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David Watson's avatar

So, why doesn't the vax work? Apparently it does mutate and they're still distributing vax for variants that aren't in wide circulation. A competent medical industry could probably keep up, issuing new vax more frequently, but the insanely corrupt approval process precludes that, so we're stuck with the vax they managed to sneak through, regardless of ineffectiveness. That, and an ample supply of stupid people assures the gravy train continues a while longer, and whatever nefarious motives might be behind it. Maybe they'll find a vax for stupidity. Prosecuting the corruption will wise a lot of them up.

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Markael Luterra's avatar

If the vast majority of intermediates (between variant lines) fall in fitness valleys, then as a null (vs. continuous lab update) hypothesis it would be helpful to be able to estimate the probability of crossing any of those valleys *within a single infected host* given the rate of replication errors and the total number of infections. For example, if - on average, and I'm just making this up - every infected cell produces 1000 virions with no genome changes, 100 virions with a single nucleotide changed, 10 with two changes, all the way out to 10 changes occuring in one out of every ten million infected cells, etc., then we could calculate the probability of new variants arising.

Also, would it be likely that the initial further single-nucleotide changes within a new variant that optimize fitness would occur within the first few hosts, thus causing the variants to *appear* to be stable by the time they are first sequenced?

Finally, it seems to me that - until Omicron - the new variants caused further waves of infection by evading innate, rather than adaptive, immunity - i.e. by infecting people that the previous strains were unable to successfully infect, rather than by reinfecting those who had recovered. It is not surprising to me that it is easier for a virus to find new hosts by increasing infectiousness (ability to overcome innate immunity), and that only once a majority of people have been infected does the more difficult approach of evading innate immunity become the best evolutionary move. That's not to suggest that Omicron or any of the VOCs *weren't * lab releases - only that the observed pattern seems consistent with evolutionary pressures to me, and that (in the absence of abundant sequence data to track and analyze genetic changes) the overall progression of waves of infection and eventual reinfection doesn't seem especially anomalous for a new virus entering the human population.

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