Pogue Mahone
The caf's Camus.
Short answer to 1) and 2) is nobody knows.I saw a couple of articles about people getting reinfected with the SA variant.. and that the vaccines might be less effective against it..
And other articles saying they dont expect the virus to go away, ie, cases go down to 0.. most people will have some level of immunity to it and we'll have to live with it.
A couple of questions..
1) how much of a concern is it in the short term? and
2)What is the likelihood of something like this (a worse version of the SA variant) starting the whole thing all over again in the future.. 2-3 years from now..
It’s not unexpected for mutations to cause the virus to become resistant to neutralising antibodies. And we’re seeing this with the SA variant. That involves tests in the lab against a predefined sample of antibodies targetting a specific part of the virus (monoclonal).
When you become immune you actually generate a whole host of antibodies targeting loads of different parts of the virus (polyclonal). A much wider range than has been identified and tested in the lab. Plus you use other elements of the immune system, such as T cells. So there’s always been a hope that even if you see resistance using in vitro tests the immunity you get in practice might be a bit more persistent.
Hence, it was slightly surprising (and more than slightly depressing) to read about South African patients catching this new variant despite prior infection and vaccines not working as well on them. It shows that this new strain is better at evading an in vivo immune response than we’d hoped. It’s still possible that this limited immune response won’t stop you getting sick but might stop you getting very sick. Which would be great. But we don’t have enough data to know if this is the case.
So it’s definitely possible you could get new variants that are even better at evading vaccination and make people just as sick as though they were never vaccinated. From listening to a bunch of experts the consensus seems to be that this is unlikely. Because the virus mutates relatively slowly and it takes a lot of bad luck to get a mutation as significant as this SA variant, so hopefully lightning won’t strike twice. But nobody knows for certain. Which sucks but there you go.