Sputnik V vaccine-neutralization escape by SARS-CoV-2 Spike variants
medrxiv.org
medrxiv.org
So covid will try and evolve to keep spreading but it will become less deadly as vaccination and natural immunity increase. So its destiny is to become a cold virus like the other human coronaviruses.
https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1/status/13769286914738135...
https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1/status/13667086756797644...
https://twitter.com/profshanecrotty/status/13552620195622092...
Also, it basically is a cold virus already. For the majority of the population it’s a mild respiratory virus. For the very elderly it is quite deadly. I wish more people appreciated this fact.
Interestingly OC43, one of the already-extant human CoVs, seems pretty comparable in mortality for the elderly last time I checked.
He's 34 and does a lot of sports. So, i wouldn't say that it's a cold virus already... Not deadly for younger people, doesn't mean it has no consequences.
A friend of mine is a nurse and she also mentioned lots of young and fit collegues getting it pretty bad.
But correct, no research. But mostly people i know they got infected. Sure, some have nothing or only lose smell and taste.
Almost all "research" I've seen of so-called "long COVID" has been self-reported surveys from self-select internet populations; hopefully it's obvious why such "research" will end up dramatically overstating the prevalence. (Edit: Re-reading this the tone doesn't come across quite how I want it so to be clear I'm criticizing the research itself not denying that anyone experiences these symptoms)
Lastly, I do very much worry that the widespread culture of fear and stress - which has been actively encouraged rather than calmed down by health "experts" around the globe - is contributing to a type of psychogenic / psychosomatic illness. To be explicit, psychosomatic illness is a real illness, but it does mean that the underlying mechanism is not of physiological origin but rather psychoemotional stress/belief systems that ultimately culminate in physical symptoms.
Very sorry to hear that you're actively suffering from long COVID. I hope things get better for you. I struggle with a sort of chronic fatigue myself (not anywhere as severe as the ME/CFS type horror stories I hear about, but still) so I know how shitty it can be. I've always got a bunch of ideas bouncing around my head of new research directions, articles I want to write, etc, and it many times feels out of my control whether I'm going to have the energy to pursue those goals or not.
Not that "self reported", i suppose...
Which claims that 1/3rd who got it has covid-19 long term problems ( WHO ), my circle doesn't seem to be needing an differentiator for age. Since I don't know any elderly who got it.
So my perception is more pessimistic about the research, but I could have a more pessimistic circle, while you had a more optimistic one.
( Except for you ofc, that sucks. I wish you a speedy recovery)
- Vitamin D is a critical pro-hormone for immunoregulatory function in general and respiratory pathology specifically. In many ways severe COVID-19 is a disorder of immunoregulation. Vitamin D deficiency is already very widespread, and telling people to stay inside / not go out, and when going out to cover some exposed skin with a mask, is very obviously going to negatively impact Vitamin D as well as nitric oxide production/release respectively. Both are really important for respiratory pathology although Vitamin D is by far more important
- Decreased sleep, increased stress/fear, decreased exercise: all of these put the body into a pro-inflammatory state as well as a state in which immunoregulatory processes start to break down. Some stress/fear/sleep is unavoidable during a pandemic or epidemic but the vast majority of it is disproportionate to the reality of the situation and is a direct result of fear-based messaging from public health "experts", politicians, and the media.
(Remember when beaches were closed down? In many places gyms are still closed, etc)
- Improper wearing of masks (read: how literally every community member wears a mask) very plausibly increases the risk of bacterial pneumonia due to having a warm, moist cloth bacterial reservoir attached to both of one's breathing holes for long periods of time. This was a concern which was identified after the "Spanish" Flu of 1918 where the scientific consensus after the fact was that such usage of masking was both completely unfounded and likely contributed to bacterial pneumonia and other worsened outcomes. So many of the interventions (universal masking) we're advised or mandated to undertake increase a lot of these risks, which is doubly ironic when the wealth of research literature around masking for community transmission of respiratory viruses is at best inconclusive.
There was an analysis a couple of days ago about a very high percentage of people having to return to ICU 3 months after going in for covid. And another high percentage dying after the 3 months.
That's not anecdotal, that's statistics.
Numbers vary but most studies have the rate of asymptomaticity quite high. I've seen anything from 10% to 60%. And then you have the people that are "paucisymptomatic" (mild symptoms). And then you have a more traditional flu-type response, and then you have the subset of people who have a severe response that seems comparable to a SARS-1 infection (read: quite bad).
I didn't say that SARS-2 was never dangerous for anyone. So-called "cold" viruses can cause serious illness too. I'm not downplaying SARS-2, rather everyone else is downplaying what a normal cold virus can be capable of.
Sorry to hear about your friend's illness BTW.
I know someone in her 40s who got it and is not overweight. She said it was terrible and that she's definitely getting the vaccine because she never wants to get it again.
What exactly would you consider a non-mild respiratory virus?
SARS-1 is an example of a non-mild respiratory virus. We don't know quite as much about it since it never became a massive global phenomenon the way SARS-2 did, but the research I've read basically indicates that a "run-of-the-mill" SARS-1 infection is much like a severe COVID-19 case.
People seem to really be taking issue with my statement, and I think it comes down to them conflating "mild respiratory virus for the majority of the population" with "mild respiratory virus for everyone". Here's one simple way to put it: if "asymptomatic COVID-19" (which is an oxymoron but I'll spare you that rant) is as common as they say it is, that's an indication that it is a mild respiratory virus in many people.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
So far COVID-19 has killed about 0.04% of the world population.
> It's still endemic today, but most of us get infected as youths which provides some immunity later in life.
Right! That's why it's really a great analogy for SARS-2. I've been trying to get people to understand for awhile now that unlike say a really bad flu pandemic [flu has a bi-modal death distribution], SARS-2 kills the very elderly and the very sickly, but doesn't touch the very young. That means that once it's more-or-less fully spread through the population (as it has been doing the last 1.5 years or so), we're basically done with COVID-19 mortality forever.
Why? Because of exactly that reason: children will get exposed to SARS-2 young the same way they get exposed to the other circulating non-SARS hCoVs. And like any infection, once infected and recovered immunological memory persists for decades upon decades. Memory B/T cells hang around, ready and waiting to respond to the characteristic antigen when presented with them in the future.
Thankfully the fantastic results of the mRNA vaccines mean that we should be able to suppress Covid down to the levels of measles, if not eradicate it like smallpox.
I may be misreading this, as English is not my native language, but 8/12 is 66 % and not 75 %, no? Or does the “(75 %)” refer to something else?
1. It gives us information on the mechanism that the variants are using for vaccine evasion - the E484K substitution which was the suspected mechanism for B.1.351 ("south african variant") was tested on its own and did not evade the vaccine-induced antibodies as effectively as the full B.1.351 mutation set. This tells us that there is some other mechanism in B.1.351 that makes it more successful at evading antibodies. This is important and valuable information.
2. It demonstrates a really fast, safe, and clever method of testing vaccine effectiveness against a new variant - what they did was to take an entirely unrelated virus, graft a modified S protein on it, expose it to blood serum from vaccinated patients, and then try to infect a cell culture with it. By counting infected cells compared to the same count without the serum exposure, you can measure how effective the neutralization is, without having to measure infection counts in a large population. This is awesome and can easily be done with other vaccines and any new variant that shows up, as long as it's sequenced, even if it doesn't have much prevalence in the population. In fact, you can use this method to test hypothetical variants that only exist in animal viruses or not at all, and be able to redeploy vaccines that are particularly effective against those in regions where they happen to emerge. This, to me, is the absolute highlight of this paper, and I suspect it will be extremely useful.
> we determined that 8 out of 12 (75%) of serum samples from 12 recipients of the Russian Sputnik V Ad26 / Ad5 vaccine showed dose response curve slopes indicative of failure to neutralize rcVSV-CoV2-S: B.1.351.
> Furthermore, we acknowledge that in vivo protective efficacy can be derived from Fc effector functions of antibodies that bind but do not neutralize.
I guess they will have to produce an updated version in nearest future.
So if you're allowed to get another vaccine in a couple of months, take Sputnik now.
There’s also a potential issue with immunity to the vector.
However, since both Moderna and Pfizer are testing mRNA "booster" vaccines specifically for the SA variant, you might just wait for that. They don't have an adeno-virus vector that could be pre-empted by immune response.
Does it mean that the South African variant will almost certainly cause another pandemic in countries vaccinated with those (thus requiring a revaccination with an mRNA vaccine) or is there somehow a chance that the variant won't be prevalent?
It's just evolution in action. Any variant that dodges the vaccine starts a new game of dice.
1. https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-vaccine-astrazene...
For laypeople and policy makers we of course need comparisons and validations before we let them guide our choices.
To the contrary, the policy makers have access to insane amounts of money. The US has spent trillions overall due to Covid and billions on vaccine development. Paying the researchers or a different lab $1M to run an important study is a no-brainer. Or do it DARPA/DoD style: announce a list of studies that need doing, let people apply for grants to do them, and keep the list updated!
The fact that researchers are bumbling around doing good quality science, getting nice publications, and failing to answer the right questions is an abject failure of science policy.
edit: here’s your meta-analysis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7654888/
This sucks. As the authors note, the individual studies were not usefully standardized and mostly can’t be compared. At the very least, the FDA could have said, as part of the initial Covid vaccination trial goals, that a specific set of identical measurements were required, and that all candidates were expected to make those particular measurements. Additional measurements would, of course, be welcome. This would have cost the public a grand total of $0. Maybe $500k for someone to write the thing down and take some feedback to make sure the list made sense, but that seems high.
There are a couple doctors in the US (particularly Peter McCullough) who make a case that we haven't invested enough in the latter and too much in the former. Naturally the anti-vax people seem to love these guys, so it's hard to find any kind of balanced analysis on it.
Or do the numbers still work out to be "more pandemic, more full hospitals, many more dead" no matter how good the drug treatment gets?
Generally medication for viral infections seems to be hard. There isn't much good medication for other respiratory viral diseases. It doesn't look like a major breakthrough in drug treatment will happen.
A vaccine can make the difference between "you get the disease" and "you don't get the disease and can't spread it to others". No drug comes remotely close to that.
We had a mishmash of variously competent and incompetent studies of AZ/HCQ. We have anecdotal data on ivermectin. We have some preliminary studies of fluvoxamine (excellent results, needs follow up); the large scale expedited follow up is MIA. It’s been over six months from the original study — there is no fundamental reason it should take more than two months to test it on a few tens of thousands of people. Ditto for anti-androgens. Camistat ought to have at least some effect (famous last words); this has been known for something like a year with no meaningful followup.
What’s needed here is IMO public health department coordination on studies, which isn’t quite the same thing as money.
The best drugs we have are either:
1.) treat the virus with a novel entity (Regeneron, the other antibodies)
2.) treat the inflammation (dexamethosone, possibly eventually fluvoxamine)
The repurposing and general antivirals (including remdesevir) have little effect and likely won’t make a difference. There are novel drugs being developed (Pfizer just started a protease inhibitor trial) but that’s the only place I’d expect to see real impact, with fluvoxamine as a treat the symptoms wildcard. People have been trying to find drugs or repurpose, and academic medical centers have been working on it. It’s that almost nothing works when subjected to the hard trials.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.21250224v...
Some contextualization at https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1367592606641704961
They are playing a zero-sum game of outbidding others so that they are 1st, no matter what.
Countries like the UK that invested in supply chain efficiencies well ahead of vaccine validation, even as there was risk of the investment failing ... this was acting ahead.
Almost every nation failed at this: we should have all been investing 10x what we did in anything to get the vaccines ready, even for those that ultimately failed because the $20B wasted on unneeded prep would have been less than the amount wasted in our current lock downs that could have been avoided were we already to have been vaccinated.
Watch around 1hr into this TWiV, if you're interested in what targets there are for anti-virals, who's working on them, and why they're hard.
Deploying the vaccines is very cheap compared to hospitalization.
And like a sibling comment has already said, we should just be spending money anywhere it even seems to make sense.
He argued that drugs can and do significantly reduce hospitalization. He also claimed that literally nobody was stuffing drugs to reduce hospitalization, which is a strong claim but alarming if true.
I also don't understand why he thinks the vaccine doesn't make sense for people under 50 (he says there is no scientific rationale for it). I'm in my early 40s and have a chance of dying of greater than 1/10,000 if I get infected. The vaccines cost very little and carry much less risk than that!
I also found it odd that somehow his practice was seeing incredible results with drug combinations in keeping people out of hospitals, but somehow this effect wasn't noticed by any other medical professionals or researchers anywhere else in the world. Are combination protocols really that under-studied?
Not all batches should or could be tested but you could do random sample testing.
1: https://factual.afp.com/las-cajas-con-vacunas-sputnik-v-mant...
We have people in hospital after 2 rounds of Pfizer.