Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been expected to trumpet a rare success in the campaign against the coronavirus on Friday: news that Britain had vaccinated 5.4 million people. By the end of the day, it was overtaken by a tentative finding that a new variant of the virus may be deadlier than the original. That possibility, raised by preliminary studies relying on small numbers of deaths in hard-hit hospitals, remains far from conclusive. But the prospect that the fast-spreading new variant, already known to be more contagious, could also be more lethal compounded fears that even with the arrival of vaccines, the pandemic will remain a severe threat for some time.
Government scientists said the early evidence suggests that the new variant, first detected late last year in Britain, could raise the risk of death by some 30 percent. But even with such an increase, the great majority of cases are not fatal, and the government estimates included a broad range of possible effects. “In addition to spreading more quickly,” Mr. Johnson said at a Downing Street news conference, “it also now appears that there is some evidence that the new variant — the variant that was first identified in London and the southeast — may be associated with a higher degree of mortality.”
For Mr. Johnson, who has struggled to find a silver lining in Britain’s response to the virus, it was not the first time that good news and bad went hand in hand. On Dec. 30, the government announced the authorization of a homegrown vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, only to put much of the country into a stricter lockdown hours later because of a surge in infections.
Britain’s struggle with the pandemic has increasingly become a race between vaccinating the public and confronting mutations in the virus, like the new variant that now accounts for a significant percentage of new cases around the country. It is a pitched battle that scientists say evokes hope as well as anxiety.