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Well, no, not every strain of the virus was on some kind of conveyor belt of evolution anymore than the hominid family tree. But all of the earlier, less virulent variants are the direct ancestors of modern variants.

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That'd probably fall under the category of giving medical advice. There may be an updated vaccine in the fall, I'm not really sure how that will play out.

That’s the sub where I first read about Covid in mid-December 2019… back when it was a case series of 20ish people with pneumonia in Wuhan. Great sub.

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The latest booking system on the NZ MOH website gives you the option to have both at the same time.

So it would behoove one to wait until the fall at this point? I was meaning to get boosted last fall but wound up missing it, but I'm unsure what to do. Official guidance always says to get it of course, but is that really worth it?

Exactly. And I think it’s important for the OP to note that rabies doesn’t “make the host want to bite others to spread the virus”. It simply causes the host to lose fear and become agitated, confused and agressive, which leads to biting incidents. But it’s not like there’s a voice in the animal’s head telling it to go find something to bite so they can spread the infection, like you might imagine with zombies who are hungry for brains or whatever. It’s just a consequence of the behavioral changes. Which as you said, happened to help it spread, yada yada.

This article gets into the details of what’s causing the behavioral changes and such if you’re interested OP:

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319735#Virus-interacts-with-muscle-receptors

Ah, I see. I need to read up more on feline coronaviruses, but my understanding is that the disease itself (FIP) is not transmissible per se. One cat with FIP won't give FIP to another cat, for example - it's a syndrome that is as much cat-dependent as it is virus dependent.

The coronaviruses themselves (there are various strains) are transmissible, but you need a specific mutation in a chronically infected cat to cause FIP. Once that virus has mutated, it may infect other cats, but won't cause FIP. I am not aware of any particular strain that is guaranteed to mutate and produce FIP in every (or even most) cats.

Does that make sense?

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Typically viruses evolve to be more contagious, but less deadly.

Chances are you’ve either had it without realising, or still carrying some immunity from your last infection and/or vaccination.

Is the fact we vaccinated during the pandemic likely to have put evolutionary pressure on selecting serotypes that can defeat vaccine protection?

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This article is pretty interesting:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3734171/

I found potential explanation #4 to be of particular interest. There is a theory that exposure to another flu strain in ~1890 may have caused a dysregulated immune response.

Sorry, what I meant to ask is if such a mutation could go beyond the chronically infected cat and replace other FIP viruses.

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To prevent the original strains from coming back when immunity to those (eventually) wanes.

We don't want to start going backwards. Plus, there's cross-reactive immunity so that similar mutations can be recognised by the immune system without ever seeing that particular one before.

Keeping a wide breadth of spike mutations allows that to work more effectively.

Edit: u/nomnomnomnomRABIES, the reason is that Flu is an entirely different beast to COVID. Despite all the mutations COVID has gone through, it is not all that different to the original strain (which is a good reason why our immunity still holds so well). Coronaviruses do not mutate all that much, as they have the largest genome of all RNA viruses. COVID is just mutating a bunch, relatively, because of how widespread it is.

Flu, on the other hand, drifts massively, and constantly. There's no point including older strains because it doesn't help you fend off next year's Flu. Maybe once or twice in your life you'll come across a strain that is similar to one you were previously vaccinated against, which is nice, but no point wasting time cramming a Flu vaccine with all these historical Flu strains.

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it's like that time when i did the math problem wrongly but got the correct result.

i failed that test, but H1N1 passes.

no fair