1/6 At a private gathering of 33 Pfizer-triple-vaccinated health care workers in the Faroe Islands, 21 were infected with Omicron—a superspreading event among 3-dose-vaccinated people. All received dose #3 within 2.5 months of the event. Very discouraging. medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
2/6 All participants tested negative within 36 hours of the event: five with rapid tests and the other 28 with PCR tests. Median age was 45. Only four of the 21 infected had any comorbidities.
3/6 And very similar to the Oslo Christmas superspreader event (where 79 of 80 infected were symptomatic, with 74 having >3 symptoms), all 21 experienced symptoms. There is virtually no asymptomatic infection with Omicron it seems.
4/6 While most had mild illness, moderate and severe symptoms were not as rare as one would hope in a group of young, healthy, triple-vaccinated individuals. Thankfully, none were hospitalized.
5/6 As seen in the Oslo superspreading event and described anecdotally elsewhere, the incubation period was short: 3.24 days on average. Five of those infected still had symptoms at the time of their interview (12-14 days after infection).
6/6 CDC messaging has consistently downplayed the risk of transmission among the vaccinated, & it needs to stop. These people did everything right: they were triple-vaxxed & all tested before gathering. It didn't matter.
I've tried to make sense of BA.3.2's penchant for kids by considering its unique spike: more compact, more closed, & more antibody-evasive than any other variant.
But I think another feature of BA.3.2 is responsible: its wholesale deletion of ORF7a, ORF7b, & ORF8 (∆ORF78).
2/
∆ORF78 is rare but not unheard of; it was in several late XBB variants (GW.5.1.1, FW.1.1, GE.1.2, etc) & a few branches of other variants. I've long thought these late XBB had an advantage in some population subsector, but I didn't suspect kids. 3/
I suspect that the number of people continuously infected since 2020 or 2021 is much larger than we realize. It's impossible to prove, but there are case studies where a chronically infected person gets infected by a new variant, which drives out the original virus...
2/16
...which consequently leaves no trace that the person was chronically infected before the super-infecting variant—took over.
Why then are some Cryptic WW variants resistant to being outcompeted by newer variants?
3/16
While the final outcome for BA.3.2 is uncertain, its unique characteristics—extensively remodeled spike NTD & SD1/SD2, novel S2 muts, & total deletion of ORF7a/7b/8—make it the best candidate for co-dominance we've seen, which could mark a new era in SARS-2 evolution. 1/
Very proud to be a co-author on this comprehensive preprint on the novel, growing saltation lineage BA.3.2, together with @Tuliodna, Darren Martin, Dikeledi Kekana, and lead author @graemedor. 1/9
I would normally write a summary 🧵 of the BA.3.2 mutational analysis here, but as much of my contribution parallels my previous BA.3.2 threads I'll just link to those here, w/brief descriptions of each.
BA.3.2 emerged in Nov 2024 after ~3 years of intrahost evolution with >50 new spike AA muts, but since then, it's changed very little. Could the drug molnupiravir (MOV) galvanize BA.3.2 into pursuing new evolutionary paths? A new 89-mut MOV BA.3.2 seq suggests it could. 1/11
Background on MOV: It's a mutagenic drug. Its purpose is to cause so many mutations that the virus becomes unviable & is cleared. But we've long known this often does not happen. Instead, the virus persists in highly mutated form & can be transmitted. 2/
I was an author on a paper published in @Nature that conclusively showed not only that MOV has created highly mutated, persistent viruses, but that these viruses have transmitted numerous times. See 🧵 below by lead author @theosanderson. 3/
The most valuable viral research tools—@nextstrain & CovSpectrum—are being destroyed, not only blocked from new data but now forbidden from even sharing info from the PAST. Why?
Because GISAID is run dictatorially by a con man, paranoid egomaniac, & liar named Peter Bogner. 1/
I use CovSpectrum & Nextstrain every day—& I'm not the only one. Every Covid thread I've ever posted here has relied partly on CovSpectrum & Nextstrain for information & visuals. These vital tools have now been stolen from us by a world-class grifter. 2/ thinkglobalhealth.org/article/to-fin…
For years scientists knew something was very, very wrong with GISAID, but the breakout story (from which much of this 🧵is based) came 2 years ago in @ScienceMagazine from @sciencecohen & Martin Enserik. 3/ science.org/content/articl…