Neutral mention · rule
Antibiotic selection does not have the same dynamics as viral evolution does. This graphic demonstrates a good example as to the epitope coverage across S by both B-cells and T-cells: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2021/07/05/202... You would need to have a variant that selects past all of the epitope coverage of both B/T-cell and bypasses affinity maturation too. NTD and RBD already has great coverage, but the rest of the pre-fusion spike confirmation used in vaccines these days has even more coverage than just with RBD alone. I think that's why BNT162b1 failed, as it was a mRNA encoded receptor binding domain only. Given how large the breadth (as in…
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epitope coverage) already is in RBD alone, you would most likely disrupt ACE2 receptor binding too at the same time if there was a such a massive change all at once to render a vaccine useless. If you managed to achieve an evolution rate of 250+ AA substitutions extremely quickly, all in one fell swoop, I’d have much much bigger concerns. A lot of the variants these days select for escape for RBD class 1 and 2 nAbs, even Mu as of now (R346K is in this weird overlap between the different classes as per the Barnes classification). You may want to see the following: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00573-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2852-1 https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abf9302 I think I read some others, but I'll have to dig through my browser history more.