Brazilian variant spooks medicos

Natural selection is a beast. The moment we get individual or herd immunity and natural selection goes to work on finding a way around it. The FT is reporting on a new COVID variant from Brazil that is spooking medicos:

First detected in November it has now spread to 35 countries.
25-61% of previously infected cases are vulnerable to re-infection.
It is twice as infectious as earlier strains and 10-80% more fatal.
It is unknown if current generation vaccines are effective.

The Brazilian variant has a E484K mutation similar to the South African variant that changes the “spike protein” that enables the immune system to identify and fight the virus.

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About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.