The coming vaccination programme is likely to cause heartburn for European leaders
Emmanuel Macron’s ban on lorries entering France wins the prize for the most fatuous political gesture since the onset of this pandemic. The mutant strain B.1.1.7 is already all over Europe.
British scientists spotted it early and have tracked it in real time because the UK has carried out almost as much genome sequencing of Covid-19 as the rest of the world combined. Harvard epidemiologist William Hanage says the country has the most advanced genomic monitoring regime on the planet.
Denmark is one of the few other states in Europe that also does extensive and rapid sequencing.
Lo and behold, the Danes have found the same mutation. Many countries do little or no genomic sequencing at all.
It stretches credulity to imagine that a variant picked up in samples as far back as September is not already rampant in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and indeed France. It had months to run when borders were wide open, long before the second lockdowns.
The spectacle of Britain cut off from the world as a leper-state in viral quarantine is unlikely to last more than a few days. The selective discounting of sterling and UK financial assets is the fleeting reaction of skittish markets trying to find their way through the fog. Sterling is undervalued against the euro.
Christian Drosten, Angela Merkel’s pandemic guru, says the mutation is almost certainly spreading in Germany already and he is sceptical about the data interpretation by Prof Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial. “I am not particularly worried,” he told Deutschlandfunk, taking a gentle swipe at headline bio-hysteria.
Prof Drosten is careful not to violate scientific etiquette but he came as close as you can to rebuking the British Government – and by implication the modellers on the Nervtag committee – for pushing a conclusion beyond the known evidence.
He questioned the pseudoquantification behind claims that the new strain is 70pc more transmissible. “There are too many unknown strains to say something like that,” he told Covid reporter Kai Kupferschmidt.
A similar flap occurred over an
earlier Spanish mutation that appeared to be more contagious at first but was in reality spreading faster because people had let down their guard and were travelling more. The problem was behaviour, not mutation.
Prof Andreas Bergthaler, from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, is equally sceptical, playing down what he called “insane alarmism” and insisting that it is still too early to know whether the new strain fundamentally changes the pathogen.
There are certainly grounds for caution. Eight mutations in the coding of the spike protein are unusual. Two are potentially dangerous: one that makes it easier for the virus to bind to the ACE2 receptor; the other causing a loss of amino acids that play a crucial role in immune defences.
A related strain in South Africa seems to hit the young as well as the old. A twist of this kind – more akin to the flu pandemic of 1918 – would be a truly disturbing development.
Whether or not the new strain proves to be a false alarm, it is Europe that is likely to face greater trouble dealing with the pandemic over the next three months. Media attention will swing back soon to the EU vaccination fiasco.
The UK has already given the first vaccine jab to 500,000 people and should be able to immunise care homes, health staff and the most vulnerable relatively quickly with the
German Biontech MRNA vaccine – which the Germans themselves do not yet have, and will not have at adequate scale for a long time, thanks to the errors and complacency of the European Commission’s vaccine alliance.
Assuming that the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine is approved over coming days, the UK will then be able to step up the pace to several million jabs a week in an immunisation crescendo that leads the world and effectively breaks the back of the epidemic by late February.
Once the first 10m people deemed most at risk have been covered – and once the next echelon has already had
a first shot – there is no longer a compelling justification for shutting down the economy or suspending ancient freedoms.
Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, should not be talking about “months” of further lockdowns. That implies a zero eradication strategy and pushes the precautionary principle into the realms of lunacy.
The demonstration effect of the UK’S vaccination Blitzkrieg is likely to cause political heartburn for European leaders, including Mr Macron. The EU will not start its jabs until next week. The Commission’s vaccine alliance did not get around to ordering the Biontech doses until mid-november. This has pushed the EU down the delivery list.
Even then, Brussels ordered too few doses – much to the fury of German health minister Jens Spahn – and mostly spread its bets on a range of vaccines that will not be available until the middle of the year or until late 2021. The next three months are going to be a very awkward time for Europe’s political class, and it will be even more awkward if the mutation is as bad as feared.
The irony is that the Oxford vaccine alone will be ready soon enough and in sufficient volumes to avert the worst for Europe this spring. It is Britain that is going to rescue the Continent. This week’s headlines will soon give way to a very different tale.
‘A strain in South Africa seems to hit the young as well as the old. A twist of this kind would be disturbing’