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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

“It should make us worry,” said David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who led the study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology. “What is going on right now might be going on for generations and generations.”

Should it though? Seems like we've survived this many times as a species, and now have the technology to combat it! I'm more optimistic with this information, and hopefully we can eradicate coronavirus forever with mRNA and next-gen vaccinations.

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> Seems like we've survived this many times as a species

I'm reasonably sure the species will survive climate change. Some nation states, civilizations and cultures' odds look more iffy.

I think your bar for worry may be a bit higher than mine.

And specifically about a pandemic, even if 50% of humans died in it the species would continue, but that would very much be something to worry about. Even at much lower percentages it would be worrying. Or the fact that it could continue for generations.

Fact it could continue? Or opinion it could continue? There's a significant difference. The latter is not science.

The comment (as you quoted) was: "Fact it could continue".

Given that nobody knows with certainty that it can't, it is very much "fact" and not "opinion" that it could continue.

Yeah, it's like surviving falling from an airplane. You technically survive, but life will be extremely different.

TIL you can likely survive a landing at terminal velocity just by orienting yourself feet-first and bending your knees.

And probably ending up being unable to walk.

That's what the OP is getting at.

Well, to be fair, you'll be unable to walk either way.

It's not the climate change that'll get us, but each other.

Left to nature alone, we'd likely evolve and adapt and survive in some form or fashion. But the advancement of humanity has led to all kinds of ways we could do ourselves in if we put our minds to it.

And those nation states and civilizations facing iffy odds aren't likely to go down quietly. In the throws of desperation, all bets are off (why care about stuff like MAD[1] when you're already facing imminent destruction by nature).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

> Should it though?

Fuck no. I'm really tired of these stories.

(this is all directed at the author that put that "it should make us worry" quote in the NYT piece, not at any HN poster, but I really need to vent)

The 1918 pandemic turned into seasonal influenza one we had enough herd immunity, enough people had T-cells that recognized H1N1 and the virus was forced into making sacrificial choices in order to spread.

This virus will not achieve an escape mutation that puts us back to square one with vaccinated or recovered people at the same risk everyone was at in 2019.

If you look at what happened in 2009 the H1 envelope protein of that virus traces its lineage back to the 1918 pandemic, it spent 50 years mutating in pigs before it jumped back to humans (that is a LOT of generations of fucking "variants") and people who were born and exposed to pre-1957 H1N1 when it was endemic to the human race had cross reactive T-cells which protected them. They still got infected, but the disease burden was vastly lower so that pandemic fizzled:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21653752/

The human immune system isn't a binary on/off switch, and while circulating neutralizing antibodies are the gold standard of immunity they are far from the entire story.

If you want to read an article supporting the idea that the coronavirus will transition to milder endemicity without all the irritated swearing read this:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741

And everyone can fuck off in advance about the idea that ADE will happen. If it was going to happen it would have already happened and this isn't Dengue:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/12/an...

All the fucking headlines about how 99% of the people who are dying now are unvaccinated are screaming out that there's no fucking ADE anywhere to be found. People still talking about ADE need to see a psychiatrist to deal with their addiction to doom and gloom.

This pandemic is ending. I'm 2 months post vaccination and everyone I'm in close contact with is vaccinated, so its pretty much entirely over for me.

Now I need a fucking snickers bar.

"If you look at what happened in 2019 the H1 envelope protein..." was that date a typo?

Yeah I used 2019 the paragraph before and had a mental bit flipping mistake.

I generally agree with you (minus the rage) and agree re: being vaccinated at this point means it's pretty much over for individuals and their associates who are also vaccinated.

The only quibble I take is that, while it's likely you (and by proxy, the experts you cite) are correct that we won't go back to square one, it is still a (low) possibility. Probably low enough that it isn't worth concerning yourself with, except to be aware that the possibility is there. And probably slightly higher than the normal chance of a random breakout until we get closer to vaccinated herd immunity worldwide. But I'm not suggesting it should necessarily change any significant behavior of those vaccinated, just something to pay a bit more attention to than normal and be ready to take action if needed (i.e. don't throw away all the masks just yet).

And that said, I really appreciate you including sources and I'm sorry I don't have any handy to back up my statement, but it does come from reading and listening to experts. That said, it's my recollection and summary of that so I'd encourage anyone to take it with that grain of salt.

> it is still a (low) possibility.

It really isn't.

An escape mutation which completely evaded T-cells would write a whole new chapter in immunology.

It on par with worrying about a jet engine falling on my head right now.

There's risks that are low enough that they aren't worth worrying about or particularly acknowledging.

From what I've read, the possibility is higher than some other random virus popping up at this moment in time. That's all I'm saying. That could be on par with the jet engine example, but if so, then all the people saying we need to learn from Covid and adjust our immunology strategies are worrying about low possibility items also.

Anyways, I'll defer to you on this, I'm definitely not an expert, and you were willing to post sources and I'm not gonna try to dredge up the information I'm basing these comments on. Plus I haven't had the time to digest the sources. So add one more chink in my wall of being back to "normalcy" :P

> From what I've read, the possibility is higher than some other random virus popping up at this moment in time.

I've read literally nothing credible that suggests that immune escape will ever be complete.

There are people who are "concerned" or "worried" about it or will argue that "we can't say"

But they're basically the same people who were arguing that the vacccines that we were producing that produced strong neutralizing titers might not work.

Or that vaccinated people might transmit the virus just as strongly as unvaccinated superspreaders, even though they have reduced symptoms and lower viral loads and we know that the household attack rate of fully asymptomatic disease is lower by nearly an order of magnitude.

The "well, we haven't proven it can't, so we have to assume the coronavirus could assemble and detonate a nuclear warhead in an American city" people have been solidly fucking wrong for the past 12 months.

They had a brief glimpse of correctness at the start of it all when people thought it would go away relatively quietly like SARS-1 + MERS. But those people were probably all the ones looking at the early ~20% case fatality rate and assuming that 20% of the coworkers were going to die.

And it isn't happening, and the messaging is horrible, and there's a cost to worrying about the literal worst case imaginable. It doesn't make you smart to consider literally all the possibilities, it gets in the way.

Someone get this guy a snickers bar.

Your logic seems fairly sound as far as the future trajectory of covid-19, if history is a guide. What I've been wondering and I'd put to you is, do you think the T-cell response to the mRNA vaccines / infection will also confer immunity or decrease the severity of MERS? Or other more distantly related wild coronaviruses?

MERS is not a Sarbecovirus, it's a Merbecovirus, so not the same subgenus. They are not similar enough for much to happen, if anything at all.

Could you explain? Are the spike proteins around MERS too different... and what about the coronaviruses that cause the common cold. Could we expect any cross immunity to those.

I think whats going on here are people are fatigued with covid related news and in the news in general. News publications are terrified and putting out these scaremongering stories to get people hooked again.

Just like the 1917/1918 swine flu didn't last for "generations"(meaning the potency of the virus was extremely deadly) this covid virus will do the same. It will def. be around but not in the same potency as when it entered the world stage late 2019.

The last thing we should do is to be laid back about this or next viruses. If we don’t use the momentum to reduce vaccine rollout times among other things - we failed.

> If we don’t use the momentum to reduce vaccine rollout times among other things - we failed.

I don't think we can use the luck we had with this vaccine to justify risky releases in the future.

The 5-10 year drug development cycle isn’t something that should stay that way forever. It’s incredibly slow and we should change that.

If it's anything like the normal vaccine development cycle, most of that time is consumed by things like writing grant proposals, waiting for grants, convincing a drug company and/or their convincing themselves it's worth taking the risk to try our your drug candidate, etc. COVID-19 vaccine development in the US and U.K. shows what you can do when people are willing to take huge gambles on a candidate ever working out, including starting mass production before Phase III trials produce strong evidence.

The US Operation Warp Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed made a huge bet on Sanofi/GSK's vaccine, which in its first trial did not produce sufficient immunity in elderly, the second set of trials that started earlier this year are very promising so far. Ditto AZ/Oxford which has not applied for an Emergency Use Authorization. Novavax's vaccine also looks very good, but they are getting severely delayed in making an application because supplies for cell culture manufacturing are first going to the Serum Institute of India and AZ for Oxford's vaccine and Janssen, and there are some supplies common with the mRNA vaccines. Trained workers are also in short supply.

Operation Warp Speed is a fantastic success in using the style of the Manhattan Project including paying Pfizer in advance for 100 million doses of BioNTech's vaccine, but so far only 2 of its 5 huge billion dollar plus upfront bets have paid off. Outside of an emergency that would be considered an unacceptable waste of money.

> It’s incredibly slow and we should change that.

It's slow because drugs aren't remotely understood, in the grand scheme of things, and not all side effects are immediate. If you stay up and watch late night TV, you'll see at least a couple "Were you affected by <recalled drug>? Our lawyers are here to help" ads. My mom, for example, has permanent heart damage from a recalled drug.

We can shorten development cycles when biology is understood. Currently, it's not. Your doctor will happily tell you "They don't know exactly why this works, but they believe..." if you ask them about any drug.

Risk vs reward aside, vaccines may have a much smaller problem space, but they're still not completely understood, evident by clots from the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines [1], the link with heart inflammation [2], and the deaths from both.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-vaccine-related-blood-...

2. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57781637

Yeah, I didn't quite understand why it should make us worry. We do have a lot more tools at our disposal than people had 20,000 years ago - vaccines, antivirals (in a few years), knowing to social distance, etc.

Population density, commercial air travel.

Social distancing is something that people even now are loathe to engage in, fortunately more and more people 'get it' but there are still plenty that do not. Arguably that's Darwin at work, but still.

Population is the big one. 7 billion people today means we have many times more opportunities for viruses to come up, combine, and mutate than we once did. I'm not sure which is the bigger phenomenon.

Other things we have today that mitigate spread:

1. sanitation

2. hand washing

3. understanding of how the disease spreads (not swamp gas)

4. knowing that throwing virgins into volcanoes does not work

5. clean water

Have we really done a thorough scientific test of #4?

Maybe it's not all volcanoes, just the ones on ley lines.

People lived in small groups most of the time. Harder to spread.

> Should it though? Seems like we've survived

Someone survived - but for the mutations to have a selection benefit strong enough to dominate that gene pool there would have to be more people who didn’t survive than did.

Not necessarily. Even a virus with a low infection fatality rate could have caused significant evolutionary changes if it was endemic across many generations.

> but for the mutations to have a selection benefit strong enough to dominate that gene pool there would have to be more people who didn’t survive than did.

To be pedantic: the gene pool is mostly influenced by anything that prevents reproduction, i.e. if you have your kids, and then die that doesn't affect the gene pool to a first approximation (there are selection pressures of becoming an orphan, but they are likely usually very weak. If being an orphan makes it more likely one will have kids or more likely to have more kids than one would have otherwise, then the selection pressure will select for death, which is inverted from what is naively thought! Edit: And if you are older and have never had kids and die, there is very little chance for selection pressure.).

To your point: "...who led the study and is now seeking notoriety and additional funding..."

While I hate to sound like a cynic, this is the human side of science time and again. The fact that too many "journalists" don't recognize the context only makes matters worse.

To that I'll editorialize and add, key word "might." Such unsubstantiated hyperbol only makes the source even more suspect.

>Should it though?

Yes of course it will. The mainstream narrative is that the virus came from a wet market. Wet markets are still open and there is no discussion about what to do about it. The most basic lessons and precautions are forbidden topics.

If 99.99% of people die, the species lives on, but everyone reading this is gone and so is civilisation.

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