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Comment by guilhas | Hacker News Reader

What does this means? Now we need booster 4? Or don't need booster 3? Or nothing matters anymore?...

Its a developing situation. What exactly it means isn't clear yet. Booster 3 is almost certainly still helpful but how helpful against this strain requires more science. Booster 4 (at least in the near term) would continue to probably do nothing further because its not a simple matter of more boosters at the same time equal more protection. That's just not how it works.

People seem to want to treat covid as if its a school assignment; as if there is a teacher giving you harder and harder homework in an arbitrary fashion who knows what is going to happen and you can ask them. Its not - this is the real world. Answers come when people test out theories and discover what's what. Its a process, and it takes time. What the article is saying basically is that there is a lot of uncertainty but what we do know so far is concerning.

Depending on who you listen to, well, you might need boosters every few months for the rest of your life. There's concern in some circles that because the vaccine trains your body to respond strongly to one specific version of one specific part of COVID, it permanently reduces your body's ability to learn how to counter different parts of other versions of COVID --- meaning that once you start taking boosters, you'll need them forever. It's unclear how much of a point this camp has.

> it permanently reduces your body's ability to learn how to counter different parts of other versions of COVID

This seems unlikely. It's usually considered that immunity to one variant gives you at least some immunity to other variants.

Could you provide sources for this claim?

The basic argument is that if you are vaccinated, and then contract the virus, the immune system will only produce antibodies for the spike protein in the vaccine, and it will not “learn” how to attack other parts of the virus.

If a new variant has a spike protein different enough, then you will not be in a better situation than an individual with no vaccine and no previous contact with the virus.

In contrast, someone with natural immunity would have the ability to produce a wider range of antibodies that target many different parts of the virus, therefore many more variants would be vulnerable to at least some of the antibodies.

(Caveat: the immune system actually is more complex than that)

> If a new variant has a spike protein different enough, then you will not be in a better situation than an individual with no vaccine and no previous contact with the virus.

That's quite a different claim to "it permanently reduces your body's ability to learn how to counter different parts of other versions of COVID".

> In contrast, someone with natural immunity would have the ability to produce a wider range of antibodies that target many different parts of the virus

This is a very different argument that natural infection gives more effective immunity than vaccination, and the empirical evidence does not seem to agree.

> That's quite a different claim to "it permanently reduces your body's ability to learn how to counter different parts of other versions of COVID".

Here the argument is that, when the antibodies “learned” from the vaccine have a low, but not nil, effectiveness, then the immune system of a vaccinated person would continue producing only the same antibodies. A person with natural immunity would instead be able to modulate the immune response and use the most effective among the many antibodies that they can produce.

> This is a very different argument that natural infection gives more effective immunity than vaccination, and the empirical evidence does not seem to agree.

There is some evidence that natural immunity lasts longer, although it is not settled yet.

So far, not much: it appears that there are very few cases confirmed (10 so far). If all those people isolate and don’t contaminate anyone, that could be the end of it. But one of them just flew on an intercontinental flight, so… yeah, things might not be contained.

If even one of them transmit to someone else, who transmit is themselves… this could spread like the Delta variant. There has not been any clinical test on the effectiveness of vaccines, of course; however, with so many mutations, in particular the mutations on the parts that code the spike protein, the vaccines that have proven effective so far (which focus on that spike) are likely to be far less effective. It’s likely we would develop new vaccines, but that presents more risk, so would need more tests, etc. Lockdowns are likely in the meantime.

> it appears that there are very few cases confirmed (10 so far). If all those people isolate and don’t contaminate anyone, that could be the end of it.

What makes you think that a set of mutations like this can evolve only once? Even if this particular lineage of COVID goes extinct, its existence demonstrates that the virus is responding to selection pressure in the way you'd expect any organism to respond under conditions of natural selection. If evolution can pull of B.1.1.529 once, it can do so again and again.

It's been found internationally already. Also there's a 0% chance that those ten detected cases are the only actual cases.

doesn't her second graph show that the indirect signature of the new strain indicates that it is widespread in SA?

Boosters of the same vaccine will make the effect of a vaccine to last longer, if its protection diminishes with time. Other variants are present too, so regardless if this particular variant spreads to your zone or not, it probably won't harm.

The problem if is this variant is different enough to the original variant for the vaccine to be effective against it or no.

From the Prof.:

“We do know that B.1.529 has many more mutations than other variants and has mutations seen in other variants that are associated with BOTH higher transmissibility AND immune escape.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com