INTRODUCTION
Since Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30, 2020 [1-4] and later declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020 [2], it has claimed over 1,754,000 lives worldwide and over a total of 79,231,000 cases reported [3]. New infection cases are continuously rising as well as deaths and other health complications and cases with new variants are increasing [5,7-9].
Even if SARS-CoV-2 was identified as the virus causing COVID-19, during earlier stages of COVID-19, mutations of the virus have been reported and Chinese researchers identified two SARS-CoV-2 variants. However, by sequencing more SARS-CoV-2 genome, they identified more variants [4,8].
Since then, other mutations have been reported in different countries and some new variants were found to be more transmissible and more virulent [4,8-12]. COVID-19 has also caused other social and economic devastations [5,6].
To mitigate these, scientists worldwide are deploying their time and different resources in developing the urgently needed vaccines [1-3,6] and investigations on how new variants react to the current vaccines are underway. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has launched a COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative for the global and non-discriminatory access to the vaccine [6,7].
