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Remember the spike needs to bind to the ACE receptor which is what vaccines target, so if it escapes vaccines, it probably isn’t going to be as easily infectious. Maybe.

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If that was true in this scenario why would it have gained so much victim market share in South Africa so much quicker than Delta did?

SA is very undervaccinated (less than 25% per the link) so it's probably too early to say either way.

SA has low levels of vaccination, but they've had high infection rates. There should be substantial levels of immunity to earlier variants in the population. It's not directly comparable, but it should be possible to get some idea of how well the new variant escapes existing immunity.

Your answer seems to assume that the distribution of spike proteins which binds to the ACE is very close to the one for which we obtain immunity by getting vaccinated.

Yet we can already see that Delta binds better than the early strains and the efficacy of existing vaccines against it is like 60%, which contradict that. Does it make sense?

Vaccine efficacy decays with time. If you've had a 3rd vaccine recently, it will be much more than 60% effective.

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