it's just you saying that..
the genetic spike protein chain is fairly consistent in all but one COVID mutation- the South African mutation. mRNA is still effective against the South African variant although its effectiveness drops from the mid 90% to the high 80%. mRNA was created to deliver an individually customizable lab engineered mRNA instruction set into the human cell to fight cancer.
No its not me, read this, currently happening.
"Vaccinations are certainly starting to pick up, but we're nowhere near where we need to be to get this thing under control."
More than 15,000 cases of the more transmissible and
potentially more deadly variants have been reported across Canada to date, with more than 90 per cent of those being the B117 variant first identified in the United Kingdom.
But the P1 variant first discovered in Brazil is also on the rise in Canada, with cases
doubling in the past week to close to 1,000 — mostly in British Columbia, Ontario and Alberta.
And the B1351 variant first found in South Africa is also picking up steam, with
over 150 cases identified in Quebec, more than 70 in
Ontario and over 50 in
B.C. as of Tuesday.
But experts say Canada's slow vaccine roll out has failed to keep up with the exponential rise in variants in the third wave and the
premature loosening of restrictions has led to an increase in hospitalizations and deaths — even in
younger Canadians.
"People were hoping that we could get to the finish line and get everyone vaccinated without having to deal with another wave and unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case," said Dr. Leyla Asadi, an infectious diseases physician at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
"That's a combination of both our reopening too quickly and now you add in these variants of concern."
Canada has emerged as one of the only countries in the world with significant outbreaks of three different variants occurring at the same time — turning us into a giant experiment on the world stage.
"There's no other country that's kind of dealing with it as we are — we have all of them emerging at once," said Dr. Zain Chagla, an infectious diseases physician at St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton.
"What happens to all three of them in the mix? Which one takes over? Which one is the fittest of the three?"
Variants could threaten vaccine effectiveness
Canada's Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam says another unanswered question that has huge implications for our ability to control the third wave is whether variants like P1 pose a threat to COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness.
"This virus might be capable of evading the immune response," she said. "But we do not have an actual vaccine effectiveness estimate that is solidified."
Tam says she has asked medical officers of health across the country to gather more information on vaccine effectiveness against P1 in particular, while encouraging Canadians to get vaccinated and provinces and territories to keep public health restrictions in place.
Amid that black hole of data, Tam says Canada may be able to fill the international research void due to our surging rates of variant cases — for better or worse.
"We don't have enough information from other countries, including Brazil, about how well these vaccines work against P1," she said. "If Canada is seeing the evolution of spread of P1, we might be a country where we will be able to produce some of this data."
Tam says scientists believe one specific mutation common to all three variants, called
E484K, could actually allow the virus to escape the immune response and even make it possible for someone who has previously had COVID-19 to become reinfected.
"That was the initial event that caused us to be concerned about this P1," she said. "There was reinfection in a particular person that already had COVID-19 before."
Tam said while there have so far only been laboratory studies done on the antibody response to P1 that showed in some cases there was a reduced ability for a vaccinated person's antibodies to neutralize P1 — the evidence so far is still a "signal of concern."
