New coronavirus mutation takes flight around the globe as health officials scramble to mount new defenses

If there’s one pandemic fact that has been proved beyond a doubt, it’s that a virus can spread faster than the news. And in this digital world, where headlines leap borders in a moment, that’s an alarming development to keep in mind for the future.

Today, as Americans were waking up for their Black Friday rituals, they were greeted with the news that a new mutation of the Covid-19 virus has appeared — after it caught an international flight to Hong Kong.

The variant is now tagged as B.1.1.529.

Here’s what we know.

Over the past 48 hours health officials spotted the new variant as it spurred an increase in infections around Johannesburg.

‘This variant did surprise us — it has a big jump in evolution, many more mutations than we expected, especially after a very severe third wave of Delta,’ said Tulio de Oliveira, director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research and Innovation Sequencing Platform, according to a report in The New York Times.

‘The sequence of this variant, currently called B.1.1.529, was first uploaded by Hong Kong from a case of someone traveling from South Africa,’ the British health minister, Sajid Javid, said. ‘The UK was the first country to identify the potential threat of this new variant and to alert international partners. Further cases have been identified in South Africa and in Botswana, and it is highly likely that it has now spread to other countries.’

Israeli officials also report that one case has been confirmed in a traveler returning from Malawi. Two other suspected cases are being studied now. All 3 were already vaccinated against Covid-19.

European health officials, already grappling with a lethal spike in infections from the Delta variant, started slapping on travel restrictions that began mid-day Friday, European time.

COVID-19 UPDATE:@UKHSA is investigating a new variant. More data is needed but we’re taking precautions now.

From noon tomorrow six African countries will be added to the red list, flights will be temporarily banned, and UK travellers must quarantine.

— Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) November 25, 2021 All of Europe is expected to follow soon, with Japan and others already taking action.

The @EU_Commission will propose, in close coordination with Member States, to activate the emergency brake to stop air travel from the southern African region due to the variant of concern B.1.1.529.

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) November 26, 2021 Next steps will entail studying this mutation to determine just what kind of threat it presents and whether the current vaccines in use can protect everyone that’s been vaccinated already.

It also underscores the new normal for this world, as countries continue to push for wider vaccination to end a pandemic that continues to bedevil the world close to 2 years after Covid-19 began to rattle the globe. The world has now become a breeding ground of new viral mutations. And there’s no end in sight.

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A nonprofit dedicated to transparency is calling on the FDA to release any and all documentation related to the approval of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine. And while FOIA requests are notorious for taking months if not years to fulfill, this time the FDA is asking for 55 years to complete the request.

After the FDA denied expediting the group’s FOIA request, the nonprofit sued FDA in the US District Court in northern Texas, attempting to compel the agency to expedite their request, which was that FDA turn over about 329,000 pages of documents in less than 3 months.