The coronavirus isn’t mutating quickly, suggesting a vaccine would offer lasting protection By Joel Achenbach March 24 at 4:30 PM ET The coronavirus is not mutating significantly as it circulates through the human population, according to scientists who are closely studying the novel pathogen’s genetic code. That relative stability suggests the virus is less likely to become more or less dangerous as it spreads, and represents encouraging news for researchers hoping to create a long-lasting vaccine.
All viruses evolve over time, accumulating mutations as they replicate imperfectly inside a host’s cells in tremendous numbers and then spread through a population, with some of those mutations persisting through natural selection. The new coronavirus has proofreading machinery, however, and that reduces the “error rate” and the pace of mutation. The new coronavirus looks pretty much the same everywhere it has appeared, the scientists say, and there is no evidence that some strains are deadlier than others.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease covid-19, is similar to coronaviruses that circulate naturally in bats. It jumped into the human species last year in Wuhan, China, likely through an intermediate species — possibly a pangolin, an endangered anteater whose scales are trafficked for traditional medicine.
Scientists now are studying more than 1,000 different samples of the virus, Peter Thielen, a molecular geneticist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who has been studying the virus, told The Washington Post.
There are only about four to 10 genetic differences between the strains that have infected people in the U.S. and the original virus that spread in Wuhan, he said.
“That’s a relatively small number of mutations for having passed through a large number of people,” Thielen said. “At this point the mutation rate of the virus would suggest that the vaccine developed for SARS-CoV-2 would be a single vaccine, rather than a new vaccine every year like the flu vaccine.”
It would be more like the measles or chickenpox vaccines, he said — something that would likely confer immunity for a long time.
“I would expect a vaccine for coronavirus would have a similar profile to those vaccines. It’s great news,” Thielen said.
Two other virologists, Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa and Benjamin Neuman of Texas A&M University at Texarkana, both of whom were on the international committee that named the coronavirus, have told The Post that the virus appears relatively stable.
“The virus has not mutated to any significant extent,” Perlman said.
“Just one ‘pretty bad’ strain for everybody so far. If it’s still around in a year, by that point we might have some diversity,” Neuman said.
Neuman contrasted the coronavirus with influenza, which is notoriously slippery.
“Flu does have one trick up its sleeve that coronaviruses do not have — the flu virus genome is broken up into several segments, each of which codes for a gene. When two flu viruses are in the same cell, they can swap some segments, potentially creating a new combination instantly — this is how the H1N1 ‘swine’ flu originated,” Neuman said.
It is possible that a small mutation in the virus could have outsized effects in the clinical outcome of covid-19, the experts say. That has been known to happen with other viruses. But there’s no sign that this is happening with the new coronavirus.
The dramatic death rates in Italy, for example, are most likely due to situational factors — an older population, hospitals being overwhelmed, shortages of ventilators and the resulting rationing of lifesaving care — rather than some difference in the pathogen itself.
“So far we don’t have any evidence linking a specific virus [strain] to any disease severity score,” Thielen said. “Right now disease severity is much more likely to be driven by other factors.”
Although one team of scientists earlier this year suggested that there might be two distinct strains of the virus with different levels of typical disease severity, that conjecture has not been embraced by the scientific community.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Trump Has Given Unusual Leeway to Fauci, but Aides Say He’s Losing His Patience https://nyti.ms/2QENNSE
Trump Has Given Unusual Leeway to Fauci, but Aides Say He’s Losing His Patience
By Maggie Haberman
Published March 23, 2020Updated March 24, 2020, 12:09 a.m. ET
President Trump has praised Dr. Anthony S. Fauci as a “major television star.” He has tried to demonstrate that the administration is giving him free rein to speak. And he has deferred to Dr. Fauci’s opinion several times at the coronavirus task force’s televised briefings.
But Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, has grown bolder in correcting the president’s falsehoods and overly rosy statements about the spread of the coronavirus in the past two weeks — and he has become a hero to the president’s critics because of it. And now, Mr. Trump’s patience has started to wear thin.
So has the patience of some White House advisers, who see Dr. Fauci as taking shots at the president in some of his interviews with print reporters while offering extensive praise for Mr. Trump in television interviews with conservative hosts.
Mr. Trump knows that Dr. Fauci, who has advised every president since Ronald Reagan, is seen as credible with a large section of the public and with journalists, and so he has given the doctor more leeway to contradict him than he has other officials, according to multiple advisers to the president.
When Mr. Trump knows that he has more to gain than to lose by keeping an adviser, he has resisted impulses to fight back against apparent criticism, sometimes for monthslong interludes. One example was when he wanted to fire the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, in 2017 and early 2018. Another was Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general. Mr. Trump eventually fired both when he felt the danger in doing so had passed.
So far, the president appears to be making the same calculation with Dr. Fauci, who was not on the briefing room podium on Monday evening. When asked why, Mr. Trump said he had just been with Dr. Fauci for “a long time” at a task force meeting. Officials, asked about the doctor’s absence, repeated that they were rotating officials who appear at the briefings.
“He’s a good man,” Mr. Trump said. Dr. Fauci was scheduled to be on Fox News with Sean Hannity a short time later.
Still, the president has resisted portraying the virus as the kind of threat described by Dr. Fauci and other public health experts. In his effort to create a positive vision of a future where the virus is less of a danger, critics have accused Mr. Trump of giving false hope.
Dr. Fauci and the president have publicly disagreed on how long it will take for a coronavirus vaccine to become available and whether an anti-malaria drug, chloroquine, could help those with an acute form of the virus. Dr. Fauci has made clear that he does not think the drug necessarily holds the potential that Mr. Trump says it does.
In an interview with Science Magazine, Dr. Fauci responded to a question about how he had managed to not get fired by saying that, to Mr. Trump’s “credit, even though we disagree on some things, he listens. He goes his own way. He has his own style. But on substantive issues, he does listen to what I say.”
But Dr. Fauci also said there was a limit to what he could do when Mr. Trump made false statements, as he often does during the briefings.
“I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down,” Dr. Fauci said. “OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time.”
In an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Dr. Fauci played down the idea that there was a divide between him and the president. “There isn’t fundamentally a difference there,” he said.
“The president has heard, as we all have heard, what are what I call anecdotal reports that certain drugs work. So what he was trying to do and express was the hope that if they might work, let’s try and push their usage,” Dr. Fauci said. “I, on the other side, have said I’m not disagreeing with the fact anecdotally they might work, but my job is to prove definitively from a scientific standpoint that they do work. So I was taking a purely medical, scientific standpoint, and the president was trying to bring hope to the people.”
A White House spokesman and Dr. Fauci did not respond to requests for comment.
Dr. Fauci came to his current role as the AIDS epidemic was exploding and President Reagan was paying it little attention. He and C. Everett Koop, the surgeon general, were widely credited with spurring the Reagan administration to action against AIDS, a fact that underscores Dr. Fauci’s ability to negotiate difficult politics.
He has recognized Mr. Trump’s need for praise; in the president’s presence and with audiences that are friendly to him, Dr. Fauci has been complimentary. He told the radio host Mark Levin on Fox News of the administration’s response to the virus: “I can’t imagine that under any circumstances that anybody could be doing more.”
And Dr. Fauci is savvy not just about the inner workings of the government but about the news media that covers it.
When Vice President Mike Pence took over as the lead of the coronavirus task force, his advisers wanted to put a 24-hour pause on interviews that administration officials were giving as they assessed where the administration was after a chaotic few weeks. They were initially fine with Dr. Fauci’s appearances, meeting with him before interviews to get a sense of what he planned to say.
But in the past two weeks, as Dr. Fauci’s interviews have increased in frequency, White House officials have become more concerned that he is criticizing the president.
Officials asked him about the viral moment in the White House briefing room, when he put his hand to his face and appeared to suppress a chuckle after Mr. Trump referred to the State Department as the “Deep State Department.” Dr. Fauci had a benign explanation: He had a scratchy throat and a lozenge he had in his mouth had gotten stuck in his throat, which he tried to mask from reporters.
Some officials have not questioned that Dr. Fauci is giving interviews, but they have wondered how he has so much time for so many requests from the news media.
Dr. Fauci, for his part, has been dismissive of some questions about whether he was at odds with the president, treating it as a news media obsession.
“I think there’s this issue of trying to separate the two of us,” he said on CBS.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Why would it need to mutate? It's doing a pretty effective job in the state it it's already in...
it is a living thing. all living things adapt or mutate in order to survive. this is how we get drug resistant bacteria. you hit bacteria with antibiotics and eventually over time they adapt to where the antibiotic is no longer effective.
the fact that covid-19 is not mutating is reassuring. this doesn't mean that it will not. it just has not been mutating in the short time that it has been studied.
the thing I do not get is, if a virus feeds and thrives off of a host, why does it end up killing the host? isnt't that suicide for the virus?
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
1995 Milwaukee 1998 Alpine, Alpine 2003 Albany, Boston, Boston, Boston 2004 Boston, Boston 2006 Hartford, St. Paul (Petty), St. Paul (Petty) 2011 Alpine, Alpine 2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
Hell yeah churches full of the devoted on Easter Sunday in a week yes, let him be the 1st to enter one of those mega churches with 10k partitioners show us what a fierce leader you are!
Why would it need to mutate? It's doing a pretty effective job in the state it it's already in...
it is a living thing. all living things adapt or mutate in order to survive. this is how we get drug resistant bacteria. you hit bacteria with antibiotics and eventually over time they adapt to where the antibiotic is no longer effective.
the fact that covid-19 is not mutating is reassuring. this doesn't mean that it will not. it just has not been mutating in the short time that it has been studied.
the thing I do not get is, if a virus feeds and thrives off of a host, why does it end up killing the host? isnt't that suicide for the virus?
The effective ones don’t kill most hosts, which is generally true of all types of infections, whether parasitic, viral, bacterial, or what have you. Infectious agents that kill all or most of their hosts don’t tend to get propagated, as the opportunity for spread dies out. However, in order to replicate, the virus does need to hijack the cellular mechanisms so it does cause damage. The ideal situation for the virus is to replicate enough that it makes maximal copies to be dispersed, while keeping most of the hosts alive to spread the virus. A bit of collateral damage doesn’t impede spread much.
my small self... like a book amongst the many on a shelf
Why would it need to mutate? It's doing a pretty effective job in the state it it's already in...
it is a living thing. all living things adapt or mutate in order to survive. this is how we get drug resistant bacteria. you hit bacteria with antibiotics and eventually over time they adapt to where the antibiotic is no longer effective.
the fact that covid-19 is not mutating is reassuring. this doesn't mean that it will not. it just has not been mutating in the short time that it has been studied.
the thing I do not get is, if a virus feeds and thrives off of a host, why does it end up killing the host? isnt't that suicide for the virus?
The effective ones don’t kill most hosts, which is generally true of all types of infections, whether parasitic, viral, bacterial, or what have you. Infectious agents that kill all or most of their hosts don’t tend to get propagated, as the opportunity for spread dies out. However, in order to replicate, the virus does need to hijack the cellular mechanisms so it does cause damage. The ideal situation for the virus is to replicate enough that it makes maximal copies to be dispersed, while keeping most of the hosts alive to spread the virus. A bit of collateral damage doesn’t impede spread much.
this is pretty amazing. thanks for explaining.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
My job involves going in peoples homes daily..I am finishing this week and using some vacation all next week..It seems like the sensible thing to do.We are getting more cases daily in Va.
I Work for a cannabis company and have been deemed essential...
omg. Thats f##kin' awesome!
Doing great Bri, thank you very much for asking! Gonna try to decipher some of the goddamn words till the snail mail arrives... Didn't even check on my community numbers, although I'm paranoid of the food containers/plastic. JFC!
Comments
I've had the same thoughts about how we could all just go inside for a bit and call it a day.
Mr. Lux,
Thanks for reminding us all to be kind and supportive to one another.
Merky, you make a good point of health over politics! I sure am getting a crash course into US politics here!
Keep well, PJ people!
Trump is something completely unique. It's the "idiot" in him that has created this completely new form of evil.
By Joel Achenbach
March 24 at 4:30 PM ET
The coronavirus is not mutating significantly as it circulates through the human population, according to scientists who are closely studying the novel pathogen’s genetic code. That relative stability suggests the virus is less likely to become more or less dangerous as it spreads, and represents encouraging news for researchers hoping to create a long-lasting vaccine.
All viruses evolve over time, accumulating mutations as they replicate imperfectly inside a host’s cells in tremendous numbers and then spread through a population, with some of those mutations persisting through natural selection. The new coronavirus has proofreading machinery, however, and that reduces the “error rate” and the pace of mutation. The new coronavirus looks pretty much the same everywhere it has appeared, the scientists say, and there is no evidence that some strains are deadlier than others.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease covid-19, is similar to coronaviruses that circulate naturally in bats. It jumped into the human species last year in Wuhan, China, likely through an intermediate species — possibly a pangolin, an endangered anteater whose scales are trafficked for traditional medicine.
Scientists now are studying more than 1,000 different samples of the virus, Peter Thielen, a molecular geneticist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who has been studying the virus, told The Washington Post.
There are only about four to 10 genetic differences between the strains that have infected people in the U.S. and the original virus that spread in Wuhan, he said.
“That’s a relatively small number of mutations for having passed through a large number of people,” Thielen said. “At this point the mutation rate of the virus would suggest that the vaccine developed for SARS-CoV-2 would be a single vaccine, rather than a new vaccine every year like the flu vaccine.”
It would be more like the measles or chickenpox vaccines, he said — something that would likely confer immunity for a long time.
“I would expect a vaccine for coronavirus would have a similar profile to those vaccines. It’s great news,” Thielen said.
Two other virologists, Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa and Benjamin Neuman of Texas A&M University at Texarkana, both of whom were on the international committee that named the coronavirus, have told The Post that the virus appears relatively stable.
“The virus has not mutated to any significant extent,” Perlman said.
“Just one ‘pretty bad’ strain for everybody so far. If it’s still around in a year, by that point we might have some diversity,” Neuman said.
Neuman contrasted the coronavirus with influenza, which is notoriously slippery.
“Flu does have one trick up its sleeve that coronaviruses do not have — the flu virus genome is broken up into several segments, each of which codes for a gene. When two flu viruses are in the same cell, they can swap some segments, potentially creating a new combination instantly — this is how the H1N1 ‘swine’ flu originated,” Neuman said.
It is possible that a small mutation in the virus could have outsized effects in the clinical outcome of covid-19, the experts say. That has been known to happen with other viruses. But there’s no sign that this is happening with the new coronavirus.
The dramatic death rates in Italy, for example, are most likely due to situational factors — an older population, hospitals being overwhelmed, shortages of ventilators and the resulting rationing of lifesaving care — rather than some difference in the pathogen itself.
“So far we don’t have any evidence linking a specific virus [strain] to any disease severity score,” Thielen said. “Right now disease severity is much more likely to be driven by other factors.”
Although one team of scientists earlier this year suggested that there might be two distinct strains of the virus with different levels of typical disease severity, that conjecture has not been embraced by the scientific community.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Hope you're doing well tish. Hang in there, we'll get through this!
Maybe it has a desire to spread further, like into dumb people who suggest people should swarm together in churches? Just a wild guess!
...and if the opposite is true?
Trump Has Given Unusual Leeway to Fauci, but Aides Say He’s Losing His Patience
By Maggie Haberman
President Trump has praised Dr. Anthony S. Fauci as a “major television star.” He has tried to demonstrate that the administration is giving him free rein to speak. And he has deferred to Dr. Fauci’s opinion several times at the coronavirus task force’s televised briefings.
But Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, has grown bolder in correcting the president’s falsehoods and overly rosy statements about the spread of the coronavirus in the past two weeks — and he has become a hero to the president’s critics because of it. And now, Mr. Trump’s patience has started to wear thin.
So has the patience of some White House advisers, who see Dr. Fauci as taking shots at the president in some of his interviews with print reporters while offering extensive praise for Mr. Trump in television interviews with conservative hosts.
Mr. Trump knows that Dr. Fauci, who has advised every president since Ronald Reagan, is seen as credible with a large section of the public and with journalists, and so he has given the doctor more leeway to contradict him than he has other officials, according to multiple advisers to the president.
When Mr. Trump knows that he has more to gain than to lose by keeping an adviser, he has resisted impulses to fight back against apparent criticism, sometimes for monthslong interludes. One example was when he wanted to fire the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, in 2017 and early 2018. Another was Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general. Mr. Trump eventually fired both when he felt the danger in doing so had passed.
So far, the president appears to be making the same calculation with Dr. Fauci, who was not on the briefing room podium on Monday evening. When asked why, Mr. Trump said he had just been with Dr. Fauci for “a long time” at a task force meeting. Officials, asked about the doctor’s absence, repeated that they were rotating officials who appear at the briefings.
“He’s a good man,” Mr. Trump said. Dr. Fauci was scheduled to be on Fox News with Sean Hannity a short time later.
Still, the president has resisted portraying the virus as the kind of threat described by Dr. Fauci and other public health experts. In his effort to create a positive vision of a future where the virus is less of a danger, critics have accused Mr. Trump of giving false hope.
Dr. Fauci and the president have publicly disagreed on how long it will take for a coronavirus vaccine to become available and whether an anti-malaria drug, chloroquine, could help those with an acute form of the virus. Dr. Fauci has made clear that he does not think the drug necessarily holds the potential that Mr. Trump says it does.
In an interview with Science Magazine, Dr. Fauci responded to a question about how he had managed to not get fired by saying that, to Mr. Trump’s “credit, even though we disagree on some things, he listens. He goes his own way. He has his own style. But on substantive issues, he does listen to what I say.”
But Dr. Fauci also said there was a limit to what he could do when Mr. Trump made false statements, as he often does during the briefings.
“I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down,” Dr. Fauci said. “OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time.”
In an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Dr. Fauci played down the idea that there was a divide between him and the president. “There isn’t fundamentally a difference there,” he said.
“The president has heard, as we all have heard, what are what I call anecdotal reports that certain drugs work. So what he was trying to do and express was the hope that if they might work, let’s try and push their usage,” Dr. Fauci said. “I, on the other side, have said I’m not disagreeing with the fact anecdotally they might work, but my job is to prove definitively from a scientific standpoint that they do work. So I was taking a purely medical, scientific standpoint, and the president was trying to bring hope to the people.”
A White House spokesman and Dr. Fauci did not respond to requests for comment.
Dr. Fauci came to his current role as the AIDS epidemic was exploding and President Reagan was paying it little attention. He and C. Everett Koop, the surgeon general, were widely credited with spurring the Reagan administration to action against AIDS, a fact that underscores Dr. Fauci’s ability to negotiate difficult politics.
He has recognized Mr. Trump’s need for praise; in the president’s presence and with audiences that are friendly to him, Dr. Fauci has been complimentary. He told the radio host Mark Levin on Fox News of the administration’s response to the virus: “I can’t imagine that under any circumstances that anybody could be doing more.”
And Dr. Fauci is savvy not just about the inner workings of the government but about the news media that covers it.
When Vice President Mike Pence took over as the lead of the coronavirus task force, his advisers wanted to put a 24-hour pause on interviews that administration officials were giving as they assessed where the administration was after a chaotic few weeks. They were initially fine with Dr. Fauci’s appearances, meeting with him before interviews to get a sense of what he planned to say.
But in the past two weeks, as Dr. Fauci’s interviews have increased in frequency, White House officials have become more concerned that he is criticizing the president.
Officials asked him about the viral moment in the White House briefing room, when he put his hand to his face and appeared to suppress a chuckle after Mr. Trump referred to the State Department as the “Deep State Department.” Dr. Fauci had a benign explanation: He had a scratchy throat and a lozenge he had in his mouth had gotten stuck in his throat, which he tried to mask from reporters.
Some officials have not questioned that Dr. Fauci is giving interviews, but they have wondered how he has so much time for so many requests from the news media.
Dr. Fauci, for his part, has been dismissive of some questions about whether he was at odds with the president, treating it as a news media obsession.
“I think there’s this issue of trying to separate the two of us,” he said on CBS.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
the fact that covid-19 is not mutating is reassuring. this doesn't mean that it will not. it just has not been mutating in the short time that it has been studied.
the thing I do not get is, if a virus feeds and thrives off of a host, why does it end up killing the host? isnt't that suicide for the virus?
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
"Trump's 'back-to-work' plan would only make things worse, experts say
The president believes the US can be open for business by Easter, but he doesn’t seem to have considered the consequences."
2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
Hampton 2016
no problem by me. I wanna keep my income flowing.
from my perspective the government wanting everything shutdown is to flatten the curve as to avoid crippling the healthcare system.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Hampton 2016
winnipeg biotech firm (my brother is high up in the company) says they may have a treatment as early as this summer.
www.headstonesband.com
Doing great Bri, thank you very much for asking! Gonna try to decipher some of the goddamn words till the snail mail arrives... Didn't even check on my community numbers, although I'm paranoid of the food containers/plastic. JFC!