A COVID-19 variant that proves to be resistant to vaccines keeps medical experts, public health officials, and health care professionals—including infection preventionists—on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic up at nights. There’s no reason to sound the alarm yet, but there may—just may—perhaps be reason to think that there’s a chance that the alarm may have to be sounded at some point about the lambda COVID-19 mutation, or C.37.
A preprint study by investigators in Chile suggests that the mutation, which first surfaced in Peru about a year ago and is highly infectious, may also be able to evade vaccine antibodies.
“Our results indicate that mutations present in the spike protein of the lambda variant of interest confer increased infectivity and immune escape from neutralizing antibodies elicited by CoronaVac,” the study states. CoronaVac is a vaccine manufactured by a Chinese company and that’s used in Peru. The study continues: “These data reinforce the idea that massive vaccination campaigns in countries with high SARS-CoV-2 circulation must be accompanied by strict genomic surveillance allowing the identification of new isolates carrying spike mutations and immunology studies aimed to determine the impact of these mutations in immune escape and vaccines breakthrough.”
Peru has the highest COVID-19 death rate of any country in the world, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center: about 600 for every 100,000 people infected with COVID-19. That’s about twice the amount of Hungary, the country with the next highest COVID-19 death rate. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that the lambda variant has been the COVID carrier in about 81% of infections in Peru since April. The WHO declared the lambda variant a variant of interest last month. The lambda variant has spread to about 30 other countries in the world, including the United Kingdom.
