Jake Tapper noted on Thursday that two House Republicans have confirmed to him that “at least 140 Republicans” in the will oppose the certification of the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6.
The Electoral College has already voted for Joe Biden to attain the Oval Office over Donald Trump, the result of a tight contest, but the results of that vote are still to be certified prior to Biden taking power.
It was on Wednesday that Senator Josh Hawley issued a statement that he would not vote in favor of certifying the results. He was widely criticized for this, but said that he was fighting for “Millions of voters concerned about election integrity deserve to be heard,” he said that he would “object on January 6 on their behalf.”
He has reportedly been joined by more in the GOP who back his assertion that he “cannot vote to certify the electoral college results on January 6 without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws.”
CNN reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had instructed Republicans not to go ahead with opposing the vote. However, McConnell has also withheld the scheduling of a vote on the COVID relief bill, which was passed by the House, signed by Trump, and now will be unlikely to clear the Senate prior to the new year.
Hawley stated that he “cannot vote to certify without pointing out the unprecedented effort of mega corporations, including Facebook and Twitter, to interfere in this election, in support of Joe Biden. At the very least, Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity of our elections.”
Hawley said “But Congress has so far failed to act.”
When Trump was elected in 2016 and when George W. Bush was elected in 2000, Democrats brought objections with regard to the electoral votes. Sen. Barbara Boxer, in 2005, objected to those electoral votes from Ohio that were cast in favor of President Bush.
This resulted in Congress needing to debate separately for two hours over whether or not to allow Ohio’s votes for Bush to stand. While neither chamber voted to reject the votes, Sen. Dick Durban backed the move to consider rejecting the votes, saying that:
“Some may criticize our colleague [Sen. Barbara Boxer] from California for bringing us here for this brief debate,” Durbin said at the time, noting that he would not vote to reject Ohio’s electoral votes. “I thank her for doing that because it gives members an opportunity once again on a bipartisan basis to look at a challenge that we face not just in the last election in one State but in many States.”
After the Nov. 3 general election, issues regarding alleged ballot fraud and election irregularities were raised, and the Trump campaign pursued lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Nevada to obtain recounts and audits of absentee ballots.
The state of Texas brought a case against Pennsylvania to the Supreme Court, but the court declined to hear it. Despite legal failures, many in the GOP have stated their ongoing concerns not just about the general election results, but election and voting procedures in states across the US.
A major issue concerned absentee balloting, which was ramped up as Democrats stoked fears that voting in person could spread coronavirus and pose a danger to those practicing their civic duty.
There have only been two presidential elections that were decided in the House of Representatives, those in 1800 and 1824. However, Congress has never amended the Electoral College votes.
On September 23, 2017 the sun will be in the zodiac constellation Virgo— “a woman clothed with the sun”. The moon will be at the feet of Virgo — “with the moon under her feet”. The ‘nine’ stars of thezodiacconstellationLeo, plus three planets (Mercury, Venus, and Mars), will be at the head of Virgo — “on her head a crown of 12 stars”. The planet Jupiter will be in the center of Virgo, and, as the weeks pass after September 23, Jupiter will exit Virgo to the east, past her feet, so to speak — “She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth”. Jupiter is the largest of the planets, the “king” of the planets, so to speak — “She gave birth to a son, a male child, destined to rule all the nations with an iron rod”.
But what of the crown of 12 “stars,” comprised of three planets and the nine stars of Leo? The response to this question is another question — why nine stars in Leo? There are many more than nine stars in Leo. Those nine are just brighter ones that are often depicted as comprising the general outline or shape of the constellation. But in fact there are scads of stars in Leo and surrounding the “head” of Virgo.
“And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth… She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron” (Revelation 12:1-2,5)
Some believe that September 23, 2017, there will be a unique alignment of sky objects that fulfills this prophetic picture.
“The woman” is the constellation Virgo. This constellation is represented as a woman in many ancient mythologies—from the groups who lived along the Euphrates, to the Eastern cultures of India and China, to the ancient Egyptians, to the classical cultures of Greece and Rome.
“Clothed with the sun” means the sun will be aligned with Virgo. As the earth moves around the sun, the sun ends up being in the same line of sight with different constellations throughout the year (what we call the signs of the Zodiac). In Septembers, the sun is aligned with Virgo.
“With the moon under her feet” means the moon will be aligned with the feet of Virgo. As the moon moves around the earth, it is also aligned with different constellations from month to month. On September 23, 2017, the moon will be near the feet of Virgo.
“On her head a crown of twelve stars” means there will be 12 “stars” directly above the head of Virgo. The constellation Leo is directly above Virgo’s head, containing what many believe to be 9 bright stars. Through the latter half of the month of September 2017, there will be 3 planets aligned with the constellation Leo, bringing the number of bright “stars” above the head of Virgo to 12.
“She gave birth to a male child” is a reference to Jupiter in the womb of Virgo. Throughout late August and most of September 2017, the planet Jupiter is lined up with the abdomen of Virgo. Jupiter was understood by the ancients to be the king of the planets, thus ruler is seen in the belly of Virgo.
Two senior administration officials close to President Donald TrumptoldAxios on Wednesday that the president recently received an intelligence briefing with not-yet corroborated claims China offered bounties to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and he plans to declassify that intelligence soon.
The officials said national security adviser Robert O’Brien briefed Trump on the preliminary intelligence on Dec. 17. Axios reported they did not receive any intelligence documents, but an intelligence summary was described to them in a phone call with the administration officials.
“The U.S. has evidence that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] attempted to finance attacks on American servicemen by Afghan non-state actors by offering financial incentives or ‘bounties,'” one official said, adding that the National Security Council “is coordinating a whole-of-government investigation” to investigate the allegations.
That same official would not specify who the “non-state actors” were. When asked about the timing of the alleged bounty offer, they did not provide an exact timeline but said it came after the U.S. and Taliban reached a peace agreement in late February of this year. America has not sustained any combat deaths in Afghanistan in the timeframe alleged, though fighting has continued between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
The U.S. has previously suspected China’s involvement in the Afghan conflict. Beijing has had meetings with Taliban officials, purporting to discuss peace deals in Afghanistan.
Chinese-made weapons and financing have also reportedly flowed into Afghanistan in the past. One official said the Trump administration had received an earlier intelligence report about “[People’s Republic of China] weapons illicitly flowing into Afghanistan.”
Claims of Chinese arms going to the Taliban aren’t new. The U.S. and British governments both raised such allegations as far back as 2007.
Afghan officials also recently discovered an alleged Chinese spy ring in Afghanistan. The Hindustan Times reported last week that the spy ring was in Afghanistan tracking Uighur Muslims, a minority group China has persecuted in recent years. China may have been trying to prevent Chinese Muslim separatists from using Afghanistan as a base of operations.
In separate remarks to Axios, Andrew Small, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund who specializes in China-Afghanistan affairs, cast doubt on the intelligence claims about China. Small said the intelligence claims seem “incongruous” with China’s motives and said one area where Chinese and U.S. interests seem to overlap is on reaching peace in Afghanistan.
Earlier this year, the administration was criticized over claims Russia had also offered bounty payments to target U.S. troops. The Russian bounty claims similarly surfaced after the Trump administration struck the U.S.-Taliban peace agreement. U.S. officials have also questioned the accuracy of the Russian bounty claims. In September, over two months after the Russian bounty allegations were publicly reported, Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), said there still hasn’t been any corroboration for the claims.
The senators are asking the state’s largest county to make the ballots “available for inspection” through a method outlined during the hearing by digital ID systems inventor Jovan Pulitzer.
Pulitzer suggested all absentee ballots in the state of Georgia be forensically examined and fraudulent ones identified in just a matter of hours. He called on state officials to allow the examination.
Officials in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office didn’t immediately respond to requests by The Epoch Times for comment on the subcommittee motion.
“Fulton County did not participate in today’s hearing,” county spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt-Dominguez said in an email to The Epoch Times. “We will continue to collaborate with the Secretary of State and General Assembly as we execute elections in compliance with all applicable state and federal laws.”
Georgia is one of the states where election results are being contested by the campaign of President Donald Trump and others. The current count in the state shows former Vice President Joe Biden ahead by some 12,000 votes.
The state has conducted manual and machine recounts, and an absentee ballot signature match audit in one county. These uncovered some issues
and irregularities, but not enough to flip the results.
The brunt of the fraud allegations has been aimed at the heavily Democratic Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.
One of the county’s polling managers previously told state lawmakers that she opened a box of mail-in ballots with a batch of 110 that were “pristine” and not folded, indicating that they were never put in secrecy envelopes, as is required.
Pulitzer said that he and his team can detect if that’s the case.
Security camera footage from election night shows that in Fulton County, what appears to be tens of thousands of ballots were counted in the absence of party or state monitors. The video seems to show that election workers scanned the same batches of ballots repeatedly. This could be a legitimate action when there’s a scanning error in the batch, such as when the ballots get jammed in the scanner.
In that scenario, the workers are supposed to discard the whole batch of scans and scan the ballots again, but the video quality makes it hard to discern if that was the case in each instance . Pulitzer said that he and his team could detect if that was the case as well.
“We would be able to tell if they were folded, if they were counterfeit, whether they were filled out by a human hand, whether they were printed by a machine, whether they were batch-fed continually over and over, we can detect every bit of that,” he testified.
The ballot paper itself, when scanned, becomes a piece of code, he explained. Every time the paper is physically handled, such as folded or written upon, the code would change and the change can be detected.
The examination he proposed can be done expediently, he said.
“All of these problems that you’ve heard today can be corrected and detected now by the simplest of things. It takes you days or weeks to recount votes. Give me these 500,000 ballots, we’ll have them done in two hours,” he said, apparently referring to the 528,777 ballots cast in Fulton.
About 5 million ballots were cast statewide.
Pulitzer criticized state authorities for refusing to allow a full-scale forensic audit.
“This is the historical artifact of a voter. And states are telling voters, ‘You have no right to that,’” he said.
“The very voter that pays your salary, that paid for that ballot, that paid for that piece of paper, and paid for the machine that you’re running it in. And so those people that pay your salary, that you work for, and do this for, you’re telling them, ‘You can’t look at them.’
LOS ANGELES - In astudypublished in September, researchers from Ohio State University found that out of more than two dozen athletes from the university who tested positive for COVID-19, 30% had cellular heart damage and 15% showed signs of heart inflammation caused by a condition known as myocarditis.
After mapping the hearts of 26 Ohio State University athletes using a process known as cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), researchers found that not only 15% of students exhibited the rare heart condition but 30% showed cellular damage.
"Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging has the potential to identify a high-risk cohort for adverse outcomes and may, importantly, risk-stratify athletes for safe participation," study authors wrote. "Recent studies have raised concerns of myocardial inflammation after recovery from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), even in asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic patients."
According to researchers, "myocarditis is a significant cause of sudden cardiac death in competitive athletes."
Acoording to the Mayo Clinic, myocarditis is typically caused by a viral infection with symptoms ranging from chest pain, fatigue, shortness of breath, to a negative impact on heart rate and rhythm as seen in conditions such as arrhythmias.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tweeted on Sept. 17, "Heart conditions like myocarditis are associated with some cases of #COVID19. Severe cardiac damage is rare but has occurred, even in young, healthy people."
Medical experts have previously warned the public of links between the novel coronavirus and heart damage, especially in young people.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health explained that while COVID-19 most commonly impacts the lungs as it is a respiratory illness, damage to the lungs can lead to serious heart complications.
Because the heart needs oxygen to function properly, COVID-19 can damage the lungs, preventing enough oxygen from reaching the heart muscle and further restricting oxygen from reaching other important tissues in the body.
A separate report by a group of U.S. doctors published in the medical journal JACC warned of the potential of heart damage to children from the novel coronavirus.
The report detailed the case of a 2-month-old infant diagnosed with COVID-19 who experienced a myocardial injury as well as a type of heart failure most commonly seen in adults.
"Most children with Covid-19 are either asymptomatic or have mild symptoms, but our case shows the potential for reversible myocardial (heart) injury in infants," said Dr. Madhu Sharma, the report’s lead author.
In a news release published on Dec. 2, the group of doctors said the infant recovered with normal heart function and was eventually discharged with no heart failure medications.
"The presentation and clinical course of this patient mirrors four case reports of acute myocardial injury reported in adult patients with COVID-19," said Sharma.
Another study published on June 25 in the journal Cell Reports Medicine found thatCOVID-19 has also been known to instigate inflammatory responses in the body which can negatively affect the function of one’s heart and brain.
According to the study, researchers observed SARS-CoV-2 infecting human heart cells that were grown from stem cells in a lab. Within 72 hours of infection, the virus managed to spread and replicate, killing the heart cells.
The researchers brought up the particularly alarming possibility that if COVID-19 can can infect the heart cells in a laboratory setting, it could possibly infect those specific organs, prompting the need for a "cardiac-specific antiviral drug screen program."
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he will object during the counting of the Electoral College vote process on Jan. 6, becoming the first senator to confirm they are joining an effort launched by more than a dozen House Republicans.
Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) attends the confirmation hearing of Attorney General nominee William Barr at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 15, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
“I cannot vote to certify the electoral college results on Jan. 6 without raising the fact
that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws,” Hawley wrote in a statement on Dec. 30. “And I cannot vote to certify without pointing out the unprecedented effort of mega-corporations, including Facebook and Twitter, to interfere in this election, in support of Joe Biden,” he added.
Hawley said that Congress should investigate voter fraud allegations and make sure that future elections are secure. According to the Missouri Republican, both chambers have failed to act in an appropriate manner.
“For these reasons,” Hawley continued, “I will follow the same practice Democrat members of Congress have in years past and object during the certification process on Jan. 6 to raise these critical issues.”
Hawley noted that Democrats objected during the 2004 and 2016 elections “in order to raise concerns” about election integrity. “They were praised by Democratic leadership and the media when they” objected, Hawley added, saying that they “were entitled to do so” and Republicans concerned about election integrity in the Nov. 3 election “are entitled to do the same.”
For the past several weeks, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) and other House GOP lawmakers have pledged to object to the counting of the Electoral College votes during the Joint Session of Congress. Their effort requires a senator and a House member that would trigger a series of debates before a vote on whether to certify a state’s Electoral College votes is held.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) in an interview with “American Thought Leaders.” (The Epoch Times
Some members of the GOP leadership, including Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.), have said their efforts are doomed to fail. And over the past weekend, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), in comments widely publicized by news outlets, referred to Brooks’s effort as “a scam.”
And, according to anonymously sourced reports, Senate Majority Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told GOP senators that they should not take part in the House GOP-led effort on Jan. 6. Another Republican, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), said the attempt to challenge the votes is an improbable one.
“It’s basically going through the motions,” Cornyn said, reported The Hill. “It’s a futile exercise.”
But Brooks, for his part, indicated that “dozens” of House members back the effort. “We’re going to sponsor and co-sponsor objections to the Electoral College vote returns,” Brooks told Fox News on Dec. 28.
In a previous interview with The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders program, Brooks said he believes the Electoral College vote can be rejected, and the election can ultimately be decided in the House of Representatives.
Former California Sen. Barbara Boxer “tried to strike Ohio for George Bush back in 2005, so this is not unusual,” Brooks said in an interview with Fox Business on Dec. 15. “The law is very clear, the House of Representatives in combination with the United States Senate has the lawful authority to accept or reject Electoral College vote submissions from states that have such flawed election systems that they’re not worthy of our trust.”
The new Congress is slated to be sworn in on Jan. 3.
Letlow, 41, was transferred from St. Francis Medical Center to the Ochsner LSU Health ICU on Dec. 23 and has been treated there since then.
Letlow is survived by his wife, Julia Barnhill Letlow, and two young children.
"The family appreciates the numerous prayers and support over the past days but asks for privacy during this difficult and unexpected time," the family said in a statement. "A statement from the family along with funeral arrangements will be announced at a later time."
Letlow, R-Start, announced Dec. 18 he tested positive for COVID-19 and was first quarantining at his Richland Parish home.
But on Dec. 19, he was admitted to St. Francis as symptoms persisted and eventually he was transferred to Shreveport.
Gov. John Bel Edwards mourned Letlow's death.
"COVID-19 has taken Congressman-elect Letlow from us far too soon," Edwards said. "I am heartbroken that he will not be able to serve our people as a U.S. representative, but I am even more devastated for his loving family.
"I hope all of the people of Louisiana will join Donna and me in praying for Congressman-elect Letlow’s family, especially his wife Julia and their two children, his many friends and the people of the 5th Congressional District. Louisiana has lost more than 7,300 people to COVID-19 since March, and each one of them leaves a tremendous hole in our state.”
Letlow won the 5th Congressional District seat with 62% of the vote Dec. 5 in a runoff election against fellow Republican state Rep. Lance Harris of Alexandria.
He would have succeeded his former boss Congressman Ralph Abraham, R-Alto, who didn't seek reelection after honoring a pledge to serve a limit of three terms.
Letlow had been Abraham's chief of staff.
Louisiana's 5th District is the largest geographically in the state covering 24 parishes. Alexandria and Monroe are the population hubs, but the boundaries dip into Acadiana to take in Opelousas and into the Florida parishes to take in Bogalusa.
Colorado officials on Tuesday reported the first known case in the United States of a person infected with the coronavirus variant that has been circulating rapidly across much of the United Kingdom and has led to a lockdown of much of southern England.
Scientists believe the variant is more transmissible but does not make people sicker.
The Colorado case involves a male in his 20s who is currently in isolation in Elbert County, about 70 miles southeast of Denver, who has no travel history, according to a tweet from the office of Gov. Jared Polis.
“The individual has no close contacts identified so far but public health officials are working to identify other potential cases and contacts through thorough contact tracing interviews,” the statement said.
A federal scientist familiar with the investigation said the individual’s lack of known travel — in contrast with most confirmed cases outside the United Kingdom — indicates this is not likely an isolated case. “We can expect that it will be detected elsewhere,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the broader context of the announcement.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that in a statement Tuesday afternoon, saying additional cases with the new variant will be detected in the U.S. in the coming days. The variant’s apparent increase in contagiousness “could lead to more cases and place greater demand on already strained health care resources,” the agency said in a statement.
Researchers have now detected the more transmissible variant in at least 17 countries outside the United Kingdom, including as far away as Australia and South Korea, as of Tuesday afternoon. Officials in Canada had previously said they had identified two cases.
While the U.K. variant appears more contagious, it is not leading to higher rates of hospitalizations or deaths, according to a new report from Public Health England, a government agency. Nor is there any sign that people who were infected months ago with the coronavirus are more likely to be reinfected if exposed to the variant, according to the report. All available evidence indicates that vaccines, and immunity built up in the population, should be protective against this variant.
The Colorado case occurred in a county of about 27,000, which is currently classified, along with much of the state, in the “red” level for covid-19, denoting serious but not extreme risk.
Two weeks ago, several hundred people gathered at a community church in the county seat of Kiowa to consider whether to pursue legal actions against Polis and other state officials for imposing covid-related restrictions, according to the Elbert County News. County commissioners and the county sheriff have declined to enforce restrictions emanating from Denver.
“I was expecting to see it in ski country first because those areas are where people from across Colorado, the U.S. and internationally, gather,” said Elizabeth Carlton, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. The absence of any apparent travel history associated with the infected person, she said, suggests he “can’t be the only case in Colorado.”
Polis, in his statement, called on Coloradans to do everything they could to prevent transmission by wearing masks, standing six feet apart when gathering with others, and interacting only with members of their immediate households.
[‘Eye of the storm’: As U.K. coronavirus cases hit record high, health-care workers are overwhelmed]
The arrival of the new variant “doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of the threat,” said Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s no more deadly than the virus was before, and it doesn’t look like it infects people who are immune.”
Lessler echoed others, saying he would be “astounded” if this were the only chain of transmission of the new variant in the U.S. “We know that the virus spreads easily and quickly between countries,” he said, and the fact that the infected person had no travel history indicates “this strain has gotten here sometime in the past, and there are chains of transmission ongoing.”
The variant has a higher attack rate, according to the UK report, which bolsters the hypothesis that the variant has outcompeted other versions of the coronavirus and is now the dominant variant across much of the United Kingdom. Among people known to have been exposed to someone already infected with the variant, 15.1 percent became infected. People exposed to someone infected with the non-variant version had a 9.8 percent infection rate.
That difference suggests the variant is more transmissible, though the health agency said more investigation is needed to bolster the hypothesis.
The working theory among many scientists is that the increased transmissibility of the variant, known as B.1.1.7, is driven by mutations that have altered the spike protein on the surface of the virus. The variant has 17 mutations — eight of which alter the spike protein.
Precisely how those changes are leading to more infections is unknown. The virus may be binding more easily to receptor cells in the human body, or replicating more easily and driving higher viral loads, enhancing viral shedding by someone who is infected. Another possibility is that people are shedding virus for a longer period, upping the chances of passing along the virus.
“Preliminary evidence suggests that the new variant does not cause more severe disease or increased mortality,”said Susan Hopkins, a senior medical adviser to Public Health England, in a statement released Tuesday.
The newly published data echo the findings in a separate study published last week, based on modeling and hospitalization data — and not yet peer-reviewed — that estimated that the variant is 56 percent more transmissible but doesn’t appear to alter the lethality of the virus.
“The good news is that B.1.1.7 does not seem to cause much more severe disease, and there’s no evidence that it is managing to evade the immune system, which means vaccines are expected to protect against it,” William Hanage, an epidemiologists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said Tuesday after reviewing the new report. “The bad news is that B.1.1.7 does appear to be much more transmissible.”
Officials in the United States have been signaling since last week that the new variantwas likely already present in this country.
“I’m not surprised,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Tuesday. “I think we have to keep an eye on it, and we have to take it seriously. We obviously take any kind of mutation that might have a functional significance seriously. But I don’t think we know enough about it to make any definitive statements, except to follow it carefully and study it carefully.”
Research findings on coronavirus variants have been ambiguous at times, and scientists say they are still trying to extract reliable signals from noisy data. Several false alarms have been sounded about virus mutations in the past. A major challenge is discerning whether a virus variant is spreading rapidly because it has a competitive advantage based on genetic and structural differences, or is simply lucky, having arrived early to a location, or leveraged a few superspreader events to gain dominance.
But with the United Kingdom seeing a severe winter surge of infections, public officials are taking no chances and have effectively locked down southern England, including London. Other countries have banned travelers from the United Kingdom.
The United States, despite having the world’s highest number of documented infections, has a weak track record in publishing genomic sequences, the process that enables researchers to track changes in the virus. Most sequences have been published by academic or private research institutions. By contrast, the United Kingdom has a national health system with a robust surveillance system.
“The U.K. made the decision in the spring to do this. The U.S. has sequencing equipment and infrastructure. As with many things in this pandemic, it was not executed the way it should have been,” said Neville Sanjana, a geneticist at New York University.
All viruses mutate randomly and over time some of those mutations appear to confer some kind of advantage to the virus as in adapts to the human species. The novel coronavirus, SARS-C0V-2, mutates at a slow rate, and scientists do not think the genetic changes seen in the variant so far are sufficient to allow it to elude the vaccines now being administered to millions of people in many countries. But the coronavirus is a moving target and these mutations require surveillance.
Many scientists call the arrival of more transmissible mutations a wake-up call. “The lack of virus sequencing and case tracking in the USA is a scandal,”said Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
Francois Balloux, who directs the Genetics Institute at University College London, predicted on Twitter that within two weeks enough data will accumulate to determine whether this new variant is indeed more transmissible. Previously, Balloux and his colleagues combed through genome sequences, looking for evidence that common variants had increased transmissibility.
“We don’t see much,” he said, referring to a report published in Nature in November that found no signs of mutations that helped the virus to spread more easily. But he said that he “wouldn’t underestimate the evolutionary potential of SARS-Cov-2.”
