Dialing the Fear To 11 As Emerging 'Lambda' Strain Appears More Resistant To Vaccine

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'A Variant Worse Than Delta': Fauci Dials Fear To 11 As Emerging 'Lambda' Strain Appears More Resistant To Vaccine

ZH |  AUG 05, 2021

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's top infectious disease specialist who funded controversial coronavirus research in Wuhan, China - and is now managing the coronavirus pandemic response for the US government, says the country could be "in trouble" unless everyone who hasn't been vaccinated gets the jab.

"What we’re seeing, because of this increase in transmissibility, and because we have about 93 million people in this country who are eligible to get vaccinated who don’t get vaccinated — that you have a significant pool of vulnerable people," said Fauci, who added that delta variant cases are rising in a "very steep fashion" and may hit 200,000 cases per day.

"And so when you look at the curve of acceleration of 7-day averages of cases per day, it is going up in a very steep fashion."

No stats from Fauci on who's dying, who's getting hospitalized, or who's the most vaccine 'hesitant' of course.

And while the Biden administration is now framing this as a "pandemic of the unvaccinated," McClatchy notes that "recent data shows that vaccinated people who still get infected with the delta variant also have high viral loads and can spread it to others, even when they aren’t showing symptoms or are experiencing mild disease."

Fauci said that data shows people infected with the delta variant have viral levels “about 1,000 times higher in quantity” than were recorded in people who were infected with the alpha variant, also known as the U.K. variant, which earlier this year became predominant in the United States.

Studies have emerged in recent weeks indicating that vaccinated individuals are at risk of “long COVID” — a series of conditions associated with infection such as fatigue, shortness of breath and loss of smell that can last for weeks or months — even if they are largely protected from severe illness and death, Fauci said.

“We already know that people who get breakthrough infections and don’t go on to get advanced disease requiring hospitalization, they too are susceptible to long COVID,” Fauci said. “You’re not exempt from long COVID if you get a breakthrough infection.” -McClatchy

Fauci also said he fears strains which are even scarier than delta!

"If we don’t crush the outbreak to the point of getting the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated, then what will happen is the virus will continue to smolder through the fall into the winter, giving it ample chance to get a variant which, quite frankly, we’re very lucky that the vaccines that we have now do very well against the variants — particularly against severe illness," he said, adding "We’re very fortunate that that’s the case. There could be a variant that’s lingering out there that can push aside delta."

"If another one comes along that has an equally high capability of transmitting but also is much more severe, then we could really be in trouble," Fauci continued. "People who are not getting vaccinated mistakenly think it’s only about them. But it isn’t. It’s about everybody else, also."

Lambda evading vaccine?

While the highly infectious Lambda variant of Covid-19 may or may not be deadlier than any of the other strains - meaning the vast majority who contract it won't be hospitalized or die - researchers at the University of Tokyo have warned in a new study that it may be vaccine-resistant, according to Newsweek.

Like the Delta variant, Lambda is highly transmissible but Japanese researchers believe that three mutations in the variant's spike proteins make it more resistant to antibodies induced by vaccination.

Lambda, which is also known as the C.37 variant, is responsible for 1,037 cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., according to data from the GISAID Initiative, which promotes the rapid sharing of information about influenza and coronaviruses.

The variant was first identified in Peru in August, 2020, where it has now become the dominant strain of the virus, and it has been reported in 29 countries including the U.S. -Newsweek

"...because the Lambda variant is relatively resistant to the vaccine-induced antisera, it might be possible that this variant is feasible to cause breakthrough infection," reads the paper, with "Vaccine-induced antisera" referring to antibodies which arise from vaccination.

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From Newsweek 8/4/21:

A Doomsday COVID Variant Worse Than Delta and Lambda May Be Coming, Scientists Say

Scientists keep underestimating the coronavirus. In the beginning of the pandemic, they said mutated versions of the virus wouldn't be much of a problem—until the more-infectious Alpha caused a spike in cases last fall. Then Beta made young people sicker and Gamma reinfected those who'd already recovered from COVID-19. Still, by March, as the winter surge in the U.S. receded, some epidemiologists were cautiously optimistic that the rapid vaccine rollout would soon tame the variants and cause the pandemic to wind down.

Delta has now shattered that optimism. This variant, first identified in India in December, spreads faster than any previous strain of SARS-CoV-2, as the COVID-19 virus is officially named. It is driving up infection rates in every state of the U.S., prompting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to once again recommend universal mask-wearing.

The Delta outbreak is going to get much worse, warns Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who leads the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. "The number of intensive-care beds needed could be higher than any time we've seen," he says. He adds that his team's analysis shows that almost every single one of the 100 million unvaccinated Americans who hasn't had COVID-19 yet will likely get it in the coming months, short of taking the sort of strong isolation and masking precautions that seem unlikely in the vaccine-hesitant population.

The variant is so contagious that it's set to smash through every previous prediction of how soon the U.S. might reach herd immunity. "We've failed to shut this down as we have other pandemics," says Jonathan Eisen, a biologist at the University of California, Davis, who studies how pathogens evolve. "It may be around forevermore, leaving us continually trying to figure out what to do next."

The Delta variant, which spreads faster than any previous strain of SARS-CoV-2, is driving up infection rates in the U.S. 

Here, a COVID-19 patient in the ICU at Johnston Memorial Hospital in Abingdon, Virginia.

Delta, like most of the other variants, blindsided us, worsening and extending the pandemic. When the damage from Delta starts to subside, what other variants will be lurking just behind it to pull us back down again? The World Health Organization is already keeping an eye on several: Eta, which is now in several countries; Kappa, which arose in India; Iota, which first popped up in New York City—and especially Lambda, which has torn through Peru and shows signs of having unusual success in infecting fully vaccinated people, according to one early study. It has already spread to Argentina, Chile, Ecuador as well as Texas and South Carolina.