- Joined
- Mar 11, 2016
Phil just gave us a white-hot take in his streamchat: Reopening will kill "tons", but Kat will be fine (you know, probably):
If I didn't know he's been doing this for ages, these posts would make me think he was some kind of committed performance artist.
EDIT: You know what? Phil has triggered my 'tism so you all are getting an impromptu biology lesson. At the risk of stating the obvious Phil was probably asleep when they learned about DNA in science class.
If I didn't know he's been doing this for ages, these posts would make me think he was some kind of committed performance artist.
EDIT: You know what? Phil has triggered my 'tism so you all are getting an impromptu biology lesson. At the risk of stating the obvious Phil was probably asleep when they learned about DNA in science class.
Coronavirus is what is called a retrovirus because it uses RNA (ribonucleic acid) rather than DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) for its genetic material. There are many differences but from a public-health perspective the main one is that RNA chains tend to be much shorter than DNA ones which makes RNA-based organisms much more likely to mutate. This is why the Brazilian and South African variants occurred so quickly and why pharma companies are or at least should be very nervous: Even if the existing vaccines provide immunity or near-immunity to the common strains it's entirely plausible that a large chunk of the world will have strains which are resistant or immune to them by the time vaccines get rolled out to shithole countries. Herd immunity may not be guaranteed until 2022 and some amount of ongoing monitoring will be a necessity.
This is not a new phenomenon either, my high school bio teacher used to work in medical research and he told us that the underlying science between an HIV/AIDS cure was well understood but any vaccine they actually sent to the FDA for approval would probably only effect a small handful of strains (i.e. a small subset of the infected population). There is ongoing work in this area but it's widely accepted that lifelong antiretroviral therapy will almost certainly be more effective than anything new they develop.
This is not a new phenomenon either, my high school bio teacher used to work in medical research and he told us that the underlying science between an HIV/AIDS cure was well understood but any vaccine they actually sent to the FDA for approval would probably only effect a small handful of strains (i.e. a small subset of the infected population). There is ongoing work in this area but it's widely accepted that lifelong antiretroviral therapy will almost certainly be more effective than anything new they develop.
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