COVID-19: Chapter 9 - OMGicron

I mean duh - lol GTFO with that weak ass arginine helix breaker. I got your furin cleavage site right here pal!

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The frustrating thing is that there was a time when I could tell you confidently what that means, but it’s been replaced by what to do with a donk bet and facts about whiskey

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Proline is the only amino acid that’s a ring, so it’s the most conformationally constrained AA. It’s generally a poor choice for substituting into a protein you’re engineering, because it doesn’t behave like any other amino acid. Glycine is the opposite. It’s R group is just hydrogen, so it’s the most free and flexible, so it also doesn’t behave like any other AA. If you are designing a protein and need a space filler, you usually choose alanine, because it’s the most boring. It’s R group is just a methyl, so it’s small, greasy, and unobtrusive. There have been experiments done where they replaced a whole alpha helix in a protein (something like a dozen or more amino acids) with nothing but polyalanine, and the protein was basically fine. No way that works with polyglycine or polyproline.

But long story short, the Wuhan strain had a most odd choice for an amino acid right around the spot that conspiracy theorists are saying must have been engineered by humans, a choice that a human protein engineer would be quite unlikely to make. Furthermore, the delta strain, which as we all know is much more dangerous, swapped out that odd choice for something a protein engineer would consider more reasonable, making it, and not the Wuhan strain the one that more closely resembles conventional thinking in protein engineering. This is evidence in favor of the Wuhan strain being naturally evolved, because evolution is full of odd, seemingly or even demonstrably suboptimal outcomes that work nevertheless.

Edit to add: I guess now we get the conspiracy theories that Indian scientists engineered the delta strain and unleashed it on the world.

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Bickering about old drama

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Bickering about old drama

and where people who don’t even make the top 10% talk about it.

3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Bickering about old drama

People say this a lot, but is it really true? Is the marginal vaccine really just being wasted? In most supply chains, the level of demand informs future allocations/orders. Even if there’s a vaccine dose at CVS that is destined to go bad if you don’t get it, is there a risk that incrementing the vaccine demand numbers by one causes a future dose to be sent to that CVS, where it then goes bad?

I don’t really know the answers to any of those questions, but if you want to skirt the rules to cadge an extra vaccine dose for yourself, I think you ought to be pretty sure. Anyone who’s old or who got J&J should 100,000% get a booster. Folks who got Pfizer and who have some “story” (mild asthma, dad bod, whatever) should probably get a booster. Young healthy people who got Moderna should really be thinking about what the ethical decision is.

This is overly cynical and not what I really believe, but from a certain angle, we spend most of our time earnestly lamenting the various distributional injustices of modern society, and then during the brief periods where people like us (mostly low-risk to start with) are eligible to to make ourselves a bit safer from the virus, it’s a mad dash to deploy any stratagem or deception to get ours, and assuage our consciences with less-than-fully-explored arguments like this one.

What I do actually believe is that vax behavior is likely to be one of the most actually-impactful things you can control about this pandemic. Getting/not getting a booster at the margin could indirectly decide whether some high-risk person in a poor country gets a vaccine now or 18 months from now. It’s an important call. I think boosters should have been allowed a long time ago, because they’re obviously safe and effective and really important for some groups, but unthinkingly getting one just because you can is not clearly the right decision (other than from a purely selfish perspective).

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Got my booster a few minutes ago. Barely waited. Actually got my shot before my scheduled appointment which is not a good sign for their popularity.

Tiny little thing compared to the previous shots. Didn’t feel a thing. Let’s see what happens.

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The US bought enough vaccines to booster all of us and is going to eventually authorize boosters for all. Maybe I’m an asshole for getting it early (I haven’t yet and as an overweight person over 40 not even sure I would be getting it early), but as a relatively well off American I probably did like five worse things the day I get the booster. I’m firmly in the if there is a hell, nearly all modern day wealthy country people are heading there camp.

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[quote=“JohnnyTruant, post:4319, topic:6255”] far more concerned with dismantling a position by posters like me and Church than actually combatting dangerous misinformation.
[/quote]

This is really the key. Even if churchill is a non-observant antivaxxer, who cares? The crusade against scary “misinformation” is almost completely antithetical to the idealized vision of having this thread be ahead of the mainstream, especially if “misinformation” is de facto defined to be anything that’s solidly outside the mainstream consensus. As a concrete example, there’s been good evidence of Pfizer vaccine waning for almost three months (Mayo Clinic study in early August). But that study was glibly dismissed around here rather than being seriously discussed, because it was outside the mainstream, and perhaps because it aligned with the earlier Israeli studies that actually had issues. More broadly, can you even think of the last time that two people who disagreed about something had a productive discussion about it rather than engaging in a series of silly dunks and counter-dunks?

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I mean, I don’t think outright lying is especially conducive to a good discussion .

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YOU DONT SAY…

I can do you one better. I was floated the idea (months ago, mind you) by a Fox Business-watching financial professional type that the epicenter of Delta outbreak mysteriously aligns with Jinping making a secret rendezvous to northern Indian during his trip to meet with the Dalai Lama, and that, just maybe, there was something on that plane they don’t want you to know about.

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I’d be interested in getting this test / these tests in the US, anybody know how to do that?

More evidence that this went worldwide before anyone had a clue what was going on.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04130-w

We find that community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 was likely in several areas of Europe and the United States by January 2020, and estimate that by early March, only 1 to 3 in 100 SARS-CoV-2 infections were detected by surveillance systems.

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Suboptimal Cleavage was actually the original name of a Beatles album, but the record company made them change it at the last minute to Revolver.

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Antibody levels are correlated with immunity, but they don’t tell the whole story. You have T-cells that function in immunity, too, and antibody measurements don’t capture that. Your body also has the ability to generate more antibodies in response to a nascent infection.

Yes I’m sure if we measured AB levels for pretty much any vaccine that we would see pretty low titers.

With some aggressive like delta there should be a correlation between initial titer to breakthrough and even symptomatic frequency. But the slope is likely nowhere near 1 (50% reduction doesn’t mean twice as many infections). And it’s probably a very minor slope to serious disease since the immune system will ramp up based on the vaccine exposure.

(The above is extrapolation with how other virus/immune system interactions work, not known fact)

Still to limit spread and to protect the vulnerable (and the morons) it’s best to keep the titers up when their is high community incidence.

Wookie-thanks for the proline explanation. I knew the concept but nowhere near that level of biochemistry detail. Interestingly one of my clients make a protein that naturally has poly-alanine sequences (for physical properties, not an enzyme).

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Seems like these commercial tests don’t really give you info that would be actionable. Nothing wrong with satisfying curiosity but you don’t want to lower your guard based on results that might not tell a full picture of what your immune system is up to.

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