Variant21K appears to have arisen in November 2021, possibly in South Africa. Early sequences are predominantly from South Africa, though also detected in Botswana and Hong Kong.
21K is primarily of concern due to the large number of mutations it has in the Spike gene. Many of these variants are in the receptor binding domain and N-terminal domain, and thus may play key roles in ACE2 binding and antibody recognition.
This literally reads like post apocalyptic fan fiction.
I find it incredibly fascinating how fast this virus can mutate in order to throw curveballs around our natural and engineered defenses and become more efficient at killing us.
How is this even possible in such a short amount of time? I thought evolution takes tens of thousands of years. It's not like viruses have giant brains with massive IQs to come up with all this so fast.
Would be cool if someone could ELI5.
In the normal case the selective pressure isn't really there, since the virus will get beat back after a week or two anyway and just 1-2 point mutations probably didn't give it any significant advantage is infecting more hosts.
Given how many mutations this variant has compared to its most direct known ancestor, the former is almost certainly what happened in this case too.
See for example: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...
Edit: fixed bit about error correction, thanks somewhereoutth!
Long to short, if death prevention is the objective then we need to shift to finding solution that are less specific but still effective. For example, anti virals.
These bits perform several critical functions: hiding from the immune system, attaching to cells the virus needs to replicate in, etc.
Changing any of these things results in two questions.
(1) Does the change make the virus better or worse at X? (where X is something related to what that bit was doing)
(2) Does the change make the virus more or less visible / resistant to the immune system?
The answer to both of these are independent, and for any one particular change, depends all the way down to chemistry and physics.
It's possible that a given virus design cannot mutate external features without rendering itself ineffective. It's also possible that relatively minor mutations can make it more effective and/or able to avoid antibodies and the immune system.
The mutation space has been studied for SARS-CoV-2, but to put it simply, it's a very complicated problem that involves (among other things) protein folding and molecular simulation. Not easy stuff to brute force.
Flu vaccines are also updated on a yearly basis to reflect the strains currently in circultion, so why would the covid vaccines not do the same?
This sounds like an anti-viral subscription service. :)
The variants arise randomly and proliferate with the current major strains. The infected population adapts to reduce the transmission of the most virulent/contagious strains. Selective pressure (tug of war between infecting people and people fighting off the infection) increases on the new variants until one or a few maintain or exceed the transmission of the progenitor strain.
That's the problem with the, "I'll get over it/I'm not worried/My segment of the population doesn't die from it" mentality. The more infections - subclinical, asymptomatic, severe, fatal, undetected - the more rolls of the dice. We (humans) are selecting variants that are worse for us, hoping we can snuff out the infection before some key mutation that eludes our immune system and/or testing develops.
Two other thoughts with internal conflicts/points worth mentioning - First, recovered patients should be more resistant to new strains. Their immune systems threw everything at the virus to defeat it, so their response will be more diversified than those with mRNA vaccines targeting a specific protein sequence. (The magnitude and usefulness of the variations in immune response can negate that advantage.) Second, the reasons that a 'novel' virus is dangerous are that we, as a species, don't know if we can (naturally/innately), and we don't know how much the virus can change in protein sequence (to evade our defenses) or our response to infection.
Anyways, I'm rambling. Not a virologist, but a PhD (and as such, I think I know more about stuff than a really do) and that's how I think about it. :)
The vaccines we're currently using don't prevent infection as they do not provide sterilising immunity. To quote[1] Sunetra Gupta[2], infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford:
> The vaccines that we currently employ appear to be highly effective in preventing life-threatening illness but do not meaningfully contribute to the maintenance of herd immunity.
> …we find ourselves trapped by the superannuated conviction that vaccines must block infection as well as disease.
Given that, how is contrasting those who've had vaccines with those who haven't of any relevance? We have other comments in the thread (like this one[3]) pointing out that it could be immuno-compromised people that are the main source of new variants. Right now, they're among the least likely people to have been vaccinated.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/11/24/vaccines-never-r...
I believe this to be a very common misconception. Evolution selects variants that are better at replicating. It does not follow that those are the worse for our health.
Imagine a variant that would effectively be very lethal to us: wouldn't it go extinct if the bearers die or even stay home sick before it can spread?
Successful viruses fly below the radar, I guess.
I'm not saying short-term, high-intensity FDA et al. EUA is ironclad, but it's a helluva lot more stringent and reviewed than what the EPA approves (or fails to ban) due to "economic considerations."
So, if we're in the worrying mindset, prioritization seems important.
By the way tons of virus cause cancer, it’s not the case for a single vaccine, so this theory is very hypothetical.
Evolution does not work that way. It is not a conscious decision or process on the part of the organism. It is the result of mutations due to imperfect copying of genetic material. Very likely most of the mutations are useless or harmful to the organism. But once in a while the mutation gives the organism an advantage and allows it and it's progeny to outcompete the other, unmutated organisms.
Even the process of evolution does not make decisions or have a particular direction or goal. It's all randomness and depends on the large number of chances.
As far as becoming more efficient at killing is, most viruses mutate to a state of being less deadly. Not killing the host is an advantage for a virus.
Sometimes far fewer tries than that, of course, but viruses certainly get a lot of iterations in any given population in any given month.
This is not actually a "goal" of the virus, since dead people cannot move and therefore spread much less of the virus. They seek to become more infectious so they can spread more, and in this process sometimes they also accidentally kill the host.
https://mobile.twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1441416013...
Numerous viruses throughout history have not become less virulent even over the course of thousands of years.
Mutations on organisms such as viruses depend on the raw amount of virus duplication which happens, not per se "time", if you have a large amount of hosts, and therefore high amounts of duplication that increases the duplication rate making it more likely that mutations will occur, therefore speeding up the mutation rate, and as it happens with large countries still not taking strong measures against covid there's ample amount of hosts which can incubate new mutations....
Also, ought be noted that mutation is entirely random, this is *not* "a consequence to vaccines existing", most mutations will be neutral, others negative to the virus itself, but few might have positive effects on its vitality, or incubation period or others
"The Evolution of Bacteria on a “Mega-Plate” Petri Dish" https://vimeo.com/180908160
The original paper about the experiment:
"Spatiotemporal microbial evolution on antibiotic landscapes" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aag0822
Some bloke who was the head of Porton Down aka Public Health England when commenting on the London Plague pits found when digging the tunnel for Cross Rail suggested RNA viruses have a single helix so are prone to high levels of mutations unlike DNA which has the double helix checksum to reduce mutations. This is probably the episode. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04cnps9
How Messenger RNA vaccines work. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...
mRNA is not the only solution, some dietary changes can create a chemical based attack vector as your body has evolved to cope with extremes. This just one example of many different chemical attack vectors. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7413200/
There is also this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12451198
But I cant find the hacker news link on a paper from MIT which also suggested a 3 day fast reset the immune systems "memory" which was a novel way of wiping vaccine triggered immune system responses and probably isnt what you want to do if you believe in the covid vaccines, but if you are an anti-vaxxer forced into having a vaccine, then it could be a way of wiping its effect from your body if the study was accurate.
Now before you go out fasting, just bear in mind you will be depleting your body of many things like the vampire chemical glutathione (NAC, Glutamine & Glycin) which depletes as you age. Its called the vampire chemical because it whitens skin and makes you sensitive to light amongst other things so there might have been some truth to those vampire legends!
I know Vit D is mentioned alot, the Welcome Trust in Cambridge reversed engineered the human genome back a few years back and suggested there were 2776 Vit D receptors, most concentrated around the immune system genes, but the VDR has a zinc finger so you need to take zinc and both A & D will get you closer to hypercalcemia so that brings its risks, but in 1959 the scientific community did work out if you take A & D you need to take K to mitigate the risk of hypercalcemia. And if you are elderly, you should consider taking taurine as this helps the body manage the fats in your diet (bile) amongst other things, which explains why the elderly generally absorb A & D less easily or respond less to supplementation compared to young people. You'll find taurine in some wacky places in the body.
That's a huge part of the pandemic, people are not used to being exposed to that kind of language, so their imagination runs wild.
Gives a better breakdown of what we're actually talking about.