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Comment by dukeofdoom | Hacker News Reader

So we will get multiple competing strains that mutate quicker than we can develop the vaccine, with us trying to predict which strain will be dominant. Flue Vaccine is effectiveness estimated to be around 30% because of this.

Dr Christina Parks testimony for Michigan HB4471, explains this effect. https://youtu.be/8DOOZpGA_VI

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Parks is a quack who lies a lot in public. I particularly like the end of your video where she goes all in on vaccines causing autism.

Flu is perculiar because it reassorts - it's genome is in 8? pieces, which can interchange with other similar flu viruses within an infected cell. So a coinfection with A and B flu strains may result in C strain mixed and matched from A and B. Very hard to immunize against.

Could sars-cov2 not do the same thing?

No, different virus structure. I believe there may be some possibility of gene swapping with a coinfected cell, but much less than flu - the Covid RNA genome is one long string, as opposed to 8 bundled together - it's easier to mixup separate pieces. Furthermore, Covid does have an error correction mechanism, though not perfect hence the mutations.

Unrelated question, and not to pick on you if English isn't your first language - I'm always impressed by people who speak any multiple languages with any competency:

I've seen people misspelling flu as "flue" a lot over the course of this pandemic. I thought maybe that it was a British spelling, or that it was the word in German or French or Russian or something and foreign language speakers were mistakenly using the same word in English based on the similarity, but I can't find a language where that's the case. What's up with that?

InFLUEnza and the shortened version is pronounced like “blue” in English? Seems reasonable for a non-native speaker to infer it should be spelled with an e at the end.

The syllables of "influenza" are "in-flu-en-za", that's probably why it became "flu" instead of "flue".

I’m not the person you’re replying to but I’ve also been wondering the same. The best I can come up with is that “flue” is an actual word (like a chimney flue) and autocorrect doesn’t alert people to the error. Kind of like there, their, and they’re.

In writing this comment though I’ve learned that my iPhone autocorrects flue to glue. Even when following the word chimney. So perhaps my pet theory is totally wrong.

I'm just a bad speller, and don't check what I type. But English is my second language. Though I'm sure I would be terrible speller in my original language.

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