US invests $ 1.7 billion in variant research

The Biden administration announced on Friday that it would dedicate $ 1.7 billion from the stimulus plan to tackle genetic mutations in the virus and improve genomic surveillance.

Even though more and more Americans are vaccinated against Covid-19, the United States is concerned about the virulence of the variants. On Friday April 16, the White House announced that it would invest $ 1.7 billion of the $ 1.9 trillion plan to aid the economy, voted by Congress at the initiative of President Joe Biden in March. , to fight against variants, report it Financial Times.

A large part of the funds will be used to improve the country’s genomic surveillance capacity, so as to identify each gene of the virus, to study the differences between them and thus to “Understand if these mutations modify the behavior of the virus”.

Delay in sequencing

Genomic sequencing in the United States, experts say “Has lagged behind the UK, hampering US efforts to detect and respond to the emergence of new variants”. And in particular the one detected in Great Britain last year, which “Has become the predominant strain in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)”. At the end of December, the CDC acknowledged that the United States had only sequenced about 0.3% of the tests.

Nearly half of America’s adult population has already received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. But the impressive rollout of the vaccination campaign in the United States was marred this week by reports of rare cases of blood clots in people who have received Johnson. & Johnson.

Vaccine makers are working to improve existing vaccines to make them more resistant to mutations. The manufacturer of the American-German vaccine PfizerBioNTech announced in early April that its vaccine was effective against the so-called “South African” variant.

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