I don't see any identification of the variants successfully defeated in this article.
For example the E484K variant identified in Brazil that is supposed to be antibody resistant is quite terrifying.
For example the E484K variant identified in Brazil that is supposed to be antibody resistant is quite terrifying.
"Moderna says it’s working on Covid booster shot for variant in South Africa, says current vaccine provides some protection"
"The company’s researchers said its current coronavirus vaccine appears to work against the two highly transmissible strains found in the U.K. and South Africa, although it looks like it may be less effective against the latter."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/25/covid-vaccine-moderna-workin...
That said based on the title you might assume the vaccine to be as effective, but that's not quite what the study says. In short it states:
>A six-fold reduction in neutralizing titers was observed with the B.1.351 variant relative to prior variants. Despite this reduction, neutralizing titer levels with B.1.351 remain above levels that are expected to be protective.
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.
Fortunately, it seems there is openness from the FDA to have a faster approval cycle for vaccine tweaks. Moderna is already working on a "booster shot" to try and increase immunity to the South-African variant.
I wish that we also had other therapeutic tools to combat COVID. I wonder if we couldn't save people who are getting hospitalized by employing drugs that block the receptor the virus uses to enter cells. Similarly to the way HIV is kept under control. That could save lives and it would be more mutation-proof.
If anyone actually cared about this there is an EXISTING mechanism to get business to produce pretty much any quantity of anything you want. You pay them money. Instead the government is constantly canceling contracts, seizing products, stopping the sale of products for more than 10% more than historic prices etc.
ALL these steps REDUCE confidence in making a big / high risk investment.
My guess - if we looked at even existing use of the DPA - probably most stuff got made by folks not expert in making it and sat in a warehouse. I'm serious - I want to know how many ventilators made under DPA by rando companies are actually in use?
I've worked in govt contracting - the govt does not get "the best" producers to produce, in situations like this the hands reach out from the experts playing the govt contracting game. Not end of world normally, but with lives on the line some more standard approaches would be refreshing.
It's possible that the current generation of vaccines could end up being outdated, and there could be some amount of waste, but the important thing is the production rate. When an updated vaccine becomes available, we want to be able to produce it and distribute it as fast as possible.
On another note, there's also research into oral vaccines. IMO that would be amazing if it could pan out. Imagine if we could just mail people capsules containing booster doses updated for the latest strain every month. We'd crush any pandemic in no time.
I guess if you really nail the science, you can make it infectious and vaccinate by breathing on people.
I suppose that a government-funded infectious vaccine would be one way to get anti-maskers to reverse their stance on wearing cloth face coverings...
This is war. Governments fight wars. It's one of the primary roles of government. In WW2 all sorts of prioritization and direction came from government. This should be the same.
https://www.evms.edu/covid-19/covid_care_for_clinicians/#d.e...
The common cold is a coronavirus. It is significantly less deadly than the seasonal flu. We have every reason to believe that a more contagious but less deadly version will resemble the common cold.
.3% of New York City has already died.
Unless the vast majority of New Yorkers have already contracted the virus, the mortality rate has to be substantially higher than .3%.
SARS-CoV-2 is also only ~3x as deadly as the flu WITH UNPRECEDENTED MEASURES TO CONTAIN IT. In areas where it wasn't contain, such as the initial outbreak in Italy that overwhelmed hospitals, it was 10x or more as deadly as the flu.
So we have no reason to believe this will occur with covid19.
Not necessarily. Assume that people try to self-quarantine as soon as they notice symptoms. (They don't need to be 100% effective at this.) Consider "mutations that affect how quickly it spreads within your body". Those that increase said efficiency would presumably increase the likelihood of death; but they would also probably shorten the "asymptomatic spreading" period, which means they'd get selected against; this selection happens even among those that aren't dying.
(Author background disclaimer: No biology beyond 9th grade.)
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]
Soldiers with minor symptoms remained where they were, not coming in contact with many other people.
The very sickest soldiers were transported by train, where the infected many other people, to hospitals, where they continued infecting many other people. It was our own attempts to care for the soldiers that caused the deadliest strains to spread and continue evolving.
What some folks are proposing in this thread (uncontrolled community spread so it will 'mellow out') is an even more massive expansion of that due to the quite visible ability for COVID to be infectious in patients with no symptoms for long periods of time, which Influenza has not been able to pull off.
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.