Short version: Any vaccine is better then no vaccine.
Maybe it's bad, maybe it's good and I suppose it's not that different than seasonal flu shots... but immunity by subscription still feels new to me.
If we take it to the logical limit, does that look like family subscriptions to McAfee mRNA edition? A flu is sequenced in London and x weeks later the vaccination is included in my quarterly update package?
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted a lot and I haven't even started on future doctor's office mRNA printers yet! Regulated to heck, partly for security reasons, vendor locked consumables and they use proprietary encryption. They have to jailbreak them in sanctioned countries and enterprising hackers work to decrypt the updates. You wouldn't pirate a vaccine! Would you?
Just like the recommended seasonal flu vaccine. Most folks won’t bother to get their seasonal covid vaccine. If you were in that group before. Your life hasn’t changed.
If covid is more severe than the flu yet requires a similar vaccination cycle (nobody knows yet!) that does seem like a major change to me.
Childhood and travel vaccinations are once-offs and seasonal flu vaccination is a good idea but not a big deal for most.
In my view that would be a very interesting development.
Here an image wearing masks from 1918: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wthr.com/amp/article/sports...
And if you're living in the US, there should be some info from your the history lessons about deadly diseases killing most of the native population...
And a lot of people volunteer for flu shots, protecting those unwilling to do so.
Second, the yearly flu vaccine already does "updates" to your immune system. That is also not a new concept, and I see nothing ridiculous about it. From what I have read, the portion of the virus targeted by the mRNA vaccines does not mutate as easily as say the flu, which is why these vaccinations still work. You will probably need a booster just to keep your immune system "remembering" the virus, but it probably won't be shifting around as much as a flu shot would
By "constant vaccination" I didn't mean at a population level, I meant a personal need for regular boosters. I agree it's not that likely and I also hope they aren't required.
And in relation to parent comment, I haven't had a polio or smallpox booster in decades, nor do I expect to ever receive one again. I believe you have misunderstood parent comment.
Uh, mass vaccination is 100% a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#
I would say that we "Need" it. You could say that we don't, but it's vaccines or Polio outbreaks, so IMHO there's only one rational choice and it's not Polio.
Yes, there are "vaccinate everyone" vaccines cited above. There are also "seasonal" vaccines for the flu.
There has never been a need for a vaccine that is both of those. And once the disease is under control, it doesn't seem like covid-19 will be one.
This is a bald faced lie. As you say yourself, there's the flu shot. Kids need their shots for school. We need to get various vaccines before traveling between certain regions. There are all sorts of vaccine boosters and new vaccines they have been recommending to my elderly parents since they were late middle age.
Hell this isn't even the first (or second, or third) mass vaccination campaign - there was smallpox and polio and measels and chicken pox/shingles.
To say that the general population hasn't needed it is literally the exact opposite of anything resembling the truth: we've been constantly getting vaccines for longer than I've been alive.
> The flu "epidemic" never ended. The common cold epidemic never ended.
It's almost like you didn't read the article because the point was made very clear that the "epidemic" does end when it transitions to something "endemic".
Most people wouldn't regard the common cold as an epidemic as you suggest it is. You're correct that we still live with it, but that doesn't make it an epidemic. As daily deaths continue falling at some point people will stop seeing COVID-19 as an epidemic but something that's endemic and treat it more like seasonal flu. It's not the eradication of the virus that marks the end of a epidemic, but it's declining severity and our changing approach to the virus.
If "it's much easier to control population flow into an island" then you still have to step up and control it. The UK government did not even show interest in doing that.
The UK government mismanaged their borders, and most other aspects of the pandemic; notable exception being vaccination.
Not really, Australia is an continent not an island.
And to be precise, only Europe and Asia are connected by land borders (suez canal, panama canal).
More, UK is an island, also Ireland, Japan... and they don't have much less cases then the rest of the world
The movement of people is a good thing. Hence stamping it out would have a huge cost, both emotionally and financially. The vaccines are comparatively cheap.
And people seem to forget the other part: your death will come for you eventually so it's not as if by avoiding COVID you've avoided a car accident. Besides, the danger of COVID has been vastly exaggerated, but irrational and disproportionate fear has gripped the brains of a lot of people.
People (typically white collar) also forget the deaths and health effects of the lockdown itself.
My answer: to live life fully with what little time we have. Memento mori.
It took Melbourne like 3 months to eliminate all cases. Far more than a "few weeks."
It would take the sort of effort (for the US or EU) only possible with total hindsight. But if Trump tried to seal our borders with force in Jan 2020, there is no way Democrats would have accepted it. They'd call it rationalization for an attack on immigration.
Much worse than that. Remember, Trump's (first) impeachment by the House had occurred in December 2019. He was not acquitted in the Senate until early February.
Patient Zero for the US is believed to have entered on January 15. Had Trump on January 14 announced a total and complete shutdown of the US border, Democrats and 95% of mass media would immediately have denounced it as Trump preparing a coup to seize total power, using the ridiculous pretext of a disease that had had zero impact on the US (and was racist to ascribe in any way to China).
Other cold and flu strains are less deadly these days as we’re all mostly adapted to them.
Why would that not happen with this coronavirus too? Why do we assume that this coronavirus will mutate more quickly than the other coronaviruses that are already endemic?
Sure you can keep saying things "might" happen or "we don't know" this or that, but we do have a lot of historical precedent for these kinds of viruses, so it's reasonable to presume that it will become not-that-big-a-deal, the way all the others viruses like it have done.
Ergo, as it becomes endemic, and all of our immune systems learn how to respond to it, it's completely reasonable to expect that it will become benign to most people. (After all, it already is pretty benign to many/most people, compared to the original SARS and MERS).
Repeating "we don't know" is an easy response, and something you can say in response to anything like this, but it's not really addressing the logic I'm presenting. You really have to demonstrate why this virus is substantially different to all the other respiratory viruses that have become endemic and mostly benign, which you've not attempted to do. You just keep saying "we don't know". Sure, but we actually have some solid historical precedent, and this virus is so-far showing no signs of being any different from all those before it.
Nevertheless, on the way in which it is widely regarded as being different, I just addressed that in a reply to another commenter here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27290964
For what it's worth I'm not really saying it's "like the flu" - more that we should expect it to be like other coronaviruses, unless there's significant evidence to the contrary.
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n579
This contradicts your position that COVID evolves just like the flu does. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
My point was that human vulnerability is due to it being novel, and that as more people’s immune systems become attuned to it (whether via contracting the virus, vaccination or being exposed to fragments in the environment), it will become less novel and less deadly to those exposed to it. Therefore, we should still expect the fatality rate to be steady among those who have never been exposed to it, but that will start dropping off quickly as immunity becomes more widespread, which is what we're seeing.
Based on everything we know, a “new” “novel” virus would most likely hit us via a jump from another species, not through continued evolution of this virus.
As for higher fatality rates from B.1.1.7 or other strains - reports about this are contradictory [1], and notably the headlines about it being no worse than other strains are always much smaller/less-prominent that the those trying to terrify us about it being much worse.
[1] https://www.contagionlive.com/view/sars-cov-2-b117-variant-m...
If a virus kills its host before it has the chance to spread, then it has an evolutionary pressure to evolve into a less harmful variant.
The difficulty with this coronavirus is that it can spread asymptomatically AND it takes up to a week before you notice any symptoms.
That's a problem, this virus has less of an evolutionary pressure to evolve towards a more benign variant. Imagine if it were to kill 100% of its hosts after 10 days, if you don't get a single symptom in the first 5 days while you're still able to transmit it, this virus will have barely any evolutionary pressure to evolve towards a more benign form.
Still, the less a virus kills the more it is able to spread, a virus's ultimate goal is to make as many copies of itself as possible.
There are plenty of viruses that have not gotten more benign over time, HIV for example.
Everything considered, I do personally believe that over the longer term 10-30 years, the disease caused by sars-cov-2 ancestors will be less bad than they are now, taking into account vaccination and our immune systems getting used to this newest virus as well.
Sure, but as you say, this is an imaginary scenario, not the reality.
In reality, it's symptomless/benign for most people for 5-7 days, then in some people it becomes symptomatic, and in relatively few cases - of impaired/frail people (or occasionally people who seemed "healthy" but had some hidden vulnerability) - it becomes severe and potentially lethal. But that last part is due to the fact that it is novel and takes time/effort to fight off, not because it has some magical quality that makes it sit dormant in your system for 5+ days before it wakes up and says "surprise, you're suddenly nearly dead".
HIV is a totally different kind of virus, so comparisons to it are mostly unhelpful. Whereas plenty of coronaviruses and other respiratory viruses have become endemic and mostly-benign before.
There's no reason to believe the rate of severe cases won't decline (more quickly than 10-30 years) once more people's immune systems become attuned to it.
Can someone point me to the latest information on asymptomatic transmission of covid-19? Last I had seen asymptomatic transmission wasn't likely:
Luckily, because coronaviruses mutate more slowly than influenza viruses, they will probably be better matches than flu shots are.
Many common cold viruses are coronaviruses, and we haven't eradicated them either.
There's hasn't been an incentive to - cost high, benefit low, after all it's just a cold.
Maybe that will change now.
There are new weapons in humanity's arsenal in the form of mRNA vaccines, and a huge incentive do develop this and to take these viruses more seriously.
Flu is epidemic flu. Hopefully we are coming to the end of the pandemic - assuming new variants don't play stupid
Most likely not. If C19 mutates in a fashion that allows it to "stay with us forever" it will almost certainly come with lower (cold-level) mortality.
That is one of the trade-offs that the virus genome has to "make" as it mutates. More lethality is a genetic dead-end because of vaccines. Cold level lethality is a genetic steady state that would allow it to thrive.
All RNA viruses mutate in the same fashion because of the way RNA polymerase functions. Its close to a statistical certainty. The absolute number of mutations is not strictly causal. What is relevant is whether the mutation(s) is beneficial (more internal spread while escaping host immune system) and whether this local variant has the fitness to dominate and spread externally.
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you - can you explain what you mean ?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.livescience.com/amp/coronav...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/how-the...