Airborne_Again wrote:
Will that affect the vaccines? AFAIU they work by making the immune system recognise the spike protein.
The honest answer is, I don’t know. Indeed, the mRNA vaccines (Biontech/Pfizer, Moderna) work by replicating the mRNA of the spike protein, which will then become a “known” target for our immune system cells. The immune system is capable of recognising similar but not exact copies of a known target (think of other vaccines, such as cow pox/smallpox). It is pure speculation wheter it will do the same with these slight mutations or wheter it will play out like flu, where we don’t develop lifelong immunity due to a greater variation of the virus strains.
Archer-181 wrote:
I am sorry but you must be joking about the Economist. I have subscribed to this since University so have had it delivered for 30 years so I have noticed the slow decline
The Financial Times has gone the same way. I still religiously buy the weekend edition, as it gives a good summary of the last seven days of business news, but editorially it has gone very softy and, well, pink.
So, I have just taken out a subscription to the Spectator, which is a very sound publication to those of us on the free markets, liberty and anti-woke side of the agenda.
MedEwok wrote:
It has a gene deletion on the spike protein encoding RNA,
Is it already known how much and where? Haven’t found a paper on it (in a quick search) and the general press is – well – of little help.
What is not so well known to general public (and obviously not to these journalists), that deletions on the spike protein are quite normal and we already know more than 140 different strains with such deletions. Some of them up to 24nt on NSP1 (in one Japanese strain). There’s even a 25nt deletion on the start of ORF10 known from Spain that might be a little bit tricky for vaccination.
Up until now, none of these Strain variants has been shown to degrade efficacy of the vaccination – and most are already known since summer. Would be interesting to know why this should be different for this 140+1st strain that was found.
…and that sums up neatly why journalism is going partisan.
Most here have said that they have or are considering switching to a paper that echoes their opinion. No wonder papers are ever more opinionated catering for their audience.
You get what you ask for.
Peter wrote:
to this morning (possibly some effect on the vaccine)
And the (vaccine) plot thickens 
Seriously, is there any reason why corona vaccines should not degrade to 40-50 % efficiency, similar to influenza vaccines? Viruses mutates continuously.
Cobalt wrote:
Most here have said that they have or are considering switching to a paper that echoes their opinion. No wonder papers are ever more opinionated catering for their audience.
I think it is a vicious circle: Few people are willing to pay for quality journalism, so newspapers rely on advertising more than ever. In the Internet age, that means revenue is generated by clicks. These, in turn, are generated by emotions. Thus, emotional opinion pieces get written more often than dry analytical articles.
Also, social media leads to tribalism and echo chambers, which newspapers try to profit from by catering to one of the “tribes”, be it woke urban hipsters or gun-toting rednecks, to use just two of the cliché “tribes”.
The Financial Times quotes ‘epidemiologists studying the infection at Imperial College’ as saying that the increase in London infections is ‘probably due to an increased number of close contacts in the capital’. Nothing so useful as the verbatim quote, or even who said it (presumably not an undergraduate :-) although later they quote Prof Paul Elliott, who heads their REACT project, so it might be him.
What I can’t understand, and the reason I looked for the actual quote, is why this increase in close contacts has spent a couple of weeks spreading from the Kent and Essex ports, along the Thames, and into London.
On the other hand, if this is a new, more contagious variant, it would be doing exactly that, i.e. spreading from its source (the ports?) across the UK with London just a place it goes through en route.
The most obvious recent increase in ‘close contacts’ must be university students returning home, but I don’t think they all live in Kent and Essex!
MedEwok wrote:
Thus, emotional opinion pieces get written more often than dry analytical articles.
I agree, but I think it is often worse than that – factual news events are reported or not depending on whether they fit into the newspaper’s ‘view’.
On the other hand, if this is a new, more contagious variant, it would be doing exactly that, i.e. spreading from its source (the ports?) across the UK with London just a place it goes through en route.
The problem with reporting that is that it would feed the agenda of the anti-vaxxers… “the vaccine doesn’t work anyway”.
Just spoke to someone whose son had it, at univ. 4 of them went in one car for a test. Tested negative. A few days later they got ill and all tested positive
Basically, if you can at all catch it, you will.
Few people are willing to pay for quality journalism
I think the problem is that you can’t sell enough of it to make money. On any given day there is only so much new stuff to write about. And what is left to fill out the other 50 pages? Features and opinions! That is why we don’t subscribe to any newspaper. Probably 95% of the content is of no current relevance, so it just takes up one’s time to read it, and fills up the recycling box. One could read it in a year’s time, and not notice.
MedEwok wrote:
It is pure speculation wheter it will do the same with these slight mutations or wheter it will play out like flu, where we don’t develop lifelong immunity due to a greater variation of the virus strains.
In other words, we have for the time being got to assume that the vaccine won’t work for the new strains, just as they don’t for the flu.
Great news. In general this means there will be no fast end to the Covid plague. So the only answers will be total lockdowns.
