Even Republicans with no regard for human life except for the lives of their billionaire donors should understand that dead employees can’t generate wealth for corporations. “Biden’s New Vaccine Push Is a Fight for the U.S. Economy”

 WASHINGTON — President Biden’s aggressive move to expand the number of vaccinated Americans and halt the spread of the Delta variant is not just an effort to save lives. It is also an attempt to counter the continuing and evolving threat that the virus poses to the economy…

“I always tell undergraduates, when they take economics with me, that economics is not about optimizing output,” said Mr. Fernández-Villaverde, the University of Pennsylvania economist. “It’s about optimizing welfare. And if you’re dead, you’re not getting a lot of welfare.

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Biden’s New Vaccine Push Is a Fight for the U.S. Economy

The effort reflects the continuing and evolving threat the coronavirus pandemic poses to the economic recovery.

Sept. 9, 2021

By Jim Tankersley

Sept. 9, 2021

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“The great fear is that nature could spit out some new variant that completely saps the power of vaccines and upends the progress we’ve made against the pandemic. But to virologists and immunologists, such a possibility seems very unlikely.

That’s not to say variants won’t impair immune protection. Already, it appears Delta is causing breakthrough infections and symptomatic cases at higher rates than other variants. But vaccines have shown they don’t lose much oomph at protecting people from hospitalization and death, no matter the variant they’re up against. The way the vaccines work leaves experts optimistic that mutations won’t suddenly leave everyone vulnerable again.

“I don’t think that we’ll end up with variants that completely escape antibodies or vaccine-induced immunity,” said vaccinologist Florian Krammer of Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. Already, Krammer said, we’ve seen the immune system’s ability to neutralize viral variants drop — to the greatest degree with the Beta variant — but it still persists. Because of that, vaccines haven’t lost major steps at protecting people from the worst outcomes of Covid-19.

Something unexpected could happen, scientists caution — another twist in a pandemic full of them. Already, they’ve had to reassess their thinking about the coronavirus’ evolution. This family of viruses proofreads itself as it replicates, which means it picks up mutations more slowly than viruses like influenza. For the first several months of the pandemic, the virus didn’t seem to be changing in dramatic ways. But now, variants are dominating the conversation.

“This virus has been surprising us,” said Ramón Lorenzo-Redondo, a molecular virologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.”

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Viral evolution 101: Why the coronavirus has changed as it has, and what it means going forward 

By Andrew Joseph 

Aug. 20, 2021

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One of the key reasons the Delta variant has ignited new surges of Covid-19 infections across the United States is its remarkable ability to make copies of itself.

That skill has helped make Delta far more transmissible than any other iteration of the coronavirus seen thus far… 

Delta’s breakneck proliferation isn’t its only trick tied to the increase in infections — and symptomatic infections — in people who’ve been vaccinated. With the mutations the variant picked up as it evolved, it can partially cloak itself from the immune system’s antibodies. That gives the variant a better chance of sneaking past that first line of defense to start an infection compared to earlier forms of the virus. (The vaccines, however, haven’t lost any significant step in protecting against severe outcomes from the coronavirus. They are also still preventing many infections entirely.)

But experts say a crucial factor in Delta’s spread even to vaccinated people is that those infected with the variant seem to be “shedding” comparatively massive amounts of virus, exposing others to much higher levels. An oft-cited statistic is that, with Delta, people have 1,000 times as much virus in their upper airways early on in their infections compared to with the strain that emerged in China in 2019. Some experts quibble with that exact estimate, but the point remains that people who contract Delta have lots more virus in their noses and throats, and are in turn emitting lots more virus. That influx of virus into others’ airways seems to be able to overwhelm the antibodies that aim to guard the cells from infection…

Delta also seems particularly attuned at cracking into cells to start an infection. Once it has a toehold, it starts cranking out copies of itself like the viral version of the brooms in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” which can then go on to infect neighboring cells, quickly driving the viral load up beyond what other variants can do and outpacing the body’s initial response…

As the virus gets into more cells, it can bring on symptoms, which is why you’ve likely heard from friends or family about how they’ve felt sick for a few days after getting a breakthrough infection. But soon after the infection onset, the immune system — trained by the vaccine (or an earlier infection) to recognize and fight off the coronavirus — brings in the big guns, with an onslaught of additional antibodies and immune cells that can clear out the virus before it leads to more serious consequences. This is why, even if Delta is causing infections in some people who are vaccinated, in nearly all cases, it is causing only up to moderate disease — the goal the shots were designed to achieve.

Beyond that, it was always going to be difficult to completely ward off a pathogen that first infects the upper airway. The strong immune response generated by the vaccines that is so powerfully protecting people from severe Covid-19 is much harder to generate and sustain in the nose and throat…

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How the Delta variant’s remarkable ability to replicate threw new twists into the Covid-19 pandemic

Andrew Joseph

Sept. 9, 2021