Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 38

More on the Spear cover

Spear (out April 19, 2022) has a lovely cover. But like all covers it took some time to come together.

It began with choosing the artist, and I plumped for Rovina Cai because of the wonderful illustration she did for my Solstice story, “Cold Wind.” I admired the way she caught the moment of transformation at the heart of the story—the reversal from predator to prey—and the sense of movement, and the outside-time atmosphere. And I loved the fact that she did it with such a subdued palette.

When I was asked what I wanted to see on the cover the first thing was easy: no clear representation of Peretur’s face! I also suggested a list of meaningful objects in the book:

spearcavewooded thickethanging bowl (or cup—as it’s sometimes in the book).

I made sketches of two kinds of spears—a boar spear and a javelin—but I focused on the bowl/ cup. There’s a good reason for that. Here’s a passage from near the beginning:

In the cave is a great hanging bowl. “My cup,” her mother calls it, when she tells her stories

[…]

The bowl is not gold, it is not silver, nor even beaten bronze; it is enamel on black iron that never dulls and never dents, though sometimes the iron shimmers with light reflected from elsewhere. Even direct from the hearth it will not burn the hand that holds it, and any who drink from it are healed. Or so Elen tells the girl. The girl herself cannot tell because she drinks and eats from the bowl every day, but every day she grows tall and taller, strong and stronger; her hair with the same heavy wave as her mother’s but paler, brass where her mother’s is bronze, her eyes sea grey with a hint of green. With her fingers she traces the bowl’s wondrous twining beasts of inlaid bronze, their raised wings and bright glass eyes; she touches the cold, enamelled escutcheons where great hooks hold the bowl when it hangs, and pushes with her palm the four small iron stumps on the base on which it stands by the hearth; she smooths the sharp etched points of the mounted knights’ spears, the clean lines of the swords they wield in endless battle…

To go with it I ferreted out some images of the Gundestrup Cauldron, and two hanging bowls from Sutton Hoo.

A week or two later I got back this concept sketch:

Concept sketch by Rovina Cai for Spear

I liked the general idea—I’ve always enjoyed the way Cai composes her illustrations, the sense of movement created by how the image leads the eye. On this one my brain starts at the bottom left, moves to midway up the right, then up and over to the left via the tree tops, mounted figure, fort wall, then birds. To me the image itself seemed to move like a flame or a wisp of smoke.

I did have a couple of concerns. One, that it was all shades of umber, not just subdued but sombre. Two—a minor detail—the depiction of what appeared to be crenellated stone walls. I was pretty sure the sombreness was a minor detail too, an artefact of the rough nature of a concept sketch, but it’s always good to check assumptions before they get set in stone. And speaking of stone, the reason I was eager to squelch the notion of crenellated castle walls was that in 6th-century Britain, most fort walls would be made of wood.

I dropped my editor a note and got on with other things.

And lo! Here’s what eventually came back:

The first cover

I loved the colours and composition. What I didn’t like was the title typeface.

That kind of heavy gothic blackletter was practically the official script of the Third Reich, and variations of it have been appropriated by white supremacists ever since (and, oddly, newspapers). I had a pretty visceral response.

I pulled together a bunch of images of Late Antique/Early Medieval manuscripts and pondered them, then sent examples of uncial and half-uncial writing and said, There, like that. That’s what I want.

UncialHalf-uncial

I was so determined to not have that original typeface that I told my editor that, if pushed, I would even cope with the loathsomely twee Rivendell:

Thankfully it didn’t come to that. The cover designer, Christine, futzed about with the images I sent and came up with something which is neither uncial nor half-uncial but with elements of both. Changing the title size and shape, though, meant some other things needed tweaking to balance the composition, so we ended up with this:

I loved it—but I kept coming back to that P. Something about it nagged at me. It looked out of alignment.

I measured it: it was a smidge too high. So I sent another note, again with an explanatory image:

In return I got a kind note (the people at Tordotcom are very patient) saying there’s a reason the P is higher, something to do with the way human brains process visual information, but that if I insisted, then, here, this is what the changed cover would look like; they thought it looked weird, but they could live with that because, eh, the difference was so small and subtle no one (but weirdly obsessed authors with nothing better to do) would notice:

And maybe my brain is weird and obsessive because when I saw the new image I was all, Yay! Much better! Unfortunately everyone else—including Kelley—disagreed. I stared and stared at one image then the other until both looked ridiculous and wrong and language itself ceased to have meaning.

There comes a point in every book’s pre-publication cycle—sometimes several points—where you just have to trust the experts. This was such a moment. Fine, I said. Let’s go with the original.

And now that I’ve made my choice, I’m happy. It’s a great cover, just right for the book. Even more excitingly I’ve seen sketches for five interior illustrations (also by Rovina Cai). I am delighted. It’s going to be a beautiful package, just lovely!

I’ve also been struck by how smooth and efficient the editorial process has been so far. Publication date is still almost a year away and we already have a finished cover and I’ve turned in my edits of the copyedits. I’m impressed by both Tordotcom’s workflow and how well the editorial collaboration between the two Macmillan imprints—Tordotcom and FSG—has meshed. It’s all been astonishingly pain free.

Next steps for me with Spear: writing the Author’s Note (I think I’ll have fun with that) and Acknowledgements, then proofs (my least favourite part), and then one of the bits I always enjoy: marketing conversations! And then figurig out how I can do the audio narration. When all that’s done, maybe I’ll make a map or draw some wee pictures or something…

Spear cover reveal!

Spear by Nicola Griffith (Tordotcom, April 19, 2022). Cover illustration by Rovina Cai, cover design by Christine Foltzer.

Image description: A book cover for Spear by Nicola Griffith. The background is charcoal, shading to black at the bottom, with the author’s name at the top is orange-red and the title, at the bottom, and ‘from the author Hild’ in white. The main image is of a great hanging bowl of black iron with inlaid figures and great bronze escutcheons for the hanging hooks. It is wreathed about by smoke and flame and fumes, and the fumes form images: in white, woods with a woman and a stone and a sword; about the trees, shading to orange, is an figure with a spear on a horse; a fort gate and box palisade, and over all, flying up in the smoke towards the author’s name, two birds.

I’m delighted to share the cover for Spear, my sixth-century retelling of Arthurian legend, publishing 19 April, 2022, from Tordotcom:

A SPELLBINDING AND SUBVERSIVE QUEER RECASTING OF ARTHURIAN MYTH BY THE LEGENDARY AUTHOR OF HILD

The girl knows she has a destiny before she even knows her name. She grows up in the wild, in a cave with her mother, but visions of a faraway lake come to her on the spring breeze, and when she hears a traveller speak of Arturus, king at Caer Leon, she knows that her future lies at his court.

And so, brimming with magic and eager to test her strength, she breaks her covenant with her mother and, with a broken hunting spear and mended armour, makes her way on a bony gelding to Caer Leon. On her adventures she will meet great knights and steal the hearts of beautiful women. She will fight warriors and sorcerers. And she will find her love, and the lake, and her fate.

Award-winning author Nicola Griffith returns with Spear, a glorious queer retelling of Arthurian legend, full of dazzling magic and intoxicating adventure.

PRAISE FOR NICOLA GRIFFITH’S HILD

“As loving as it is fierce, brilliant, and accomplished. To read it felt like a privilege and a gift.” —NPR

“Nicola Griffith is an awe-inspiring visionary . . . I finished the book full of gratitude it exists.” —Dorothy Allison

The cover is luscious, exactly what I wanted, and perfect for the book. The illustration is by Rovina Cai and design by Christine Foltzer.

For covers I usually I prefer bright colours, but for Spear I wanted something subtle and atmospheric. I asked for Rovina specifically and tomorrow I’ll talk more about why, but for now: Spear is a story of wild woods, magic and mystery, love and lust and fights to the death—it’s all about the feels—and I knew Rovina could do that.

When I was asked about images for the cover, I suggested several things—a spear, a cave, a wooded thicket, and a hanging bowl (or cup—as it’s sometimes called in the book)—all vital to the story. And as you can see, we ended up focusing primarily on the cup.

Tomorrow I’ll talk a bit more about that hanging bowl/cup and a lot more about how the cover evolved—a tale involving 6th- and 7th-century manuscripts, Nazis and the Third Reich, and wrestling with millimetres…

But for now, simply enjoy this delicious image and, if you’re so inclined, go listen to me read the first two pages, which I hope will give you a taste of the atmosphere and rhythms of the book.

Beer yesterday, Spear cover reveal tomorrow!

Yesterday Kelley and I went out for a beer and talked to other human beings! My first pint of Guinness for 16 months AND IT WAS AWESOME!!

[image error]The first pint in 16 months…

And coming tomorrow, right here, the cover reveal for Spear. THAT TOO IS AWESOME!

[image error]Coming tomorrow…

So, all in all, this week? Pretty fucking great so far.

Pfizer vaccines well over 90% effective against variants

Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash

From the New England Journal of Medicine, a truly astonishing and encouraging analysis of the real-world effectiveness of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against variants of concern in Qatar.

The main points:

In Qatar during the study period (February 23 – March 18), 50.0% of documented cases of Covid-19 were caused by B.1.351 and 44.5% by B.1.1.7. 14 or more days after the second dose, estimated effectiveness of the vaccine against infection with the B.1.1.7 variant was 89.5% and against the B.1.351 variant was 75.0% Vaccine effectiveness against severe, critical, or fatal disease due to any variety of SARS-CoV-2 was 97.4%

The study doesn’t address P.1—the Brazilian variant—but I’m not aware of evidence that P.1 is significantly more infectious or more deadly than B.1.351. Certainly its escape from naturally-acquired neutralising antibodies in lab tests is similar to that of B.1.351 (both have the Eek mutation) and, equally certainly, as of mid-March this year P.1 was not outcompeting B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants in Qatar. So right now I’m cautiously optimistic that the Pfizer vaccine is overwhelmingly effective against variants in the real world.

Given that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines use essentially the same mechanism, and that their efficacy in trials were so similar, I’m confident that both mRNA vaccines are equally effective.

So, take a moment. Absorb this news: Once you’re fully vaccinated with a Moderna or Pfizer vaccine you have a not-far-from-100% guarantee that you won’t end up in hospital or die with Covid-19.

Take another moment and just fucking marvel! This might be the closest thing to a miracle any of us will ever experience.

Given the latest report from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) this miracle comes not a moment too soon. IHMA estimates that the real number of Covid-19 deaths vastly outnumber official figures:

6.9m deaths worldwide905,000 deaths in the US655,000 deaths in India (nearly triple the official number)

The pandemic is far from over. Only a tiny percentage of the world’s population has been vaccinated, cases are accelerating, and therefore the chance is increasing that a variant will emerge that does evade the current vaccines. Here in the US, the richest and most privileged country on earth, many people are not yet vaccinated—in addition, so many fools are refusing vaccination that their communities will very likely become breeding grounds of infection and therefore variants.* Who knows, perhaps it will be that pretty little town of apple and cherry orchards and smiling tourists that will become ground zero not only of a new variant of concern but a variant of high consequence. That’s when the story changes.

So go get your jabs, people. Then venture out in the bright wide world and laugh and play for a while. We are lucky.

* Here in Washington State the vast majority of current cases (over 75%) are now B.1.1.7 variant, with P.1 variant increasing particularly among younger adults, a demographic who only recently became eligible for vaccination.

Hild’s bynames: an occasional series

Over on Gemæcce, my research blog, I’m starting an occasional series of posts about Hild’s bynames—the additional names she is known by by different people in different times and places. In Hild she was freemartin, hætes, butcherbird, and light of the world. In Menewood, she acquires a few more.

But first, one of her earliest such names: .

New Books to Look For

I had planned to write a long and rambling post about all the delicious books I’ve read over the last few months, but in the end decided to focus on just four: three coming out very soon (next week! next month!) and one that was published late last year just as Covid was surging, election-related horrors were gearing up, and everyone and everything was embittered, embattled, and battened down tight.

Golem Girl, Riva Lehrer (Oct 6 2020)

I’ll going to start with the book that’s already published: a debut, a memoir by friend, fellow crip, and portrait artist Riva Lehrer. First-time authors did not always fare well in the time of Covid, and October/November last year were a particular horror show, so I wanted to give this important book another shoutout. (Also, it gives me a chance to gloat and croon yet again over the marvellous portrait Riva made of me ten years ago as part of her Mirror Shards series.)

Riva is an artist with a particular focus on portraits, more particularly on portraits of disabled artists: writers, painters, sculptors, choreographers, dancers and more. Her work is brilliant. Her canvases hang all over the world, including the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian.

Golem Girl is an artist’s memoir. It was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Riva is a disabled artist. Golem Girl was the inaugural winner of the Barbellion Prize, a new book prize “dedicated to the furtherance of ill and disabled voices in writing.” The prize will be given every year to “an author whose work has best represented the experience of chronic illness and/or disability.” That description doesn’t specifically demand that the writing be Own Voices so I’ll be interested to see how the prize and its prize culture develops. This year the judges and prize advisors were a stellar crew including Tom Shakespeare, Stevie Marsters, and Shahd Alshammari. Let’s hope they continue to set ambitious goals.

Here’s what I said a year ago:
“With deft painter’s prose, Riva Lehrer helps us discover what it is to be human when others see us as broken. Lehrer gives us the gift, at long last, of our own crip beauty.”

I meant every word. Disabled people are rarely portrayed as beautiful in and of ourselves; Riva absolutely smashes that box. Buy it here.

Things We Lost to the Water, Eric Nguyen (out May 4)

Eric was one of the Emerging Voices Fellows in my Fiction Workshop when I taught for Lambda Literary 11 years ago. He was very young—not nearly old enough to drink—but even then his talent was startling. People often talk of prose that so sharp it glitters, or limpid prose (I seriously hate the word limpid), but Eric’s prose is so clear and clean and candid that as you read you barely notice it—only to put the book down at the end and find you understand the world differently. I am filled with pride that I helped to make work like this possible.

This is not autobiography but it is a work of fiction written from an understanding of the queer experience,  Vietnamese immigrant experience, and how it is to feel different in the world.

Here’s what I said about it:

“In Things We Lost to the Water, Eric Nguyen not only uses water to great effect but the prose itself feels like water: clear, powerful, and life-giving. While reading we believe that being loved and being flawed are not incompatible, nor belonging and being estranged. Nguyen helps us understand that we can all float if we let go of having to swim the same way to the same rhythm—we will find our own level in our own time. This is a beautiful book!” Buy it here.

Sorrowland, Rivers Solomon (out May 4)

I’ve never met Rivers, but I know of their work (An Unkindness of Ghosts, The Deep), and was delighted when their latest book was acquired by FSG, my publisher. I agreed to read the novel without having a clue what it was about, or even what genre. I was expecting anything—and even so I was surprised, delighted, and amazed by it. If you ever want to see what it looks like for a woman, with everything in life arrayed against her, simply blow through obstacles like a hurricane through a drift of spores, then you should read this book. It will give you confidence that whatever life throws at you there’s always a way to handle it and find the joy.

Here’s what I said about it:

“Sorrowland is a raw, powerful, and visceral read. With Vern, Rivers Solomon has created a woman who simply side-steps her damage, and level after level of difficulty―young, Black, queer, blind, alone in the woods with two newborns and pursued by monstrous government agents―to assume her own power. Nature, joy, science, belonging, human metamorphosis, generational oppression, strength, and sheer lust for life: if Toni Morrison, M. Night Shyamalan, and Marge Piercy got together they might, if they were lucky, produce something with the unstoppable exhilaration of this novel. Sorrowland is sui generis.” Buy it here.

One Two Three, Laurie Frankel (out June 8)

Laurie is a writer right here in Seattle. We’ve known of each other for a while—it’s a small city that way—but we had never met when I got email from her out of the blue one day in 2019. She offered to buy me lunch in exchange for picking my brains about something. We met, had a wonderful conversation about disability, norming the Other, representation and pity porn, and after that met up every month or two for lunch until Covid shut everything down—at which point we swapped to Zoom Happy Hour. Laurie is smart, warm, generous, and a very, very good writer with a particular flair for characters who feel simultaneously real, different, and unexpected. (If you haven’t yet read This Is How It Always Is, you should.) Her latest novel is One, Two, Three, a tale of ecology, adversity, capitalism and greed, disability, and triumph. There are no miracle cures; there are no suicides; there is no pity or inspiration porn. I read a very early draft and then the final draft. Here’s what I had to say:

“One Two Three is a powerful and nuanced novel about hope, human frailty, and love. Laurie Frankel takes a clear-eyed look at the mess we make of the world when we privilege profits over people and, brilliantly, without flinching from the truth, allows no hint of contempt, disgust, or hatred to enter the conversation. Three sisters, Mab, Monday, and Mirabel, understand that you can’t fight old problems with traditional tools. Their gifts and differences and love for each other help them to understand that their mother―and by extension our mothers―can’t make the change the world needs. It’s up to the daughters to act, to move us forward, to tell a different story. It is the daughters who will save us. One Two Three is the blueprint for a true revolution.”

Watch for an event with me and Laurie for Brookline Booksmith sometime in summer. Meanwhile buy it here.

Happy reading.

Happy Lesbian Visibility Day!

Lesbian Visibility Day began in the UK. This photo of me and Carol was taken at the first UK Lesbian Conference, April 1981, almost exactly 40 years ago. It’s now part of the Visible Girls series, Corbin’s photos of ’80s women’s subcultures.

It seemed like a good day to repost it.

Carol and Nicola in the Tabernacle, April 1981. Photo by Anita Corbin.

Hild art

Over on Gemæcce I’ve just posted about making my own Hild art—for fun, really, but also perhaps to illustrate maps or make a colouring book or create a calendar. I’m asking for suggestions: what would you like to see? Please leave comments either here or gemæcce.com.

Meanwhile, here’s Cait Sith, adapted from a photograph of a Eurasian lynx by Bernard Landgraf (Wikimedia Commons). Cait Sith is one of the personas Hild acquires in Menewood—when she’s north of the Wall with a small band of terrifying gesiths who becomes known as her Fiercesomes (sic).

Cait Sith — a lynx (adapted from a Wikimedia Commons photo by Bernard Landgraf)

Tell me what you want to see!

Vaccinated: Now What?

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Definition of terms in this post:

Covid — aka Covid-19, an often serious and occasionally fatal illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virusSARS-CoV-2 — the novel coronavirus first identified in Wuhan in late 2019 that can cause Covidasymptomic — being shown to be infected by SARS-CoV-2 but showing no signs of illness, not even mild onesvariant — a genetic variant of SARS-CoV-2 virus, which when it replicates creates one or more mutations which can have varying degrees of impact on how the virus impacts people. The CDC currently lists three classes of SARS-CoV-2 variants: those of Interest, Concern, or High Consequence. But as Variants of Interest have no impact on vaccine effectiveness, and, as of writing this, there are no Variants of High Consequence (that we know of), we’re only going to talk here about Variants of Concern (VoC).

If I were predicting the score of the finals in the Covid vaccine vs virus USL Championship 2021, it would be 9-to-1, a decisive win for Team Vaccine. If the rest of the world were vaccinating at the pace of places like Bhutan, the US, UK, Israel, Chile, and Bahrain I’d just go ahead and declare the vaccine the winner of the 2022 World Championship, and I’d doubt there would be much of a championship in 2026, just local tournaments. Team Virus, including the star variants who get substituted in, simply stands no chance against the superior defence and attack of Team Vaccine.Kelley and I are among the approximately 24% of Americans fully vaccinated against Covid.[1] A large and loud voice inside me is clamouring to go to a pub. I long to sit down, take off my mask, and order a pint. I want to sip Guinness, eat something—something I haven’t planned, shopped for, or cooked—and have a lazy conversation about nothing in particular with another human being, live and in person, while around us the hum of strangers’ conversation rises, and outside on the sidewalk a passerby bumps into someone they know, bends down to pat their dog, and stands, unmasked, to chat for a while. I yearn for it.

But I haven’t done it yet. Why?

Let’s begin with why I’m so convinced Team Vaccine is the winner.

While the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines (Kelley and I got Moderna) have been shown in trials to be 95% effective, several real-world studies (for example, in Israel) show that even in the wild it is an astounding 91% effective against Covid. Further, and excitingly, it’s been shown that the majority of those vaccinated not only don’t get sick with Covid, they don’t get infected with SARS-CoV-2 at all. In other words, they’re not just asymptomatic, they are wholly virus free and therefore cannot pass the virus on to anyone else, vaccinated or unvaccinated. In the majority of cases, vaccination stops transmission dead. Virus replication inside a host is prevented: a chance for the virus to mutate further is thwarted.

For the small minority of vaccinated people who do become ill, the illness is very much reduced: among the vaccinated—particularly those 75 and over—hospitalisations have plummeted.

However, while being fully vaccinated is amazing it does not provide perfect protection. There are occasional breakthrough infections.

Here in Washington State, as of 14 April, 1.7 million people have been fully vaccinated. Of those 1.7 million, 217, or 0.013%, have had breakthrough infections. Many of those 217, if not most—it’s unclear from the press release—had either no symptoms of Covid or mild symptoms. However, 5 of the 217 died. (All were aged 67-94, frail, and dealing with multiple underlying conditions.)

The takeaway: of all those vaccinated in Washington State, only 0.003% actually died of Covid.

It’s Not Done to compare statistical apples and oranges[2] but indulge me for a couple of paragraphs.

In Washington State over the entire course of the pandemic, of the total WA population of about 7,615,000 people, 5,415 total have died of Covid, that is, 5,410 unvaccinated people: 0.071%.

If you compare those two rates of death-by-Covid, the vaccinated dying at a rate of 0.071% and the unvaccinated at 0.003%, then you see that fully-vaccinated people have 0.42% of the chance of death that unvaccinated people do. That is, unvaccinated people are more than 200 times as likely to die of Covid than those who got their shots.

If you run those sets of calculations for the US as a whole, you end up with vaccinated residents having 0.57% the chance of dying as the unvaccinated, a little less than 200 times as likely to die.

If you compound statistical heresies and take the simple mean of unweighted-for-population WA and USA results, you essentially get 0.5%. If you are unvaccinated you are 200 times more likely to die that your fully-vaccinated neighbour.

As I’ve said, you really, seriously would not want to take those numbers to the bank. But even if we imagine they’re off by a factor of ten, by my back-of-the-envelope math unvaccinated folk are twenty times more likely to die of Covid than vaccinated folk.

Those are pretty persuasive odds. So if you’re dithering, go make an appointment right now to get your shot. I’ll wait.

Ah, you say, but how effective are the vaccines against those flashy superstar variant players? To answer that, let’s first take a quick detour into how vaccines work. And along the way I’ll swap metaphors.

I’ve seen several people on social media asking why a 90 lb woman gets exactly the same dose of, say, Moderna vaccine as a 250 lb man. The answer is that vaccines aren’t drugs or toxins (like opiates, or alcohol) that act directly on the body; their action is not weight dependant. Moderna’s mRNA vaccine is a blueprint of instructions for our bodies to read and follow in order to make something the immune system can be trained to recognise as an enemy and so defend against if we encounter it in the wild. In the case of Moderna, the instructions are for making a particular piece of the protein found in the part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus called spike. The spike is what helps makes SARS-CoV-2 so transmisslble: it’s what latches onto specific parts of a cell’s membrane, the ACE2 receptor, and allows the virus to invade individual cells where it then coopts the cell machinery and replicates.

Think of the vaccine as an instruction sheet that shows your body how to put together a bunch of giant cardboard cutouts of a recognisable bad guy, let’s say Thanos—slide tab A into slot B, fold along dotted line C—which, when you’ve put it together, become silhouette targets to train apprentice superheroes on a gun range. In itself the cardboard cutout isn’t dangerous; all it does is sit there and be recognisable as a target, to say, in effect, This is what the enemy looks like! If you ever see anything remotely resembling me in the future, swarm, attack, kill!

After two doses/training sessions, two different squads of your immune system, B lymphocytes and T lymphocytes, will recognise that Thanos/SARS-CoV-2 spike protein on sight; they are now alert, on patrol, and loaded for bear (while the original Thanos cardboard targets just dissolve and get flushed away). If the body encounters Thanos/spike in the wild, the B lymphocytes’ job is to latch onto the spike and prevent the virus from attaching to and infiltrating any of your individual cells, and T lymphocytes’ job is to annihilate via suicide attack any individual cell that does get invaded.

It’s a very clever and efficient system—unless for some reason the immune system doesn’t recognise Thanos/SARS-CoV-2 spike and so doesn’t spring into action against it.

Which brings us back to variants.

We are now closing in on 600,000 deaths in the US, and 3m worldwide. Globally, the pandemic is accelerating and vaccines have not yet reached, never mind been administered in, a huge proportion of countries. As a result, the virus is replicating madly and variants—strains of virus whose genetic code has mutated—are springing up faster than we can keep track of them. (The more virus there is out there, and the more often it replicates, the more often it will mutate.) The greater the variance of a virus—the less it looks like the original Thanos target—the more likely it is to be able to escape recognition.

There are many variants—with more appearing everyday. What matters here, though, are Variants of Concern (VoC).[3] According to the CDC these are variants that demonstrate:

Evidence of impact on diagnostics, treatments, and vaccinesEvidence of increased transmissibilityEvidence of increased disease severity

The first VoC I was aware of was B.1.1.7. First identified in the UK, it is by some estimates 50-70% more transmissible than the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 (it’s spike is more efficient at grabbing ACE2—it still looks like Thanos but just has stronger hands). It’s now the most widely found strain in the US and many other countries. There is some disagreement about whether B.1.1.7 is also more deadly—those infected tend to carry higher viral loads—though the most recent study suggests that it is not. Whether that convinces you or not (and my jury is out), what does seem to be clear is that this super successful variant is not vaccine resistant in the real world.

Then there are the so-called South African (B.1.351) and Brazilian (B.1.1.28) variants. These, like B.1.1.7 are more efficient at grabbing ACE2 but they also have a mutation, E484K (often called Eek), also in the spike protein—that acts as a partial disguise. So now Thanos not only has stronger hands, he’s also wearing a funny red hat that from some angles changes his silhouette. This means a certain number of defending lymphocytes might not recognise this variant as an enemy. But only a certain number. In vaccinated people there are still way more—way, way more, many multiples more—defenders than attackers. So even if some of them don’t recognise the enemy, the enemy is still easily overwhelmed.

We know this because in the lab—where they pit antibodies and virus variants in test tubes and petri dishes, in vitro—you can see clearly that you need more antibodies to neutralise the virus. But as far as I’m aware there is no real-world evidence that, in the wild, that is, in vivo—in real living bodies—any variant shows the ability to evade the Moderna or Pzfizer vaccine.

Variants continue to spring up spontaneously. Just last month Oregon produced its own homegrown Eek mutation from the B.1.1.7 variant. However, given the pace of vaccination in this country it’s pretty unlikely there’ll be enough virus replication to produce enough wildly different mutations for one to emerge that might fool Team Vaccine’s recognition systems; it’s just gong to be variations on the funny hat and false moustache playbook. One caveat: most of the population needs to be immunised. Right now only 70% of American plan to get vaccinated. I have hope for one group: those those who for various good reasons–a history of their commuity being lied to and abused by government and medical professionals–are showing willingness to listen to their own community leaders who are generally doing a good job of persuading people that, this time, in this one way, they can trust. The other group, though, the so-called vaccine resisters–obstinate right-wing conspiracy theorists, mostly straight white Republican men–are not going to get over themselves until the mRNA vaccines are fully approved by the FDA (as opposed to their current emergency-use status). Once that happens, legally more entities (whether government, business, education, community) can start requring vaccination as a condition of entry and/or participation. And that, I hope, will be more persuasive than appealing to the greater good (which the white right-wing men already, demonstrably, don’t give a shit about).

If we could get the vaccination rate up to 90% I doubt residents in this country would need booster vaccinations tweaked to combat variants.

The rest of the world, well, if we want Team Vaccine to be victorious in 2022 and again in 2026 we need to get the vaccine in billions of arms globally and reduce the mutation feedstock. If we don’t get more people vaccinated, we not only will need those annual or semi-annual booster shots talked up by the Pfizer CEO, we might have to build a whole new vaccine desiged to recognise some other part of SARS-CoV-2.

I can’t imagine anyone—not even Big Pharma—wants that. (The former scenario, the booster shots? Oh yep; they want to make money. The latter? No. You can’t make money if all your customers are dead.)

So, vaccines are awesome, Team Vaccine are the champs. So why am I not going to go to the pub right now, this afternoon? After all, if I’m right—and I think I am—my odds of dying of Covid are vanishingly small, less than my odds of being struck by lightning.

Well, because. For one thing, I don’t want to sit in a pub with a mask on, pulling it to the side only to take a drink then putting it back on—it sort of spoils the point. And right now I’d feel obliged to do that because I’m guessing most of the servers haven’t had their jabs and frankly it would feel Ugly American of me to assume that kind of risk privilege. Then there are the other customers who might glare if I don’t wear a mask because they have to. And then there’s the fact that I haven’t been unmasked in public for 14 months; I haven’t been in a crowded room for 14 months; I haven’t been among strangers for 14 months. It will take some getting used to.

So, to begin with, I might sit outside in a beer garden unmasked. And I most likely will invite other fully-vaccinated folk, two by two, to the house for dinner. And by the time I’ve done that a few times, and then invited six people at once, I’ll be desensitised to crowds, the odds of the servers having been vaccinated will be pretty good, and perhaps as much of 65% of those customers in the pub will also be vaccinated. At that point, I’ll venture out.

And, oh, I’m looking forward to that day!

[1] The numbers are constantly changing. See the CDC’s data tracker for the most recent data.

[2] In the early days of the pandemic medical professionals had no experience of dealing with acute cases; there was no standard of care; the most effective therapies had not yet been determined. best therapies had not been determined. Add to that the fact that the most vulnerable—those 75 and older—the ones most likely to die, were vaccinated first. Add to that the unseparated vaccinated and unvaccinated totals. And that’s just for starters. But we have to start somewhere, so I choose here.

[3] The CDC has a good explanation of various variant classifications along with tables of which variants have mutated how

GOOOOAAL!! Team Vaccine wins the Covid Cup

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Definition of terms in this post:

Covid — aka Covid-19, an often serious and occasionally fatal illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virusSARS-CoV-2 — the novel coronavirus first identified in Wuhan in late 2019 that can cause Covidasymptomic — being shown to be infected by SARS-CoV-2 but showing no signs of illness, not even mild onesvariant — a genetic variant of SARS-CoV-2 virus, which when it replicates creates one or more mutations which can have varying degrees of impact on how the virus impacts people. The CDC currently lists three classes of SARS-CoV-2 variants: those of Interest, Concern, or High Consequence. But as Variants of Interest have no impact on vaccine effectiveness, and, as of writing this, there are no Variants of High Consequence (that we know of), we’re only going to talk here about Variants of Concern (VoC).

 

If I were predicting the score of the finals in the Covid vaccine vs virus USL Championship 2021, it would be 9-to-1, a decisive win for Team Vaccine. If the rest of the world were vaccinating at the pace of places like Bhutan, the US, UK, Israel, Chile, and Bahrain I’d just go ahead and declare the vaccine the winner of the 2022 World Championship, and I’d doubt there would be much of a championship in 2026, just local tournaments. Team Virus, including the star variants who get substituted in, simply stands no chance against the superior defence and attack of Team Vaccine.Kelley and I are among the approximately 24% of Americans fully vaccinated against Covid.[1] A large and loud voice inside me is clamouring to go to a pub. I long to sit down, take off my mask, and order a pint. I want to sip Guinness, eat something—something I haven’t planned, shopped for, or cooked—and have a lazy conversation about nothing in particular with another human being, live and in person, while around us the hum of strangers’ conversation rises, and outside on the sidewalk a passerby bumps into someone they know, bends down to pat their dog, and stands, unmasked, to chat for a while. I yearn for it.

But I haven’t done it yet. Why?

Let’s begin with why I’m so convinced Team Vaccine is the winner.

While the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines (Kelley and I got Moderna) have been shown in trials to be 95% effective, several real-world studies (for example, in Israel) show that even in the wild it is an astounding 91% effective against Covid. Further, and excitingly, it’s been shown that the majority of those vaccinated not only don’t get sick with Covid, they don’t get infected with SARS-CoV-2 at all. In other words, they’re not just asymptomatic, they are wholly virus free and therefore cannot pass the virus on to anyone else, vaccinated or unvaccinated. In the majority of cases, vaccination stops transmission dead. Virus replication inside a host is prevented: a chance for the virus to mutate further is thwarted.

For the small minority of vaccinated people who do become ill, the illness is very much reduced: among the vaccinated—particularly those 75 and over—hospitalisations have plummeted.

However, while being fully vaccinated is amazing it does not provide perfect protection. There are occasional breakthrough infections.

Here in Washington State, as of 14 April, 1.7 million people have been fully vaccinated. Of those 1.7 million, 217, or 0.013%, have had breakthrough infections. Many of those 217, if not most—it’s unclear from the press release—had either no symptoms of Covid or mild symptoms. However, 5 of the 217 died. (All were aged 67-94, frail, and dealing with multiple underlying conditions.)

The takeaway: of all those vaccinated in Washington State, only 0.003% actually died of Covid.

It’s Not Done to compare statistical apples and oranges[2] but indulge me for a couple of paragraphs.

In Washington State over the entire course of the pandemic, of the total WA population of about 7,615,000 people, 5,415 total have died of Covid, that is, 5,410 unvaccinated people: 0.071%.

If you compare those two rates of death-by-Covid, the vaccinated dying at a rate of 0.071% and the unvaccinated at 0.003%, then you see that fully-vaccinated people have 0.42% of the chance of death that unvaccinated people do. That is, unvaccinated people are more than 200 times as likely to die of Covid than those who got their shots.

If you run those sets of calculations for the US as a whole, you end up with vaccinated residents having 0.57% the chance of dying as the unvaccinated, a little less than 200 times as likely to die.

If you compound statistical heresies and take the simple mean of unweighted-for-population WA and USA results, you essentially get 0.5%. If you are unvaccinated you are 200 times more likely to die that your fully-vaccinated neighbour.

As I’ve said, you really, seriously would not want to take those numbers to the bank. But even if we imagine they’re off by a factor of ten, by my back-of-the-envelope math unvaccinated folk are twenty times more likely to die of Covid than unvaccinated folk.

Those are pretty persuasive odds. So if you’re dithering, go make an appointment right now to get your shot. I’ll wait.

Ah, you say, but how effective are the vaccines against those flashy superstar variant players? To answer that, let’s first take a quick detour into how vaccines work. And along the way I’ll swap metaphors.

I’ve seen several people on social media asking why a 90 lb woman gets exactly the same dose of, say, Moderna vaccine as a 250 lb man. The answer is that vaccines aren’t drugs or toxins (like opiates, or alcohol) that act directly on the body; their action is not weight dependant. Moderna’s mRNA vaccine is a blueprint of instructions for our bodies to read and follow in order to make something the immune system can be trained to recognise as an enemy and so defend against if we encounter it in the wild. In the case of Moderna, the instructions are for making a particular piece of the protein found in the part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus called spike. The spike is what helps makes SARS-CoV-2 so transmisslble: it’s what latches onto specific parts of a cell’s membrane, the ACE2 receptor, and allows the virus to invade individual cells where it then coopts the cell machinery and replicates.

Think of the vaccine as an instruction sheet that shows your body how to put together a bunch of giant cardboard cutouts of a recognisable bad guy, let’s say Thanos—slide tab A into slot B, fold along dotted line C—which, when you’ve put it together, become silhouette targets to train apprentice superheroes on a gun range. In itself the cardboard cutout isn’t dangerous; all it does is sit there and be recognisable as a target, to say, in effect, This is what the enemy looks like! If you ever see anything remotely resembling me in the future, swarm, attack, kill!

After two doses/training sessions, two different squads of your immune system, B lymphocytes and T lymphocytes, will recognise that Thanos/SARS-CoV-2 spike protein on sight; they are now alert, on patrol, and loaded for bear (while the original Thanos cardboard targets just dissolve and get flushed away). If the body encounters Thanos/spike in the wild, the B lymphocytes’ job is to latch onto the spike and prevent the virus from attaching to and infiltrating any of your individual cells, and T lymphocytes’ job is to annihilate via suicide attack any individual cell that does get invaded.

It’s a very clever and efficient system—unless for some reason the immune system doesn’t recognise Thanos/SARS-CoV-2 spike and so doesn’t spring into action against it.

Which brings us back to variants.

We are now closing in on 600,000 deaths in the US, and 3m worldwide. Globally, the pandemic is accelerating and vaccines have not yet reached, never mind been administered in, a huge proportion of countries. As a result, the virus is replicating madly and variants—strains of virus whose genetic code has mutated—are springing up faster than we can keep track of them. (The more virus there is out there, and the more often it replicates, the more often it will mutate.) The greater the variance of a virus—the less it looks like the original Thanos target—the more likely it is to be able to escape recognition.

There are many variants—with more appearing everyday. What matters here, though, are Variants of Concern (VoC).[3] According to the CDC these are variants that demonstrate:

Evidence of impact on diagnostics, treatments, and vaccinesEvidence of increased transmissibilityEvidence of increased disease severity

The first VoC I was aware of was B.1.1.7. First identified in the UK, it is by some estimates 50-70% more transmissible than the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 (it’s spike is more efficient at grabbing ACE2—it still looks like Thanos but just has stronger hands). It’s now the most widely found strain in the US and many other countries. There is some disagreement about whether B.1.1.7 is also more deadly—those infected tend to carry higher viral loads—though the most recent study suggests that it is not. Whether that convinces you or not (and my jury is out), what does seem to be clear is that this super successful variant is not vaccine resistant in the real world.

Then there are the so-called South African (B.1.351) and Brazilian (B.1.1.28) variants. These, like B.1.1.7 are more efficient at grabbing ACE2 but they also have a mutation, E484K (often called Eek), also in the spike protein—that acts as a partial disguise. So now Thanos not only has stronger hands, he’s also wearing a funny red hat that from some angles changes his silhouette. This means a certain number of defending lymphocytes might not recognise this variant as an enemy. But only a certain number. In vaccinated people there are still way more—way, way more, many multiples more—defenders than attackers. So even if some of them don’t recognise the enemy, the enemy is still easily overwhelmed.

We know this because in the lab—where they pit antibodies and virus variants in test tubes and petri dishes, in vitro—you can see clearly that you need more antibodies to neutralise the virus. But as far as I’m aware there is no real-world evidence that, in the wild, that is, in vivo—in real living bodies—any variant shows the ability to evade the Moderna or Pzfizer vaccine.

Variants continue to spring up spontaneously. Just last month Oregon produced its own homegrown Eek mutation from the B.1.1.7 variant. However, given the pace of vaccination in this country it’s pretty unlikely there’ll be enough virus replication to produce enough wildly different mutations for one to emerge that might fool Team Vaccine’s recognition systems; it’s just gong to be variations on the funny hat and false moustache playbook. One caveat: most of the population needs to be immunised. Right now only 70% of American plan to get vaccinated. I have hope for one group: those those who for various good reasons–a history of their commuity being lied to and abused by government and medical professionals–are showing willingness to listen to their own community leaders who are generally doing a good job of persuading people that, this time, in this one way, they can trust. The other group, though, the so-called vaccine resisters–obstinate right-wing conspiracy theorists, mostly straight white Republican men–are not going to get over themselves until the mRNA vaccines are fully approved by the FDA (as opposed to their current emergency-use status). Once that happens, legally more entities (whether government, business, education, community) can start requring vaccination as a condition of entry and/or participation. And that, I hope, will be more persuasive than appealing to the greater good (which the white right-wing men already, demonstrably, don’t give a shit about).

If we could get the vaccination rate up to 90% I doubt residents in this country would need booster vaccinations tweaked to combat variants.

The rest of the world, well, if we want Team Vaccine to be victorious in 2022 and again in 2026 we need to get the vaccine in billions of arms globally and reduce the mutation feedstock. If we don’t get more people vaccinated, we not only will need those annual or semi-annual booster shots talked up by the Pfizer CEO, we might have to build a whole new vaccine desiged to recognise some other part of SARS-CoV-2.

I can’t imagine anyone—not even Big Pharma—wants that. (The former scenario, the booster shots? Oh yep; they want to make money. The latter? No. You can’t make money if all your customers are dead.)

So, vaccines are awesome, Team Vaccine are the champs. So why am I not going to go to the pub right now, this afternoon? After all, if I’m right—and I think I am—my odds of dying of Covid are vanishingly small, less than my odds of being struck by lightning.

Well, because. For one thing, I don’t want to sit in a pub with a mask on, pulling it to the side only to take a drink then putting it back on—it sort of spoils the point. And right now I’d feel obliged to do that because I’m guessing most of the servers haven’t had their jabs and frankly it would feel Ugly American of me to assume that kind of risk privilege. Then there are the other customers who might glare if I don’t wear a mask because they have to. And then there’s the fact that I haven’t been unmasked in public for 14 months; I haven’t been in a crowded room for 14 months; I haven’t been among strangers for 14 months. It will take some getting used to.

So, to begin with, I might sit outside in a beer garden unmasked. And I most likely will invite other fully-vaccinated folk, two by two, to the house for dinner. And by the time I’ve done that a few times, and then invited six people at once, I’ll be desensitised to crowds, the odds of the servers having been vaccinated will be pretty good, and perhaps as much of 65% of those customers in the pub will also be vaccinated. At that point, I’ll venture out.

And, oh, I’m looking forward to that day!

 

[1] The numbers are constantly changing. See the CDC’s data tracker for the most recent data.

[2] In the early days of the pandemic medical professionals had no experience of dealing with acute cases; there was no standard of care; the most effective therapies had not yet been determined. best therapies had not been determined. Add to that the fact that the most vulnerable—those 75 and older—the ones most likely to die, were vaccinated first. Add to that the unseparated vaccinated and unvaccinated totals. And that’s just for starters. But we have to start somewhere, so I choose here.

[3] The CDC has a good explanation of various variant classifications along with tables of which variants have mutated how