Moderna vaccine appears to work against variants

Six fold reduction is extremely concerning!

As the vaccine becomes more widespread, it will be tested more widely by exposure to the virus and this will trigger faster evolutionary cycles by the virus to defeat the vaccine.

My forecast is we will have to get much faster at releasing updated vaccines and distributing them in order to stay ahead of this virus -- and that everyone will need to be vaccinated every 6 months until we hit sufficient heard immunity of the circulating strains such that is stops circulating so rapidly and the speed of mutation consequently reduces.

Variant is almost synonymous to mutation here. Do you want to say the new variants didn’t come into being via mutation?

Can you explain what is the difference between mutation, lineage, variant, strain, please?

That's a mixed bag, as on one hand sure the number of dead goes down per 100, but then the number of folks infected goes up, thereby meaning the same number of dead possibly, or more people infected in hospitals.

Viruses are believed to become less deadly over time when being less deadly offers an evolutionary advantage in ability to spread. If being more deadly and more spreadable have the same mechanism (e.g., avoiding spike protein-inhibiting antibodies), you can expect that old adage not to hold true over the short-term.

That is a dangerous misunderstanding of evolutionary pressure in viruses.

LONG TERM, less deadly viruses will tend to spread better because the more deadly a virus is, the more it raises stakes for the host population to remove it or prevent it , and the more it can make it apparent who has been infected. Ebola for instance justifies pretty almost any action you can imagine to contain it's spread, where we are still arguing if lockdowns or travel restrictions are the cost appropriate measure with COVID.

If the time of fatality is sufficiently delayed, or the time to implement other countermeasures or recognize the situation has changed is too long, it doesn't help anyone in the short, medium, or potentially even long term - you can have massive fatalities and huge spread.

The 1918 pandemic had multiple waves, with the second in particular having a much higher fatality rate than the first - 10x a typical flu season, which is what we're seeing now. This was almost certainly caused by variants, though lack of data makes it impossible to prove. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu]

A particularly nasty example [https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/science/2020/03/22/how-an-al...]

The more infections, the more likely we'll get more variants, and the more likely we'll get some that cause terrible, terrible problems - and may still be quite infectious.

Long term, will the most terrible ones die out? Very likely. However, smallpox was a scourage on humanity since likely 300 BCE and up until eradication by a massive global effort in 1975, it still had fatality rates around 25-35%. So don't just assume COVID will 'evolve to harmlessness', or if it does that it would happen on a timeframe convenient for society [https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html]

A virus may become less deadly. There is no guarantee. It depends on what evolutionary options are available and what pressures are selecting mutations.

Pre-symptomatic infectiousness has about the same selection pressure as low mortality rate IMO. Low risk viruses circulate well because people don’t care about transmission very much. High risk infections cause people to take precaution and thus eliminates those stains. SARS-COV-1 and MERS were that way.

But pre-symptomatic infectiousness (SARS-COV-2) makes this calculus immaterial for most people; they transmit it without knowledge. This reduces the pressure on high mortality / morbidity strains / variants.

A strain that spreads more while not being significantly less deadly is much scarier than a more deadly strain that spreads less. Do the math if you don't believe me.

UK's Pandemic Team says the new strain appears to be more deadly. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210125/uk-variant-may-be-m...

> Viruses can't really "adapt" to "not being spread".

Of course they can. We have this pandemic because a coronavirus became highly transmissible.

They mutate, and mutations more successful in causing infections cause more infections and become dominant.

There are many ways for this to happen, some of which covered in this thread - changes in the surface presented to the host, more viral load produced and expelled by an infected host earlier being some obvious ones.

Some potential methods that have occurred with other diseases in the past include additional methods of infecting hosts (from prior versions), such as viral envelopes that can insert against additional types of cells, or changes to the way the virus hijacks cell replication machinery to produce products that are better at hiding what is going on to the immune system.

Thank you. Basically they could just change the actual vaccine a bit to cover all those variants right?

But could they become useless before we "solve" this pandemic? Is actually my fear and other "noobs" in this matters.

Where was it submitted? I couldn't see that anywhere.

I disagree. In a pandemic it's important to get solid and clear information to the population. If you start saying things that don't go through the proper channels to be verified as reasonably true, then you create massive confusion when you potentially have to go back on that information. Scientists can and do make mistakes. A lay person might not understand what "preprint" or "not peer reviewed" mean yet this article is on the BBC which the average lay person does trust as a source for reasonably true information.

There are two ways to do clinical trials on vaccine effectiveness. One is to vaccinate someone and then deliberately infect them; this gives you good data quickly, but due to the deadliness of COVID-19, this is generally regarded to not be an option. Another is to vaccinate a very large number of people and wait to see if they get sick with the virus from natural exposure. This is ongoing right now on a very large scale; millions of people have been vaccinated, and sooner or later people will come in contact with these new variants. However, it takes time to collect enough data with this approach to provide useful results, and in this case it can be confounded by the lack of a control group (you don't know how many exposure events happened that did not lead to infections).

Regardless, the current vaccination campaign is highly effective against the original - still very widespread and deadly - virus, so it's worth getting it, and as people get vaccinated with it, it will eventually be apparent whether it works against various variants as well. If it doesn't, it's likely that a booster vaccination can be developed for these variants (and indeed, Moderna has begun work, as an insurance policy, on a booster for the south african variant).

The lockdowns are created by states and are political. If their goal has been archived, they can be lifted.

There is some talk that it also _is_ deadly. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/22/new-uk-covid-v...

There's a substantial lag, though, between finding out how infectious a variant is and how deadly it is (AIUI the rough averages are 2 weeks from infection to hospitalization and another 2 weeks from hospitalization to deaths, but that might have changed). That means that the data on how infectious a variant is becomes available ~1month ahead of information about how dangerous it is. Have we even had confirmed spread of these variants for a month?

BBC’s _More or Less_ did a bit on this. 70% more deadly (per person) would actually be better than 70% more infectious. Deaths increase linearly with deadliness of virus, but they increase exponentially with infectiousness.

Say the current mortality rate is 2% and each infected person passes on the disease to one other after a week, then stops being infectious. If 100 people have the virus in week 0, after 10 weeks 1000 people will have had the virus and 20 will have died.

Increase the death rate by 70% and you’d have 34 deaths instead. Increase the transmission rate by 70%, and you’d have 170 people newly infected in week 1, then 289 in week 2, totalling 285,000 infected people, of which 2% die. That’s now 570 deaths.

Obviously the numbers can all be changed somewhat depending on treatment, or whether you expect everyone to be infected at some point anyway, but the takeaway is that more deadly is not necessarily worse than more infectious.

Those two took decades to eradicate, we won't be able to keep the Earth's population on lockdown/no-lockdown cycles for that long.

SARS and MERS as well, which is notably more relevant. These don't exist anymore.

COVID is different in that it appears to have numerous animals it can live in. It's one thing to lock down people, but another entirely to lockdown animals.

Sorry if I could have worded it more clearly - I meant that we have never successfully eradicated a member of the coronavirus family. If we have, I appreciate a correction, preferably with a source. Reread my comment and I think this will be clear

Actually much faster than months. MRNA-based vaccines can be brewed up in days to weeks.