Chat message

Slack / Private Message Drop, p.416 [SLACK_000630] · slack_pm:msg:04299

Date: 2021-01-18 09:06
Type: chat message · slack
recipient: Kristian G. Andersen, Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut
speaker: Robert F. Garry

Recipients on this medium are inferred from channel membership, not per-message addressing.

In some ways thou the fact that we're seem the same mutations popping up repeatedly is "reassuring" in the sense that it may not take a gazillion.

In context

A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.

2021-01-18 08:22 Kristian G. Andersen open

Interesting. I expect we'll see N501Y pop up on that background shortly.
2021-01-18 08:24 Kristian G. Andersen open

Bob, to your point about vaccine updates - yes, absolutely going to be needed. However, what's going to be very different here is that we're going to have a gazillion different (partially) vaccine 'resistant' lineages floating around atthe same time because we have sooooo many infections. Are we going to make an updated vaccine for each? Stick'em all together in a single vaccine? How are we going to prioritize?Until we use NPIs to massively drop infections down, I don't think we'll be successful in this game of whack-a-mole.
2021-01-18 08:26 Kristian G. Andersen open

I may be extremely pessimistic here, but by the time we have vaccinated enough people to reach herd immunity thresholds, I'm pretty sure we'll be dealing with almost completely resistant SARS-CoV-2 - and multiple different lineages.
2021-01-18 08:32 Robert F. Garry open

Maybe true - and it may be time to *start lowering expectations*. It's very possible we'll be in a situation [maybe already there] where the vaccines do not prevent infection or spread but offer some protection from severe disease. AKA flu vaccine. This means getting you ~flu~ CoV vaccine each year or maybe even every 6 months.
2021-01-18 09:06 Robert F. Garry

In some ways thou the fact that we're seem the same mutations popping up repeatedly is "reassuring" in the sense that it may not take a gazillion.
2021-01-18 09:10 Robert F. Garry open

Alina was clearly wrong on many levels when she stated "SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans." It's what lead her down the path that SC2 must be engineered or GOF. It's not that well adapted apparently because it keeps mutating. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1.full.pdf
2021-01-18 09:56 Kristian G. Andersen open

Yeah, we'll have to wait and see - maybe SC2 only has a narrow window for escaping (some level of) immunity, but I'm not convinced that's the case - we only need to look to all the ccCoVs.I warned Alina about her "well adapted to human" comments, making it clear that compared to SARS, yes, that might look to be the case, but there's a whole world of viruses out there where what we're seeing (dN/dS) in SC2 isnothing special. We're definitely seeing that play out now.
2021-01-18 10:14 Kristian G. Andersen open

https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1351228542143651840?s=20
2021-01-18 10:16 Kristian G. Andersen open

Starts ~40 mins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja_tLG8CLAc

Full conversation →