SINGAPORE – Experts in Singapore say there is no fact that Malaysia has discovered a strain of coronavirus that causes Covid-19 that is 10 times more infectious.
They also say that this strain, D614G, which is already in Singapore, will have no effect on vaccine development.
Malaysia’s Director-General of Health, Dr. Noor Hisham Abdullah, posted on his Facebook page on Sunday (August 16) that the mutation, which he said had been “discovered by scientists in July 2020” and now known in 3 patients in Malaysia, is “10 times to infect other individuals.”
He added that progressive vaccines would possibly be useless in the face of this mutation.
He attributed the spread of two recent groups to this mutation, which first occurred in Malaysia last month.
But Professor Wang Linfa, director of the Emerging Infectious Diseases Program at Duke-NUS School of Medicine, told the Straits Times that “there is no genuine clinical evidence to claim that the D614G is more communicable, not to mention the claim 10 times.”
His program assistant, Professor Ooi Eng Eong, said, “This mutation would not actually have an effect on the effectiveness of the vaccine, as vaccines would generate antibodies that would bind to many other portions of the complex protein of the virus and would not only be limited to the site of the mutation.”
Associate Professor Hsu Liyang, infectious disease specialist at THE NUS School of Public Health Saw Swee Hock, the mutation has been circulating here since February.
Singapore secluded a pattern of the virus in patients and discovered more than a hundred with this mutation between February and July.
Since only a fraction of the virus samples are sequenced, Professor Hsu said this would likely mean that thousands of infections here are due to the D614G mutation.
In June, an article in the prestigious Cell newspaper claimed that the D614G variant made the world dominant.
Professor Wang said this variant is genetically more adapted, but that doesn’t mean it spreads more fluently or causes a more serious disease.
Dr. Asok Kurup, who chairs the Infectious Physicians Section of the Academy of Medicine, said there were no clinical effects on the mutation.
But he added that if this were to be more contagious, existing measures such as masking and social estrangement would be even more important.
This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission is required for playback.