The union government is set to release a genome sequencing study of breakthrough infections noted among the healthcare workers (HCWs) which will be published in preprint version by next week, top officials informed The Statesman.

The study is conducted over the healthcare staff of two leading private hospitals in Delhi–Sir Ganga Ram and Indraprastha Apollo–who got infected with Covid-19 despite taking vaccines against the viral disease.

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The study was conducted at two leading laboratories which are part of the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG), The National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB).

NCDC Director Dr SK Singh confirmed the development to The Statesman.

“It is an ongoing process that we sequence every sample of breakthrough infection reported to us. However, a particular study involving healthcare workers from two Delhi hospitals have been conducted by our INSACOG labs and it will be released in the public domain next week,” he informed.

The Director of CSIR-IGIB Dr Anurag Agrawal also confirmed the matter and said that the information about the study is shared with other agencies as well.

He also said that the study has provided much evidence against the breakthrough infections by the B.1.167 variant of Covid-19, which is currently dominating the country and many parts of the globe.

“We are working on the pre-print which is in the final stage. Much evidence by now of vaccination breakthroughs being associated with B.1.617.2 is gathered. Information was indeed shared with other agencies and pre-prints should be out next week,” Agrawal added.

A breakthrough infection is a case of illness in which a vaccinated individual becomes sick from the same illness that the vaccine is meant to prevent.

Experts believe that genome sequencing of breakthrough infections’ studies help evaluation of how the virus is behaving in the presence of vaccines and also if a variant is compromising the vaccine’s efficacy.

“Genomic sequencing from samples collected from breakthrough infections can provide useful additional insight on how well the vaccines are working against specific variant and that which variant is causing higher breakthrough infections. In this fight against the pandemic, we need to harness all the tools at hand,” Dr Chandrakant Lahariya, Epidemiologist and public policy and health systems expert told The Statesman.

A day ago, Public Health England (PHE) shared a study where it was found that found AstraZeneca’s vaccine’s efficacy reduced by just 6 per cent against symptomatic disease from the B.1.617.2 variant two weeks after the second dose.