Researcher Alex Sigal has followed the mutations of the coronavirus in an HIV patient over months [1], and he believes that the pattern of mutation in the Omicron variant is similar to what they had observed in that patient. So he favors the HIV scenario for the development of Omicron.
And he speculates that, given this scenario, this would increase the chances of Omicron being milder than other variants, because, as he puts it, a virus that persists for months in an immunodeficient patient is probably not particularly deadly.
It doesn't quite match my...
I don't think it's clear that mRNA flu vaccines will be as effective as mRNA corona vaccines.
One reason why SARS-CoV2 is an "easy" target for vaccine is that it has a very low mutation rate (as do other corona viruses). Influenza viruses evolve much faster. A standard problem of flu shots is that they are not designed against the virus that circulates in the winter, but rather against viruses that circulated half a year ago. For the corona virus, this does not make a big difference, but for flu viruses, it can render the vaccine (partially) useless.&...
What a great post! This is really accurate.
Let me add a nuance about the political debate by comparing Germany and Switzerland.
I have moved from Germany to Switzerland (Zurich) 10 years ago. Germany and Switzerland are often considered similar by outsiders, or at least by Germans. To some extent this is true, but from the beginning I was really shocked by how much better the Swiss political system works than the German one (which is already considered sober and highly functional).
The most obvious difference is how much media and news in Switzerland focus o...
Fun fact: in the field of optimization there are heuristics which are modeled after evolutionary principles. These "evolutionary algorithms" also work with populations, offspring generation through mutation and mating, selective pressure, diversity preservation, and so on.
As a rule of thumb, these algorithms also work better when sexual reproduction is used. For example, a standard theoretical benchmark are monotone functions on bit-strings, where each gene takes only two values zero and one, and flipping a zero into a one gives higher fitness in all... (read more)