S1E61 / The UK’s B.1.1.7 Variant — More Contagious and Virulent / Andrew Hayward, Trevor Bedford, Gard Nelson, Graham Medley

EPIDEMIC with Dr. Celine Gounder

KFF Health News and Just Human Productions

Society & Culture, #Eradication, Medicine, #Covid, Science, Life Sciences, #Sarscov2, Documentary, #Coronavirus, #Covid19, Health & Fitness, #Smallpox

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2021

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"I had been assuming that my life and everyone else's life would get closer to normal in March. This [variant] has me worried that it won't be March, that we'll have a spring wave and I don't know how big that will be." -Trevor Bedford This winter a new, more contagious variant of SARS-CoV-2 arose in the United Kingdom: B.1.1.7. The CDC estimates that this will become the dominant strain of coronavirus in the United States by March. This is the first of several episodes on the science and policy implications of the new coronavirus variants emerging out of the UK, South Africa, and Brazil. This episode will discuss how new variants are created, why we need to worry about B.1.1.7, and what this all means for public health in the coming months. This podcast was created by Just Human Productions. We're powered and distributed by Simplecast. We're supported, in part, by listeners like you. #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 #COVID #coronavirus

Transcript

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0:00.0	All strains of COVID really have the potential to cause enormous disruption and the more
0:12.3	viruses you have, the greater the chance that you actually have a variant which is going
0:16.8	to evolve around what you're doing.
0:31.0	You're listening to Epidemic, the podcast about the science, public health and social
0:35.2	impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. I'm your host, Dr. Saline Gounder.
0:46.8	The winner started with a lot of hope.
0:53.2	All right, breaking news, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer just announced moments ago that its
0:57.9	coronavirus vaccine is 95% effective and that they will apply for FDA emergency use approval
1:04.2	within days.
1:05.7	The FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use on December 11th.
1:10.8	The FDA says its review of the data suggests Pfizer's COVID vaccine is very promising.
1:16.7	And then the Moderna vaccine got approved soon after.
1:20.4	For the second time in just over a week, a panel of scientists advising the U.S. Food and Drug
1:24.9	Administration recommended another COVID-19 vaccine, this one produced by Moderna, which
1:30.6	is 94% effective.
1:35.5	But around this same time, something was stirring in the United Kingdom.
1:39.9	I think the first sign of this really was we were in a period of lockdown.
1:46.9	This is Andrew Hayward. He's the director of the University College of London Institute
1:52.2	of Epidemiology in healthcare.
1:55.0	And what we could see was that in one area of southern England in Kent, there were increasing
2:01.4	rates of the virus despite the tight control measures, whereas in other areas everything
2:07.6	was going down and we couldn't really understand that.
	...

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