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I was under the impression that it's the other way around; spike protein is not conserved between variants [1]: https://theconversation.com/new-coronavirus-var

• garmaine 6y ago
  If you track each and every mutation as a variant, then here are thousands of them. Changes in the spike protein have the largest effect though, so we track those specifically, and clusters of changes to the spike protein are what get official designation as variants. Because that’s what we care about.
• tialaramex 6y ago
  That article is explaining that it's particularly worrying that some variants do have changes to the spike protein, not that this is common (it isn't). Mutation causes random changes, the selection process eliminates those that render the mutated version less fit. The focus on the spike is because most random changes to the spike also make it useless, the virus becomes impotent. Such mutations won't thrive of course, and so we hardly see them at all, but they are happening. In contrast, many random changes elsewhere might not prevent the virus from working. They might say, make it less able to survive outside a body, which would give it a disadvantage against variants that don't have that change, but if they also mean the immune system of a previous host doesn't recognise them, that's a big advantage to counteract that. We see lots of these variants because they "work", but since the spike is the same existing vaccines ought to be effective. So this is why it made sense to focus on the spike, even though as this article shows it isn't a magical panacea.