COVID Transmissions for 6-2-2021

WHO approves another vaccine

Jun 02, 2021

Greetings from an undisclosed location in my apartment. Welcome to COVID Transmissions.

It has been 563 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19.

Bolded terms are linked to the running newsletter glossary.

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Now, let’s talk COVID.

WHO approves Sinovac for Emergency Use

Today, the World Health Organization (WHO) added China’s Sinovac “CoronaVac” COVID-19 vaccine to the list of COVID-19 vaccines that it recommends. This is an important step, since approval by the WHO is necessary for distribution through the COVAX program.

Currently many Western-made vaccines are approved by the WHO, but up until now only one Chinese-made vaccine has been approved. The addition of a second vaccine sets up substantially expanded capacity, something that is needed if we are to vaccinate the world.

While I was at times critical of the development process for certain Chinese vaccines, the products’ efficacy appears to be more than sufficient for controlling the pandemic. I am excited to see this option become available. We need every weapon we can get against this virus.

CoronaVac is a very traditional vaccine design. It consists of inactivated SARS-CoV-2, and an adjuvant. The virus is grown in a cell line called vero cells, commonly used to grow large volumes of viruses. After this it is inactivated using a chemical called beta-propriolactone, which binds to virus components and effectively renders them inoperable. This approach has been used historically in many inactivated vaccines.

What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:

Reading: All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Some of you may know that I try to keep up with reading all science fiction and fantasy novel award winners, and I’m currently on my way to finishing up the Nebula awards for Best Novel. I recently finished All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, which is a marvelous fairy tale about science and magic. There’s a cliche in speculative fiction that says that if the magic in the story happens because of a fancy machine, it’s science fiction, and if the magic comes from praying to a tree, it’s a fantasy story. I feel like Anders was considering this cliche and trying very deliberately to turn it on its ear, when she wrote her novel.

I found the opening of it to be very different from the rest of the book, setting a tone more like a children’s story, while the next portion took us forward in time to some very adult moments with the main characters. That choice was a little strange for me, but overall, I quite liked the work and would recommend it.

Carl Fink proposed a reason for the WHO renaming scheme that I mentioned yesterday:

Hi, John. I suggest that the (or a) reason for the Greek letter designations is to suppress terms like "the Indian variant" and "the Brazilian variant". With what seems to be a worldwide wave of anti-Asian violence irrationally caused by references to the "China virus", I completely support such an effort.

Of course, this is correct. I do believe this is at least part of what the WHO is trying to combat with their new naming scheme, and should have mentioned this. However, I think their implementation is quite misguided, as I said in my reply:

I believe that's what they intended, but the PANGO designations were working fine for that purpose, and were far more descriptive and specific. I've seen virologists who've petulantly responded to this new thing by saying "I'm going to go back to geographic designations," which is the opposite of what anyone wants. This is a mess.

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