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Comment by Threeve303 | Hacker News Reader

What happens if the world gets into a situation where the virus mutates rapidly and we find the vaccines becoming less effective?

We assume the drug companies will be able to adapt the vaccine quickly to the new variants. If this happens then it creates a few problems..

One problem is having to continuously distribute a new vaccine to people indefinitely.

Another problem is only certain countries are capable of manufacturing the vaccine. So you have a kind of supply chain scarcity develop where only certain people in certain countries will be able to get one.

I've seen mixed reports about whether the current vaccine will hold up as variants appear.

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The vaccine creates broad protection against the virus’s spike protein structure. If the virus mutated enough to evade this protection, it would have to develop a structure so radically different that it would likely no longer be able to attach to the ACE2 receptor.

What is going on right now is mass anxiety. The vaccine is out, so humanity is imagining how things could still go wrong. The easiest thing to imagine is a version of the virus that doesn’t respond to antibodies. Luckily, they imagine this because they don’t understand how the vaccine works. It’s fantasy, and it is highly unlikely that any of this would play out.

>> What is going on right now is mass anxiety. The vaccine is out, so humanity is imagining how things could still go wrong.

Not enough anxiety, in my opinion. Tons and tons of people are still behaving as if everything is normal, or that they are somehow special.

So you think we need more irrational anxiety to control behavior? Mental health is just as important as physical health.

Anxiety ("anticipation of future threat") can be rational. It exists to prepare you for threats.

Disordered anxiety is reacting when there is no threat.

The anxiety we are talking about here is exactly the kind of anxiety you _don't_ want. If there was no vaccine in the short/midterm future people would probably (and somewhat rationally) assume that everybody (or rather 60%) will get the disease at some point, which would mean that the reward for behaving cautiously now is a lot worse (at least on an individual level, it would still be necessary not to overwhelm hospitals or to protect certain high-risk-groups).

You might be inducing a "so-what" mentality where people don't want to refrain from going to bars and restaurants just to not catch a virus that's going to get them at some point.

People line up every year to get a new flu shot because seasonal influenza keeps mutating the part of its hemagglutinin protein where most neutralizing antibodies bind after exposure to a vaccine that carries the entire hemagglutinin protein (embedded in a weakened/inactivated influenza virus).

Sure, spike ain't hemagglutinin and corona ain't no influenza, but let's not pretend there's no precedent at all for proteins mutating to the point that vaccines become ineffective.

Disclosure: I know nothing about the science of vaccines.

Perhaps the new mRNA technique could lead to better flu vaccines as well.

NIH is working on it, but it’s taking a backseat to covid

We have over 80 different COVID vaccines today if you look at the COVID vaccine tracker. Next year it will be at least 120.

In Spain alone they have 3 different vaccines that are not even in phase 1, but will be next year.

There will be at least 5 totally different technologies against it. There are "slower to market" technologies than RNA but stronger and proven.

Also the weather is going to get better in the North Hemisphere soon.

>Also the weather is going to get better in the North Hemisphere soon

January is colder than December usually. We're not even over the peak. February should be roughly similar to December, March is when it gets better again usually. But that's still 2 months of people staying indoors a lot.

Barring post-Thanksgiving spikes, cases in the US Midwest have been dropping since mid-November. And the spikes didn't even show up in all those states. Seems like places are getting past the peak already despite the temperature still dropping.

In Germany they've been rising despite the lockdown light.

Er should avoid meaningless terms like “lokdown light” and just say that we closed bars and restaurants and told people not to meet in private, which was largely ignored.

I agree we should have closed shops after this didn't work and then schools if that still hadn't worked. But they didn't course correct for 4 weeks where it was obviously not working.

But the people I know kept to the private rules as much or as little as during the first lockdown, which seemed to work despite keeping public transport open. Which would enable similar transmissions as shops and schools.

it's barley transmitted in shops, restaurants and bars.

if schools are open, it's pointless doing anything else. if schools are closed kids will still go out and play.

basically you're screwed if you do and screwed if you don't. and less and less people will listen as time goes on while the virus mutates and selects for contagious variants.

We just do not have the means to detect transmission that happens outside of households and private parties. Data from countries that have working contact tracing procedures suggest that bars restaurants, gyms and so forth are indeed important drivers.

The lockdown started on 16th December right? Shouldn't the effect become visible after 2 or 3 weeks? The current numbers are the outcome of the pre-lockdown rules?

This news started to break and fear mongering ticked up once the vaccine was out, to get people accustomed to the idea that one vaccine won’t be enough.

I came across the nextstrain site [1] in March, where they showed multiple variants in the wild, concentrated to certain regions.

The media is turning this into a bigger deal than it is, else they’ll lose control over the population. Imagine what would happen if there wasn’t constant coverage of the est. case count...life would go back to normal.

[1] https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global

> What happens if the world gets into a situation where the virus mutates rapidly and we find the vaccines becoming less effective?

This is precisely the world we're in, and which we've been in since the dawn of infectious disease.

Some viruses (in fact, some entire realms of virus) exhibit this phenomenon; they're sharp as hell for things that aren't even a full-fledged organism. But we're sharper, and we make vaccines to account for subtle mutations. Often times, we get it right, which is incredible.

> One problem is having to continuously distribute a new vaccine to people indefinitely.

We already do this for influenza.

Mutations are always happening and produced the coronavirus that caused covid-19 as well as every other coronavirus you have caught in your lifetime.

Mutations that spread quicker are also less deadly.

That is a good rule of thumb, however, by no means a tautology.

> Another problem is only certain countries are capable of manufacturing the vaccine.

In virological warfare "that's a feature, not a bug".

The virus mutates all of the time. Each time it enters a cell and then makes copies of itself. Sofar the consensus seem to be the mRNA vaccines should proof effective.

Most mutations aren't viable. Given the low fidelity of RNA replication (at least compared to DNA replication) it's remarkable just how close each copy is in a large population. Only a few mutations prove to be viable. Much less prove to be strong enough to overpower the current population.

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