Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, prepares to testify before a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Work and Pensions (HELP) at Capitol Hill in Washington, USA, 30 June 2020.
Kevin Dietsch | Reuters
The coronavirus has mutated in a way that could help the pathogen spread more easily, White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday.
Investigations are underway to confirm the possible mutation and its implications, Fauci said, adding that “there is a small dispute about it.” Viruses mutate naturally, and scientists have previously said that they have observed minor mutations in the coronavirus that have not affected its ability to spread or cause disease in any significant way.
The possible mutation Fauci cited was first reported by researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in an article published in the journal Cell on Thursday.
“The data shows that there is a single mutation that makes the virus better able to replicate and perhaps have high viral loads,” Fauci said in an interview with Dr. Howard Bauchner of the American Medical Association. “We don’t have a connection to whether a person worsens with this or not; it just seems like the virus replicates better and may be more transmissible.”
He added that investigators “are still in the stage of trying to confirm that.”
The World Health Organization and its team of global researchers have been monitoring more than 60,000 different genetic sequences of the coronavirus collected from samples taken worldwide.
All viruses evolve, or mutate, throughout their useful lives. RNA viruses like coronaviruses mutate faster than other viruses, senior WHO officials told reporters last month, because unlike human DNA, RNA viruses do not have “natural error checking,” which means that the virus code cannot correct itself.
Not all mutations will lead to any significant change in the behavior of the virus or its impact on humans, the WHO said previously. However, the United Nations health agency has formed a comprehensive genetic sequence database to investigate possible mutations.
On Thursday morning, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, WHO chief scientist, told reporters at a press conference that “natural mutations” of the virus were expected. He explained that there are certain “domains” of the virus that are “more critical,” such as the spike protein, for which the coronavirus gets its name.
“If major mutations occurred in those domains, it could actually affect vaccine development,” he said.
The mutation the Los Alamos researchers wrote about is affecting a specific amino acid, the report’s authors wrote. The mutated variant is known as D614G.
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