Why is Boris defying SAGE?
Boris is still pressing on with his plan to open up on June 21. He seems to have grown a pair, let's see why.
One SAGE member Prof Ravi Gupta says the Indian variant, B.1.617.2, will continue to rise, and says that “We still have people under the age of 30 not vaccinated, we have many people with only one dose, so this virus has plenty of space to expand exponentially and reach very high levels of infection with quite high levels of morbidity overall.” I think he's wrong.
The virus has achieved partial vaccine escape in the India variant. For one jab it is 30% protection from symptomatic disease -- the protection from infection hasn't been given, but it is clearly much worse than 30%. For both jabs Pfizer is still giving some reasonable protection from symptomatic disease, but clearly is going to be worse than 50% protection from infection (as it was 50% for the original variant). AZ second dose is fairly bad -- protection from symptomatic disease at 60% so again it's going to be much worse than 50% for protection from infection.
Vaccination is no longer providing adequate protection. At the very least an update of risks/benefits analysis for the vaccines is necessary. I doubt that herd immunity is at all possible with the vaccines now (maybe if everyone had Pfizer. Not a chance if 50% have AZ).
The reason we have vaccine escape is because we've given the virus extraordinary selective pressure to escape the vaccines through the use of inefficient vaccines and very large scale vaccination programmes. To surge vaccinate in outbreak areas will make this problem worse. It would be better to surge vaccinate in areas where there isn't yet an outbreak of India variant, but it is too late and even that will make things worse (just not as bad as surge vaccination in outbreak areas).
If that wasn't bad enough, there's now a fair amount of evidence suggesting that vaccinees are particularly susceptible to symptomatic disease on infection during the 21 days following vaccination -- so, again, surge vaccination in outbreak areas would appear to be a risky strategy. I suppose there's only cold-comfort in the fact that this surge vaccination might provide the evidence to suggest that we shouldn't use surge vaccination in outbreak areas.
At this point it isn't too late to do what should have been done all along -- lock down the vulnerable (whether vaccinated or not) and leave the rest of society to get on with it, using the residual protection offered by the vaccines against India variant.
The problem we have now is that this coming infectious wave will likely generate the escape variants that will come to haunt us this coming winter. I hope things don't get too bad.
At least we might have some escape-targeted booster vaccinations this autumn. If we only boost the vulnerable and then get them to behave (not too much travel and avoidance of social areas for the boosted-vaccinated during outbreaks) then it is possible that we might scrape through. I've not got my hopes up, however, because there seems to be a problem with getting the supposedly educated people we have in power to understand the basics of how evolution works.
The reason we have vaccine escape is because we've given the virus extraordinary selective pressure to escape the vaccines through the use of inefficient vaccines and very large scale vaccination programmes. To surge vaccinate in outbreak areas will make this problem worse. It would be better to surge vaccinate in areas where there isn't yet an outbreak of India variant, but it is too late and even that will make things worse (just not as bad as surge vaccination in outbreak areas).
Most of you post is hogwash, since none of the jabs done in England have made an iota of difference to the evolution path of the indian variant, since our vaccines have not been deplyed there.
Most of you post is hogwash, since none of the jabs done in England have made an iota of difference to the evolution path of the indian variant, since our vaccines have not been deplyed there.
Not true.
One of India's main 2 vaccines is Covishield which is the brand for Astrazenica over there....
Although its not been deployed in anywhere near enough numbers to select for these variants. They were first sequenced before anyone got vaccinated.
The reason we have vaccine escape is because we've given the virus extraordinary selective pressure to escape the vaccines through the use of inefficient vaccines and very large scale vaccination programmes. To surge vaccinate in outbreak areas will make this problem worse. It would be better to surge vaccinate in areas where there isn't yet an outbreak of India variant, but it is too late and even that will make things worse (just not as bad as surge vaccination in outbreak areas).
Most of you post is hogwash, since none of the jabs done in England have made an iota of difference to the evolution path of the indian variant, since our vaccines have not been deplyed there.
Most of the vaccines end up looking the same to the immune system -- just the 'original variant' spike protein. Sinovac is different (as it is whole virus), but it is still original variant, but the spike protein is the same. Deployment of any vaccine will push towards the same vaccine escape.
You also appear to think that the place where a variant is first identified is where it first evolved. I doubt this is true often, unless the area is relatively isolated.
Most of you post is hogwash, since none of the jabs done in England have made an iota of difference to the evolution path of the indian variant, since our vaccines have not been deplyed there.
Not true.
One of India's main 2 vaccines is Covishield which is the brand for Astrazenica over there....
Although its not been deployed in anywhere near enough numbers to select for these variants. They were first sequenced before anyone got vaccinated.
Vaccines had been deployed when B.1.617 was first discovered, though I'd agree that it wasn't in numbers at that stage. However, you don't need large numbers of people to get an escape mutation forming, just a large viral load in a vaccinated-infected person.
The important step was B.1.617.2, which has more vaccine escape -- there had been substantial vaccination when that was discovered.
Case numbers only started increasing when vaccination levels increased. I find this interesting as it might be an indication that the variant has only low increased infectivity compared with prior variants (indeed, technically an escape variant can have a lower infectivity compared with prior variants, so long as the vaccinated population is large enough).
I'd note that we're behind the curve re. the detection of vaccine escape mutations -- they always start off in low numbers and most countries aren't doing enough genetic sequencing to pick up on them at the point of early spread (the UK is very good at this, however, which is probably why we find a fair number of mutations here). The next stage of escape-variant has probably already formed and is going through the first stages of transmission.
