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Comment by IAmGraydon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

>> 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.

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