Malaysia's Director General of Health has claimed that a coronavirus strain D614G found in the country is 10 times more infectious and will impact ongoing vaccine development. The claim was made by Noor Hisham in a Facebook post.
News agency Bloomberg reported the story with a headline that said, "Just in, Malaysia detects a new coronavirus strain that's 10 times more infectious." They subsequently changed the headline to say, "Southeast Asia Detects Mutated Virus Strain Sweeping the World." But the tweet remains the same.
But is the strain new? And is it more infectious? And will it impact vaccines that are under development? We examine the claims made by the agency and by the director general.
D614G is a mutation of the Sars-CoV-2 virus. Mutation indicates a change in the generic material of the virus. D614G points to mutation in the spike of the virus, that the virus uses to invade human cells.
The D614G variant was found in a cluster of 45 cases in Malaysia. The government traced the origin of the virus to a restaurant owner who had returned from India. The man was found guilty of violating home quarantine and has been jailed for 5 months.
While it may well have been noticed for the first time in Malaysia, the variant has been seen across the world and is not new. China, US, Europe and Philipines have all reported finding this variant in the samples of COVID-19.
Virologist Dr Shahid Jameel says the same variant has been found in India as well.
In his Facebook post, Noor Hisham calls the variant 10 times more infectious. But is this claim based on a study? That's not mentioned in the post. He says, "It's found 10 times easier to infect other individuals and spread easily if spread by the individual 'super spreader."
Dr Jameel says being more infectious doesn't make the mutation in itself is more dangerous.
In his Facebook post, the Director General says, "This D614G mutation was found by scientists in July 2020 and will probably lead to an existing vaccine study not to include or not effective in this mutation."
Dr Jameel explains that in this variant, a change has been detected in the spike protein's 614 position. But this mutation will not impact the vaccine development, because the part of the virus essential for vaccines has seen no change.
According to an article published in the well-known journal Cell in June, the ability of the mutation to impact vaccines is almost nil.
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