How the British variant became so powerful

Alpha’s swift success has left scientists wondering how the variant conquered the world. A new study points to one secret to its success: Alpha disables the first line of immune defense in our bodies, giving the variant more time to multiply. “It’s very impressive,” said Dr. Maudry Laurent-Rolle, a physician and virologist at the Yale School of Medicine who was not involved in the new study. “Any successful virus has to get beyond that first defense system. The more successful it is at doing that, the better off the virus is.”... They found that lung cells with Alpha made drastically less interferon, a protein that switches on a host of immune defenses. They also found that in the Alpha cells, the defensive genes normally switched on by interferon were quieter than in cells infected with other variants. Somehow, the immune system’s most important alarm bells were barely ringing in the presence of the Alpha variant. “It’s making itself more invisible,” Dr. Towers said.