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New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

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Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#11

Post by dataflow »

lazide wrote: post #10
jjcon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is always going to continue to spread won’t it? A vaccine may slow it down which is good but my fear is that long term non-live vaccines like this could just make things worse when used with such a volatile virus.

Why would a live vaccine be better?

I feel like the parent wasn't trying to argue that injecting people with live vaccines (er, live virus?) would be better?

Rather the idea seemed to be to stop making more vaccines for COVID - kind of like how we deal with colds now.

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#13

Post by lazide »

dataflow wrote: post #11
lazide wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a live vaccine be better?

I feel like the parent wasn't trying to argue that injecting people with live vaccines (er, live virus?) would be better? Rather the idea seemed to be to stop making more vaccines for COVID - kind of like how we deal with colds now.

They were explicitly saying their concern was with non-live vaccines though?

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#14

Post by dataflow »

lazide wrote: post #13
dataflow wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the parent wasn't trying to argue that injecting people with live vaccines (er, live virus?) would be better? Rather the idea seemed to be to stop making more vaccines for COVID - kind of like how we deal with colds now.

They were explicitly saying their concern was with non-live vaccines though?

I obviously can't say for sure, but given the topic was the development of artificial resistance to vaccines, I would've thought the alternative they had in mind was natural resistance - i.e. getting infected naturally.

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#15

Post by peteradio »

Kerrick wrote: post #8
jjcon wrote: post #7

Can anyone with more knowledge on this topic than me (I’m no expert) assuage my fears: by giving human populations such artificial resistances (non-live vaccines) we run the risk of selecting for viruses that are even harder for even our own immune systems to detect and destroy. Current Covid strains don’t seem all that bad, basically everyone I know has been infected now. Might we run the risk of making things worse…

Reducing the spread of existing variants reduces the number of replications the virus can make, which in turn reduces the occurrence of mutations.

That doesn't answer the question though, almost a non-sequiter.

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#16

Post by Taniwha »

latchkey wrote: post #3

Sign me up.

I'm going to wait for actual careful human testing .... could be that 5% of the human (but not mouse) population have a variant of some critical metabolic path that this anti-body attacks .....

But yes, once we know it's safe sign me up too

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#18

Post by osigurdson »

Kerrick wrote: post #8
jjcon wrote: post #7

Can anyone with more knowledge on this topic than me (I’m no expert) assuage my fears: by giving human populations such artificial resistances (non-live vaccines) we run the risk of selecting for viruses that are even harder for even our own immune systems to detect and destroy. Current Covid strains don’t seem all that bad, basically everyone I know has been infected now. Might we run the risk of making things worse…

Reducing the spread of existing variants reduces the number of replications the virus can make, which in turn reduces the occurrence of mutations.

I've often wondered if other viruses (below) could possibly mutate into a more dangerous form. Perhaps there is a reason why they cannot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virus_species

Re: New antibody neutralizes all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in lab tests

#20

Post by robbiep »

jjcon wrote: post #7

Can anyone with more knowledge on this topic than me (I’m no expert) assuage my fears: by giving human populations such artificial resistances (non-live vaccines) we run the risk of selecting for viruses that are even harder for even our own immune systems to detect and destroy. Current Covid strains don’t seem all that bad, basically everyone I know has been infected now. Might we run the risk of making things worse…

Evolution is climbing mount improbable. And natural selection (even in the face of in this case intelligently designed selectors) funnels organisms into potential dead ends which they can’t evolve out of - they’ve gone up the ‘north face’ and in order to reach fitness in the face of their selectors, they actually need to be on a completely different mountain.

An antibody that dead ends all current evolutionary trends for an organism means that they can’t evolve out of the dead end natural selection has funnelled it down.

So no, this isn’t a ‘might make it worse’, this is a ‘end of covid’ agent.

That’s if the antigenic trigger can be made into a vaccine. More likely what the research is describing is that it is now possible to make a monoclonal antibody that can work as an infusion and is active against all known and future possible variants with the same efficacy.

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