Slack / Private Message Drop — page 331

That is weird. The Australian (from Victoria) cluster didn't take off but the circumstances here are not like US/Europe because there is strong intervention. The lineage that did take off in Victoria a little later did so because it was associated with a super-spreading event. [2020-12-20 14:12:37] [Eddie Holmes] As if by magic: [shared file(s): Victoria_trends.pdf] [2020-12-20 14:23:56] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, I don't think we can compare - Australia has this under control, we don't - I'm sure that with Aussie like control measures in place, N501Y wouldn't have had a chance to take off either. [2020-12-20 14:33:01] [Kristian Andersen] From all of this, I had the most concise question from Biden TF members this morning "should we ban travel from the UK". I guess when it comes down to it, we all need to be able to take all the science and distill it down into a simple yes/no answer. Easy. [2020-12-20 17:47:09] [Robert Garry] I think the people who have been doing the monoclonal antibody work need to start sharing their epitope data. What we don't know is how many epitopes there are and which are protective. My guess based on the other class I viral gps (hiv, ebov, lasv) is there aren't that many protective epitopes. Knock out a few and you might not kill vaccine effectiveness altogether but effectiveness could take a pretty big hit. A 50% vaccine doesn't sound nearly as good as the 90+ we're expecting at the moment. [2020-12-20 17:56:59] [Robert Garry] Another problem is that in vitro studies might rapidly identify a problem if the vaccinee plasma has reduced ability to neutralize. If vaccinee serum still neutralizes that's hopeful but still not out of the woods. At the point you wont really know if vaccinees are protected from the elephant until you fail to see infections in vaccinees. [2020-12-20 18:43:10] [Robert Garry] To Andrew's key point "Do folks understand that there are two separate concerns?" From what I gather the answer - at least at the moment - is no. [2020-12-20 18:58:48] [Kristian Andersen] Totally agree Bob - we have no idea which epitopes are protective and we don't know if e.g., the different vaccines cover the same epitopes. Given that the Oxford/AZN vaccine doesn't use stabilized spike (so stupid!) I assume that probably provides protection via only a handful of epitopes. Let's see what the experiments show - will be critical. [2020-12-20 19:20:46] [Robert Garry] Reading the Kai K article in Science and I think he gets it right. I agree with Sir Jeremy and comments above that this is an high alert event. With both 69/70 del and N501Y looking like neutralizing epitopes in domains important enuff that the SAME mutations could plausibly also cause increased transmissibility [not to mention the P in the FCS] there is no reason to blow this off ala VR. [2020-12-20 19:26:02] [Robert Garry]