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Every time I pick up a phone, a guy comes out have covid. I myself am one of them. My friends and colleagues are falling like bedbugs into the clutches of the most famous disease of the 21st century. Those of us who had been spared for two years, perhaps thanks to our taciturn and socially awkward character, are now paying the debt we had contracted with nature. All multivaccinated and equipped with paracetamol of one gram, we have spent these weeks a mild covid, with fever for a couple of days, headache and somewhat more persistent symptoms in the upper respiratory tract, such as bronchial cough and nasopharyngeal congestion. A year or two ago we would have won many, but things have changed. high vaccination rates in the rich world and the kindness of the omicron variant and its descendants, which are highly contagious and kill little, have freed us from a new bloodbath. But read the last post up to date by Pablo Linde, because it reveals that some things remain to be addressed and decided. Important things.
The ability of the last sub-lineages of the omicron lineage (BA.4 and BA.5) to infect all your family and friends is due to a double factor. First, these next-generation viruses have the greatest ability to spread that we have known so far. There are indications that this is due to structural changes in the spikes, the proteins that adorn the outer surface of coronaviruses, give them their name (think of a King of Wands seen from above), and interact with human cells with the clear intention of sneak inside. If this is confirmed, investigating that hyper-efficient spike will yield a treasure trove of data. Second, BA.4 and BA.5 are exceptionally elusive to the immune system. This allows them to evade our antibodies, whether generated by vaccines or previous infections. This is why they cause so many reinfections and infections in vaccinated people.
There are moves about it. With your covid zero policy, China has ended up getting into a mess. Let no one get infected, Beijing decided as it closed down cities with tens of millions of inhabitants. It worked for a while, but omicron and its sublineages have ended up slipping through the wall, and now they have caught the population with a virgin immune system or poorly prepared to face this whole family of infectious agents. Even more importantly, the Asian dragon decided to exclusively use the Chinese vaccine, developed with rather primitive and demonstrably ineffective techniques. Beijing steadfastly refused to import the new RNA vaccines, despite repeated opportunities to do so. Call it headstrong, but that’s the way things have been in the emerging world power. Very bad.
But China has found a curious way to alleviate the damage without giving up its principles. It has developed its own RNA vaccines. As reported Nature, the Chinese RNA vaccine has shown a higher immune response than the traditional injection they have used so far, and is close to approval by the government agency. Nobody can guarantee that the new vaccine will solve the problem of the covid-zero policy, but the injection reveals a lot about the psychology of a dictatorship.
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