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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

My current take (not a virologist, doctor):

At this point, if you are not immunocompromised and you have the first vaccination and a booster. You should be able to easily recover regardless of the mutation(s). The virus would need to completely diverge from SARS-CoV-2 in order to fully defeat the countermeasures of the current vaccinations.

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Strikes me as unnecessarily early to make such a claim.

Testing of vaccines against this new variant is already starting.[1] First results in 2 weeks.

Pfizer says that if they have to generate a new vaccine for this variant, it will take about 100 days.[2] That's the great thing about this mRNA vaccine technology - given the gene sequence of a virus, a vaccine can be designed. The original Moderna vaccine was designed in two days.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/omicron-variant-prompts-concerns-ab...

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/pfizer-release-statemen...

100 days + XXX days for the new approval of the vaccine.

Yes. Although variations on the vaccine require less approval than a totally new one. This process takes place every year for flu vaccines.

Never for mRNA vaccines though - will be interesting to see how the administration/FDA handles this

While I know nothing about vaccine development I guess that a "release often in small batches" might be a better mode than doing mass clinical trials which are slow and costly. As far as I know it's possible from a manufacturing standpoint as the updates would mostly be changes in mRNA code. I think people not dying from being properly immunized outweigh the risk of a small number of people facing side effects if done properly.

Close to mid terms + if it becomes an actual big body count/hospital overflow in the US I'd bank on political pressure to approve fast.

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

Any reasoning/source or this is just what you wish for / want to believe?

Not OP but I remember reading that with the way the vaccine works, as long as it’s classified as a variant you should be covered. If you’re not covered anymore (assuming the full vaccination is not outdated) that means it’s most likely a new virus rather than a new variant. I can’t find a proper link to quote tough, so you can assume this is totally wrong. Nevertheless, the logic behind it makes sense (to me at least).

Quick research tells me that Biontech does need two weeks to check if the vaccine works against the new variant [1], so clearly it does NOT need to be a new virus for the vaccine to become useless.

[1] https://www.boston25news.com/news/trending/biontech-will-kno...

True but the mRNAs have held up well against every variant to this point. It's not even something I'm comfortable banking on against this new variant, but we're far from concluding this is a problem, too. Edit-I'm thinking it's like 66% against this VOC from escaping the vaccines and 33% pro, very roughly.

This does have quite a few mutations, including several that are pretty rare. https://github.com/cov-lineages/pango-designation/issues/343

Are people getting sicker with it?

> However, Dr Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association and a practising GP based in Pretoria, said it was “premature” to make predictions of a health crisis.

“It’s all speculation at this stage. It may be it’s highly transmissible, but so far the cases we are seeing are extremely mild,” she said. “Maybe two weeks from now I will have a different opinion, but this is what we are seeing. So are we seriously worried? No. We are concerned and we watch what’s happening. But for now we’re saying, ‘OK: there’s a whole hype out there. [We’re] not sure why.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/26/south-africa-b...

Best case scenario: A virus that causes only mild symptoms, spreads quickly, and causes immunity against the original (more harmful) variants.

Just lift measures and let it do its work...

COVID has been weaponized politically. Any politician that doesn’t take part in counter-measure theatrics risks losing an election where they will be attacked for not doing enough.

This would be incredible

Unfortunately, right now, it seems unlikely :(

There are already reports of (vaccinated) young people getting seriously ill.

Unlike with other viruses, there is little selective pressure towards being less deadly, because illness/death mostly happen after transmission.

And while I'm not a virologist, it doesn't seem far-fetched that "breeds higher viral loads more quickly" would be correlated not only with transmissivity, but also with "kills more".

"the cases we are seeing are extremely mild"

So, like most COVID infections?

I heard the minor symptoms are muscle aches and tiredness.. Like most days for the elderly.

“Mild” in this case means you don’t go to the hospital (and/or the morgue). It doesn’t rule out long COVID or extremely severe (from a layman’s perspective) symptoms.

And that’s the same as other “mild” COVID infections, yep. The ones where you don’t die. You ignorant dipshit.

Well that last bit sure came out of left field.

Yikes - attacking another user like that will get you banned here, regardless of how ignorant they are or you feel they are. We're trying to avoid this sort of degenerate spiral.

If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Have you never had a severe cold when you were young or did you get one of those stupid attendance trophies in school? Geez. I'm starting to wonder if anyone on Hacker news has ever gone through any hardship.

We don't know yet, the number of cases this variant has been confirmed in is far too low at this point. You'll likely get a better idea of what that mix of mutations means in terms of clinical aspects and transmissions in a few weeks, most of the current takes are educated guesses based on what this variant has in common with the previous ones.

Seems like a bad take since we already know the vaccine immunity is reduced with time.

> The virus would need to completely diverge from SARS-CoV-2 in order to fully defeat

Yeah, you shouldnt be making these claims if you don't have specific background or understanding of what you are talking about

All current vaccines target few/couple specific proteins and protein groups on the virus spikes which interact with our cells, if these couple spikes/protein groups change then the vaccines stop being effective, you don't need a complete divergence of the vaccines to stop working as the vaccines don't target the "whole virus" to begin with, just specific parts of it, that was the worry with Delta and is the worry with this new strain

> All current vaccines target few/couple specific proteins and protein groups

Since you have the specific background and understanding and know what you are talking about can you explain to us how inactivated virus covid vaccines target specific proteins ? I would expect them to target the whole virus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covaxin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoronaVac

Basically the same reason why we have a new flu vaccine every single year

Current vaccines target key proteins necessary for attaching to the cell. If the virus stops expressing these proteins, it will be less fit at invading cells.

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