[zpeti]

There's so many questions that this raises.

- Is it more infectious or just bypasses current immunities?

- Will the vaccines basically be voided by this?

- Is it less lethal? Could it create more general immunity in communities without killing?

- Has is spread yet? I've read the UK gov knew about this in october... seems like it's probably everywhere by now

[makomk]

It seems the answer is that we don't know if it's spread yet. To quote the ECDC's briefing, "However, most EU/EEA countries sequence much smaller proportions of virus isolates than the UK, so ongoing circulation of this variant outside of the UK cannot be excluded". https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/SAR...

Basically, the UK is just better set up to detect variants like this than a lot of other countries. The other possibility is that even if this variant hasn't spread yet, there are other variants out there with similar properties that just haven't been detected due to the lack of widespread RNA sequencing. South Africa apparently has one that's similar but unrelated.

[imeron]

https://twitter.com/The_Soup_Dragon/status/13403496399466291...

If this chart is true EU countries announcing the closing borders the last couple of days is waaay to late to prevent the spread of the new strain in Europe.

[makomk]

Yeah, all the evidence seems to point to the border closures being a stupid, counterproductive attempt to close the stable doors after the horse has bolted and maybe shoot the messenger in the process. Unfortunately, there seems to be a bit of a push here in the UK to spin this as a necessary and inevitable measure that the government should have anticipated, including the closure of the border to road freight - which I think is a siginificant escalation compared to the previous EU border closures - for, basically, Brexit-related partistan political reasons.

[Someone]

I think it may be too late, but if it isn’t, bordering of a population where it is more widespread will help. Even if it is too late to prevent this variant from leaving Britain, it will lower the speed at which it spreads, giving time to prepare (assuming it is more widespread in Britain than elsewhere)

Because of that, I think this move may be overcautious, but I don’t see how it can be stupid or counterproductive.

[sjg007]

It makes sense to stop further introduction.

[Closi]

Being a little more cynical, the strain probably started somewhere else in Europe and came across the border.

It's probably not a coincidence that this strain was first detected as spreading right next to the Dover crossing.

[lucideer]

No answers on most of those Qs, but the messaging on (2) "Will the vaccines basically be voided by this?" is that no, vaccines should still be effective.

I'm not sure how they can no that without restarting extensive trials, but as a sibling commenter points out, viruses mutate constantly so I guess dealing with variants is pretty common when it comes to vaccination.

[SifJar]

My understanding is as long as the variant has the same spike protein, vaccines "should" remain effective. So while trials haven't been done yet to verfiy the vaccines are still effective, I'm assuming the spike protein has been observed to be the same so there's no reason to suggest vaccines wouldn't be effective.

EDIT: Actually, sounds like a couple of the mutations are in the spike protein and there is some evidence of reduced antibody effectiveness against the mutated version.

[lbeltrame]

N501Y is properly neutralized by vaccination (there's a paper in Science with these data, but I don't have a link handy right now).

The deletion seems to reduce antibody neutralization, but:

- In the preprint where this was shown, only 4 convalescent sera were tested;

- The same 4 sera had large variation in neutralization activity per se;

- There is no investigation on potential impaired T cell reactivity (cellular immunity): FTR, the "mink mutation", although it exhibited slightly lower antibody neutralization, did not change the reaction of T cells to it.

[lbeltrame]

I realized I made a mistake here but can't correct now: the sera used were 5, not 4.

[sjg007]

This is being studied.

[xiphias2]

Safety is the hardest part of trials, and also the vaccines that were approved are in Phase 4 (post market surveillence).

[JetSetWilly]

> Will the vaccines basically be voided by this?

It has been around since September - if vaccines were voided it would have shown up in trials. It seems the human immune system is pretty smart and manufactures many different antibodies against many different sites on the spike protein. So even if some parts of the spike protein mutate, you still have antibodies that will do the job.

- Is it less lethal? Could it create more general immunity in communities without killing?

It might be - it carries one mutation (a deletion) on a part of the genome that helps it evade the host immune system - but more data is needed. If it was less lethal that is a mechanism that can help it spread - people are asymptomatic for longer, or feel better so are out and about instead of in their bed. But although I have seen rumours on this there's nothing definite and no data.

- Has is spread yet? I've read the UK gov knew about this in october...

It has been detected in Denmark as well. The UK - especially obviously London where it is prevalent - is highly globally connected. This variant will be everywhere in the world now in small amounts and if it does spread better it is just a matter of time. The UK does a LOT of genome sequencing compares to most countries so it is well equipped to detect the emergence of new strains and their spread.

[spuz]

> It has been around since September - if vaccines were voided it would have shown up in trials.

The variant didn't reach a significant proportion of infections until November. Evaluation of the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine was done in July and August. We don't have data to understand how effective the Pfizer vaccine is against this variant yet.

[DoingIsLearning]

This should be the official position when communicating this information. There simply is not enough data at this point.

I was really shocked to read German Minister statements saying the vacine is still effective for this variant. Sure theoretical the spike is majority unchanged but there is no evidence or data for a government official to make such an absolute statement.

[spuz]

The official message from the UK government when they announced concern about this new strain was "we have no evidence to suggest that the Pfizer vaccine is not just as effective against this new strain". Somehow that gets twisted by some people into "we believe the vaccine is just as effective against this new strain". I think it's party due to not wanting to appear to be doomsaying but also very misleading in terms of communicating the facts.

[sjg007]

Notice the word choice: “we have no evidence...” the answer is actually “we don’t know” because we haven’t studied it. There’s a term for this type of communication as it’s quite common but the name escapes me..

[DoingIsLearning]

My criticism was of Jens Spahn, Germany's Health minister. Claiming there was no evidence that the vacine would not be effective. [0] Which although true sounds incredibly misleading taking into the account the data we currently don't have.

[0] https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/20/covid-vaccines-still-effectiv...

[detaro]

I thought Spahns full statement was reasonable. Deferring to what the health organizations report to him, saying that that "would be very good news" (would be, not is), emphasizing multiple times that this is "as of now, sunday evening". If you hear that and take away "we're definitively safe" ...

(Of course I can't judge the biology and if that actually accurately represented the expert opinion behind it, but to me it communicated clearly enough that this isn't a certain claim, but reflecting a current snapshot of something that's actively looked at)

[glitchc]

Voided as a term doesn’t make sense. The vaccine will be less effective for sure, correlated to the distribution of the variant vs. the original strain in the population.

[maxerickson]

It's not really clear how the vaccine and variant will interact. It can be the case that the vaccine confers strong immunity against the variant or that it doesn't confer any immunity at all, it's not necessarily predictable or linear.

That said, what I've seen immunologists saying is that they expect the vaccine to still work well, because they wouldn't expect months of mutations to add up to the variant escaping the vaccine.

[hordeallergy]

Yes, it's in other countries too eg Australia and Netherlands.

[robbiep]

If may have been detected in Australia in returned travellers but it is not in Australia in the community.

Yesterday Australia had 15 community acquired cases (yes, 15 in total, with a further 11 from international travel in hotel quarantine) in the country and a quarter of sydney is in lockdown due to it, the virus variant is an American strain.

[sjg007]

Maybe but these variants can arise spontaneously as well, probably as a function of the immune response.

[robbiep]

There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning - yes, as an RNA virus, there is a high rate of mutation. However because of the redundancy of amino acid encoding most mutations will be preservative (ie produce the same protein). Additionally, although there is no reason that chance can’t produce the exact same spike protein mutation in another location in the world, it will be of a different lineage which will clearly show up on sequencing as there will be some clear differences elsewhere (in the preservative mutations). This is highly unlikely to be a result of immune response pressure, in fact I would discount this entirely, mutations arise as a response to copying errors and inside an infection cycle (initial infection, replication, transmission, adaptive immune response).

The final immune response will shut down the virus ability to replicate freely due to recognition; selective pressure to avoid immune response is unlikely due to 1) the continually lowering viral load and 2) the very high number of non-selective antibodies produced that recognise a large number of viral epitopes.