NERVTAG minutes

[AcornAutumn]

Allegedly these are the minutes of the meeting that led to the Tier 4 decision

khub.net/documents/135939561/338928724/SARS-CoV-2+variant+under+investigation%2C+meeting+minutes.pdf/962e866b-161f-2fd5-1030-32b6ab467896?t=1608470511452

What happened to evidence based medicine?

What does the antigenic bit translate to in dumbese?

@emptydreamer

There's never been a randomised control trial on the efficacy of parachutes. There actually has been one, and published too. It was intended tongue in cheek, of course, to show how even with a perfect textbook experiment design when it comes to correlations you can end up with bizarre conclusions if your original premise is nonsensical when it comes to causation. The study is quite commonly referred to in bioinformatics / biostatistics programmes.

Want a link?

Didn't they jump out of a stationary aircraft on the ground?

Fair enough, I take on board all these points.

(Except the one about David Icke, who I didn’t even know about till a surreal night out in a bar last year, I knew he’d done that interview on Wogan but that was it).

@orangenasturtium
Hey, those are minor technical details! The authors were interested in deeper aspects

@Cornettoninja ths explains it quite well:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigenic_escape

But, just to clarify, the minutes don't really say much other than there are 4 probable cases of reinfection out of 915 cases so nothing can be concluded until there is more data.

@orangenasturtium to borrow a popular phrase from the young uns ‘thanks, I hate it!’.

I think i got the general gist and am pleased to note your caution!

@Schonerlebnis

Maybe because I've never known whole wards full of patients with the same illness in 25 years of nursing. How are hospitals supposed to cope when you have 20-30 patients on high flow oxygen or requiring cpap machines ? Last month we nearly ran out of oxygen, at the height of the pandemic we were rapidly running out of IV sedation and were having to supplement with oral benzos to put down ng tubes. Anecdotal but still relevant.

thank you for posting this. I think a lot of the problem with why so many are so resistant and angry is that they cannot understand how this virus is different from flu. They cannot grasp that only a tiny percent of ill people needing hospitalisation = a flood on the hospital when the population is infected on mass. That clip from the BBC Hospital programme from the summer where the Royal Free nearly ran out of Oxygen is the sort of thing that needs distributing for people to understand what the problem is with treating Covid.

@Cornettoninja

What does the antigenic bit translate to in dumbese?

Basically, that the new variant could be different enough from "original coronavirus" so that a person's immune does not recognise it, even if they've been previously infected by "original coronavirus" so they have no enhanced immune response to it - the body might just see it as a totally new infection and respond to it as such.

And a vaccine developed for specific antigenic parts of "original coronavirus" might not work against the new variant if those specific antigenic parts are significantly distorted or missing altogether.

Seems they don't have a large enough dataset yet to unequivocally say what it means, but seeing as there have been very few reinfections that I've seen reported in the past 9 months (Worldwide 25 confirmed, 421 suspected from 75 Million cases), these 4 in 1000 cases I imagine are causing the scientists great concern.

The problem is, @Backyard72, there is so little information in the minutes. They haven't specified whether they mean infection with the new strain twice or infection with the new strain after having had a different strain. They also say "probable" so we don't know if these people have had a previous positive test or just believe they have had COVID-19 already. They also haven't specified whether the 4 individuals had antibodies from a previous infection (and they probably don't know).

I do share your concerns but I don't want to overstate anything and concern anyone from that one paragraph that has no detail and is based on very little data.

As it is, there is no evidence yet that the vaccine won't work. The new variant is similar enough to previous variants that antibodies generated from the vaccine should work. Basically, in lay man's terms, the antibodies from the vaccine are "looking" for a virus in a red hat with a black coat, this new strain has a red hat and black coat but has grown a moustache.

Excellent posts from @orangenasturtium and @Backyard72, almost nothing to add.
Only that the current government reaction should include, and probably does include a great degree of prudence. It is also not a binary question of whether or not the vaccine is effective against the new variant. It could be, for example, that the efficiency falls by only a tiny margin, not significant in the greater scheme of things.

But absolutely any new "negative" information on this topic will probably immediately be catastrophised and sensationalised by the media, leading to worse outcomes than the new variant itself. So all communications need to be very, very carefully designed.