Coronavirus mutation in minks could threaten vaccine efficacy
- Denmark said that a mutation of the virus had jumped from minks to humans and infected 214 people
- The Scandinavian country has warned the new strain could undermine the effectiveness of any future vaccine
Fast-forward to November, and Frederiksen’s stance has radically changed. She’s announced plans to kill Denmark’s entire mink population – which, at 17 million, outnumbers humans in the country by a factor of three.
The news has caught the attention of health officials across the world after Frederiksen warned that certain strains of the coronavirus – having apparently jumped from mink back into humans – developed mutations that could undermine the efficacy of any vaccines.
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Scientists reacted with plenty of head scratching at first, along with calls to see some supporting evidence from the Danes backing drastic measures that will cripple the country’s fur industry.
On Friday, officials said they’d shared the entire genome sequence of at least one mink-related strain of the coronavirus. That was enough to convince some outside researchers that Frederiksen wasn’t overreacting.
“It would be nice if it could be confirmed first in another laboratory,” Eskild Petersen, an infectious diseases professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, said in an interview. “But this is an evolving public health emergency. You have to act, and that’s what the government has done.”
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In total, Danish officials have detected 214 cases of people infected with a mink-related strain of the virus. That’s after scientists completely sequenced a pool of 5,000 Danish patient samples from recent months. Officials expect confirmed linked to the outbreak in the animals to rise in coming weeks as they fully analyse more than 30,000 other samples from that period.