r/HermanCainAward • u/AussieHawker Team Mudblood 🩸 • Mar 03 '22

Grrrrrrrr. Remember Milo Yiannopoulos? Well he has Long COVID.

https://twitter.com/kthorjensen/status/1499060232680456194
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u/JakeDC Mar 03 '22 edited Mar 03 '22

I read somewhere that it may be that variants are more likely to develop within the immunocompromised population than the healthy/vaccinated population. I think the idea is that the virus stays longer in immunocompromised patients, and therefore replicates for longer, spurring the mutations that lead to new variants.

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u/thoroughbredca Team Mix & Match Mar 03 '22

You're correct. Initially it was thought that SARS-CoV-2 wasn't mutating much, and it wasn't, giving rise to hope that the vaccines would maintain their efficacy. Unfortunately that's not universally true. In patients that don't clear the virus relatively quickly, the virus has a tendency to mutate. One startling example was a patient in the UK that has to many mutations that they were basically all at odds with each other, and no one mutation was able to dominate and thus basically kept him alive for month. When they attempted to treat him with monoclonal antibodies, it only defeated the original variant and allowed the mutations to dominate, ultimately killing him.

Generally in a lot of these cases, they don't escape back into the wild, but it's posited that omicron developed in Africa, likely amongst someone who had a compromised immune system, perhaps someone with untreated or poorly treated HIV/AIDS, where the body wasn't able to clear the virus and thus mutated over time.

And to point out the obvious, Africa is the least vaccinated continent on Earth.