Greetings from an undisclosed location in my new apartment. Good morning and welcome to COVID Transmissions. It has been 498 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19. In 498, Kavadh I returned from exile to the Sassanid Empire, with an army of 30,000. He used this army to punish those who ousted him, including his own brother.
I feel a little guilty about wasting the megaphone you granted me on RaDVaC, so instead of talking further about that, here are a few things I think are more important:
1. Do any of the emerging COVID variants evade existing vaccines?
A strain that evades existing vaccines could render all the effort we've put into vaccinating people moot and set us on track for a rerun of the whole pandemic (but worse because people are much less willing to lock down a second time). It's better to figure this out sooner rather than later, so that my household can decide what lengths to go to chasing vaccination this round, whether there's anything that we should scramble to do over the next few months when we'll likely be vaccinated against the dominant strains and benefitting from COVID's seasonality, and, of course, whether to surrender and take our chances instead of giving another year of our lives away to avoidance.
We know that we're probably safe from B.1.1.7, but it's not the only variant of concern now, and there will likely be more later.
I paged through your last couple months of posts, and it looks like you're already following new strains closely, so I guess just take this as positive reinforcement :-)
2. Related to above: how quickly can we expect vaccines against novel variants?
If we are facing a vaccine-evading strain (there might already be one propagating somewhere), we probably need to start tooling up factories by late summer (better yet: be doing it now) in order to get ahead of it, and that requires the pharmaceutical and regulatory apparatus to exhibit much faster turnaround than we saw for the first vaccines. What are the odds this speedup will actually happen?
3. No countries, even rich countries, are spending anywhere near enough money on vaccines. I think it might still make a big difference if this changed now, even if there are no vaccine-evading variants to contend with.
Wow, thanks for the spotlight!
I feel a little guilty about wasting the megaphone you granted me on RaDVaC, so instead of talking further about that, here are a few things I think are more important:
1. Do any of the emerging COVID variants evade existing vaccines?
A strain that evades existing vaccines could render all the effort we've put into vaccinating people moot and set us on track for a rerun of the whole pandemic (but worse because people are much less willing to lock down a second time). It's better to figure this out sooner rather than later, so that my household can decide what lengths to go to chasing vaccination this round, whether there's anything that we should scramble to do over the next few months when we'll likely be vaccinated against the dominant strains and benefitting from COVID's seasonality, and, of course, whether to surrender and take our chances instead of giving another year of our lives away to avoidance.
We know that we're probably safe from B.1.1.7, but it's not the only variant of concern now, and there will likely be more later.
I paged through your last couple months of posts, and it looks like you're already following new strains closely, so I guess just take this as positive reinforcement :-)
2. Related to above: how quickly can we expect vaccines against novel variants?
If we are facing a vaccine-evading strain (there might already be one propagating somewhere), we probably need to start tooling up factories by late summer (better yet: be doing it now) in order to get ahead of it, and that requires the pharmaceutical and regulatory apparatus to exhibit much faster turnaround than we saw for the first vaccines. What are the odds this speedup will actually happen?
3. No countries, even rich countries, are spending anywhere near enough money on vaccines. I think it might still make a big difference if this changed now, even if there are no vaccine-evading variants to contend with.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/preparing-for-a-pandemic-accelerating-vaccine-availability.html (don't read the post comments - they're terrible)