Implications of New COVID Variants Escaping the Immune System.

New COVID Variants Are Escaping the Immune System. Here’s What That Means. Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / GettyBA.5, BQ.1.1, and XBB? It’s no wonder people are struggling to keep all the circulating variants of COVID-19 straight right now. Whether you want to call them “alphabet soup,” “Scrabble,” or “Kraken,” we’ve been reminded time and again that it’s not the name of the subvariant that matters, but rather the way it interacts with our immune systems. And as we enter into our fourth year with COVID-19, scientists are most concerned with how YahooNews

... as we enter into our fourth year with COVID-19, scientists are most concerned with how well prior infections, vaccinations, and boosters can protect us against emerging variants of the virus.

The answers are starting to roll in—and they’re not looking great for us. In a letter published on Jan. 18 in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory detail the nasty abilities of variants BQ.1.1 and XBB.1 to escape incapacitation from COVID-specific antibodies. This is cause for concern because as the authors wrote, these variants “may reduce the efficacy of current mRNA vaccines.”

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