Hacker News Reader

Comment by TrispusAttucks | Hacker News Reader

Yes. So long as no mutation takes place on the protein spike.

And this part I'm less confident in, but my understanding is the protein spike is unlikely to mutate because it's exactly what allows the virus to bind where it does. If that mutated and that mutation was still somehow successful, I believe it likely wouldn't be as bad a virus.

My understanding is that virologists and immunologists can't really estimate the chance of a more virulent strain that escapes antibodies analytically, because the probability space is too big. A mutation might escape antibodies but also greatly inhibit how fast it spreads, and so on.

Its been passed around on TWiV and immunologist twitter awhile back that there's ~20 different epitopes on the spike protein that would need to mutate in order to achieve immune escape.

The read on that is that immune escape should come at a cost to fitness and less virulence and transmissibility. The virus will have to "pay" with fitness in order to buy stealth.

At the same time though there have very obviously been multiple different mutations on the spike protein which have enhanced binding / viral load / transmissibility / virulence. So the virus clearly has some room to maneuver in that space.

Mind you, it is a protein. So you're banking on the virus encoding a different/new protein that still binds to ACE2.

Depends on the significance of the mutation. The vaccines have shown to be pretty good at protecting at the mutations we have observed so far. However, it is right to assume, that eventually a mutation comes around which evades any existing immunity. That is one the biggest reasons to reduce infection count globally. The higher the infection count, the larger the risk of a mutation that resets everything back to the beginning immunity-wise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com