Some news on the variants of SARS-CoV-2 and the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine, (good news)!

[NNadir]

Today at the virtual ACS meeting I attended two lectures, one by Phil Dormitzer of Pfizer and one from Melissa Moore of Moderna.

I don't have much time to discuss the details, but during Dr. Dormitzer's fascinating lecture some cool things came up.

It appears that the variants are fairly well removed from the target areas of the vaccines, which a good thing. They have nonetheless been completely mapped, and work is underway to address them if needed. In Dr. Dormitzer's lecture he specified them, if my notes are correct as D614G (Aspartic Acid replaced at the 614th residue of the spike protein by glycine), N501Y, replacement of asparagine at the 501st residue by tyrosine, and E484K, replacement of glutamic acid at the 484th residue by lysine.

There are some genetic differences between races in diseases and response to diseases; for example, women of Chinese origins are much less likely than women of European extraction to get certain forms of breast cancer because of a variant in the COMT gene (catechol O methyl transferase). African American men and women are less likely to respond to certain blood pressure medicines, (which makes it regrettable that omipatrilat was not approved, since it treated this hole in medicine.)

It turns out that African Americans are winners in terms of the ethnic profile of the Pfizer vaccine effectiveness. For them, according to the data shown in the talk and them alone, the Pfizer vaccine is 100% effective in preventing Covid infections.

Dr. Moore's lecture made me realize something that had not occurred to me in the development of these novel RNA drugs and vaccines. (I'm not a nucleic acid kind of guy.) They are a lot more difficult to make than one might think niavely. This is because of the multiplicity of codons for several amino acids. One has to be very careful in considering the availability of transfer RNA's corresponding to these codons, since they are not necessarily available in the same concentrations in organisms in which they are generated. Dr. Moore pointed out that for the SARS-Cov-2 Moderna vaccine there were actually 10^201 choices that could have been made in the codon sequence, which is a number larger than all of the atoms in the known universe! She briefly described the statistical methods used to manage this chemical space and make wise choices.

Nevertheless, Moderna has spent years learning how to choose the particular sequences of codons, and they are also ready to make changes FAST! FAST! FAST! as necessary.

Another thing: Both vaccines incur, according to the existing clinical trial data, a higher level of immunity than one actually obtains by having Covid. This suggests that even people who have had Covid might want to consider vaccination.

Very cool, very cool.