UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday said that there is increasing confidence in Britain about the efficacy of Covid vaccines against the double-mutant strain that was first detected in India.
“We have increasing confidence vaccines are effective against all variants, including the Indian variant,” he told parliament.
The strain, known as B1.617.2, is said to be more transmissible. It has now spread to several parts of the world, including the UK. This had triggered concerns as Britain is planning to lift the lockdown completely on June 21.
However, a UK-based epidemiologist had said the variant may be spreading in Britain less quickly than first feared.
“There’s … a glimmer of hope from the recent data that, whilst this variant does still appear to have a significant growth advantage, the magnitude of that advantage seems to have dropped a little bit with the most recent data,” Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, told BBC radio, adding more data was needed.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has designated the strain found in India as a “variant of concern”.
It is also believed to be the dominant variant that drove India’s catastrophic second Covid-19 wave.
