Yeah, his second claim is bogus. That’s not how it works, and that’s not what we’ve been seeing with existing mutations.
As an example, look at E484K—this mutation changes the amino acid polarity, so that antibodies trained against the E variant will have a much harder time attaching to the K variant. If an antibody fails to attach, it doesn’t ‘crowd out’ anything.
In the case where an antibody attaches but doesn’t actually “inactivate” the virus due to a mutation, that’s because the virus’ attack surfaces are still present and exposed (otherwise, it would be inactivated.) Again, we wouldn’t expect to see “crowding out” of other antibodies.
And lastly, there’s the extremely unlikely scenario of sufficient mutation that existing antibodies give us Vaccine Enhanced Disease. This is both something vaccine designers explicitly focus on to minimize the risk of, and would require an extreme amount of change to enable.
As an example, look at E484K—this mutation changes the amino acid polarity, so that antibodies trained against the E variant will have a much harder time attaching to the K variant. If an antibody fails to attach, it doesn’t ‘crowd out’ anything.
That makes sense; I was wondering about this exact thing. It seems like VB is painting a worst-case scenario where a bunch of things go wrong in a specific way. Perhaps not impossible, but based on what you’re saying, there’s no reason to be unusually concerned.
Yeah, his second claim is bogus. That’s not how it works, and that’s not what we’ve been seeing with existing mutations.
As an example, look at E484K—this mutation changes the amino acid polarity, so that antibodies trained against the E variant will have a much harder time attaching to the K variant. If an antibody fails to attach, it doesn’t ‘crowd out’ anything.
In the case where an antibody attaches but doesn’t actually “inactivate” the virus due to a mutation, that’s because the virus’ attack surfaces are still present and exposed (otherwise, it would be inactivated.) Again, we wouldn’t expect to see “crowding out” of other antibodies.
And lastly, there’s the extremely unlikely scenario of sufficient mutation that existing antibodies give us Vaccine Enhanced Disease. This is both something vaccine designers explicitly focus on to minimize the risk of, and would require an extreme amount of change to enable.
That makes sense; I was wondering about this exact thing. It seems like VB is painting a worst-case scenario where a bunch of things go wrong in a specific way. Perhaps not impossible, but based on what you’re saying, there’s no reason to be unusually concerned.