Scientists at Cog-UK, which was established last March with £20million of funding, have already identified the Kent variant and earlier this month detected another new variant, E484K, in Bristol and Manchester.

According to Professor Ravi Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology in Prof Peacock’s team at Cambridge University who helped discover the Kent variant, the latest E484K mutation has already demonstrated a worrying resistance to vaccines.

Prof Gupta says the Pfizer vaccine has been found to be around eight times less effective against the new variant while with the Oxford vaccine that figure rises to tenfold. However, he stressed even then the vaccines are still preventing serious illness and death.

Despite the rapid number of variants being discovered by scientists, Prof Peacock insisted she is confident vaccine manufacturers will keep ahead of future mutations. “It’s not possible to exclude the scenario where the virus becomes fully resistant but I think we will keep ahead,” she said.