Thought For The Day - 21 December 2020

If it doesn't have a spike protein, is it still a coronavirus? If it still has a spike protein, does it matter how it might otherwise mutate, even if it changes its attack vector? If it still has a spike protein, won't the mRNA vaccines still work, even if it changes its attack vector? If it sheds its spike protein, will it become another, hopefully less damaging virus? So many questions. Let's look for some answers.

Here's a preliminary answer, and a bit dated (in pandemic time), from August

What scientists can say is that the virus seems to tolerate mutations to this key piece of the coronavirus, and more elaborate methods of focusing immune responses may become necessary. "But just because we find that there are mutations that are tolerated, it doesn't necessarily mean anything bad is going to happen," Greaney said.

Furthermore, here is an undated report (but cites others from the August time frame) on how mutations happen and what happens as a result.

The G614 mutation significantly impacts antigenicity of the virus, but not at all in the way we were expecting. The G form of Spike is more sensitive to neutralizing antibodies than the D form. This was reproducible in mice, monkeys, and humans (Weissman 2020).

If you don't read the whole paper, the G form is the mutated Covid, while the D form is the original (so far as I know) from Wuhan. In other words, the mRNA vaccines blocking the spike protein shouldn't/won't be diminshed by this mutation.