Researcher predicts ‘normal Thanksgiving’ even as new California COVID-19 strain spreads
A California variant of the new coronavirus already has emerged and played a key role in the fall surge of COVID-19 infections around the state, but a leader of the Cedars-Sinai team that first observed the viral mutation said he believes Californians will “have a normal Thanksgiving holiday in 2021.”
Dr. Eric Vail said that he believes adoption of the COVID-19 vaccines will be widespread enough that he is telling his family and friends to count on it: “When I say that Thanksgiving is going to be a normal Thanksgiving, that means shaking hands and hugging and all that stuff.”
Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, told the Los Angeles Times this week that this new COVID-19 strain appears to be easier to transmit and that it evades neutralizing antibodies produced by vaccines. The UCSF scientists have a paper publishing on the California variant this week at the online website MedRxiv.
Still, Vail, director of molecular pathology in the Cedars-Sinai Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, urged Californians not to put off getting the COVID-19 vaccine because they want a shot proven to work against the emerging viral variants. Antibodies generated by the vaccines could very well make the difference between someone simply getting sick or dying.
“The worst data that we’ve shown for vaccines so far have been from the South Africa strain, and even that, I think for Johnson & Johnson showed a drop from 75% efficacy to 50% efficacy,” Vail said. “If you remember from the beginning of the pandemic, the (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) said they would approve any vaccine with 50% efficacy, so it would have been approved anyway, even if that was normal.”
The message that needs to get out, Vail said, is: “Please don’t wait. If you can get a vaccine, get a vaccine.”
He has been vaccinated, he said, and so has his pregnant wife, who’s an urgent care physician. His support of his wife’s decision to do so, he said, is the strongest endorsement he can give to the vaccines.
Vaccines ‘provide an edge’ against variants
Reports of COVID-19 variants will continue to emerge, Vail said, because viruses replicate millions and millions and millions of virions in each person, but have very poor quality control as they do so.
“In humans, we have a bunch of proteins that every time we replicate, they check to make sure there were no errors,” he said. “It’s like spellcheck basically. Viruses don’t have as many of those. Not only are they replicating more, but they don’t have as much fact-checking on top of what they’re doing.”
New variants of viruses pop up all the time, he said, noting: “Most of the time, they’re actually not good for the virus or they’re neutral. They don’t impart any change or difference, so either they die off or they go away. Every once in a while, these mutations will cluster together and will provide some sort of increased fitness for the virus in their environment, and the more people that the virus infects, the more likely you will see these (variants) start to emerge.”
However, he said, the mutated strains don’t breed and create some sort of supervirus. Rather, he said, each viral mutation is like a branch on a tree and new mutations develop off that branch.
It’s important, though, that public health officials are aware of the mutations and are considering things like transmissibility when developing strategies, Vail said.
The vaccines provide an edge, Vail said, because, by getting the shots, humans can largely end transmission and stop the viral variance. Viruses can’t spread if they don’t replicate, he said, echoing statements made by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden.
People should also continue practicing good hygiene: washing their hands regularly, maintaining two arms’ lengths of space between themselves and others in public and wearing a face mask, Vail said.
Vail said his team found the California COVID-19 variant, known as CAL.20C and B.1.427/B.1.429, in almost 50 percent of COVID-19 samples they studied in January. They published a Feb. 11 paper about the new California strain in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The discovery was completely unexpected, he said, because his team hadn’t set out looking for it. Rather, they were trying to answer a post-Christmas query from the Cedars-Sinai leadership: Was the UK COVID-19 variant known as B.1.1.7 spreading in California?
“Between Christmas and New Year’s, we gathered all the samples, and the techs loaded the sequencer at 11 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. We analyzed it on New Year’s Day, and there was no UK strain,” Vail said. “We said, ‘OK,’ and I told my team to relax a little bit, to not look at it for a couple of days and then to go back and look at it. And, I got an email a couple days later. My ... student who’s the lead author on the (JAMA) paper said, ‘There’s something different.’”
When they checked COVID-19 samples in California’s public databases, they found that the CAL.20C variant was showing up all around Southern California.
This doesn’t mean, Vail said, that it originated in California, but the evidence points to it disseminating here.
The fall-winter COVID-19 surge would have happened Vail said, even if CAL.20C had not emerged, but not so many people would have been struck ill.
This story was originally published February 25, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Researcher predicts ‘normal Thanksgiving’ even as new California COVID-19 strain spreads."
