The CEO of Johnson & Johnson said Tuesday that people may need to be vaccinated against COVID-19 annually for the next several years; similar to seasonal flu shots. “Unfortunately, as the virus spreads, it can also mutate,” Alex Gorsky said in an interview on CNBS. “Every time it mutates, it’s almost like another click of the dial, so to speak, …
The emerging variants the CDC is closely monitoring have mutations in the virus genome that alter the characteristics and cause the virus to act differently in ways that are significant to public health (i.e., causes more severe disease, spreads more easily between humans, requires different treatments, changes the effectiveness of current vaccines). It is important to understand that genetic mutations …
Variants of the COVID-19 virus are very much in the news and we are seeing is a slow but steady evolution of the coronavirus. There are now four major variants of the virus that are of concern and in fact, experts refer to them as “variants of concern”. The first recognized variant was the U.K. variant, identified in the southern …
The United States has the most coronavirus cases in the world but in sequencing cases to check for genetic changes, it lags at an astoundingly low rate. Of the more than 18 million cases officially reported in the U.S., just 51,212 or 0.3% have been genetically analyzed for variants. Worldwide, the United States ranks 43rd in percentage of cases sequenced …
