SARS-CoV-2 B 1 617 2 variant rampant in State thehindu.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thehindu.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Long Bets is a philanthropic website built with funds from Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. Anyone can post a prediction and a challenge the winner donates the money to charity. Lord Rees, the prominent British astronomer, placed a bet in 2017 that “bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a six-month period starting no later than December 31, 2020.” His friend and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker took up the wager and lost. All bets are off as the pandemic cuts widening fatal swathe in India because of no trials and many errors.
In a podcast, Niall Ferguson, the author of
Reports of breakthrough infection with varying degrees of severity and even death have been reported across the country but there is no data available on post-vaccination deaths.
Reduced antibodies not a cause of worry on efficacy against COVID-19, say experts
Both Covishield and Covaxin, while effective at generating an immune response against the coronavirus, appear to generate only half as many antibodies against the B.1.617 strain, or the Indian strain, according to a series of early reports authored by scientists at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Several scientists told
The Hindu that this drop didn t diminish the fact that the vaccines continued to be potent tool against COVID-19.
Scientists at the ICMR-National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune have since January been collecting samples from coronavirus-positive individuals and testing them for prominent variants mostly the international variants of concern B.1.1.7 (UK variant), the B.1.351 (South Africa variant), the P2 (Brazil variant) and B.1.617 (Indian variant). Three related variants of the B.1.617 now make up an increasing proportion of cases in India.