COVID vaccinations are slowing -- just in time for the Indian variant

The Indian lineage might not actually be from India. But it’s in India that scientists first detected it, way back in October. It took months for the lineage, which geneticists call “B.1.617,” to become dominant in the South Asian country. Once it did, it helped to drive a spike in infections. India, which with 1.37 billion people is the world’s second most populous country, had managed to drive new infections down to just 11,000 a day as recently as mid-January. Last week the country logged a record 233,000 new cases a day, on average There’s a lot we don’t know about B.1.617. We don’t know whether it’s more virulent. We don’t know for sure whether it can evade, even partially, any of the vaccines in use across the roughly two dozen countries where the lineage has spread. But geneticists have identified two key mutations in the Indian lineage. The E484Q and L452R mutations both affect the spike protein that the virus uses to grab onto and infect our cells. It’s because of these twin genetic changes that some experts refer to the lineage as a “double-mutant”—although other experts warn that all coronavirus lineages feature numerous mutations.