This article doesn't seem to address any of the strains originating in India, fwiw. My guess is that they haven't known of them long enough to understand their reaction in vaccinated people.
The popular media has done a huge disservice by naming this the "Indian double mutant." It's two changes that have been seen in other variants and have been studied already.
The "double mutation" is L452R and E484Q. L452R is the defining feature of the B.1.429 variant (California). E484Q has been seen in derivatives of B.1.429 and in bunches of other variants in the US. It has some antibody evasive properties, but not enough to render vaccines ineffective. Yes, the E484K mutation seen in B.1.351, P.1, and P.2 has been more studied, but E484Q has been studied too.
Double mutant makes it sound like it is something entirely novel that is going to murder us all.
I assumed that the common mutations were the result of travel. Is that not the case? Is the belief that the virus is hitting the same mutations independently in multiple places?
While its possible some of it is due to travel, I've definitely read that there is plenty of reason to believe these mutations are arising independently in different nations. Basically the virus is mutating all the time, but the vast majority of mutations are meaningless or have negative impact on the fitness of the virus. However some mutations may be more commonly observed, either because certain mutations in particular regions are more common (due to the physics/chemistry of the proteins involved) or because the mutation changes the virus in a way that makes it more like to stick and ultimately spread among the population. Some of these mutations are basically like local minimums in a mathematical function, and its not uncommon to see random traversals of that function coalesce around these minimums, at least temporarily.
India is by and large not using Pfizer. Evidence to date points to AstraZeneca (which they are using) being quite effective in preventing serious illness.
Not rendered ineffective per se, but it's part of why you need a flu shot every year. There are a lot of strains and they mutate a lot, so we do a best guess of which current strains will be the most infectious in a given year and develop vaccines targeting those strains.
Generally the vaccines are moderately effective, but it's because we update them every year. If we didn't, they wouldn't be.
That being said there are efforts underway to make vaccines that would be more broadly effective against the flu and will be less susceptible to variants escaping ("universal flu vaccines"), and so this may not always be true in the future.
In the meantime, mRNA vaccines will likely be a huge aid for fighting the flu, because they can be manufactured rapidly for specific strains. Currently there's a six-month or longer lead time for inactivated- or attenuated-virus vaccines — which is what flu shots generally are — and sometimes new variants pop up or are discovered to be more infectious in between the manufacturing start date and that year's flu season.
Moderna apparently plans to make COVID booster shots that are also flu shots, although they may not be ready this year.
OK, this is the part I wasn't aware of. I assumed (dangerous, I know) that each year's 'new' flu vaccine was really just a new 'blend' of existing proven vaccines, for the most prevalent strains that year.
Edited to remove badly conceived question. New Question: How often do we have to develop novel vaccines for new Flu variants?
From this [1] Wikipedia article it looks like there aren't new strains every year, but generally every few years there will be a new variant that replaces an older variant in the mix. The oldest variant currently in flu vaccines is from 2013, and the newest is from 2019.
That being said, the process generally doesn't change — you still grow and kill (or grow and weaken) viruses the same way, you just start from a different base strain. For already-approved inactivated-virus flu vaccines, the FDA does not require new clinical trials for strain updates, and for already-approved attenuated virus vaccines, they only require very minimal trials (300 adults to prove adequate attenuation) [2]. So they're not novel in the sense of the COVID vaccines, which needed large scale clinical trials to prove efficacy — the flu vaccines have generally already proved efficacy, so for strain updates the most they need to prove is safety.
yes - they make a prediction about which strains will be prevalent every Northern and Southern winters - it's a bit of a crap shoot, they're not always right though usually they are.
As I understand it predicting which flu strains to vaccinate this year is particularly hard because mask wearing/isolation/social distancing has reduced flu levels enough that they don't have a lot of data to base their predictions on
It seems like the flu virus is the example you want right? Every year the vaccines delivered is a cocktail based on the predicted most common variants, because no one vaccine can protect against them all.
I considered that, but as I understand it (this could wrong) the variants that are more prevalent each year are pre-existing and we just don't know which ones will be 'popular' ahead of time.
Another way of looking at this is that they're not new mutations that we scramble to develop and test vaccines for, we just roll out the same tried and tested vaccines, but we have to cobble together a different blend some years.
If the above is correct, then I guess the Flu example to answer my question would be: How often is a new variant of Flu (HxNy) discovered that necessitates a new vaccine being developed?
And for every single study of every single variant that has been studied, the vaccine in the study significantly reduces the incidence of severe cases of COVID-19 among the trial group. There is not a single study covering any variant for which this is not the case.
Yes we have obviously not tested every combination of vaccine and SARS-CoV-2 variant. But so far, the evidence that we have supports the working assumption that all vaccines drastically reduce, or in some cases eliminate entirely severe COVID-19 symptoms.
you can set it up that way if you prefer, there is a resume= kernel param you can set to a separate file or device. I keep them combined tho because I hardly ever use much swap, and don't have a ton of disk, and if hibernation ever did fail, I can just close some tabs and be fine
Well, taking a step back, this is all a very very poor analogy to describe the mechanics behind why the Yahoo Answers team might choose not to maintain static web pages; bringing up Mitt Romney's arguments in that context is...perplexing, to say the least (and probably flame-bait).
But in the spirit of actually engaging with the comment, Mitt Romney's argument is centered around the debate around whether rights that are traditionally afforded to individuals by American law (i.e. the US Constitution) also extend to individuals acting in a group capacity. That is to say, if I got up on a soapbox and started preaching communism, can the US government prevent me from doing that? If you and I decided to create a group and find like-minded people and collectively use our resources to get up on a soapbox and started preaching communism, can the US government prevent us from doing that? The Supreme Court found that the answer to both of those questions is "No", and — importantly — that the answer to the latter question is "No" for the same reason that the answer to the former question is "No".
So taking another step back, arguing that "America is a person" doesn't make much sense in that context, because the argument is about whether "America" has collective rights under American law; it's like dividing by 0. But groups within the US are different; a group of communists talking about how dope they think Marxism is, in a legal sense, is exactly the same as McDonalds Inc talking about how dope burgers are, or Google Inc. talking about how dope search engines are...or even groups of Indians talking about how dope Shah Rukh Khan is. They're all protected by the First Amendment.
Part of the problem that Scots faces is that there are actually 3 Scottish languages: Scottish Gaelic, Scots, and Scottish English. Scottish Gaelic is similar to Irish, Scots is a descendant of Old English, and Scottish English is a dialect of standard British English. People often conflate Scots with Scottish English.
