COVID-19: Chapter 9 - OMGicron

Rhetorical, right?

When I got Covid, Iā€™d get a call every day from provincial health authorities and one daily q was my temperature. We didnā€™t even own a thermometer. Gf picked one up after our quarantine was up.

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This is over my head, how worried should we be?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-021-00779-5

Itā€™s not good, Jim.

I was able to deduce that! But couldnt tell if this was a ā€œhey, heads up, its November 2019 againā€ bad thing or just a ā€œwe should be cautious because looks like immune evasion is possibleā€ thing.

Seems inconclusive to me. The measured antibody escape seems worrying, but itā€™s lesser or comparable to how the beta variant behaves in the same trials. The vaccines were shown to still be effective against beta in the thing we actually care about: not making people sick and keeping them alive and out of the hospital. So, performing poorly in these tests doesnā€™t equate with vaccine escape, but it also isnā€™t necessarily going to be as forgettable as beta was. So, Iā€™d just watch the CDC variant monitoring page:

Itā€™s all delta all the time and has been for months, but if something starts showing up at an appreciable rate, then thatā€™s the real news.

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Thanks. Yeah I honestly didnt know if this was a delta lineage strain either. I know delta has offspring now that are still considered delta, but it starts to get over my head in terms of the science.

My understanding was that beta could have been bad and actually good, in some ways, that delta outcompeted it.

Delta outcompetes other variants right now, but seems like vaccines could change that.

Thats sort of what Ive heard Pfizer is thinking. That as the population gets vaccinated with spread still high thereā€™s a reasonable chance we see mutations move towards more evasion vs.more transmissibility and that, perhaps, as vax rates increase and delta burns through the unvaxxed that an evasion variant became more likely to take hold even if less transmissable.

Guess all just wait and see, and Iā€™ll be happier when my kids are vaxxed, but cant say I feel super good about what 2022 is gonna look like unfortunately.

Good news is they say they have found neutralizing antibodies for it so spinning up boosters for it should be a snap.

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Yeah, i havent heard any real concern about doomsday ADE type scenarios. Making new vaccines for these variants doesnt seem like a super hard technical problem with the mRNA platform.

Obviously going back towards square one and starting the approval and revaccination process over, and putting back stringent NPI in place while we wait, would a huge issue. Unless the IFR really spiked or we really got coercive Id have a hard time seeing vaccination, round 2, getting up to more than like 50-55% uptake and Id have to think even some sort of expedited process would take 3-6 months best case to revax the population.

They said the variant was detected in Europe back in spring this year, so a good six months ago, and yet thereā€™s no sign of it having a competitive advantage despite high vaccination rates in Europe over that time.

Iā€™m far from an expert, but having seen a view of these immune-escape in vitro studies and read reactions to them, my impression is that the connection between antibody evasion in cell lines in vitro and consequences for viral evasion of a full immune response in vivo is tenuous at best. I think weā€™ll probably see an immune escape variant eventually, but I think that with or without these stories demonstrating possible steps along that path.

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Aw geez, I read that part about being found in Angola and Sweden and then read right over that it was identified this past spring rather than being some late breaking variant. That tilts the needle from inconclusive to solid snoozer for me.

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Man, it must be super depressing to be Washington State and say to your head coach, ā€œWe want you to get the vaccine. If you have concerns, we have arranged a private meeting between you and one of the worldā€™s experts on vaccines.ā€ And then the coach is like, ā€œNope, still not willing.ā€

Over about an hour, Rolovich drove a conversation that focused on topics that were consistent with what Palmer said has been shared by the ā€œanti-vax crowd on social mediaā€ over the past several years.

ā€œKind of typical ones: Is Bill Gates involved with the vaccines? Does [Gates] hold a patent on the vaccines?ā€ Palmer recalled to ESPN. ā€œHe asked whether SV40 is in the vaccines and whether that could be a dangerous thing. And the answer to that is no.ā€

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My company has started a soft vaccine requirement (donā€™t want to get into the exact details) and weā€™ve started to get resistance from a small number of employees. The reasons they are giving make it sound like they are talking in code.

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Iā€™m going out on a speculation limb here but Iā€™m thinking that the likeliest mutations for escape AND improved spread are at least different and hopefully at least somewhat conflicting.

So at a minimum delta needs to mutate to evade and keep up its high transmission or beta needs to escape and then mutate to high transmission. Either needs to happen without losing the original character.

As long as there is an ample reservoir of unvaxxed, delta like strains are going to dominate based on numbers.

So Iā€™m bullish on at least having time for a response before something thatā€™s good at both emerges. I hope the vaccine makers are developing new antigen sequences as escape mutants are detected so the base neutralizing efficacy is all ready to go and they can jump right into production and trials (at least in the plugnplay mRNA regime).

Of course we can always mask, socially distance and lockdown if we get behind in the battle - @SweetSummerChild

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I donā€™t know if this should go here or in the meme thread:

https://twitter.com/jbenton/status/1453375910695026700

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I canā€™t tell if this is rungood or runbad.

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Light work and good stories both have their upsides and downsides.

This makes me want to vomit

https://twitter.com/thereal_truther/status/1452800810262228997?s=21

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