This gets to what Geert has been talking about for at least a year and half, why Geert now says that disaster will be here in a few months at the latest.
The next U.S. COVID wave is coming. Why it will be 'much weirder than before
The next U.S. COVID wave is coming. Why it will be 'much weirder than before
https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-next...ll-be-much-weirder-than-before-200044795.htmlWhy? Because they’re “escape” variants. While earlier sublineages that were jockeying for post-BA.5 supremacy in the U.S. had a few advantageous mutations, XBB, B.Q.1.1 and their ilk — including BN.1 and BA.2.75.2 — now boast at least six changes in just the right places on the virus’s spike protein (leading some researchers to refer to them as the “pentagon” or “hexagon” variants). As a consequence, they now rank as the "most antibody-evasive” strains ever tested, according to Yunlong Richard Cao, an immunologist at Peking University in Beijing.
This is troubling for two reasons. The first is that the most vulnerable among us — the immunocompromised and the elderly — tend not to produce as strong or as lasting an antibody response after infection or vaccination. Monoclonal antibody treatments have helped fill the gap and shield them from severe illness.
But many of these treatments were abandoned after prior variants rendered them useless — and now lab experiments have shown that the remaining antibody therapies (bebtelovimab and Evusheld) don’t work against XBB and B.Q.1.1. (Last week, the Food and Drug Administration warned that Evusheld can’t neutralize the latest variants, meaning immunocompromised people may no longer be able to take it for pre-exposure protection.) Once the new escape variants take off, people at high risk for severe COVID are likely to be even more vulnerable than before (though not completely vulnerable as vaccination and prior infection still offer some defense against serious illness).