Delaying a Covid vaccine’s second dose boosts immune response
nature.com
nature.com
"Peak antibody levels were 3.5 times higher in those who waited 12 weeks for their booster shot than were those in people who waited only 3 weeks. Peak T-cell response was lower in those with the extended interval. But this did not cause antibody levels to decline more quickly over the nine weeks after the booster shot."
I care less about short-term peak antibody response than longer-term T-cell response or longest-term immunizing antibody response. On the latter two points, this study was not encouraging or outright silent. Nor was there any indication of how well these folks fared after they returned to the wild.
This info doesn't seem sufficient to draw meaningful conclusions about longer term protection.
> In relation to the cellular (or T cell) immune response, which plays an important role in supporting and maintaining antibody production, the team found that within the three-week interval group, 60% had a confirmed cellular response at two to three weeks following the second vaccine - although this fell to only 15% eight to nine weeks later.
> The proportion of participants showing a cellular response in the 12-week-interval group was only eight per cent at five to six weeks after the first vaccine, but this rose to 31% two to three weeks after the second vaccine. Research is required to further explore these variations in responses.
You're correct that the evidence isn't dispositive yet, but it's an encouraging signal. Antibody response in the short-term is positive and in the medium-term cellular response possibly converges.
More importantly, the implications for the first doses first strategy are positive. Those who know how to reason under uncertainty saw the UK's strategy as a calculated gamble based on a model that extended the point information provided by the vaccine efficacy RCT; critics were generally incoherent but their claim was that it was likely to cause large _negative_ effects on efficacy, worth paying the cost of vaccinating far fewer people.
On top of the priors that led to the decision, we now have signal from the way the winter surge played out in the UK, and the increased antibody response alone provides further weak signal that the delay was worth it - and conversely, that the US's approach cost lives).
The evidence still isn't dispositive, but crucially, there's no such strong basis for believing the alternative either: that extending doses _reduces_ efficacy and that vaccine availability should be limited in the name of adhering rigidly to the RCT-studied timeline.
The status quo bias of medical culture killed a lot of people during this pandemic by continuing their habit of pretending that certainty exists where none does and refusing to engage in critical thinking about uncertainty. Refusing to explicitly extrapolate a model from few high-quality samples really just means "implicitly extrapolating a crappy model through bias and guesswork". This may be adaptive in the normal medical context, where the status quo is generally fine, but is an incredibly poor fit for a fast-moving pandemic that was killing thousands a day in the US alone.
[1] https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2021/05/covid-pfize...
That said, the most effective defense I've seen for the seemingly incoherently cautious status quo approach is that the medical community doesn't operate on the span of one pandemic, but is rather in a perpetual struggle. So even if the short-term expected value of an excessively cautious approach is negative, resulting in more deaths and a longer pandemic, it might be outweighed by reducing the chance of damaging public faith in medicine long-term by an erroneous more aggressive move.
I still don't agree, but that very long-term view is the only defense I see for the approach given what we knew at the time.
The theory that they're overindexing on protecting that credibility doesn't really comport with their behavior the rest of pandemic, however. Leaving aside all of the blood on the hands of mindless bureaucracy (like effectively banning testing for Covid in the early pandemic when it was most crucial), there has been decision after decision that prioritized status quo bias and RCT-worship even when the long game suggests it would damage their credibility (the fervent anti-mask recommendations in the early pandemic is a great example, as is the bizarre insistence on recommending precautions against fomites over aerosols until extremely late).
More importantly, "public health is misleading you at the cost of your health/life because they're playing the long game" doesn't actually preserve much credibility. It certainly casts public health figures in a more positive light, but I'm not really thinking in terms of blaming individuals over institutions/cultures anyway. It doesn't really matter _why_ public health advice is wrong in obvious and significant ways. What matters is the ultimate conclusion: if you have basic scientific literacy and an IQ over 105, form your own broad understanding of the science. This isn't a call to jettison epistemic humility: you're not going to be able to understand things anywhere close to as well as an individual epidemiologist can. But the point is that listening to the science as filtered through public health advice _is even worse_, in the same way that getting nutrition advice from the USDA will.
I watched Contagion for the first time last week, and they had the same attitude toward fomites, where it was spread through knobs and cash registers.
I’m convinced that the movie was interpreted as a documentary on what to do rather than science.
Now I question how much hand-washing helps prevent the spread of other respiratory viruses.
Looks like, for flu, in this study, fomites were responsible for 4% of cases:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6121424/
… and
> Mask wearing is much more useful than hand washing for control of influenza A in the tested office setting. Regular cleaning of high-touch surfaces, which can reduce the infection risk by 2.14%, is recommended and is much more efficient than hand-washing.
But I’m just a guy that spent 2 minutes searching studies on Google of respiratory viruses, why make decisions so easily based on that when you can base decisions on a movie on Netflix.
To put it another way, that's the kind of information I would spend the time digging into once knowing the answer would push my model across a decision threshold. I look forward to seeing the follow-up research, which is usually the quickest way to fill in gaps in the "primitives".
Do you have a source for this I could see? I did some light Googling and couldn't find anything that said as much; it also runs contrary to the impact of Britain's choice of widespread vaccination over incremental effectiveness gains (though this is of course just a correlation). A study I did find[1] looking at effectiveness in the UK has first-dose effectiveness at 70%, roughly as expected (I'm using the UK here as a noisy proxy for the UK variant, but I think that's reasonable).
Leaving aside the veracity of this concern, the counterfactual was facing the massive winter surge many countries saw while intentionally choosing to vaccinate half as many people. It's not clear at all that it would be good policy, especially given the ability to change policy[2] as the reality on the ground changes. Seeing how public health has conducted themselves throughout pandemic, I simply don't have the blind faith that they handled this cost-benefit analysis competently.
To pick just one example I came across[3]: as much as I respect Bob Wachter, the Chair of Medicine at UCSF, he was exemplary of this flaw in critical thinking ability that medical culture indoctrinates into HCWs. He came around to FDF on New Year's, after a month of arguing against it. It's amazing to see him discover the concept of quantitative rigor in the face of uncertainty when speed is crucial. This is especially striking when contrasted against his prior argument in the opposite direction, which consists of handwavy platitudes around "unnecessary curveballs".
My sister and her husband are both (Ivy League-educated, very successful) physicians, one a clinician and one a clinician scientist. We've had a decade-long conversation about this tendency, the degree to which it exists, the degree to which it's salutary, how it should affect patient/informed-citizen behavior, etc. Part of my relative confidence in my model of this epistemic culture is that these pitfalls were entirely predictable, and indeed, I pre-registered concerns[4] about the pandemic's characteristics and how modern medical culture was likely to interact with it.
This isn't as damning an indictment of medicine as it may sound (the FDA's Vogonic bureaucracy fetish has way more blood on its hands than any of the flaws in medical culture). And one thing I've picked up from all my conversations with my brother-in-law is that the average consumer of medical information is almost unbelievably stupid (not how he would phrase it) and is far better off following public health (and nutrition) advice as dogma than trying to understand and pick it apart. But if you are basically scientifically-literate, say to the point that you can read and mostly understand the paper I shared in [1], you're likely far worse off uncritically accepting their epistemic flaws than using them as a baseline and doing your own research (and as always, retain a heaping dose of epistemic humility around your error bars and counterfactuals)
[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1088
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/world/india-covid-second-...
[3] https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1344667655324585986
[4] This was in conversation with them. Sadly, I have no online proof I can share without self-doxxing
For preventing infection:
B.1.1.7: 29.5% effective after one dose (Pfizer)
B.1.351: 16.9%
IIRC one of the tricky things in the development of mRNA vaccines was being careful to not overstimulate the immune systems, triggering autoimmune types of reactions.
It seems plausible to me that there is a "safe" level of immune response, and either too much or too little could be less desirable (maybe for different reasons).
If you power up the response to massive levels, does it also augment the downsides of that "original antigenic sin"?
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.03.21256520v...
The Pfizer vaccine is shown here to elicit increased cytokine immune response to many types of non-covid agitants like mold and bacteria. The danger there would be cytokine storm in the extreme or cytokine-induced inflammation in mild cases.
Again, could just be timing.
Second shot in a week, so we'll see if it happens again!
Except it didn't because past week or so they've been back again.
One guy infested himself with various worms to give his immune system something productive to do.
I myself didn’t really eat for a month once. That ended a multi month long flare. Idea is it kills off immune system for awhile.
Trial data for the mRNA vaccines has not yet indicated an elevated risk of experiencing a cytokine storm.
There’s really not much to get excited about here.
Related to this, vaccinations are correlated with a lower risk of Alzheimer's:
https://www.alz.org/aaic/releases_2020/vaccines-dementia-ris...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/health/vaccine-pregnancy....
And from Pfizer and Moderna's research: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-01-27/covid-19-va...
There is now a large trial of pregnant women getting the vaccinces. So far no evidence to suggest it is problematic.
So far, the evidence is pretty compelling that the vaccines have continued efficacy 6-7 months post-administration. It's obviously impossible to know much beyond a couple months however.
I'm aware that there's not enough information to say yet, but it's something I'd like to see them look out for. The side effects are absolutely not a good enough reason to avoid getting vaccinated, both for your own sake and as a participant in herd immunity, but I've personally witnessed enough unpleasantness to know that there will be people who avoid it just to avoid the side effects.
Being able to provide good advice to help the rational but fearful may help get us over the threshold, despite the large numbers of irrationally fearful. We'll need every single one to get there.
Don't let fear of side effects drive you away from getting the necessary booster. As of today, Fauci says I can ditch the mask. I'll still be keeping one in my pocket just in case though.
The number of poor reactions is very small, but pretending like they don’t exist or failing to address ways to overcome them only further fuels the fear in those hesitant to get vaccinated, and furthers the divisiveness in an issue we should all be working together on.
Which makes sense if you’re a politician or Dr. Fauci, but doesn’t make sense if you just care about the health and safety of everyone and want to get this damn pandemic over with already.
Forcing or shaming the hold outs to get vaccinated won’t do this, but giving honest confidence in the vaccine to people will.
Is it because the study period is just that i.e. 12 weeks? Even the studies on natural immunity from COVID suggests at least 6 - 8 months antibody persistence because the study period were just that[1][2]. Note that policies are being made now to defer the jab for those who got infected by COVID, based on these studies.
We'll likely see studies confirming long term protection from vaccines & natural immunity after disease in coming months. Btw, How much is long term?
[1]https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...
Right, reduces, but the full dose is needed to render the virus mostly harmless. My partner's coworker has Covid and one does of the vaccine, they are still severely ill.
It takes ~14 days after the first dose to get the ~80-90% protection (Pfizer/Moderna).
Please correct me in case you have different information
Second of all, the choice was never between giving two doses to 16 million people (as of today) or giving one dose to 16 million people. The choice was giving two doses to 8 million people or one dose to 16 million people. The total death toll from the pandemic would be lower the sooner we get to the point of herd immunity. Giving everyone one dose gets us there sooner and ultimately saves lives.
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/immunization...
In an ideal world, you'd do a few clinical trials and figure out the optimal dose regime and timing. (I'm not really sure why they didn't run 5 parallel trials with different timings to begin with).
In the world we inhabit, alas we didn't have those studies. But that doesn't mean we have no reason to believe that the first shot is protective! You can still look at how vaccines in general work, and our basic understanding of immunology. In general, for vaccines with multiple shots, the model seems to be that the first shot gets you >50% of the protection, and the second shot mainly extends the protection over time. This might not be how the COVID vaccines work, but your priors should be fairly strong that this is what the clinical trials will ultimately show, because that's what they have shown for a bunch of different vaccines with different mechanisms.
If you're in an ideal world where inaction doesn't cost you anything, sure, do the studies.
In the world we inhabit, thousands were dying every day, and so inaction is morally horrifying. Giving a pair of doses as first shots to two >65yo results in far fewer people dead than giving that pair of doses as a full course to one 65yo. The expected value is pretty clear on this one, even though the clinical trials were not.
You should probably have started to feel tentatively confident that the first-dose-first strategy was sound circa mid-Feb, when it the UK's death rate had been falling rapidly for about two weeks: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/GGlgMxEKIoaxyuZbuHjjEBH2er... -- while it's hard to disentangle lockdown effects, EU vs. UK was mainly a difference between "locked down with vaccines" and "locked down without vaccines", at risk of oversimplifying.
If I had to summarize in a sentence: use Bayesian reasoning rather than applying unjustifiably strict error bars on your decision process.
In the US, though, I don't think we have ever been forced between these two scenarios: we have always had enough vaccine doses for people in our high risk classes. The question thereby is more whether it is better to have all the essential workers and everyone over 65 years old along with maybe third of everyone else with a single dose or to have the first two classes of people fully dosed... and "I dunno", right? ;P
I'm not sure; January->April the US was constrained by vaccine supply. The initial rollout to at-risk groups was not a case of "we got a shipment of 100m doses, now we need to figure out how to use them", it was more "we're manufacturing 1-2m doses per day and trying to ramp that up". It took months to go through the gradually broadening risk tiers. (e.g. see https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d..., which says "deliver 100m vaccines by end of March, 100m more by end of May").
I believe the US was keeping shots back in favor of using them later as second doses, rather than giving them immediately as first doses, though I don't have a citation for that to hand. If that's right, the US could have ~doubled its rate of vaccination, i.e. got to the April 15 "all age group open vaccination" milestone in 2 months instead of 4 months, with first doses only administered to that population. At the very least, we were giving second doses in Feb (21-28 days after first doses in Jan) that could have been given as first doses to the higher-risk groups we were still prioritizing through April.
There's a follow-up question on which I have not run the numbers -- are there any X,Y pairs for which you'd rather hold back a shot to give as a second dose later for a >X year old, instead of giving it immediately as a first dose to a <Y year old. Interesting question, I don't think that's what you were getting at though.
We don't have time to RCT test all scenarios. That's how life works. The long term immunity as a function of delta between the first and second shot has not been tested at all. J&J vaccine is one shot mostly because it can only be one shot yet it still works. There are other aspects that have not been tested in the trials. We need to make reasonable decisions under uncertainty in an ever changing landscape.
In other words, the supply was enough to make sure that all of those people could get one dose in twelve weeks, so that's the dose interval that was set.
That goal (quickly vaccinate all of the at risk population with one dose) was pretty much achieved. I guess it remains to be seen whether it was the right goal, but early indications (deaths/day down from 1,000 to 10 or so) are positive. (Obviously correlation is not causation and so on, and there undoubtedly a ton of confounders.)
It might take a while, as immunity wanes, to see what these different intervals really mean.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/will-india-s-devasta...
Apart from India it seems that Japan should take notes, it's quite a surprise to me that only 1% of the population has been fully vaccinated.
No wonder they are reluctant to let spectators be present for the olympics.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/only-1-japan-fully-v...
They are actively cancelling Olympic training events and reducing paralympic events, and only 10% of Tokyo residents surveyed said they are happy the games are going to continue as planned.
In Denmark the English B.1.1.7 variant needed about 3 weeks to become dominant, though it's a bit unclear which variant will become the dominant one in Japan.
Some additional links
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/COVID-variants...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
And a link that gives some insight as to why Japan have vaccinated so few.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/opinions...
And Japan seems to be an outlier with massively underreported deaths.
Probably because many elderly died alone at home and where interred or incinerated without further testing.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/05/15/there-have-bee...
https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
I’m happy that pigs and birds don’t seem to get COVID-19 (and hoping that’s not a mutation away).
seeing almost half the efficacy after 250 days.
Edit: podcast link for who's curious https://ark-invest.com/podcast/understanding-mrna-conversati...
Wild poliovirus has been eradicated in all continents except Asia, and as of 2020, Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only two countries where the disease is still classified as endemic.[5][6]
Polio certainly has been eliminated from the United States. The point is, polio is no longer a significant problem here.
Why would anyone's vision for the future of humanity be an animal that can only exist in the context of an advanced civilization? Why would anyone's vision of humanity be an animal that is dependent for survival on <product> from <company> as though they were cattle? To reduce a human being to a dependent component of a pharmaceutical production chain is an abhorrent moral hazard.
Smallpox was made extinct, and other diseases may be made greatly reduced because they are unique to humanity. But the many coronaviruses are shared between mammals, and are an eternal component of the environment. We have a moral obligation to evolve to suit the environment. That is what it means to be a successful animal.
So tools as a whole are just... sins? How far down this line do you want us to go? No plastics? No computers? No structures? No roads? No clothes?
That is a textbook description of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, IMO. We are not very impressive without an advanced civilization.
Dolphins are evolutionarily unfit to occupy the niche they had back on land. The bacteria that precipitated the oxygen crisis were very successful until they weren't.
There are many reasons to care about environmental destruction, pollution, and the loss of biodiversity, but at the same time it's neither particularly rational nor natural to obsess about preserving exactly the niches which existed at a particular point in time, nor our fitness for them.
If civilization crumbles, then natural selection will take the reins and a lot of people will die, but that's not a goal we should aim for.
And we've done that by evolving our mental capacities and developing a wide range of tools that have enabled us to survive and prosper. We are apex predators of apex predators, to the point that we kill other predators for sport rather than food.
Stick me naked and toolless in the wilds of Siberia and I'd estimate my survival time in hours rather than days. Without our tools we're a pretty useless species that hasn't even evolved far enough to be able to walk on two legs without developing back pain, unlike penguins.
Vaccines taken once in a lifetime, or taken annually, or taken daily are just another tool. Why is this any worse than brushing your teeth, showering, taking medication or even getting dressed. If a doctor told you to take heart medication on a daily basis to stay alive, would you refuse on the grounds that it's better for humans to evolve hearts that are less prone to heart disease?
I'm not sure how any of this related to morality. What is your moral framework here?
However, if we accept it, the unique success of humanity clearly does not stem from blindly accepting whatever nature throws our way. Humanity's success, and defining characteristic is that we're able to bend nature to our will, and when that isn't possible, consciously bend ourselves.
The vaccines are another example, and the mRNA vaccines are incredible example of this. We engineered a way to use our own body as a factory.
Humanity's progress doesn't depend on giving up on technology, it depends on increasing our abilities with it. Evolution is too slow and too random, humanity can do better altering our own genome. If we survive, humanity will eventually be able to manipulate entire solar systems or even galaxies. Possibly the whole universe. That's our destiny, not dying of smallpox on our home planet.
We're already half-human half-chemical half-cyborgs. We drink coffee which includes caffeine, we use alcohol and THC regularly to "socialize", we take ibuprofen et al when feel pain, we eat sugar because we're fucking addicted. We use internet almost all the time except when sleeping and taking a shower. We check reddit, twitter, HN, facebook, instagram as if our lives depend on it. We're on track to build virtual reality googles that'll entertain us in an entire different simulated reality that we can only experience via our eyes. Not to mention most people look at monitors most of their lives anyway.
We regularly vaccinate against tetanus, HPV, chicken pox, flu etc. Do you not get the flu shot every year? I vaccinate my cat against rabies and distemper every year. I take antidepressants (anxiety) and antihistemics (allergy) every day, because I kinda need them to live normally. My girlfriend has to take pain medicine once a month due to her basic biology.
And the problem is we'll add COVID and cold to our annual flu shots, and that somehow makes our world any more dystopic. Makes absolutely no fucking sense. There are trillions of shit to be outraged about, this ain't one of those. Just chill.
Incidentally, only half of people or less even in affluent countries get the annual flu shot. It is frequently believed to be relevant only for the elderly and at-risk demographics.
This was never the case. If you didn't understand that COVID is here to stay indefinitely, like flu, after April 2020 I'm sorry but you aren't paying attention. Not to mention, if we follow perfect vaccination around the world, we can eradicate COVID like we eradicated smallpox etc, although this will be a lot harder.
So, I still don't see your point. Yes people need to take yearly vaccines not to die of horrible diseases. That has been the case for the last few hundred years.
> Yes people need to take yearly vaccines not to die of horrible diseases. That has been the case for the last few hundred years.
No, it hasn’t. The only common annual vaccination is for influenza, it was introduced only in recent decades, and, as I mentioned, only half the population or less take it annually.
You only take flu annually but there are other vaccines you need to take periodically. E.g. tetanus booster every 10 years etc. For example, I'm supposed to take my last HPV vaccine this summer and this is the 3rd shot. I'm 25 and I took approx. one vaccine every year for the last few years. I'm not saying strictly one every 12 months, it's just that it doesn't make sense to be outraged about COVID vax since regular vax is already part of our lives.
This isn't even remotely true. There's a set of vaccines taken in childhood, a few later. And that's it generally.
Had the situation been reversed, you'd have had to get Yellow Fever vaccinations a lot more often if you were travelling into those regions, and the COVID situation would be one-and-done. It just happens that this is the way it worked out, instead. There's nothing dystopian about this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_disease_case_fat...
I know the IFR is lower in developing countries, I never meant to imply otherwise.
Even if nasal sprays bought from a corner pharmacy are on the horizon, they would probably only reach developing countries years from now – and merely buying a product from a pharmacy in most countries might not get you an internationally recognized certificate of vaccination.
The only way that changes is if some new and extremely deadly variant is out there, but again past vaccinations are likely still helpful. Thus, regular vaccination deployment would be a pure win for travelers.
You are right as far as about half getting it, at least for the United States. Quite a few people who are not elderly or at risk get it. Here are the age breakdowns.
About 60% of the people under 18 get it [1]. Under 18 is about 25% of the population.
About 34% of 18-49 year olds get it. They make up about 42% of the population.
That makes under 18s who get flu vaccine about 15% of the population, and 18-49s who get flu vaccine about 14% of the population. If only 50% of the population get the flu vaccine, that would mean that 58% of the people getting flu vaccine are under 50.
I do not. I have never had a flu shot in my life.
You do not have to feel that you cannot live without pharmaceuticals. The value of a tetanus shot is obvious, but it can be something you choose, not something which you are burdened to bear as the price of birth. Depressive disorders are wholly a disease of our malignant society. I would encourage you to examine the work of Stephen Ildari, for it has helped me greatly. I encourage you to see what happens to you and your gf when you eat plants instead of processed <product>.
You can be more than a tax cattle, or someone else's paycheck, or the reflection of the vision and will of powerful strangers. You are still very young. Take control of who and what you are.
We should be celebrating science, the discovery and advancement of vaccines, and their ability to give immunity or strong protection against diseases that have previously debilitated individuals or worse.
The fact that I have never known anyone with Polio is because of the strong global efforts to irradiate the disease from the face of the planet. Tragically the anti-science and anti-vaccine messaging has made that not possible for covid... something that's already resulted in near equal death of WWII in just over a year and will only continue.
Are you saying that every covid vaccine has 100 % efficacy? ("everyone", "a vaccine"). AFAIK this is not true for any extant vaccine.
Meanwhile those who do choose to take it will hopefully be able to live a life largely free of these annoyances and dangers.
One specific thing I do find freeing about the vaccines is that I don't really need to worry about being asymptomatically infected and passing the disease onto others who are more vulnerable. I guess I could simply say "fuck those people", as many have done, but I guess for me, responsibility is a counterpart to freedom.
FWIW, Stephen Ilardi appears to support vaccination, so you may want to dig a little deeper into his thoughts around them.
Who is we? I don't consume caffeine or THC, don't eat much sugar or drink much alcohol, and don't remember taking painkillers at all in 2020 or 2021 so far. I don't use social media like FB or IG. I don't remember getting a flu shot ever, maybe in childhood and I forgot.
Despite telling the other commenter to chill, your comment is bafflingly aggressive. It's possible to live without drugs and social media and we should encourage that, not take for granted that everyone should be forced to use drugs just to socialize or eat sugar.
(I say this as someone who fortunately almost never gets sick. People who are often sick would relish this even more.)
Well the ONLY year of my life (I'm 33) I wasn't sick was 2020-2021. I think... the mask helped a lot. I feel like I understand now all these people telling me getting so sick every year wasn't normal...
Continually applying harsh selection criteria just homogenizes a population to a local maxima and leaves them vulnerable to future change.
By far the largest problem of any genetic pool (animals, plants, whatever) is not having enough genetic diversity in it. See: Cavendish bananas, the Tasmanian devil.
I doubt you do any of these things, because you aren't willing to accept the low chance of survival-to-adulthood that typical wild animals have. It may keep their genetics in tip top shape, but is that really what you want?
So what is suddenly giving you pause here? Just the idea that these shots may be needed more regularly, rather than a few times during childhood?
Do you think we should return to a life in which we forage naked for berries in the forest?
Assuming the answer is no, where do you draw the line as to what technologies you're willing to accept, and which you aren't?
I personally do not get those seasonal flu shots, and I had no issues for years. It was entirely voluntary, and no one gave a shit if you got it or not (it was not the first question that left people when they met you either), it was up to you entirely. We treat the COVID-19 shot very differently, I mean, after all, there actually is a vaccine cert you receive, and without it, you are pretty much doomed these days (it varies between countries, but here many employers made it a prerequisite). What about those who cannot receive the vaccine for health reasons?
Many people here got the vaccine only to get the vaccine cert, because that meant that they could go back to work (as it was a prerequisite). This artificial limitation or restriction goes to extremes somewhere. Here they talk about not being able to receive basic health care without it! Can you believe that? But of course you have to continue paying for social insurance (that covers it).
---
If I may, I would like to have those down-votes explained as I did not say anything that is false, and I did not express my opinion regarding the vaccine either. What exactly could have been down-voted? I believe everything I said is true. If it is not, can you point it out, please?
I still have diseases, just other kinds. No vaccine or treatment for them.
We are still trying to figure out how to make effective flu vaccines.
> What about those who cannot receive the vaccine for health reasons?
This is why herd immunity is so important. For those healthy adults that are able to get vaccinated, should get vaccinated. When herd immunity is reached, those who cannot be vaccinated for health reasons are protected by everyone else.
I do not believe the vaccine cert being fair, I believe it is discriminatory. People who cannot receive the vaccine for health reasons may not have access to basic health care in my country (if they go with it), and they already cannot get a job in many places. How is this not discriminating? Heck, if people are so caring, then how come that I am being down-voted for expressing such a view, a view against discrimination? Actually, for the most part I was only talking about life around here (i.e. facts, that for some reason get down-voted, unless they read too much into my comment), and was not expressing such a view. In this comment, I specifically do. In any case, no worries, I do not expect you to actually give me a reasoning as you cannot possibly see inside their heads.
I don't know, maybe its all fine and good, but if you ask me, I think a lot of people are way too excited to be part of this study. Especially since the risk/reward doesn't seems to be that great in the first place.
We're talking about small amounts here, that aren't replicating. If you have the virus coursing around you get a lot of contact with the real spike protein, which can replicate inside your body.
The body is used to fighting off a lot of viruses and bacteria at the same time. Why would this spike protein, without the attached virus, be different?
After all we can't compare the vaccine to a world without the virus, since we won't get that back. Instead we need to compare the vaccine to the world with the virus.
Maybe it does not matter much, but the immune reaction can indeed be very strong. Just don't be completely naive when in comes to regular booster shots, there might be a fine line between benefits and negatives. Also other types of vaccines are on the way I heard, so we'll see, maybe that will open up alternative ways to combat the virus.
Are we even remotely close to having a suitable vaccine for a common cold? What is the point of having a vaccine for a simple cold anyway...?
Covid is by far the worst and deadliest pandemic since 1914, which both justifies and facilitates very fast testing and use of new vaccines.
But we haven't had the time to look for long-term effects yet. This is not an antivaxxer stance - it's basic epistemology. mRNA vaccines allow us to trigger and target the immune system to point it in arbitrary directions to a degree we haven't before. The immune system is a sensitive thing that can cause lots of damage if it gets confused.
I'd want a lot of high-quality data on long-term effects in terms of risk of autoimmune disease, Alzheimers, ME and so on a world where we deliberately provoke strong immune responses versus things that are mostly minor inconveniences - the common cold, the flu, herpes, etc.
I certainly hope this is the future, but I won't be the first in line to test it out.
Hopefully, eventually the virus evolves into a less deadly form and maybe our immune systems develop some more resistance. I don't know if the latter is actually reasonable to expect.
The more people who die, the more likely it is we evolve protection
Since I don't have 10,000 years I prefer to make cars obsolete.
Evolution doesn't care. There are also reasons to not protect the weak. Either way it changes the future of the species. On one hand we don't protect the weak, and thus the strong survive; on the other hand we protect the weak, the species doesn't get as strong, but we can encourage some other trait(s).
Note, strong species might be a stronger skull, better reactions, or something else that I can't even think of. I don't know how to force any choice.
Actually this _really_ pisses me off that you were downvoted. Everyone is treating this vaccine plan (and I mean speaking from the US point of view vaccine plan) like it is the end of the pandemic permanantly. I can assure everybody that it is NOT. Indeed, there has been talk of these universal flu & cold vaccines for decades, but they have yet to be produced - just look how long the COVID vaccines took to be released worldwide when the first one was produced in January of 2020 (not a typo). Meanwhile, multiple countries in Africa, as well as all of India are still being ravaged by this virus - where is thier vaccine help? There is such a western centric twist on HackerNews that it really makes me question just how intelligent our "best programmers in the world" really are. From my initial view point, it seems everyone here understands the entire situtation no better than any other anectdotal theory from the average lurker on 4chan or reddit.
People don’t have very broad knowledge or education, a few do, but it can be hard to pick out.
(As best as I know there was little scientific evidence available when they decided to delay)
And then, merely hours ago, they decided because of the Indian variant they'd instead change the recommendation from 12 weeks to 8. So, at least in my opinion, it's a bit of a random walk down statistics street.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/statement-from-the-uk-chi...
This isn't true, the JCVI did have evidence. In fact their statement showing reasons behind the call said:
"There is evidence that a longer interval between the first and second doses promotes a stronger immune response with the AstraZeneca vaccine."
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prioritising-the-...
(Statement first released on 31st of December 2021, only available via google archive https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...)
Some people might call it incredible luck, while others might say that it was a good decision made by world leading vaccine experts informed directly by the scientists who created the vaccine.
In fact, the BMJ said at the start of January:
> The trials of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine did include different spacing between doses, finding that a longer gap (two to three months) led to a greater immune response, but the overall participant numbers were small. In the UK study 59% (1407 of 2377) of the participants who had two standard doses received the second dose between nine and 12 weeks after the first. In the Brazil study only 18.6% (384 of 2063) received a second dose between nine and 12 weeks after the first.3 The combined trial results, published in the Lancet,4 found that vaccine efficacy 14 days after a second dose was higher in the group that had more than six weeks between the two doses (65.4%) than in the group that had less than six weeks between doses (53.4%).
So there was knowledge/thoughts when the decision was made that an extended gap could change efficacy.
Besides, let’s give the UK’s biomedical community more credit than assuming it was a fluke anyway!
Not much positive to say about the handling of covid but when it comes to vaccine plans they've really done brilliantly.
Probably because it's scientists, doctors and the NHS that have handled it and not the government.
This looks to fit in with that trend ... after 14 days, slowly growing immunity.
No rna jab had never passed phase iii before, so they hedged their bets and tested a 1/2 + 1 formula, knowing that it had higher likelihood to succeed testing.
This is important for anyone who thinks it might be a good idea to wait. You have to carefully weigh the risk of being vulnerable in the meantime.
(and some protection can be in the 70% range [1])
[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
"The Moderna vaccine has been shown to have an efficacy of approximately 92 per cent in protecting against COVID-19, starting 14 days after the first dose." - https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/the-mod...
One conclusion a friend of mine wrote about this is "One other surprising thing which is not obvious, but is made very clear from the results, is that it really takes real time for this vaccine to get effective. It only starts becoming truly useful after 2 weeks, but even then keeps getting better with time. This effect is one reason why there was a very real lag between when Israel got vaccinated at a very high percentage of population and when the cases started freefalling (2-3 weeks+). "
It's very like simulated annealing.