5 ms·

This is what you get when you keep vaccinating/hyper-targeting against wild-type spike protein only for a mutating virus.

gameswithgo 5y ago
Pretty good result really that it still protects against severe disease. We got lucky to get a variant that spreads super fast but is less dangerous and still protected a bit by our vaccines.
etiam 5y ago
Emphatically agreed. Not saying there aren't potential deficiencies with this technology that was more or less completely untried until recently and still hasn't been evaluated long term, but if people insist on trying to make the wrong action work by doing lots of it, what's to expect. I was hoping this would be about results from clinical trials using the updated sequences. That will be interesting, not least whether a broad cocktail can defend against all the major strains simultaneously.
pfg 5y ago
My understanding is that existing inactivated (whole-virus) vaccines perform worse than mRNA-based spike-targeting vaccines when it comes to neutralization. Here's a small study comparing BNT162b2 and Coronavac[1]. [1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.13.21267668v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.13.21267668v...
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  It’s a good study and worth reading. Relevantly, it looked at omicron. A few points: > Third, we have not assessed the T cell immunity against the Omicron variant, which correlates with disease severity. Non-antibody immune response is understudied. I suspect antibodies are just easy to measure, but, unfortunately for my academic record, there’s more to immune responses than just antibodies. > Fourth, since all Coronavac recipients had an MN titer of <10 against the Omicron variant and the GMT against the ancestral virus is only 21.73, an accurate fold-reduction in neutralizing antibody titer cannot be determined. Takeaway is that mRNA vaccines are very immunogenic in general. Hard to say if a more immunogenic coronavac would fare well against omicron or not.
merrywhether 5y ago
It’s been kind-boggling to me that we haven’t been continuously updating the vaccines. Low turnaround time is one of the great benefits of mRNA vaccine technology and yet here we are crossing our fingers that evolutionary pressure doesn’t do what exactly evolutionary pressure always does. In some ways we’re creating a perfect environment to breed better Covid strains by applying “gentle” pressure against its imperfect initial form. It’s kind of amazing that we’ve figured how to take a reactionary approach (waiting until vaccine “failure” to start updating it) to what is normally a proactive policy (vaccination).
- GuB-42 5y ago
  We know our mRNA vaccines are safe and they worked great against Delta. Also Omicron is not a vaccine-optimized Delta, it is completely different strain that has evolved from an early variant. A vaccine targeting Delta probably wouldn't have fared better against Omicron. In fact, it could have been even worse. While making a new variant-optimized vaccine is easy and takes about a week, and maybe they have already done it. But it still takes months to test it and to produce it at scale. One thing for sure, it wouldn't have been ready for the current wave. I think one reason we don't have an omicron-specific vaccine underway is that we came out lucky with this variant. It is less deadly and vaccines are still effective against severe disease. If anything, the spread creates natural immunity. My guess is that the next big wave, which I hope will never happen, will not be Omicron but instead a new variant that escapes immunity offered by an Omicron pre-infection or vaccine. I think people are now looking for a more generic anti-coronavirus vaccine, capable of protection against all variants of SARS-CoV-2, and possibly other coronaviruses like SARS. But it is not as simple as copy-pasting the genetic code of the spike protein like with current vaccines.
  - odyssey7 5y ago
    > One thing for sure, it wouldn't have been ready for the current wave. The reality is it isn’t ready for the current wave. It was easy enough to create, but the process of testing it and producing it at scale just haven’t been optimized. We should have been able to expect better from the $133 trillion global economic system.

gameswithgo 5y ago

Pretty good result really that it still protects against severe disease. We got lucky to get a variant that spreads super fast but is less dangerous and still protected a bit by our vaccines.

etiam 5y ago

Emphatically agreed. Not saying there aren't potential deficiencies with this technology that was more or less completely untried until recently and still hasn't been evaluated long term, but if people insist on trying to make the wrong action work by doing lots of it, what's to expect. I was hoping this would be about results from clinical trials using the updated sequences. That will be interesting, not least whether a broad cocktail can defend against all the major strains simultaneously.

pfg 5y ago

My understanding is that existing inactivated (whole-virus) vaccines perform worse than mRNA-based spike-targeting vaccines when it comes to neutralization. Here's a small study comparing BNT162b2 and Coronavac[1]. [1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.13.21267668v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.13.21267668v...

Scoundreller 5y ago
It’s a good study and worth reading. Relevantly, it looked at omicron. A few points: > Third, we have not assessed the T cell immunity against the Omicron variant, which correlates with disease severity. Non-antibody immune response is understudied. I suspect antibodies are just easy to measure, but, unfortunately for my academic record, there’s more to immune responses than just antibodies. > Fourth, since all Coronavac recipients had an MN titer of <10 against the Omicron variant and the GMT against the ancestral virus is only 21.73, an accurate fold-reduction in neutralizing antibody titer cannot be determined. Takeaway is that mRNA vaccines are very immunogenic in general. Hard to say if a more immunogenic coronavac would fare well against omicron or not.

merrywhether 5y ago

It’s been kind-boggling to me that we haven’t been continuously updating the vaccines. Low turnaround time is one of the great benefits of mRNA vaccine technology and yet here we are crossing our fingers that evolutionary pressure doesn’t do what exactly evolutionary pressure always does. In some ways we’re creating a perfect environment to breed better Covid strains by applying “gentle” pressure against its imperfect initial form. It’s kind of amazing that we’ve figured how to take a reactionary approach (waiting until vaccine “failure” to start updating it) to what is normally a proactive policy (vaccination).

GuB-42 5y ago
We know our mRNA vaccines are safe and they worked great against Delta. Also Omicron is not a vaccine-optimized Delta, it is completely different strain that has evolved from an early variant. A vaccine targeting Delta probably wouldn't have fared better against Omicron. In fact, it could have been even worse. While making a new variant-optimized vaccine is easy and takes about a week, and maybe they have already done it. But it still takes months to test it and to produce it at scale. One thing for sure, it wouldn't have been ready for the current wave. I think one reason we don't have an omicron-specific vaccine underway is that we came out lucky with this variant. It is less deadly and vaccines are still effective against severe disease. If anything, the spread creates natural immunity. My guess is that the next big wave, which I hope will never happen, will not be Omicron but instead a new variant that escapes immunity offered by an Omicron pre-infection or vaccine. I think people are now looking for a more generic anti-coronavirus vaccine, capable of protection against all variants of SARS-CoV-2, and possibly other coronaviruses like SARS. But it is not as simple as copy-pasting the genetic code of the spike protein like with current vaccines.
- odyssey7 5y ago
  > One thing for sure, it wouldn't have been ready for the current wave. The reality is it isn’t ready for the current wave. It was easy enough to create, but the process of testing it and producing it at scale just haven’t been optimized. We should have been able to expect better from the $133 trillion global economic system.