#botswana variant

""We have not beaten Covid. No return to normal is right around the corner. Leaving aside the fact that what used to pass for normal was an exhausting ecological suicide pact to begin with, normal isn’t coming back.

Vaccines only provided us with a very temporary reprieve, a little hiatus from worry. Several indicators suggest it may come to an end sooner than we thought.

Neutralizing antibodies — whether our bodies learn how to produce them by surviving an infection or through a vaccine — identify and target the virus by its spike protein. The latest new variant triggering concern has an astonishing 32 mutations of that spike protein, which may make it difficult or impossible for current vaccines to effectively target it.

We shouldn’t be surprised. A study in the respected scientific journal Nature already warned us to expect the virus to evolve to bypass our vaccines and treatments. Two thirds of epidemiologists warned that variants could render vaccines s by March of 2022.

We just didn’t listen."

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BAFMnotes: Questions Are Being Asked By Scientists Why The CDC & NIH Approved Vzccines Have Not Been "Tweeked" To Fight New Variants Instead Of Booster Shots Made From The Parent Virus?

"The World Health Organization is monitoring a new variant with numerous mutations to the spike protein, scheduling a special meeting Friday to discuss what it may mean for vaccines and treatments, officials said Thursday..."The World Health Organization is monitoring a new variant with numerous mutations to the spike protein, scheduling a special meeting Friday to discuss what it may mean for vaccines and treatments, officials said Thursday...

We don’t know very much about this yet. What we do know is that this variant has a large number of mutations. And the concern is that when you have so many mutations, it can have an impact on how the virus behaves,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, said in a Q&A that was livestreamed on the organization’s social media channels.

The U.K. announced it would ban flights from six African countries, including South Africa, starting midday Friday.

The B.1.1.529 variant contains multiple mutations associated with increased antibody resistance, which may reduce the effectiveness of vaccines, along with mutations that generally make it more contagious, according to slides he presented at the briefing. Other mutations in the new variant haven’t been seen until now, so scientists don’t yet know whether they are significant or will change how the virus behaves, according to the presentation.

The variant has spread rapidly through the Gauteng province, which contains the country’s largest city of Johannesburg.

Right now, researchers are getting together to understand where these mutations are in the spike protein and the furin cleavage site, and what that potentially may mean for our diagnostics or therapeutics and our vaccines,” Van Kerkhove said. She said there are fewer than 100 full genome sequences of the new mutation."

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