Thread by @sailorrooscout

Okay, while this sounds alarming, I am here to tell you this is to be expected. Viruses undergo evolution and natural selection, just like cell-based life, and most of them evolve rapidly. The E484K mutation was already identified in the SA and Brazil variant, now the UK variant.

https://twitter.com/kakape/status/1356359522177179662

When two viruses infect a cell at the same time, they may swap genetic material to make new, "mixed" viruses with unique properties. For example, influenza strains can arise this way. Natural selection can only happen when it has the right starting material: genetic variation.

Genetic variation means there are some genetic (heritable) differences in a population. In viruses, variation comes from either recombination where viruses swap chunks of genetic material (DNA or RNA) or random mutation where a change occurs in the DNA or RNA sequence of a virus.

In other words, these variants are essentially doing what they will as they adapt. This particular mutation has already been proven to not affect the vaccines. If this mutation was a new or novel one we hadn’t seen before then I’d be alarmed but it’s not. While this mutation is

aggressive mind you, if anything we need to continue to increase our social distancing measures and increase our mass vaccination efforts. The slower we go the more time we give it to adapt and increase its fitness. As I said before, viruses need unprotected hosts to mutate.

If ANYTHING this mutation is becoming common amongst the variants because we are allowing it to do so and it’s a recurring mutation. The virus is increasing its fitness to become more transmissible which is exactly what this mutation allows it to do so this variant adapted.

This tells us we need to really ramp up our vaccination efforts and social distancing measures. It’s the only way we are going to bring this virus down to a manageable level. And so no, while it’s not essentially good news, this is not new behavior from a virus.