Yeah, thats the second strain that most cases r now apparently and the second strain that someone who had gotten the first strain was able to be reinfected with, which is why i fear that a vaccine will be ineffective for the same reason flu vaccines r.
It managed to create a new strain in just a few months, which seems like it could create more strains each year, each one creating more strains, multiplying exponentially, all able to reinfect someone vaccinated for prior strains.
Im not a virologist tho, so just conjecture about a worse case scenario.
The original flu vaccines were shit, my brother had one when he was about twenty.
It was a decision made by The GPO (general post office) that was sold off to create British Telecom, they decided when the first vaccine was released to pay to have it given to all their employees to ward off the usual winter sick days.
Didn't work, in fact it had the opposite effect, for three months half of their service technicians at any one time were off sick with flu, as the vaccine was flawed.
That was fourty years ago, and things have moved on a lot, the vaccine used nowadays is quite effective, I have one every year as it is provided free of charge by the NHS to people who are Diabetic.
I was very interested in a documentary on TV this week, it used scientific, and medical experts to explain why Covid 19 transmits easily, and so is therefore difficult to contain, also why an effective vaccine will probably not be able to be manufactured within a year of now.
However, as you are talking about flu, it also transpired in the documentary that "seasonal flu" is actually one of the first Corona viruses, with the mildest damage to the body.
Don't forget that it has been mutating for decades, we are now up to Covid 19, and in the future there will no doubt be more variants as the virus evolves in order to survive, just as humans, and animals have done since the dawn of time.
According to this documentary Corona viruses are responsible for many things from "seasonal flu" up to SARS.
In one of the newspapers today it gave an explanation about the latest change in the virus (and the number of it of it, can't remember off the top of my head, but it was something like G614 instead of the earlier one of D614) the change has meant that potentially it passes infection on more easily, but the trade off is that it does not appear to damage the body so much, and so obviously the mortality rate would be lower.
