SARS-CoV-2 Lambda variant exhibits higher infectivity and immune resistance | Hacker News Reader

SARS-CoV-2 Lambda variant exhibits higher infectivity and immune resistance

biorxiv.org

35 pointsharambae50 comments

There have been massive conversations here about immunology and virology by confidence-men who have zero understanding of the human immune system. Even the most well educated medical scientists recognize there is a giant amount of uncertainty surrounding SARS-CoV-2, much of which confidence-men show up and attempt to resolve by lying, usually to advance some political/economic agenda.

Have some respect for the scientific process and its pursuit of slowly unraveling the fog surrounding pristine knowledge. Grow comfortable with uncertainty and don't assume you have the answers. Be a little bit humble in the face of this virus that has caused so much suffering.

Cannot agree more with you. Fingers crossed that "scientific process" is not influenced by political/economic agenda.

> There have been massive conversations here about immunology and virology by confidence-men

many of them on this very site!

There's no better place to get information on immunology than a forum full of software engineers

But we sometimes use antivirus so it checks out

"confidence-men" love it!

"I have done my own research watching 100s of FB and Youtube videos and I don't need vaccine!!!"

Headline is misleading. The infectivity is comparable to Delta (within a standard deviation). From what I can tell, they only compares immune escape relative to the original wild type, not delta. I'm not an immunologist but the headline seems to me highly editorialised, and not supported by the paper. Would appreciate the input of someone qualified.

Leaky vaccines, like with delta, can lead to natural selection of 'hotter' variants. I think we will not see an end to this pandemic. It will continue to evolve and infect people. The thing that will change will be our perception of it.

Unvaccinated people have the virus longer and enable it to mutate more. Getting vaccinated will help irregardless if it is a "leaky" vaccine.

Please keep talking points to a minimum, and stick to the science.

What? That is the science.

The Spanish flu passed after two years and four waves of varying lethality. No reason to lose all hope.

That's what I was thinking and it was a ray of hope and maybe even the rational thing to expect.

But we now have vaccines they had not.

Is the loss of advantages (if they are) like different population density and spread, travel, nutrition, etc. compensated by our vaccines so that we can hope for the same ending ?

I read a lot that covid-19 would turn into a milder flu as time passes by and as the virus naturally evolves to become more infectious but less lethal. But this is not what happened.

I was confident until Delta happened and newspaper headlines started mentioning a fourth wave (most articles I read about Spanish flu only mentioned a third wave).

Today, as far as I am concerned, all bets are off.

I am vaccinated with what I consider the best option available at the time (mRNA, maybe protein based vaccine would have changed my mind) and the way things are now I'll keep wearing a mask indoor, at work, in public transport for a long time and follow all the other recommendations. And I am not in the US, I live in one of the less impacted (at the moment) European country.

There's too much mobility in the world, tourism is quite a vehicle for spread and too many countries went all in on tourism - I'm from Portugal, and clearly our government gave priority to tourism over public health, over and over again.

Not because they wanted to, but because they had to - for economical and political reasons. Just like they stripped off all measures during Christmas for political goodwill, and it caused the death of thounsands.

Very few were, and are, willing to end this pandemic.

One thing was made very clear: politicians will do anything - ANYTHING - to keep themselves in power. This pandemic turned to the worst when it became a political weapon. They placed too much hope on the vaccine, when it should have been considered one valuable tool to end this pandemic, not the final fix for it.

Only time will tell the long term effects of these decisions.

There might be a time when the pandemic could've been curbed, but it was just too contagious for the initial lack of transparency and honesty. It is also perfectly balanced, not too deadly, not too insignificant. I doubt it could've been stopped in time as soon as it started spreading widely among the public.

> It will continue to evolve and infect people

..or whatever is going on.

There’s no evidence of this. All covid variants of concern emerged before vaccines were widely available. Uncontrolled infection leads to variants, not vaccination.

Leaky vaccines are uncontrolled infection. Delta can be transmitted by vaccinated people. The point is, they will need to reformulate the vaccine to prevent this or it's fairly likely we will see further mutations. Given that there is immunity to the lesser strains, this leaves only one direction for those new strains to take - more virulence. So basically, there's a reduced chance of mutations that will prevail, but if one does occur, then it will likely be worse.

You conveniently omit the fact that vaccinated people are much less likely to contract delta (and subsequently transmit it) than unvaccinated. Even legitimately ‘leaky’ vaccines have been shown to reduce virulence (not increase it) in other diseases: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-0358-3

An aside, are you getting your information about vaccines from Joe Rogan? Unsurprisingly, the medical advice of a comedian is totally wrong: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorr...

Most likely from Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying. Two biology professors that are now full time podcasters. This particular theory is being advanced by a guy who dubiously claims to be the inventor of mRNA vaccines because he was the middle author of a paper in the ballpark of mRNA about 25 years ago.

>professors that are now full time podcasters

Shocking, the people peddling the crackpot theory also stand to profit from its proliferation.

I haven't heard of either of them. I merely brought this up as a point of discussing a possible issue. I feel the more we discuss things, the more we learn and can prepare for possible future issues. Unfortunately, it seems the debate is dominated by people on both sides who are treating possibilities as inevitabilities and preliminary data/results as idempotent facts to be applied to any future scenario regardless of the variables that might change.

Agree it’s important to discuss and debate the facts. However I think it’s unequivocal that anyone who can get vaccinated today should as quickly as possible.

"An aside, are you getting your information about vaccines from Joe Rogan?"

No.

That article mentions Mareks disease in its argument. Yes, it's true that vaccinated chickens will reduce viral load compared to unvaccinated chickens. That's not something I'm arguing. Viral load is not the same as virulence, although it could be a good indicator depending on the other variables. You would have to look at viral load (or fatality rates really) in the unvaccinated population for each strain to determine if the disease has gotten more virulent over time (Mareks has). Nor am I saying people shouldn't get vaccinated.

What I am saying is that the vaccines should be updated to prevent the breakthrough infections, otherwise we do have some risk of additional mutations occurring. It may be true that vaccination reduces viral load compared to unvaccinated people, but the measure that matters in this conversation is what that load looks like between strains. Delta is more virulent, producing up to 1000x the viral load. Unless the vaccine reduces viral load by 1000x or greater, then vaccinated people with delta would have the same or greater chance of infecting someone else as someone who is not vaccinated and has the original strain.

We are seeing more virulent strains. These emerged prior to widespread vaccination. But it seems even with widespread vaccination, there may be enough transmission to generate new mutations (Isreal is 80% vaccinated and they are seeing another wave including breakthroughs).

So really, the only thing I take issue with, aside from your personal attacks, is that your following statement isn't really true, and the article doesn't support protection against development of more virulent strains, but merely that there is lower viral load when vaccines are involved.

"Even legitimately ‘leaky’ vaccines have been shown to reduce virulence"

http://epidemics.psu.edu/articles/view/leaky-vaccines-promot...

The article you include is from 2015. It only shows that a leaky vaccine leads to a higher survival rate of the host (vs no vaccine). It does not show that leaky vaccines select for more virulent strains.

>Nor am I saying people shouldn't get vaccinated.

Viral load is a common proxy for virulence. Your comments all read as casting doubt on vaccination. It's proving to be incredibly effective at reducing death and severe disease.

>But it seems even with widespread vaccination, there may be enough transmission to generate new mutations (Isreal [sic] is 80% vaccinated and they are seeing another wave including breakthroughs).

You provide no data to support this assumption. What is clear is that there will definitely be more transmission without vaccines.

>What I am saying is that the vaccines should be updated to prevent the breakthrough infections

They are being updated rapidly. That is a great advantage of mRNA technology.

"Viral load is a common proxy for virulence."

The measure is only relevant if the other variables don't change. If we want to measure virulence compared to other strains, then you have to do that using all unvaccinated people, or all vaccinated people. Otherwise, the numbers don't matter when changing multiple variables.

"It's proving to be incredibly effective at reducing death and severe disease."

Which is good, but not very relevant to the discussion of genesis of new strains.

"They are being updated rapidly. That is a great advantage of mRNA technology."

Do you have any info on this? There does not seem to be any trials that I have heard of. Plus, the CDC/FDA have not yet recommended boosters for most people, let alone a different formulation.

"But it seems even with widespread vaccination, there may be enough transmission to generate new mutations (Isreal [sic] is 80% vaccinated and they are seeing another wave including breakthroughs)."

"You provide no data to support this assumption."

https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-vaccine-defiant-israeli-muta...

The Times of Israel article is still just conjecture. The only data is a quote from their ex-virus Czar saying selective pressure ‘could’ lead to the emergence of a vaccine resistant variant.

We know conclusively that large unvaccinated populations do lead to the emergence of more virulent strains. We also know that mass vaccination reduces mortality significantly so it’s the best option available today.

An updated mRNA booster would undoubtedly be a good thing and I suspect it will come in the next year.

"We know conclusively that large unvaccinated populations do lead to the emergence of more virulent strains."

Then why were the experts saying that virulence should go down over time at the beginning of the pandemic? It seems that either side would just be conjecture.

I know Elon Musk tweeted that out early in the pandemic but I don’t recall medical experts specifically making that claim. If some did, they were clearly wrong.

Ah, my wording was off. Some said it was a possiblity, not that it should.

What happened to epsilon, zeta and eta variants ?

They're considered non relevant from a mutation perspective.

Mathematicians say that Epsilon was very small.

nice :)

What does immune resistance mean?

Yes, but does it run on AWS?

It is called Managed for a reason..

Not sure what to make of stuff like this honestly: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking...

But it’s interesting every time these variants pop up and they evade vaccines.

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