The Omicron variant was probably incubated in a person with poorly controlled HIV who struggled to clear a coronavirus infection.
, an immunologist and founding director of the Ragon Institute in Cambridge, Mass., warned against stigmatizing patients whose conditions may give rise to variants. But Omicron’s emergence from a patient with prolonged infection is a pretty good bet, he said.
A new variant will bear no telltale signature of how or where it came into existence, he added. But “statistically speaking, there are a variety of causes of immune suppression. And in southern Africa, one of the leading causes is HIV.”published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature, De Oliveira and three South African colleagues warned that “Africa is being completely left behind,” as COVID-19 vaccines, medicines and testing supplies are hoarded by the world’s affluent countries.
To complicate matters, the continent’s fitful progress in securing vaccines has prompted public health officials to focus first on elderly patients. The result is that virtually all of Africa’s young adults remain unvaccinated. And since 80% of those with HIV across the continent are under 50 years old, vanishingly few patients who are at risk of harboring a prolonged coronavirus infection have been vaccinated.
It’s possible Omicron has been circulating for months somewhere else, steadily accumulating genetic changes. If the variant matured in countries where genetic sequencing is rare or absent, it might have flown under the radar until it arrived in South Africa — the continent’s genetic sequencing powerhouse — already laden with mutations, he said.
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