In a new University of Texas Medical Branch study, the updated bivalent (two-strain) mRNA COVID-19 booster marshaled a robust antibody response against the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 subvariants but not against the more recently emerged BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, or XBB.1 strains.

The authors of the study, published yesterday in Nature Medicine, noted that the BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, and XBB.1 subvariants have additional mutations in the spike protein that may affect vaccine effectiveness.

Someone is going to go broke spending gobs of money on vaccines every time a new strain emerges.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/updated-covid-shot-doesnt-spur-strong-response-newest-strains

On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 9:36:19 PM UTC-5, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:20:36 AM UTC+11, Fred Bloggs wrote:
> > In a new University of Texas Medical Branch study, the updated bivalent (two-strain) mRNA COVID-19 booster marshaled a robust antibody response against the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 subvariants but not against the more recently emerged BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, or XBB.1 strains.
> >
> > The authors of the study, published yesterday in Nature Medicine, noted that the BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, and XBB.1 subvariants have additional mutations in the spike protein that may affect vaccine effectiveness.
> >
> > Someone is going to go broke spending gobs of money on vaccines every time a new strain emerges.
> >
> > https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/updated-covid-shot-doesnt-spur-strong-response-newest-strains
> That's exactly what we've been doing with influenza for many years now, and nobody has gone broke.

The mRNA vaccines are significantly more expensive than whatever technology the flu vaccine uses. And then there's the added expense of accelerated production schedule. Influenza surveillance gives something like 6 months advance notice of what's coming, COVID does not. It may only take weeks for a COVID variant to cause enough hospitalizations to justify a new vaccine.

>
> --
> Bill Sloman, Sydney

On 08/12/2022 14:53, Fred Bloggs wrote:
> On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 9:36:19 PM UTC-5, bill....@ieee.org
> wrote:
>> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:20:36 AM UTC+11, Fred Bloggs
>> wrote:
>>> In a new University of Texas Medical Branch study, the updated
>>> bivalent (two-strain) mRNA COVID-19 booster marshaled a robust
>>> antibody response against the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 subvariants but
>>> not against the more recently emerged BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, or XBB.1
>>> strains.
>>>
>>> The authors of the study, published yesterday in Nature Medicine,
>>> noted that the BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, and XBB.1 subvariants have
>>> additional mutations in the spike protein that may affect vaccine
>>> effectiveness.
>>>
>>> Someone is going to go broke spending gobs of money on vaccines
>>> every time a new strain emerges.
>>>
>>> https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/updated-covid-shot-doesnt-spur-strong-response-newest-strains

It is hardly surprising that with the pressure that a vaccinated
population creates on the selection process Covid is gradually evolving
towards vaccine escape strains that can infect anyone.
>>>
That's exactly what we've been doing with influenza for many years now,
and nobody has gone broke.
>
> The mRNA vaccines are significantly more expensive than whatever
> technology the flu vaccine uses. And then there's the added expense
> of accelerated production schedule. Influenza surveillance gives
> something like 6 months advance notice of what's coming, COVID does
> not. It may only take weeks for a COVID variant to cause enough
> hospitalizations to justify a new vaccine.

The "guess the next influenza strain" game is a total crap shoot. Some
years they guess wisely others the vaccine has no effect or worse a
malign effect manifesting as GBS as happened in France and USA in 1976.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak

There may be a case for a vaccine for the most vulnerable but we are
reaching the point where the general population (at least in the UK) has
enough acquired immunity from vaccination, infection or both. The number
of people here I know that have not had Covid is now vanishingly small.

Covid is a relatively stable virus with only a slow genetic drift away
from the most dominant widespread strains. Unless we are really unlucky
it will burn itself out in a roughly 5 year timescale just like all
previous pandemic strains of flu and coronavirus have done.

Covid-19 will join the pantheon of childhood diseases along with OC43
and the next generation will all have grown up with immunity to it.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:09:20 AM UTC-5, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
> On Friday, December 9, 2022 at 1:53:23 AM UTC+11, Fred Bloggs wrote:
> > On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 9:36:19 PM UTC-5, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
> > > On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:20:36 AM UTC+11, Fred Bloggs wrote:
> > > > In a new University of Texas Medical Branch study, the updated bivalent (two-strain) mRNA COVID-19 booster marshaled a robust antibody response against the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 subvariants but not against the more recently emerged BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, or XBB.1 strains.
> > > >
> > > > The authors of the study, published yesterday in Nature Medicine, noted that the BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, and XBB.1 subvariants have additional mutations in the spike protein that may affect vaccine effectiveness.
> > > >
> > > > Someone is going to go broke spending gobs of money on vaccines every time a new strain emerges.
> > > >
> > > > https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/updated-covid-shot-doesnt-spur-strong-response-newest-strains
> > >
> > > That's exactly what we've been doing with influenza for many years now, and nobody has gone broke.
> >
> > The mRNA vaccines are significantly more expensive than whatever technology the flu vaccine uses.
> So what. Vaccination, even with an expensive vaccine, saves a great deal more money than it costs.

When hospitalization is 1000x the cost of vaccine, you need an unachievably high vaccine effectiveness too break even.

> > And then there's the added expense of accelerated production schedule. Influenza surveillance gives something like 6 months advance notice of what's coming, COVID does not. It may only take weeks for a COVID variant to cause enough hospitalizations to justify a new vaccine.
> Twaddle. Covid-19 mutates less rapidly than influenza. and we are now monitoring it a lot more closely than we used to monitor influenza, and with better tools.

Now you're just making stuff up. COVID mutates on a monthly timescale, influenza mutates on a yearly time scale.

>
> Covid-19 is now killing much the same portion of the population that influenza did - the immuno-compromised - and they were going to end up in hospital anyway.

The later Omicron has a mortality of 4.9%.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7137a4.htm#:~:text=Crude%20mortality%20risk%20(cMR)%20(,period%20(p%3C0.001).

That's about 10x influenza.

>
> --
> Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:10:51 PM UTC-5, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
> On Friday, December 9, 2022 at 3:47:08 AM UTC+11, Fred Bloggs wrote:
> > On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:09:20 AM UTC-5, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
> > > On Friday, December 9, 2022 at 1:53:23 AM UTC+11, Fred Bloggs wrote:
> > > > On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 9:36:19 PM UTC-5, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
> > > > > On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:20:36 AM UTC+11, Fred Bloggs wrote:
> > > > > > In a new University of Texas Medical Branch study, the updated bivalent (two-strain) mRNA COVID-19 booster marshaled a robust antibody response against the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 subvariants but not against the more recently emerged BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, or XBB.1 strains.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > The authors of the study, published yesterday in Nature Medicine, noted that the BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, and XBB.1 subvariants have additional mutations in the spike protein that may affect vaccine effectiveness.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Someone is going to go broke spending gobs of money on vaccines every time a new strain emerges.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/updated-covid-shot-doesnt-spur-strong-response-newest-strains
> > > > >
> > > > > That's exactly what we've been doing with influenza for many years now, and nobody has gone broke.
> > > >
> > > > The mRNA vaccines are significantly more expensive than whatever technology the flu vaccine uses.
> > >
> > > So what. Vaccination, even with an expensive vaccine, saves a great deal more money than it costs.
> >
> > When hospitalization is 1000x the cost of vaccine, you need an unachievably high vaccine effectiveness too break even.
> A thoroughly implausible claim. Vaccines pay off by making you less likely to become infected and even less likely to get seriously ill and need hospitalisation if you do get infected. For the people for whom vaccines don't work well the economics are different - something is going to kill them fairly soon and the only economic benefit lies in having them die of something less infectious and infecting fewer other people on their way out.
>
> You really do need to give up on these imagined arguments - they make you look really dumb.
> > > > And then there's the added expense of accelerated production schedule. Influenza surveillance gives something like 6 months advance notice of what's coming, COVID does not. It may only take weeks for a COVID variant to cause enough hospitalizations to justify a new vaccine.
> > >
> > > Twaddle. Covid-19 mutates less rapidly than influenza. and we are now monitoring it a lot more closely than we used to monitor influenza, and with better tools.
> >
> > Now you're just making stuff up. COVID mutates on a monthly timescale, influenza mutates on a yearly time scale.
> It's you who is inventing your facts. Influenza and Covid-19 don't mutate on any timescales. Both have a low but finite chance of mutating every time they replicate.
> Covid-19 needs more replications per mutation. When you have an epidemic you have more replications in a given time so may it look faster for Covid-19 right now, but Covid-19 is moving rapidly to being merely endemic, so it's mutations are going to end up being less of a problem than influenza's used to be.

The reason COVID is fading away, like most deadly pandemic viruses, is because the original wild strain evolved to be the optimum endowment for survival. The mutations serve to move it away from the optimum, reducing its virulence. Omicron popped up with far greater transmissibility, but then it had greatly reduced lethality. The host population then selects for the less virulent strain by relaxing safeguards against it and allowing more infection. The resulting population herd immunity selects even further removed mutations with virulence approaching harmless. All of this occurred accidently, one day they will know enough to do it purposefully, vaccinating only the people at very high risk instead of the whole world.

> > > Covid-19 is now killing much the same portion of the population that influenza did - the immuno-compromised - and they were going to end up in hospital anyway.
> >
> > The later Omicron has a mortality of 4.9%.
> >
> > https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7137a4.htm#:~:text=Crude%20mortality%20risk%20(cMR)%20(,period%20(p%3C0.001).
> >
> > That's about 10x influenza.
> But it is totally meaningless. It's the mortality risk for people hospitalised with Covid-19 in the US. What it is mainly reporting is deaths in people who haven't been vaccinated against Covid-19, but with a an increasing proportion of deaths in people too old or other-wise too immuno-compromised for vaccination to helped much.

It takes less viral damage to kill an older person. So even if they did have the immunity of a younger person, it wouldn't help them.

A disproportionately large fraction of the population is now vaccinated. This is not 2021.

Here's a KFF report:
https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/why-do-vaccinated-people-represent-most-covid-19-deaths-right-now/#:~:text=The%20share%20of%20COVID%2D19,deaths%20were%20vaccinated%20or%20boosted.

> I had a sobering exchange with my pharmacist lat week - I'd got the Moderna bivalent vaccine from him as a walk-in a couple of weeks ago, and had then recommended it to my neighbours, who hadn't been able to get it. When I asked why, it turned out that my prescription list marked me as potentially immuno-compromised.

People with a history of heart disease need as much protection as they can get because they're less able to tolerate virus related complication in the heart, and SARS-CoV-2 is well known to affect the heart.

>
> This came as something of a surprise.
>
> --
> Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:31:45 AM UTC-5, Martin Brown wrote:
> On 08/12/2022 14:53, Fred Bloggs wrote:
> > On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 9:36:19 PM UTC-5, bill....@ieee.org
> > wrote:
> >> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:20:36 AM UTC+11, Fred Bloggs
> >> wrote:
> >>> In a new University of Texas Medical Branch study, the updated
> >>> bivalent (two-strain) mRNA COVID-19 booster marshaled a robust
> >>> antibody response against the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 subvariants but
> >>> not against the more recently emerged BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, or XBB.1
> >>> strains.
> >>>
> >>> The authors of the study, published yesterday in Nature Medicine,
> >>> noted that the BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, and XBB.1 subvariants have
> >>> additional mutations in the spike protein that may affect vaccine
> >>> effectiveness.
> >>>
> >>> Someone is going to go broke spending gobs of money on vaccines
> >>> every time a new strain emerges.
> >>>
> >>> https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/updated-covid-shot-doesnt-spur-strong-response-newest-strains
> It is hardly surprising that with the pressure that a vaccinated
> population creates on the selection process Covid is gradually evolving
> towards vaccine escape strains that can infect anyone.

I think you're giving evolution a bit too much credit. The main reason the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, designated Wu-Hu-1, disappeared is because the variants shoved it out of the way. The variants impede the replication of the previous circulating strain. This is why when a new variant shows up, suddenly the old one starts to fade away and the new one dominates. There are numerous research papers documenting this effect in vitro at the molecular level, and the observations of viral emergence/ dominance in the real world validates the findings. Did you ever ask yourself what happened to Wu-Hu-1? How come nobody is coming down with it? Certainly there are plenty of unvaccinated hosts globally susceptible to it. Wu-Hu-1 is gone. I'm not sure vaccination helps with emergence of variants because they all originated in places with a large unvaccinated populations and they evade vaccine immunity. The sheer accident of nature is that coronavirus cannot persist in the human population. Humans keep getting hit by it sporadically but from external animal reservoirs where the virus can persist.

> >>>
> That's exactly what we've been doing with influenza for many years now,
> and nobody has gone broke.
> >
> > The mRNA vaccines are significantly more expensive than whatever
> > technology the flu vaccine uses. And then there's the added expense
> > of accelerated production schedule. Influenza surveillance gives
> > something like 6 months advance notice of what's coming, COVID does
> > not. It may only take weeks for a COVID variant to cause enough
> > hospitalizations to justify a new vaccine.
> The "guess the next influenza strain" game is a total crap shoot. Some
> years they guess wisely others the vaccine has no effect or worse a
> malign effect manifesting as GBS as happened in France and USA in 1976.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak
>
> There may be a case for a vaccine for the most vulnerable but we are
> reaching the point where the general population (at least in the UK) has
> enough acquired immunity from vaccination, infection or both. The number
> of people here I know that have not had Covid is now vanishingly small.
>
> Covid is a relatively stable virus with only a slow genetic drift away
> from the most dominant widespread strains. Unless we are really unlucky
> it will burn itself out in a roughly 5 year timescale just like all
> previous pandemic strains of flu and coronavirus have done.
>
> Covid-19 will join the pantheon of childhood diseases along with OC43
> and the next generation will all have grown up with immunity to it.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Martin Brown

On 09/12/2022 22:50, Fred Bloggs wrote:
> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:31:45 AM UTC-5, Martin Brown
> wrote:
>> On 08/12/2022 14:53, Fred Bloggs wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 9:36:19 PM UTC-5,
>>> bill....@ieee.org wrote:
>>>> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 10:20:36 AM UTC+11, Fred
>>>> Bloggs wrote:
>>>>> In a new University of Texas Medical Branch study, the
>>>>> updated bivalent (two-strain) mRNA COVID-19 booster marshaled
>>>>> a robust antibody response against the Omicron BA.4/BA.5
>>>>> subvariants but not against the more recently emerged
>>>>> BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, or XBB.1 strains.
>>>>>
>>>>> The authors of the study, published yesterday in Nature
>>>>> Medicine, noted that the BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, and XBB.1
>>>>> subvariants have additional mutations in the spike protein
>>>>> that may affect vaccine effectiveness.
>>>>>
>>>>> Someone is going to go broke spending gobs of money on
>>>>> vaccines every time a new strain emerges.
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/updated-covid-shot-doesnt-spur-strong-response-newest-strains
>>
>>>>>
It is hardly surprising that with the pressure that a vaccinated
>> population creates on the selection process Covid is gradually
>> evolving towards vaccine escape strains that can infect anyone.
>
> I think you're giving evolution a bit too much credit. The main
> reason the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, designated Wu-Hu-1, disappeared
> is because the variants shoved it out of the way. The variants impede
> the replication of the previous circulating strain. This is why when

It is a side effect of exponential growth. A strain that is even 1%
better at replicating will become completely dominant in a thousand
generations. Most of the strains have been 2-3x more infective so far.
It is now bumping up against the theoretical maximally infective limit
for an airborne disease presently occupied by measles.

> a new variant shows up, suddenly the old one starts to fade away and
> the new one dominates. There are numerous research papers documenting
> this effect in vitro at the molecular level, and the observations of
> viral emergence/ dominance in the real world validates the findings.

There are some nice graphs of each strain waxing and waning.

> Did you ever ask yourself what happened to Wu-Hu-1? How come nobody
> is coming down with it? Certainly there are plenty of unvaccinated
> hosts globally susceptible to it. Wu-Hu-1 is gone. I'm not sure
> vaccination helps with emergence of variants because they all
> originated in places with a large unvaccinated populations and they

I doubt if any of the strains are quite entirely gone. But they are at a
very low level if they still survive at all and likely lurking in rural
China or somewhere else with inadequate vaccination.

> evade vaccine immunity. The sheer accident of nature is that
> coronavirus cannot persist in the human population. Humans keep
> getting hit by it sporadically but from external animal reservoirs
> where the virus can persist.

New pandemic class strains are generally zoonotic viruses that have
jumped species and gained functionality to infect humans. Bats are one
of the reservoirs because they have strange immune systems that allow
them to coexist with viral infections without signs of illness.

Bird flu is the most well known other serious risk (we have outbreaks in
the UK right now laying waste to our turkey Xmas dinners - half of the
free range ones infected and so slaughtered not for food). It is capable
of killing farmers too but so far no human to human infections.

Previous coronaviruses all coexist with humans as one form of the common
cold. It was the UK's common cold research facility that named them
coronaviruses after how they looked in an electron micrograph.

https://www.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/blog/revealing-the-first-coronavirus/

They were a favourite for such cold research because they were so
intrinsically stable. They established very early on that you can catch
the exact same strain again after about 12 months elapsed time.

Many of the childhood sniffles are coronaviruses of one sort or another
and it probably explains in part why Covid bounces off young children.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w

Best estimate for Covid-19 is that we can look forward to catching it
again on average every 18 months going forwards. Your hard immunity
against catching it lasts as little as 3 months from last infection.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(21)00219-6/fulltext

--
Regards,
Martin Brown