The Delta variant of the coronavirus can evade antibodies that target certain parts of the virus, according to a new study published on Thursday in Nature. The findings provide an explanation for diminished effectiveness of the vaccines against Delta, compared with other variants.
The variant, first identified in India, is believed to be about 60 percent more contagious than Alpha, the version of the virus that thrashed Britain and much of Europe earlier this year, and perhaps twice as contagious as the original coronavirus. The Delta variant is now driving outbreaks among unvaccinated populations in countries like Malaysia, Portugal, Indonesia and Australia.
Delta is also now the dominant variant in the United States. Infections in the country had plateaued at their lowest levels since early in the pandemic, though the numbers may be rising. Still, hospitalizations and deaths related to the virus have continued a steep plunge. That’s partly because of relatively high vaccination rates: 48 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, and 55 percent have received at least one dose.
But the new study found that Delta was barely sensitive to one dose of vaccine, confirming previous research that suggested that the variant can partly evade the immune system — although to a lesser degree than Beta, the variant first identified in South Africa.
French researchers tested how well antibodies produced by natural infection and by coronavirus vaccines neutralize the Alpha, Beta and Delta variants, as well as a reference variant similar to the original version of the virus.
The researchers looked at blood samples from 103 people who had been infected with the coronavirus. Delta was much less sensitive than Alpha to samples from unvaccinated people in this group, the study found.
One dose of vaccine significantly boosted the sensitivity, suggesting that people who have recovered from Covid-19 still need to be vaccinated to fend off some variants.
The team also analyzed samples from 59 people after they had received the first and second doses of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.
Blood samples from just 10 percent of people immunized with one dose of the AstraZeneca or the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were able to neutralize the Delta and Beta variants in laboratory experiments. But a second dose boosted that number to 95 percent. There was no major difference in the levels of antibodies elicited by the two vaccines.
“A single dose of Pfizer or AstraZeneca was either poorly or not at all efficient against Beta and Delta variants,” the researchers concluded. Data from Israel and Britain broadly support this finding, although those studies suggest that one dose of vaccine is still enough to prevent hospitalization or death from the virus.
The Delta variant also did not respond to bamlanivimab, the monoclonal antibody made by Eli Lilly, according to the new study. Fortunately, three other monoclonal antibodies tested in the study retained their effectiveness against the variant.
In April, citing the rise of variants resistant to bamlanivimab, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration revoked the emergency use authorization for its use as a single treatment in treating Covid-19 patients.
Stephen Covey published The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989. For those of us who read it, it changed the way we interacted with others, with ourselves, and with how we strove to grow, and achieve balance in personal and professional lives. Decades later, I feel the weight today, perhaps more than ever, of how important these lessons remain. >MB
For fifty years Jackson Browne has rolled out platinum after platinum after platinum. To this day, he has the voice, emotional range, sensitivity, and personal presence that just stick. <MB
Most social obligations would be best left in the Before Times.
Jessica Grose, New York Times
When I was in my early 20s, my friends started calling me “The Bailer.” I was infamous for making plans and then canceling the day before. Even at the time, I knew this was irritating and ungenerous behavior. But I made the plans with the best intentions: I love my friends! I want to see their faces! That spoken-word event in a dank, low-ceilinged bar sounded like fun when you told me about it three weeks ago!
About 24 hours before many social outings, I would start to feel sweaty and inert. After a long day’s work at an office, I would often feel drained from human contact and all I would want to do is buy an enormous burrito at the spot near my apartment, get home, take off my pants and eat it in privacy while watching reality television. After a few years of disappointing my friends last minute, I learned that it’s much kinder and less stressful for everyone involved to be honest with myself — and my friends — about what I would actually show up for.
I began to evaluate what I really enjoyed doing and what I valued about interactions with friends. I did not like standing for prolonged periods of time, for almost any reason. I did not like waiting in line for food. I did not like anything that included the word “networking.” I did like getting drinks or dinner in a place where we could really talk, or lounging in someone’s living room, or going to a party if there were going to be lots of people I knew there and ample seating room.
Having children at 30 was a great excuse for being the hermit I naturally am, and it also helped clarify my socializing needs even further. I was both more tired but also more starved for grown-up conversation. I opted for even more socializing in small groups without my daughters, and when I was with them, I experienced the joy of raucous dinner parties with a separate kids’ table. I learned the valuable skill of continuing conversations through multiple interruptions.
During the pandemic I added a few more types of socializing to my repertoire, including outdoor walk-and-talks, like I’m some jerk in an Aaron Sorkin TV show. Though some pandemic behavior comes easily to me, because I do hate leaving my house, this year of enforced isolation has been depressing, and even a shut-in like me has been missing human contact with people I am not related to.
That does not mean I will come to your spoken word performance in the future. I am still short on time on this mortal coil, and I imagine I will return to my previous socialization preferences.
While obviously there are some obligations you show up to because you love and honor your friends and family even if you don’t want to attend, I invite you to figure out what you actually like about seeing people in the “After.” Especially now that people are making plans with frenzied abandon, saying yes to all manners of activities without a second thought because they are so starved for socializing. Yes to that group sound bath! Yes to the wine-cooler tasting! Yes to the early morning rave! Oh honey, no. No. No.
Be honest with yourself. If you like the energy of a big crowd, say no to that intimate coffee and parry with a trip to a concert. If you hate going out, invite people to come over.
Tell people the real reasons you’re saying no for things you say no to. This has two benefits: it will give you deeper intimacy with friends who will know you for the true crank you really are. And it will mean that they stop inviting you to things that you really don’t like to do. My friends no longer call me The Bailer, because now I always show up.
Social media is designed to keep us scrolling even when we know we’d be better off putting the phone down. Yale SOM’s Fiona Scott Morton and her co-authors argue that smarter and more robust antitrust enforcement can help, by making room for new social media platforms that promote themselves as healthier alternatives.
Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics, Yale University
Written by Susie Allen
If you’ve ever delayed sleep to doomscroll on Twitter or checked Instagram just one more time to see if someone else liked that selfie, you know that social media can be a time suck. But is it addictive?
A growing body of medical evidence suggests it is, economist Fiona Scott Morton of Yale SOM writes in a new paper, co-authored with James Niel Rosenquist of Harvard Medical School and Samuel N. Weinstein of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. That has important implications for how regulators should oversee social media platforms. And it also has surprising implications for antitrust enforcement.
Scott Morton, Rosenquist, and Weinstein argue that antitrust enforcement has long relied on assumptions about how to measure consumer welfare that simply don’t work when a company is making a habit-forming product. Indeed, Scott Morton points out, the entire field of behavioral economics has arisen to give us more sophisticated ways to understand “irrational” decision making, including evaluating the impact on our welfare of goods and services that come with self-control issues, from gym memberships and energy-inefficient air conditioners to opioids.
The addictive qualities of social media are compounded by a lack of competition in the industry. When air conditioners compete, the more efficient ones can gain an advantage by advertising their low running costs. But without meaningful social media competition or regulation, companies have little incentive to change the addictive quality of their content.
“We don’t want to ban cars because they are dangerous, nor would that be a good solution for social media,” Scott Morton emphasizes. “Instead we limit the danger of cars with tools like speed limits, traffic lights, drivers’ licenses, and seatbelts—and we have lots of competition and choice. In digital media we need to find a way to control the stuff that’s harming us, and our children in particular, while keeping the healthy part.” She believes smarter antitrust enforcement could help, making room for newer and safer social media platforms in the market as well as more competition.
For decades, the medical community was hesitant to accept that addiction was possible without the ingestion of a physical substance. But, as Scott Morton and her co-authors write, growing understanding of so-called behavioral addiction has chipped away at that resistance. In fact, gambling addiction is now recognized in the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Social media and gambling can hijack the brain’s reward system in similar ways, the researchers argue. In the case of gambling, you’ll keep pulling the slot-machine lever even after you’ve lost hundreds of dollars, just in case the next one is a winner; in the case of social media, you’ll get lost in the infinite scroll, no matter what else you should be doing.
It’s no coincidence that many of us find social media so hard to resist. The business model platforms have adopted depends on people giving up their time: the longer a user is swiping away, the more revenue-generating ads they’ll see. Features such as likes, comments, autoplay, and algorithmic promotion of emotionally arousing content are designed to keep users coming back again and again.
Scott Morton has seen it all firsthand. “Twitter will show me some posts, I’ll look at them, and then two minutes later, they’ll meter out some more…You can watch them try to drip it out so that I stay on the platform longer,” she says.
In theory, of course, there’s nothing wrong with spending a lot of time on social media. Companies have argued that the hours we log represent positive engagement with the platform: we like what we’re seeing, and so we stay.
But in practice, Scott Morton and her co-authors note, survey data finds that a large number of heavy social media users wish they used social media less because of its negative effects on their lives—a classic tug-of-war between short-term impulses and long-term goals that is a hallmark of compulsive behavior. Early data also links social media use among adolescents to mood disorders and ADHD. The dangers seem particularly acute for girls.
So, what does this all mean for regulators trying to decide whether social media platforms are engaging in anti-competitive conduct? Baked into antitrust enforcement is the idea of increasing consumer welfare: enforcement ought to make life better for consumers by promoting competition so that goods become cheaper, better, or both.
And economists have long argued that one especially useful way to look at consumer welfare is through what’s called output—the quantity of goods or services produced in a given market. “Historically, we have thought of pro-competitive things as being those that increase output and non-competitive things as those that decrease output,” Scott Morton explains.
If the merger of two ice cream companies results in an overall larger ice cream market, then (the basic argument goes) consumers must have benefited, either because ice cream was cheaper and they bought more, or because it was better and they bought more. If the merger reduces the size of the ice cream market, it must have been anticompetitive.
But the logic of output maximization falls apart when it comes to any addictive product. For someone addicted to, say, OxyContin, giving them more OxyContin represents an increase in output—but it surely doesn’t represent a simple increase in consumer welfare.
“This shortcut, which is, ‘Let’s use an output measure like number of pills to proxy for consumer surplus,’—it isn’t a valid shortcut anymore, not when you’ve got an addictive product,” Scott Morton says. “Giving people a larger quantity of something they’re addicted to is likely not increasing social welfare.”
So, rather than looking at output, regulators need to take a more expansive view of consumer welfare, Scott Morton and her co-authors argue—a view that incorporates the specific nature of the product in question. In the case of social media, an antitrust case might rely on whether a company’s business model offers incentives for addiction or has other negative effects on users’ behavior.
By looking at social media companies from this perspective, regulators can promote competition and innovation. It may seem paradoxical to argue that the answer to the problem of social media is more social media, but there’s good reason to believe it. Basic consumer protection regulations would also help by creating a level playing field.
With more companies vying for users, Scott Morton explains, they’ll have a greater incentive to differentiate in ways users value. In all kinds of markets—cars, movies, food—companies have thrived by promoting themselves as the safe option. A non-addictive social media platform could have similar consumer appeal.
“More social media sites means I can choose the site that offers me fewer ads, less addiction, more of the content that interests me,” Scott Morton says.
How far are we from a world of safer social media? Scott Morton thinks there’s reason to be optimistic. Indeed, considering how long it took to rein in exploitative practices in products such as cigarettes and credit cards, there’s an argument that social media regulation is on a fast track.
Lawmakers and regulators are paying more attention because “today, the harms are really much more visible to everybody,” Scott Morton says. “I think the younger generation is speaking up more and they understand it. The Europeans are moving quickly. So all of that is, I think, creating an environment where there might really be some progress.”
