121–130 of 337 posts
Twitter thread from a vaccine developer: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1464222680731820043.html A lot of speculation still, but it's not all bad so far.
The red portion of the graph on the far right is the new variant.
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Imagine there was a fire near where you live, constantly spreading and endangering lives in your community. Would you say people can just "learn to live it"?
When far more people are harmed by the indirect effects of the fire (fear, jobs lost, mental health issues etc) than the fire itself, then yes - I would encourage them to liberate their minds, embrace reality and start living.
Disease and death have been a part of humanity since time began. All we can do is try to make the most out of the short time we have here on this earth. Playing this covid theater game for 2+ years is, in my opinion, an insulting to human nature. We aren't meant to do this.
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Also known as B.1.1.529 Variant21K appears to have arisen in November 2021, possibly in South Africa. Early sequences are predominantly from South Africa, though also detected in Botswana and Hong Kong. 21K is primarily of concern due to the large number of mutations it has in the Spike gene. Many of these variants are in the receptor binding domain and N-terminal domain, and thus may play key roles in ACE2 binding a…
>This literally reads like post apocalyptic fan fiction. I find it incredibly fascinating how fast this virus can mutate in order to throw curveballs around our natural and engineered defenses and become more efficient at killing us. How is this even possible in such a short amount of time? I thought evolution takes tens of thousands of years. It's not like viruses have giant brains with massive IQs to come up with a…
In the normal case the selective pressure isn't really there, since the virus will get beat back after a week or two anyway and just 1-2 point mutations probably didn't give it any significant advantage is infecting more hosts.
Given how many mutations this variant has compared to its most direct known ancestor, the former is almost certainly what happened in this case too.
See for example: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...
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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...
Twitter thread from a vaccine developer: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1464222680731820043.html A lot of speculation still, but it's not all bad so far.
>Chair of ...Maryland's Newest Anthropomorphic Convention!
Not sure how I feel about this. Are many vaccine developers also furries?
Will people ever get over sensationalism and learn to live with it? It will continue to mutate and spread for years to come. Putting life on pause should've never been an option because of the toxic precedent it created.
Imagine there was a fire near where you live, constantly spreading and endangering lives in your community. Would you say people can just "learn to live it"?
Twitter thread from a vaccine developer: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1464222680731820043.html A lot of speculation still, but it's not all bad so far.
>vaccine developer >Chair of ...Maryland's Newest Anthropomorphic Convention! Not sure how I feel about this. Are many vaccine developers also furries?
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.
>The mRNA and viral vector vaccines induced ONLY spike protein antibodies in the inoculated test subjects
>In comparison, whole inactivated virus and natural infection induce antibodies to many parts of the virus
Original antigenic sin:
>Subjects injected with the old formulations have locked their immune response to only a few antibodies
>Any new formulation of the injection will amplify those antibodies rather than inducing new ones
Antibody-dependent enhancement:
>Omicron may have mutated to take advantage of non-neutralising antibodies to the injection spike protein
>This would mean that the virus can more easily latch onto the CD147 receptor and enter cells in the vaccinated
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No. 10,000,000 times 50,000,000,000 (rough stab at # of virions per infection, range 1 to 100 B), is 500,000,000,000,000,000 opportunities for mutations so far. You can take it to the bank that the number of mutations is far, far higher than the number that makes it to the press because the strains that end up dominating have already undergone a lot of competitive pressure by the time we notice them, so there will be…
One thing to be aware of with RNA viruses - they mutate all the time and almost all mutations are nonviable (unable to infect cells or unable to replicate) and die off immediately. The fact there are so few variants (and there hasn't been a new dominant variant since October 2020 ) illustrates how fragile its mechanisms are.
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.
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