New year, new vaccine evasive variant
https://mobile.twitter.com/AbraarKaran/status/1609067496484794370
I mean, I've seen almost everyone I know whose fully vaccinated get BQ and get pretty sick. It's definitely seemed like the vaccines straight out are not working on BQ, but the media hasn't harped on it because they don't want to downplay people from getting vaccines.
The fact that antibody treatment does.not.work.at.all on BQ sorta signals that. I mean what are the vaccines doing? Mostly providing antibodies and those antibodies don't work on BQ. I mean there's the T-cell stuff which hopefully helps, but yeah, we've hit the point in this last wave were the variants have basically totally evaded the existing vaccines and we're back to square one, which is why the #s are so high in this wave.
That said, at least anecdotally it doesn't seem like a deadlier variant. Though that may be the T-cell stuff keeping people from dying even if the antibodies aren't working. I know so many people who got covid this wave, but luckily I don't know anyone that's died from this wave and a couple were close to hospitalization but didn't end up needing to go to the hospital and got past it.
Still, it's been enough that I'm like fuck being around people this holiday.
I do wonder what's next in terms of science trying to catch up. We basically saw with Omicron that even when they skipped human trials and fast-ran the vaccines, they were too late. It was good for like 2-3 months max and then BQ wave started and they were useless. They need to figure out a new strategy this year for variants.