3 ms·

> these same variants tend to be more contagious regardless, It may be the case for B 1.1.7 (but around 30%, not the 70% originally flaunted by the UK governme

> these same variants tend to be more contagious regardless, It may be the case for B 1.1.7 (but around 30%, not the 70% originally flaunted by the UK government and the media), but at this time there are no data on transmissibility of B 1.351 (the variant discussed here).

tempestn 6y ago
I thought I'd read something recently suggesting that the SA variant was also thought to be more transmissible, but I can't find it so you're likely right. Regardless, as more people are vaccinated or infected it will select for variants that can bypass immunity to earlier strains. It doesn't follow from that though that vaccination is dangerous or undesirable. I think perhaps there's a tendency to make a mental analogy to antibiotics, where it is dangerous to expose pathogens (bacteria in that case) to antibiotics without wiping them out completely, because you encourage resistance. There are a couple differences here though. First of all, we have a limited number of viable antibiotics, but these vaccines can be continually adapted to target changes in the virus. More importantly though, the interaction between the two is different. It's not that the virus is being exposed to the vaccine and selecting for mutations that avoid it within a host, as bacteria might do in response to an insufficient round of antibiotics. It's simply that the vaccine will protect against the strands it can, which will leave us with the ones that resist vaccines. That situation is better than the one where we're being infected by all strains! An exception would be if there were vaccine resistant strains that caused more severe illness than non-resistant ones, and that infection with a non-resistant strain also protected against these resistant strains, whereas the vaccine didn't. That isn't the case now though, and such a strain is unlikely to develop, because immunity from vaccines tends to be stronger than natural immunity. (So if anything, the opposite is true - even against resistant strains people are likely to be better off with vaccine-based than natural immunity.)

tempestn 6y ago

I thought I'd read something recently suggesting that the SA variant was also thought to be more transmissible, but I can't find it so you're likely right. Regardless, as more people are vaccinated or infected it will select for variants that can bypass immunity to earlier strains. It doesn't follow from that though that vaccination is dangerous or undesirable. I think perhaps there's a tendency to make a mental analogy to antibiotics, where it is dangerous to expose pathogens (bacteria in that case) to antibiotics without wiping them out completely, because you encourage resistance. There are a couple differences here though. First of all, we have a limited number of viable antibiotics, but these vaccines can be continually adapted to target changes in the virus. More importantly though, the interaction between the two is different. It's not that the virus is being exposed to the vaccine and selecting for mutations that avoid it within a host, as bacteria might do in response to an insufficient round of antibiotics. It's simply that the vaccine will protect against the strands it can, which will leave us with the ones that resist vaccines. That situation is better than the one where we're being infected by all strains! An exception would be if there were vaccine resistant strains that caused more severe illness than non-resistant ones, and that infection with a non-resistant strain also protected against these resistant strains, whereas the vaccine didn't. That isn't the case now though, and such a strain is unlikely to develop, because immunity from vaccines tends to be stronger than natural immunity. (So if anything, the opposite is true - even against resistant strains people are likely to be better off with vaccine-based than natural immunity.)