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COVID-19 Has Mutated...Again
Media’s “70% More Infectious” Claim
Has Not Yet been Verified as Accurate
By: David Deschesne
Fort Fairfield Journal, January 13, 2021
The establishment corporate media has been hyperventilating over a new COVID-19 mutation that was recently found in England and has now been observed in the U.S. They claim it is “Seventy percent more infectious.” But that isn't entirely true since the claim is based on a computer model, just like the error-filled and completely inaccurate models for deaths that came out of the UK's Imperial College in early Spring, 2020.
“That's one model, and we know how models work in this pandemic. It is okay to have an abundance of caution, the problem is, of course, what they're doing has huge economic and social consequences. So, we have to be very careful when we look at this science,” said Stanford University-trained medical doctor, Zubin Damania. Dr. Damania explains that immediately after the release of the original Wuhan strain, the virus had already mutated and that mutation became the dominant strain when it got to Europe in late Spring, early summer of 2020.
COVID-19 belongs to the same family of viruses - coronavirus - that the common cold belongs to. As such, it has less “error correction” machinery to fix errors in its RNA when replicating so it is more prone to mutations. But mutations often times make a virus less effective, sometimes more. It does not follow that just because a virus mutated, it is more deadly. That simply isn’t what has been observed with virus replication throughout modern medical history.
But, the infectiousness of this current mutation is a prediction based upon a computer statistical model - not a scientifically verified lab study of the new strain. “We can't say for sure that [70% more infectious] is true because to do that you'd have to actually go into the lab, infect animals, do these studies to say is it actually more transmissible, or are our models saying one thing but in reality what happened is it was just luck that this mutation was just selected for through a series of human behaviors. They don't know yet.”
Dr. Damania also noted that “The British/UK mutation that they're talking about is not one mutation, it's actually 17 to 20 mutations. But out of all of those there are only two that affect what is the 'business end' of this virus - one is the spike protein that allows it to bind to human cells. The other mutation is a deletion effect, where a portion of that spike protein is gone. What that seems to do is make that version a little more resistant to anti-bodies that form against the spike protein in natural infections.”
For viruses to change enough to actually evade the body's immune response doesn't happen overnight, however. Dr. Damania explains that to evade the immune response these types of changes take as long as five years to become effective to that end. “With this coronavirus there isn't an immediate danger that this thing is going to evade our new vaccines.”
Currently, the new mutated strain of COVID-19 is found to have the same Infection Fatality Rate as the former strain which means it is no more deadly than its predecessor, which has an IFR of just 0.2% - or just slightly more than seasonal flu.
The excessive hype over the purported transmissibility of this mutated strain is likely more a marketing ploy to sell COVID-19 vaccines than any verifiable, objective fact on the actual transmissibility of the virus.