In South Africa, a network of researchers is studying whether lineages BA.4 and BA.5 escape immunity from COVID-19 vaccines and previous infections.
Tulio de Oliveira’s team at Stellenbosch University in South Africa discovered the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of Omicron.Speckled guineafowl drift into the garden where Tulio de Oliveira sits as he describes two new members of the growing Omicron family of SARS-CoV-2 coronaviruses. Called BA.4 and BA.
At the same time, researchers are grappling with how to openly communicate their concerns and the uncertainty about variants while not provoking unnecessary government policies and anxiety. Late last year, when de Oliveira’s team detected the original Omicron variant, some countries — including the United States and the United Kingdom — imposed travel bans against South Africa. The bans failed to prevent the variant’s spread, but severely damaged the already struggling South African economy.
In addition to the accumulating sequences from South Africa, a few BA.4 sequences from Botswana, Belgium, Denmark and the United Kingdom have been uploaded to the data platform GISAID in the past two weeks, and BA.5 sequences from China, France, Germany and Portugal have appeared there too. At the time, Lee was relieved that the mutation was vanishingly rare in real life, suggesting that it hindered the virus in some way. Only about 50 of the nearly 10 million SARS-CoV-2 sequences in GISAID contained the mutation, so Lee felt assured that the antibody treatment would still be broadly useful. But with the rapid rise of BA.4 and BA.5 in South Africa, it seems that the coronavirus has evolved so that the mutation no longer holds it back, Lee explains.
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