Pearls before swine: Review of SARS-Cov-2 variants, spike mutations and immune escape

[link to www.nature.com (secure)]

"In this Review, we summarize the literature on mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, the primary antigen, focusing on their impacts on antigenicity and contextualizing them in the protein structure, and discuss them in the context of observed mutation frequencies in global sequence datasets."

In the conclusions:

"There is now clear evidence of the changing antigenicity of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and of the amino acid changes that affect antibody neutralization. Spike amino acid substitutions and deletions that impact neutralizing antibodies are present at significant frequencies in the global virus population, and there is emerging evidence of variants exhibiting resistance to antibody-mediated immunity elicited by vaccines."

In other words, the lockdowns and vaccinations will continue in perpetuity.