Omicron variant: Move over, Delta
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@aqua-letifer said in Move over, Delta:
@mik said in Move over, Delta:
'They' have also speculated that the virus can only mutate so much. But it's at the point where I believe none of what I hear and only half of what I see.
That might mean different things.
Proteins are very complex. There are probably a near-infinite number of possibilities.
But how many of them can compete with Delta? Assume Xi (I'm calling it that) replaces Delta in fitness. That is hard enough, but Xi, being even more fit, would make it that much harder for new variants to replace Xi. And the kind of traits the new variants would need would lead it eventually toward attenuation. That's not to say one of them could blow up into something really nasty, but overall it's incentivized to get to something more like the common cold instead of ebola.
Technically this is Nu…
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@lufins-dad said in Move over, Delta:
@aqua-letifer said in Move over, Delta:
@mik said in Move over, Delta:
'They' have also speculated that the virus can only mutate so much. But it's at the point where I believe none of what I hear and only half of what I see.
That might mean different things.
Proteins are very complex. There are probably a near-infinite number of possibilities.
But how many of them can compete with Delta? Assume Xi (I'm calling it that) replaces Delta in fitness. That is hard enough, but Xi, being even more fit, would make it that much harder for new variants to replace Xi. And the kind of traits the new variants would need would lead it eventually toward attenuation. That's not to say one of them could blow up into something really nasty, but overall it's incentivized to get to something more like the common cold instead of ebola.
Technically this is Nu…
I Xi.
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Very clever.
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@jolly said in Move over, Delta:
Shocking...
Jolly, he is way off base. Novavax received emergency authorization for it’s regular vaccine. They are now starting to research and develop an Omicron vaccine update. Moderna, J&J and the others are now talking about testing their standard vaccine against the variant, which makes sense.
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@george-k said in Move over, Delta:
The "already worried" tweet was on Aug 4.
Hey, I'm still holding out hope for my Omega Variant prediction from Aug 2: https://nodebb.the-new-coffee-room.club/topic/10582/what-s-the-next-best-outbreak-name
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Moderna CEO expects material drop in Moderna vaccine’s effectiveness against the Omicron variant.
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@axtremus said in Move over, Delta:
Moderna CEO expects material drop in Moderna vaccine’s effectiveness against the Omicron variant.
At this point in time, he's blowing smoke out of his ass.
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@George-K Reminds me of @bachophile post about spread vs seriousness of disease… This may be less serious on average, but if it’s spread is wider it could be far worse than Delta.
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@Jolly I would think that they could look at the particular spike proteins their particular vaccine targets and be able to say “oh “
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Dr. Uğur Şahin—the co-founder of BioNTech who helped develop Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine—told The Wall Street Journal Tuesday that, even if the Omicron variant leads to more breakthrough COVID-19 infections, he believes the vaccines will continue to protect against severe disease. “If a virus achieves immune escape, it achieves it against antibodies, but there is the second level of immune response that protects from severe disease—the T-cells,” he said.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said yesterday that as of Tuesday morning, 44 Omicron variant cases had been confirmed by 11 European countries and that “all cases for which there is information available on severity were either asymptomatic or had mild symptoms.”