Seems J&J’s vaccine shows 85% efficacy for South African variant. I guess we can all learn about all these is that the vaccine roll outs will be as fluid as it will be. Have to keep adapting as information and data comes.
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Also important to note that the demographics of the Spanish flu fatalities were odd - people who had been affected by the Russian flu of 1889 had a very high survival rate. That was a very nasty flu, but not the killer that Spanish flu was.
However, that highlights the critical difference between the immunity that humans acquire to the influenza virus versus coronavirus. There was no significant reinfection known in 1919, and the acquired immunity to a close relative protected people 30 years later. By contrast, we were already seeing reinfection last June, and at least one of the Variants of Concern, the SA version, appears to substantially bypass antibody response from prior infections. That may be true for the Brazilian variant as well.
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So which avenue do you think represents the most likely way out of this, globally? An effective vaccine response or a natural less-deadly mutation? I appreciate that it’s not either/or but it seems to me that if we want to emerge from this within 3 years the greater prospect lies with the virus mutating to something less deadly than being able to deliver an effective vaccine response on such a huge scale.
Given the investment and requirement, necessity being the mother of invention and all, I’d imagine a blanket jab will be available in 18 months or less that doesn’t need boosting. Or the virus gets almost eradicated and boosters are only needed in flare up areas. Only a matter of time before there’s 52 different variants, the vaccine will have to take a different path I think. I’ve heard bleach and sunlight are very effective?
I also wonder why there are not some great projects going on being driven by millions of working people with a computer on furlough currently watching DVDs. No idea what but there’s a hell of a lot of man (and woman) power going to waste at the mo. Think something like SETI but for the virus.
Quite, if they had spoken to the lads that track flights of potential Liverpool signings and put them in charge of track and trace, they would have had an effective operation going in only a few days.
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I read an interesting article saying the virus will eventually mutate into less deadly form, because this is what evolution will force it towards. Which sort of makes sense - a virus that kills everyone it infects will be much less successful than one which doesn’t. The virus doesn’t ‘want’ to kill people.
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It is a strange article of faith in the science that the unique optimal pathway for a virus to mutate is toward a more benign form. But that rests on the fact that it does not kill its hosts being the unique optimal strategy, and that the optimal strategy will be discovered and win out. But we know evolution doesn’t always work like that. The equilibrium doesn’t have to be optimal. Organisms evolve into sub-optimal dead-ends all the time, and die out -pathogens not least by killing their hosts. Ophiostoma ulmi is nowhere near as common as it used to be, because it cannot find anymore elm trees.
In this case, there is no particular reason that a more benign version wins out if the more malign versions are able to reinfect. Maybe the Friendly mutation of the South African virus emerges, a version that defeats vaccines, is as contagious, has no symptoms and has no effects while providing us with immunity wins out, but that is the scientific equivalent of the Good Fairy coming to help us. It could happen, but we have minimal sense of the timelines and such a variant would in the timeframes relevant to us have minimal competitive advantage. We would be applying most of the selective pressures to it along with the rest, and in particular the transferable immunity characteristic has no near-term competitive advantage.
The fact that we have a toolbox tells me the near-term way out of this is with that - vaccines, a process of finetuning, and a global effort to do what we did with smallpox on a compressed scale. Hoping a mutation will help us within 3 years is a fantasy to my mind. I think the time scale for a benign variant to become endemic and displace all others would be much, much longer. We are a year in, and have probably infected no more than 20% of the global population.
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The critical word being ‘eventually’. Eventually, we are all dead. A lot of alternative mutations can hae a good run before the eventual wins out.
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I seem to remember @Arminius citing this as a policy recommendation nearly a year ago and that countries that had to deal with SARS were better prepared to deal with this than others. Still no excuses for the UK not doing so sooner, mind.
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Yes, our hospitals have been great about this, complete separation of the streams. Shame about the care homes.
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@Arminius - which vaccines do India have? AZ and?
Just AZ, right now. There is also a Bharat Biotech one with an EUA for India, but it still has no Phase 3 report.
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Has anyone figured out how NZ has managed to be so successful in containment?
I saw one of my favorite bands just played a festival, looked like 10,000 people in attendance.
Closing borders early, having a population roughly half that of London in a country bigger than the UK, whose nearest large neighbour is approximately 2,000kms away all probably helps. But they were proactive in taking protective measures early on so although they have considerable advantages they also took sensible decisions in a timely manner.
Pop density NZ 19/km² UK 270.7/km²
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most of bloody kiwi lives in Oz anyway
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