Pretty much
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The initial reports I read stated that they had no reason to think the mutation would affect the vaccine, but that was made with no details given. Assuming the best, in most cases but especially in medicine, is generally a bad idea. While I haven’t seen anything suggesting this variant is vaccine resistant, I would really very much like to see data that says it is not.
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This is the part that suggests we may have a problem. Their initial investigation (basing decisions on preliminary data is always risky) suggest that this new mutation is “makes antibodies from the blood of survivors less effective at attacking the virus.”
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Holy shit… 
1/21/21 cannot get here soon enough.
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That’s because Americans are so darn self-sufficient, that we don’t need no handouts like them weak-willed foreigners. We just get on Amazon.com and see which country we can order really cheap imitation leather bootstraps from.
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So it runs in the family! Gotta love it!
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Parton Sisters 2024!
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From about 10 days ago, but some good points.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects that more than 500,000 Americans will have died of the coronavirus by the end of March. It expects that vaccines will have saved 25,000 lives by then — but that broader mask usage in this period could save even more lives, 56,000.
Refusing to wear a mask is today’s equivalent of drunken driving. The odds of killing someone are low, but collectively this year the refusal to wear masks will kill far more Americans than driving under the influence.
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We’ve so thoroughly gutted the competency of every other agency within the government at this point (something that was vastly accelerated by Trump but by no means started by him) that the military is apparently the only arm of the government left that’s capable of logistics management.
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In particular, we have gutted the CDC and completely eliminated it’s pandemic response unit, who would normally be in charge and would likely have had a significant amount of the logistics ready in stand-by, and would certainly have had it well in place by the time any vaccine might have finished final vetting.
Using the military is both trying to pretend that there never was any civilian capacity to do this, and that also government can only do things that involve men wearing wildly inappropriate camo in office buildings.
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the military is apparently the only arm of the government left that’s capable of logistics management.
They are the only ones left in danger of getting shot if they carry out their duties incompetently. Sharpens the mind a bit.
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I’ve been saying this for 9 months now. I think the test is over now, and the results are coming in.
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I’m half serious about this: do we know that the strain is more contagious, or is it simply that there are lots of strains, this is the prevalent strain in the UK, and also the UK is experiencing a huge infection spike and people are making a correlation?
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The ECDC report posted by @gatto upthread features some lab data that supports the 70% increased infectivity, so not pulled from thin air, but is preliminary (once again, 1 yr old bug, WDKS) and more data will tell. Not certain what to make of the reported decreased response to convalescent plasma seen in @vermes82 post, but certainly something to keep an eye on.
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Every infected person/animal is a possible source of mutated versions. That’s what we get for having such large numbers of infections running through the population, no thanks to the kill grandma “herd immunity” proponents.
If only this could have been foreseen! /s
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I am filled with incandescent rage.
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And yet, our only saving grace here is natural selection. Right now nature is selecting for increased infectivity (a spike protein that doesn’t bend as easily, and therefore more viruses can infect more hosts). But, if nature combines a stronger spike protein with a more robust payload… well, then we are truly fucked.
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Yup.
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