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Why is Delta so infectious? New tool spotlights little-noticed mutation
- hcurtiss 5y agoI get it. We need the tools. But, man, this all strikes me as super dicey. They’re manipulating particles without the ability to replicate, but it sure feels like they’re tinkering with humanity on the edge of a knife. I can’t help but worry something could go wrong.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- peakaboo 5y agoIt's too late now anyway. Humanity didnt listen to the warnings because the officials said the vaccine is safe. Lots of sickness on the way for humanity due to these vaccines.
- belltaco 5y agoNah, humanity ignored covid because their leaders told them it harmless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o We're still seeing the effects of harmful disinformation about the vaccine in East Europe.
- trhway 5y agoThere is no "the vaccine". There are several existing vaccines, and so far no one prevents infection, nor prevents spread. The only thing current vaccines do is making the illness softer. Yet the governments everywhere pushing the mandate which would have made sense only if the vaccines prevented infection and spread. Whole stuff of an emergency department in a Russian town resign refusing to get vaccinated. In addition to their main job they also work in the local covid hospital, and so far nobody of them has gotten ill. They are being forced to either get vaccinated or resign: https://www.rbc.ru/society/04/11/2021/6183924a9a794708a564ae6b https://www.rbc.ru/society/04/11/2021/6183924a9a794708a564ae... > but it sure feels like they’re tinkering with humanity on the edge of a knife. I can’t help but worry something could go wrong. well the current Covid is a result of such experiments - the original gain-of-function NIH grant channeled through the Dvorjac's EcoAlliance to the Wuhan lab even had the "Human Subjects Involved" checked. Gain-of-function in human model with human specific genetic modification of the virus (check the EcoAlliance's DARPA proposal) - what can go wrong... Well, now we know at least one such scenario for real.
- mcguire 5y agoNo vaccine prevents infection, nor prevents spread.
- trhway 5y agothat is antivax propaganda. The main push of the antivaxxers these days is associating the successful, effective and well proven vaccines (like the ones against polio, etc.) with the obviously failing (except for the softening of illness effect) covid vaccines. The covid vaccines are at the level of those every year flu vaccines - make sense for vulnerable population, otherwise no effect on infection and spread.
- pcwalton 5y agoYour posts are themselves spreading antivax falsehoods. The COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective in reducing severity of infection and spread.
- trhway 5y agoNo, they aren't effective in reducing spread. Singapore, Israel, UK, Wisconsin studies or even just public data on US infections all tell the same picture.
- pcwalton 5y agoYou literally have to just search [covid vaccine reducing spread] to find articles all saying the same thing, for example https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y Not acknowledging this is just denial.
- trhway 5y agoSpeaking about denial - looks like you didn't read the article you submitted: " A person who was fully vaccinated and then had a ‘breakthrough’ Delta infection was almost twice as likely to pass on the virus as someone who was infected with Alpha." ( and that is the same what i was saying months ago without any study and just based on simple arithmetic on public data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28081982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28081982) "Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus." To the comment below: I quoted facts/numbers, not conclusions (which is the title/subtitle/etc). The article spins those facts into conclusions sounding much more substantive and far going than what the facts/numbers are. There is no meaningful difference between the 57% and 67% when it comes to the spread of that an infectious virus in a dense human society (as i stated above "not effective in reducing spread"). The article is right though saying 57 < 67 on the 1st grade arithmetic basis, you win.
- mrtesthah 5y agoThe sickness of which you speak is that of your own mind. Don’t project your own mental illness out onto the rest of the world.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago> But because it is stripped of the virus’ RNA genome, it can’t hijack a cell’s machinery to replicate and burst out of the host cell to infect more cells. “It’s a one-way ticket. It doesn’t spread,” says Charles Rice, a molecular virologist at Rockefeller University. Did these people not take Jurrasic Park seriously? Life finds a way!
- shadowgovt 5y agoProbably best not to extrapolate too much from some fun but inaccurate science fiction when actual human lives are on the line. The odds of creating a super-virus researching Delta with this method are far, far lower than the odds of Delta continuing to stack up a body-count if we can't understand it better.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoIf you want to tell the truth, write fiction. The odds of COVID19 escaping a BSL4 facility were also pretty low but here we are.
- civilized 5y ago> The odds of COVID19 escaping a BSL4 facility were also pretty low but here we are. Only a small fraction of scientists actually believe the lab leak hypothesis, so it's a bit ridiculous to speak as if it's an established fact.
- drran 5y ago> Only a small fraction of *scientists* actually *believe* Emmmm. It doesn't look like scientific argument.
- civilized 5y agoAre you under the impression that the lab leak is proven unless I myself disprove it in these comments? I'm just telling you a reason you should doubt that it has been proven. Is this confusing or something?
- frankfrankfrank 5y agoWhat I find most shocking about all of this is that we can't even publicly or openly discuss things anymore because even if it is no longer done, there is surely still a latent deterrent effect from all the censorship and public persecution of anyone who was not willing to tow the regime message. When a culture of fear and intimidation sets it, it is extremely dangerous and usually in my experience even terminal for things like organizations and companies.
- nickthemagicman 5y agoThere's a term for it. It's called Social Cooling.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoWhere is it that you’re not able to publicly or openly discuss things? There has never BEEN such a wealth of opinions and discussion freely accessible to everyone.
- rsj_hn 5y agoCorrect, which is why there is a such a strong push to get Facebook to increase censorship. All of this communication freedom is absolutely freaking elites out, as their ability to control the discourse has slipped substantially.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoOK, so by many standards I'm "elite" (in terms of net worth, education etc.). But I don't think I'm part of the "elite" you're referring to, and I'm still concerned about the information flows enabled by the internet. Does that make me a member of said elite, or is there something else going on?
- furgooswft13 5y agoIt makes you a useful idiot.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoCan any commenter who actually has a medical degree please indicate this, so we can separate the wheat from the chaff? :-)
- bena 5y agoWhy would someone with a medical degree be able to verify the works of research biologists? This comes from a team led by a woman whose credentials in this field are very nearly impeccable. Not to mention, this article is pretty much information that we have no ability to act on. This is more like something you read and go "Huh, that's interesting" and then move on. It's an indicator that we're learning more. It doesn't need approval from your General Practitioner.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoAgree 100%. My reaction was to the comments, not the article itself.
- ceejayoz 5y agoPeople keep making this mistake. A medical degree here is about as relevant as asking a mechanic to opine on metallurgy.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoI see your point but a well practiced mechanic in the right subset of the field (i.e not automotive) is going to have picked up a lot of knowledge to the point where only the most arcane gotchas are likely to get them.
- imnotlost 5y agoMaybe Dr. Oz can help! (joking!)
- nickthemagicman 5y agoMedical degree is a generalist. They focus more on pathophysiology than molecular biology. What you want is a molecular biologist or even better a virologist.
- zmmmmm 5y agoIt's fascinating to see how knowledge evolves over time. So far most of the emphasis has been on the spike protein and its cleavage mechanisms. Now we start to see that may even be a relatively minor factor compared to the nucleocapsid. It is quite important to understand all these things if we are seeing new variants arise and need to assess how dangerous they are likely to be. Most especially since vaccines are based on the spike protein on the premise that it is essential to the infectiousness. But what if a variant can arise with a highly compromised spike protein yet compensate enough to still be highly infectious due to other factors? The most interesting thing is to think about where the other empty spaces in our knowledge are that are yet to be filled in - what will we know this time next year that will have us saying "previously we thought ...."
- mdp2021 5y agoForthcoming vaccine Valneva will be based on inactivated virus. Nucleocapsid preserved.
- angelzen 5y agoNovavax has also applied for approval in Canada, UK, Australia and NZ, and possibly already received EUA in Indonesia. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29111197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29111197 https://ir.novavax.com/press-releases?category=2 https://ir.novavax.com/press-releases?category=2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2021/11/03/if-approved-the-novavax-covid-19-vaccine-could-help-reduce-vaccine-hesitancy-in-the-us/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2021/11/03/if-appro...
- kordlessagain 5y agoI guess if we start glowing, we'll know which lab leaked.
- fallingknife 5y agoFrom the description it seems like the nucleocapsid protein mutation is something that would make the virus more effective in any given host. Whereas a spike protein mutation would be specific to the host since that is a part of the virus that interfaces with the host cell. In that case I would expect such a protein to already be very optimized (even in a lab leak scenario). Am I missing something here?
- ak217 5y agoThe virus evolved in bats, which have a much faster metabolism (to support the metabolic requirements of flight) and a constitutive (always on) immune response. This means in bats, the virus is always "on the run" from the host immune system and the host may never actually completely extinguish the infection, allowing it to continue at a low level while reducing inflammation. The trade-offs and selective pressures are different in the bat host compared to human. Packaging more copies of the mRNA per particle implies slowing down particle production so more mRNA can be made, but in bat that may slow down the generation time so much that the virus gets extinguished by the always-on host immunity. That's just one plausible mechanism of many, including simply that the protein structure was just not as "optimized" as you expect prior to the spillover event.
- rolph 5y agofor general edification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_nucleocapsid_protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_nucleocapsid_prote...
- alfor 5y agoLet’s try in a (safe) lab to make it more infectious, you know for science ! Hey, while we are doing this why not try on MERS, immagine the number of citation I could get for this ! Let’s think for one second the cost of a leak to the world population. It seems to me that we are doomed to self destruction if we don’t get wiser fast.
- jdavis703 5y agoViruses will always mutate. We can either let nature beat us to the punch or we can attempt to race nature. Also there’s a lot of literature on BSL 4 labs with crazy safety lapses (e.g. labs using duct tape to seal leaks and what not). If we wanted to treat BSL 4 with the same safety culture of modern nuclear technology we could. This is ultimately a policy problem, not a technical problem (e.g. shutting down dangerous labs and defunding the researchers running offending labs).
- etiam 5y agoViruses will not always successfully replicate, and failing that, have a hard time mutating. I'm not saying all gain of function research should automatically be precluded, but considering that a severe disease phenotype is (almost?) never directly selected for, deliberately bringing pathogens directly into danger zone is bound to often be go fetching trouble which would never have manifested on it's own. I'm not convinced I'd feel much more comfortable with biosafety labs being handled according to the same safety culture as modern nuclear technology either, and that's by the argument that they both suffer from the circumstance that policy problems, and policy enforcement problems, do not rank anywhere near the top of a list, good to poor, of how humankind handles things.
- travoc 5y agoDon’t forget to lie about it when you get caught.
- ashtonkem 5y agoYes, virus research does indeed come with trade offs that we have to balance. But it’s not like not researching these things don’t come with trade offs too; after all the worst viral outbreak in human history probably started in Kansas on a farm, not in a lab. This is an argument for good regulation of safety protocols, not an outright ban.
- mycoborea 5y agoIs there a specific reason as to why the most popular and promoted vaccines in the US target only the spike protein?
- SECProto 5y agoHere's[1] a 12 year old paper on why the spike protein is a good target for vaccine development. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2750777/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2750777/