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I read a paper on hn to this effect a little while ago, I'll provide source if needed.
If we can expect more surprises like this, movement will have to be curtailed till we’re sure we have things under control (like SARS). We can’t have the whole world economy in lockdown because a new strain spread because prior immunization is ineffective against the variant.
You could even schedule them in advance.
I for one am not concerned. The true mortality rate appears to be 65. What does that mean? To put it into perspective you may only know one person in your friend group which knows one person who dies. Your friends / family are more likely to die of cancer. How often do you know someone die of cancer? It's definitely unfortunate; we should all socially distance & wear N95's where possible. All of us can decide if we w…
That depends on how many smokers and ex-smokers you know. It makes it all the sadder because the death was preventable. Which puts it into a similar headspace with Covid.
Pulling directly from TFA, > Here we show that this lineage exhibits complete escape from three classes of therapeutically relevant monoclonal antibodies. Furthermore 501Y.V2 shows substantial or complete escape from neutralizing antibodies in COVID-19 convalescent plasma. These data highlight the prospect of reinfection with antigenically distinct variants and may foreshadow reduced efficacy of current spike-based v…
exiting discussion
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.15.426911v1
Interesting... the common cold and the flu also tend to mutate to be resistant to past immunity. I wonder if we’re on a the cusp of finally finding cures for these types of rapidly mutating viruses.
"To determine whether 501Y.V2 is still recognized by non-neutralizing antibodies, the binding of polyclonal sera (from Fig.2a) to a recombinant 501Y.V2 RBD+SBD1 protein and an RBD+SBD1 from the original lineage was assessed by ELISA (Fig.2b). These data revealed that binding of polyclonal plasma to 501Y.V2 RBD+SBD1 was only substantially affected in a minority of cases (14 of 44 with ≥five-fold reduction, 32%). Most of the convalescent plasma/serum suffered less than four-fold reductions in total binding activity (as measured by area under the curve), suggesting a considerable non-neutralizing antibody component are still able to bind the 501Y.V2 spike antigen"
Its also worth to note that only 44 plasma samples were used from individuals out of a population where the virus probably originated.
Worth noting that this study isn't peer reviewed yet.
Worth noting that peer review is also a bit (or a lot slow) and not perfect, and that all peer-reviewed studies have in the past been not peer reviewed.