Ross Clark Ross Clark

What we know about the Brazilian Covid variant

Rio de Janeiro during a lockdown (photo: Getty)

The World Health Organisation’s appeal to stop naming variants of Covid-19 after geographical locations evidently cut no ice with the Prime Minister, who warned MPs yesterday about a new Brazilian mutation of the Sars-Cov2-virus. Chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance later suggested to ITV News that the changes identified in the new variant ‘might make a change to the way the immune system recognises it but we don’t know. Those experiments are underway.’

According to Pfizer last week, its vaccine still offers protection against the newly-identified Kent and South African variants of the Sars-CoV-2 virus. But should we now be worrying that the Brazilian variant will creep through our defences? The very name will be enough to cause alarm, because Brazil currently has the world’s second highest death toll from Covid-19, at 206,000 (although in terms of deaths per million population it falls behind Britain).

What’s particularly concerning is that the Brazilian strain is thought to potentially have originated in Manaus,

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