Denmark
5.8 million people
17 million mink
Cull all mink, 207 farms effected, 1,000 farms overall
Mutated form of coronavirus
Transmissible to humans, 12 transfers so far
Virus may therefore already be in the local human population
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen
Mutated virus posed a risk to the effectiveness of future vaccine
Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, US
UK response
Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, announces travellers arriving after 4am on Friday must self-isolate for 14 days
Prof Kåre Mølbak, vaccine expert and director of infectious diseases
State Serum Institute
The worst-case scenario is that we would start off a new pandemic in Denmark
There’s a risk that this mutated virus is so different from the others that we’d have to put new things in a vaccine
and therefore [the mutation] would slam us all in the whole world back to the start
Dutch virologist and zoonosis expert, Wim van der Poel
more research needed
It seems the mink-variant mutation is found in the spike protein of the Sars-Cov-2 virus
but we don’t really know
Weasels, badgers, otters, ferrets, martens and wolverines
Prof Ian Jones, virologist at the University of Reading
The idea that the virus mutates in a new species is not surprising …
as it must adapt to be able to use mink receptors to enter cells and so will modify the spike protein to enable this to happen efficiently
The danger is that the mutated virus could then spread back into man
and evade any vaccine response which would have been designed to the original, non-mutated version of the spike protein
