Thread by @DrEricDing

⚠️Worrisome—New lab experiments from Japan show that #BA2 may have features that make it as capable of causing serious illness as older variants–including Delta! And yet as evasive as old #Omicron cousin BA1. #BA2 🌍 surging—needs upgrade to VOC asap @WHO!
cnn.com/2022/02/17/hea…

2) BA2 is seriously bad news. It’s both faster transmission than BA2 and if it’s truly more severe and as evasive against prior immunity including BA1 old #Omicron immunity— then it’d be the worse of 4 worlds. 👀

https://twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1494336422421032964

3) Faster is bad. Very bad. Hard to imagine faster than old Omicron — yet here we are!!! 🤦🏻‍♂️

https://twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1494336629816762382

4) Resistant to Omicron BA.1 induced immunity. Being BA1 immune from past infection provided immunity against BA1– ➡️ but significantly less against BA2. 👀

Good thing we aren’t dropping mitigations anywhere right??? 🤦🏻‍♂️

5) for vaccine evasion- BA2 is similar to BA1 albeit both are MUCH more evasive than Delta. Boosters still good ~70-74% VE for symptomatic infection. But not enough people boosted. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

6) just how fast is BA2??? It’s now 90% of all #COVID in Denmark. And there’s even two different BA2 versions! Red and blue below. The red H78Y is surging even more 👀

Ht @DrWilliamKu

7) Let’s look at it this way—BA2 is much more aggressive than anything —both pink and green below are BA2 — but the green H78Y subtype of BA2 extra aggressive it seems. Meanwhile BA1 old Omicron near extinct in 🇩🇰! That doesn’t happen by chance. We need to raise BA2 as VOC asap!

8) here is what is happening in the country with the most #BA2 variant so far.., 🇩🇰 has been BA2 dominant for weeks and have now almost no mitigations either… now their excess deaths are spiking again…

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1494700102904131586

9) "[#BA2] might be, from a human's perspective, a worse virus than BA.1 and might be able to transmit better and cause worse disease," says Dr. Daniel Rhoads, section head of microbiology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. BA2 needs a new designation now!!!

10) Worse— monoclonal antibody drug now fails against #BA2 VARIANT—one of the last monoclonal antibody drug still available fails—the rapidly spreading #Omicron BA.2 sublineage "exhibited marked resistance" to sotrovimab in lab experiments. Shit.

medscape.com/viewarticle/96…

11) Meanwhile, we know #BA2 is also surging fast in the US. CDC needs to update its BA2 data — it’s been almost 2 weeks with no new data released!! C’mon @CDCgov - release the new BA2 numbers. The world is watching @CDCDirector

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1491309163129237504

12) Even the @WHO is getting very concerned about #BA2 variant outcompeting and displacing old #Omicron. WHO’s COVID lead @mvankerkhove now warns about a likely BA2 related surge. We must be vigilant. This is not a drill—BA2 is real.

HT @Cleavon_MD.

13) we must act quickly with high urgency to stop the rise of BA2. We have not learned from the past — if we ignore BA2, we could be facing another / continued wave of excess deaths. Let’s learn from history rather than repeat it. 🙏

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1495021668112154630

14) The other urgency is that vaccine effectiveness is only high with boosters in face of #Omicronc whether BA1 or BA2. But most folks aren’t boosted in most countries. Thus are we truly prepared for #BA2 given we know BA1 infection immunity isn’t as good versus BA2? #GetBoosted

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1495604861949206531