It's Here: Lambda Variant Is Vaccine Resistant

This part "Lambda S is more susceptible to an infection-enhancing antibody" is really BAD news. Infection-enhancing antibodies actually facilitate the virus binding with target cells, ACE2 mostly. IOW it's turning part of your immune response against you in a very lethal way.

"Here we reveal that the spike protein of the Lambda variant is more infectious and it is attributed to the T76I and L452Q mutations. The RSYLTPGD246-253N mutation, a unique 7-amino-acid deletion mutation in the N-terminal domain of the Lambda spike protein, is responsible for evasion from neutralizing antibodies. Since the Lambda variant has dominantly spread according to the increasing frequency of the isolates harboring the RSYLTPGD246-253N mutation, our data suggest that the insertion of the RSYLTPGD246-253N mutation is closely associated with the massive infection spread of the Lambda variant in South America."

N-terminal is not actually part of the spike and is omitted from the vaccines as they already knew about this risk.

We had around 10% L452Q in FL & CA earlier in the year, but it's now less than 1%. So, it's not a major concern here yet.

Daily deaths in Peru are down about 15:1 from their peak in May. It's going away, vaccine or not.

Un bel giorno Fred Bloggs digitò:

^^^^ ^^^^

All variants are vaccine resistant to some degree. From the comments on the article itself:

<< If you put "higher infectivity" in the title, it requires a comparison. But there's none. Not even in the abstract is the question "what is it more infectious than" answered. Only in the discussion does it become clear that the infectivity is higher than D614G, Gamma and others, BUT NOT Delta. A better title would be: "SARS-CoV-2 Lambda variant exhibits similar in-vitro infectivity and immune resistance to Delta" >>

It will be.

The disease enhancing antibodies are a game changer. These antibodies block access to the RBD by the neutralizing antibodies. Whenever disease enhancing antibodies show up you have a disaster.