Some of those mutations appear to make the virus more infectious, and there are concerns that vaccines could be less effective against new variants as well.
As a reminder of how nasty the SARS-COV-2 virus can be, there are signs that immunity against older variants doesn't necessarily protect against newer ones.
The Brazilian city of Manaus, severely struck by Covid-19 in April last year, is now experiencing a second wave that could be even deadlier than the first one, with thousands dead already. People seem to be getting re-infected, and the Plan B idea of herd immunity looks like a dangerous folly.
Existing vaccines may need to be updated quickly to help prime people's immune systems against the new virus variants, in other words. Luckily, the advanced science and technology behind the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines should come to rescue here.
There's some interesting thinking happening here: coder Bert Hubert observed how digital life (that is, DNA - deoxyribonucleic acid and RNA) and Covid-19 vaccines are.
To be a bit geeky, Hubert who has long taken an interest in genetics, likens the DNA to the durable storage in computers with each A, C, G, T character holding two binary bits of information.
As with computers, the information in the DNA isn't run there because it's slow; Hubert has DNA read speed at just 15 bytes a second per thread. Instead, it's processed in faster but volatile storage. In living beings, that's mRNA which is similar to random access memory (RAM) that computers have close to processors.
There are more similarities between IT and genome information storage and processing, like when it comes to fixing bugs and corrupted information in software.
In fact, it should be possible to patch existing vaccines in a similar fashion to fixing up faulty computer code. When a new virus variant appears and is genomically sequenced, an existing vaccine is then updated accordingly rather than recreated.
There are lots of nuances here of course, but patching vaccines seems to be what virus researchers are looking at currently.
"Yes, the analogy is decent, and it's what we're starting to see groups doing internationally as well," Environmental Science and Research Institute (ESR) computational geneticist Miles Benton said when asked about patching mRNA vaccines similarly to software.
Immunologist James Ussher at the University of Otago's Department of Microbiology and Immunology agrees that RNA vaccines have the crucial advantage that they can be patched, but getting them past the regulators could be an issue.
"RNA vaccines are certainly easier to update than many others - just change the sequence," Ussher told me.
Ussher said, however, it's unclear at this stage what regulators such as the US Food and Drug Administration and NZ's Medsafe might require for updated vaccines.
"While it is very unlikely that they would require phase 3 efficacy trials again - and those may be difficult to do once vaccines are rolled out - it is possible they might require the developers to demonstrate immunogenicity and comparable reactogenicity in a phase 1 trial," he added.
It could be that the regulators may accept registration without such data, as with the current influenza vaccine, which is updated every year.
"Patched vaccines" hold out hope for quicker updates and deployment to keep on top of virus mutations. As with the entire pandemic, this is all new and uncertain ground with lots more research needed and fast too to beat the mutations.
As one Internet pundit put it: "So basically the COVID vaccine (full of mRNA) is a patch released to fix bugs in our bodies, or to update our internal virus database".
In the meanwhile, do your bit and don't provide a breeding ground for the virus to mutate in: mask up, scan in, wash hands and keep safe.
