doublebluff
Go Beavs
Peyton- I don't read Fauci's comments in that way. I think his current message is that the vaccine will still work against the variants.
In the future, large-scale vaccination will probably select for variants that will grow in vaccinated people, and this will almost certainly need to be addressed, quickly. But at present, I don't think the known variants are less susceptible to the vaccine in a practical sense.
There are certainly a very wide variety of variants in the covid virus sequence, both known and not yet known. Viruses create variants all the time- as a rule. This is especially true for RNA-based viruses. For example, in a single early-stage HIV-infected individual, there are likely variants at every single base pair in the 9,00 base pair viral genome.
Remember in the evolutionary world, in all creatures, mutations (variations) occur all the time. This is then followed by selection, leading to survival of the fittest.
In the future, large-scale vaccination will probably select for variants that will grow in vaccinated people, and this will almost certainly need to be addressed, quickly. But at present, I don't think the known variants are less susceptible to the vaccine in a practical sense.
There are certainly a very wide variety of variants in the covid virus sequence, both known and not yet known. Viruses create variants all the time- as a rule. This is especially true for RNA-based viruses. For example, in a single early-stage HIV-infected individual, there are likely variants at every single base pair in the 9,00 base pair viral genome.
Remember in the evolutionary world, in all creatures, mutations (variations) occur all the time. This is then followed by selection, leading to survival of the fittest.