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EnricoPallazzo on 21 December 2020
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SvennoJ said:

A less conspiracy view on the new strain (what was that second part of that video....)

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/what-we-know-about-the-u-k-s-new-novel-coronavirus-variant-1.5239317
- over 70% more transmissible (hence becoming visible, taking over)
- "doesn’t seem to make it necessarily worse in terms of infection but it may make it worse in terms of transmission"
- "no current evidence to suggest the new strain causes a higher mortality rate or that it affects vaccines and treatments although urgent work is underway to confirm this,”
- “the expectation is that vaccines stimulate a broad antibody response. So they (the vaccines) are triggering a response to the entire spike protein, so if we have mutations in some regions (of the DNA), it doesn’t seem like that would reduce the efficacy of the vaccine in a particularly significant way.” But she stressed changes to vaccine efficacy “wasn’t completely implausible.”

Isn't this at least the second time a seemingly more contagious strain variant takes over? Natural selection also favors asymptomatic transmission, unnoticed (less damaging) transmission gets free reign, while people with symptoms isolate. The reason this virus is so hard to get rid of is because it's not all that deadly and doesn't severely affect most people.

A less damaging, more infectious strain can actually help build up herd immunity. However there are no signs either that it is less damaging.

This is my biggest fear, that the vaccines get impacted by mutation on the virus. It seems that as long as the mutations are not located in the protein receptors, which is what the vaccines target then we should be ok. Anyway, this vaccine will probably be "season flu" vaccine style, updated every year with the new strains of the virus. Let's keep fingers crossed.