Home » New covid variant in France, divided experts and WHO monitors

New covid variant in France, divided experts and WHO monitors

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While Omicron continues its rise by pushing covid infections – also in Italy – a new variant of the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus animates the debates in these days: B.1.640.2. On 9 December, experts from the Ihu Méditerranée Infection of Marseille explained that they had detected it in 12 patients from Forcalquier, in the South of France.

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The variant, reported in the post, was baptized ‘IHU’ and deposited on the Gisaid platform with the name B.1.640.2. The ‘zero’ patient in this cluster of cases, as emerges from various reports in the French media, had returned from Cameroon. Why bother? Because, the scientists explain, this new mutant – which descends from the line of another variant, B.1.640 (first identified in Congo and France in September 2021) – appears to have 46 new mutations and 37 deletions, more than Omicron then.

We are talking about it now because in recent days the work of the French group on the variant was published in a pre-printed version (not subjected to peer review) on the ‘Medrxiv’ platform. But experts are divided in the approach to this mutant and in the definition of the scope of the threat. The World Health Organization, for its part, monitors from a distance. And WHO expert Maria Van Kerkhove via Twitter recalls that the ‘mother’ of this sub-variant – B.1.640 – has been “classified as ‘Variant under monitoring’ (Vum)” by the UN health agency “since November” and that WHO has a solid system for intercepting and evaluating the evolution of Sars-CoV-2.

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Virologist Tom Peacock, of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College London, is not convinced by the excess of spotlight on the variant.

And he explains why via social media: for the expert it is necessary to keep in mind some aspects, such as the fact that “B.1.640.2 actually precedes Omicron”, he writes in a tweet, and that “in all this time there have been” exactly “21 sequences” deposited. “I wouldn’t worry too much at the moment.”

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