Brazilian mutation has scientists worried

carbon20; good find, terrible news; From the article; 

While the variant from the U.K. took about three months to dominate the outbreak in England, P.1 took only about a month to dominate the outbreak in Manaus. In addition, Manaus had already been hit extremely hard by the virus in April. One study estimated that the population should have reached herd immunity and the virus shouldn't be able to spread easily in the community. So why would the city see an even bigger surge 10 months later? Could P.1 be evading the antibodies made against the previous version of the virus, making reinfections easier? Could it just be significantly more contagious? Could both be true?

"While we don't *know* exactly why this variant has been so apparently successful in Brazil, none of the explanations on the table are good," epidemiologist Bill Hanage at Harvard University wrote on Twitter.

Reinfections are a serious concern for several reasons. First off, like the variant from South Africa, P.1 carries a cluster of mutations along the surface of the virus where antibodies — especially the potent antibodies — like to bind. "They are kind of the major targets of the immune system," said virus expert Penny Moore at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. "So when we see a whole lot of mutations in [those surfaces], it raises the possibility that the mutations might be conferring immune escape." That is, the mutations are helping the virus evade antibodies or escape recognition by them. In essence, the mutations are providing the virus with a type of invisibility cloak.

To test out this hypothesis, Moore and her colleagues took blood serum from 44 people infected with the previous version of the virus and checked to see if the antibodies in that serum still worked against the new variant from South Africa. Or did the antibodies lose their sensitivity?

"Indeed that's what we saw," she said. "In fact, it was really quite a dramatic drop-off in sensitivity. We saw that in half of the serum, the antibodies were significantly less effective against the new variant [from South Africa]." So far, scientists haven't tested out P.1 in similar neutralization experiments, but P.1 has two mutations that scientists have already shown reduce antibody binding.

And thus, now we have a game of "cat and mouse," said virus expert Ravi Gupta, between the virus and the vaccine. The virus finds ways around the vaccine (and our immune system), said Gupta, and so the manufacturers have to reformulate the vaccines (or else we run the risk of getting infected twice).

DJ The conclusion of the article "The coronavirus is going to cause a long term disruption" may be "mild". 

If the Brazilian variant "just ignores" Manuas 75% "natural immunity"due to prior infection and is slowly spreading around the globe the outlook for this pandemic is getting only worse...

The discussion on how often people would need vaccination-would it be just like the flu-shot each year is an older question. Looks like yes-we may not only have mass vaccinations just to get out of this pandemic but may need re-vaccinations to stay out of this pandemic...

In Dutch news-The Brazil (P1-Rio) variant was found while sequencing recent samples. People in South-West part of NL in a carecenter did show the B-variant...several of them tested positive in the second week of january. (In Manaus there is a P2 variant showing to be a bigger risk).

[url]https://www.atlas-mag.net/en/article/the-brazilian-mutant-worst-covid-19-variant[/url] or https://www.atlas-mag.net/en/article/the-brazilian-mutant-worst-covid-19-variant

Just watching news about the South African mutation.....

Looking even more scary.........