STAT reports:

It’s impossible to say how the coronavirus will continue to evolve. Those changes, after all, are a result of random mutations.

But there are some fundamental principles that explain why the virus has morphed as it has, principles that could guide our understanding of its ongoing evolution — and what that means for our future with the pathogen.

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. [Continue reading…]