Neanderthal gene doubles Covid risk

A SINGLE neanderthal gene found in one in six Britons is likely to blame for up to a million Covid deaths globally, according to an Oxford academic.

The LZTFL1 gene has been shown to double a person’s risk of severe disease and death but before now there had never been an estimate for how many lives during the pandemic were lost as a result of this single piece of genetic code.

Roughly 15 per cent of Europeans have the neanderthal form of the gene, and 60 per cent of South Asians.

Dr James Davies, a genomic expert at the University of Oxford, became aware of the gene’s lethal role after creating a new way of looking at DNA.

The method allowed him to identify LZTFL1 as the gene that increases mortality. Previous methods failed to narrow it down beyond 28 different genes.

Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, Dr Davies said: “We identified a gene called LZTFL1. It’s a single letter difference out of three billion. This tiny section of DNA doubles your risk of dying from Covid.”

His team believe the neanderthal gene changes how a cell behaves when the SARS-COV-2 virus binds to the ACE2 receptor on a human cell, making the risk of infection much more likely.

Dr Davies put the number of deaths from this genetic variant “in the hundreds of thousands to a million”.

He said the neanderthal gene infiltrated humans 60,000 years ago after a solitary interspecies tryst that saw the LZTF1 gene jump from our now-extinct cousin species to homo sapiens.

“If this dinner date between the human and the neanderthal had gone wrong, we would have had a much better time in Covid, we would have had hundreds of thousands fewer deaths,” said Dr Davies.