Twitter thread I've been waiting for. This is the Seattle guy who has been tracking the genome changes since the beginning.
Synopsis.
1. We do need to watch something like this UK mutation (btw, the South Africa mutation is a different mutation, so they are watching that one closely too).
2. The immune response the Pfizer / Moderna vaccines are producing is so powerful that it will likely take a large set of mutations for the virus to evade them in a significant way. However, smaller drops in efficacy would not be unexpected.
3. Over time, we likely will have to update the vaccine to include newer variants. But this is not influenza in terms of how fast and specific the virus is mutating in a way that is likely to evade the vaccines.
Most experts are using this to remind people why the other steps we are taking are so important (staying in your bubble especially). The more bodies the virus has a change to infect, the more mutations you would expect to find. Don't let the virus win the lottery by having so many tickets. So sure, you may recover just fine, but maybe your body was an incubator for a problematic mutation. This one, they think might have been from a patient who had a longer, chronic infection. Stop the spread, stop the mutations. But you can already hear the howling from the "rooting for the virus" people about how nothing we do will matter, and it's just government trying to scare people.
