Another new COVID strain found in Nigeria, says Africa CDC
www.aljazeera.com
News comes after UK and South Africa report new and more contagious variants of virus, leading to travel restrictions.

🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃

we're going to be dealing with this for the rest of our lives. climate change isn't going to get to kill capitalism because covid beat it to the punch.

  • the_river_cass [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    the south african strain appears to be highly transmissible (similarly to the UK strain) and more lethal and has a mutation in the spike protein, potentially impacting the vaccine.

    • OgdenTO [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Would this affect only the mRNA vaccines? That is, would china's whole inactivated virus vaccine likely still be effective?

        • OgdenTO [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Well, yes, I guess i meant - does the whole virus vaccine depend entirely on the spike protein ? Does the mRNA vaccine?

          Edit: here's a good paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2798-3

          Overall, it states that coronavac likely has widespread effect against a number of proteins, while the mRNA vaccines seem to be specifically targeting the spike protein (either all of it or just part of the protein)

          Additionally, it lists "adverse events" caused by the vaccines in trials and the mRNA vaccines seem to elicit headaches and fever in 50% or higher of all people who got the vaccine at higher doses (in the range of what is in the actual vaccine), while coronavac reported no adverse events from the full, inactivated virus vaccine they have.

          • the_river_cass [she/her]
            ·
            4 years ago

            the mRNA vaccines only produce the spike protein so yes, they're dependent on it. I don't know enough about coronavac to say.