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Comment by adriancr | Hacker News Reader

> there are billions of people that will never have access to the vaccines

False. Pfizer alone will manufacture 2.5 billion doses this year, 3 billion next year. Considering EU/US already at 50-60% vacicnated, there are a lot of doses for the rest of the world.

Moderna will likely have similar production. The other simpler ones even more.

> If it is true that only unvaccinated people generates new dangerous versions of the virus

You get infected, virus can mutate, it's that simple.

> which is completely false since leaky vaccines can cause enhanced versions of the virus

You do realize you are not on reddit or an anti-vax forum?

If yes, please back up this statement with proper scientific sources.

If in good faith, for your own well-being please get out of that conspiracy theory rabbit-hole

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You are surprisingly optimistic. We have been a few months in the vaccination campaign and we are already in need of boosters to patch new strains. Even if the numbers you mention are true, you still have to deliver a product with extremely complex logistics in highly unreachable places (vaccinating westerners with our infrastructure is way easier than doing the same in Africa), hope that they will really deliver those numbers at that speed, and cross fingers that when this happens, the virus hasn't already mutated enough to make it obsolete. Consider also that many people in third world countries do not trust westerners so I would predict that the percentage of people that will avoid the jab might be much higher than what you have in the USA or EU.

Anyway I am sorry I didn't share an article about what I mentioned, I thought it was known enough to not need an article. (I might say the same about your numbers)

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/info:doi/10.13...

> Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.

The journal you reference studies Marek's disease in chicken. The vaccine does not prevent transmission (which farmers found good enough). As such, all vaccinated chicken can get the virus but dont get sick and still transmit it.

That is irrlevant since, its a study on chicken, with a vaccine that wouldn't be approved for humans. Also all vaccines stop transmission with 90-95% or less for poorer vaccines (you are 95% less likely to catch it)

All the study shows is the need to vaccinate everyone and extinguish the virus same as polio before it evolves.

As for numbers source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/biontech-...

As for difficulty distributing vaccines in Africa. Where there's a need people will figure out a way.

The fact that it's about chickens is irrelevant. This is about how viruses evolve when confronted with an immune system.

But you are correct that the lower the transmission rate from vaccinated people, the lower the risk of enhanced viruses.

But your 95% is debatable. The number goes drastically down depending on which vaccine you use, the new strains, and probably time.

My point is that the myth that unvaccinated people are the part of the population creating enhanced variants is false. Before the vaccination propaganda started it was known to everyone that isolating the sick tends to forces the virus to evolve in less dangerous strains.

> My point is that the myth that unvaccinated people are the part of the population creating enhanced variants is false.

Incorrect. By logic, 95% (or whatever % you want) of the vaccinated population will not catch virus. As such, virus cannot evolve in them. Logical right?

This is what they study says.

> ... anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission ...

The vaccines we have PREVENT transmission with various effectiveness. The vaccine in study did NOT. Since viruses could still infect vaccinated chicken, it evolved.

The numbers are between 95% of Pfizer at his best and 50% of Sinovac. And we are not vaccinating to avoid a pandemic, we are doing it during the pandemic making the risk of it happening much higher.

But the final point I was trying to pass is that isolation of the sick will slowly push the virus to evolve in more contagious but less risky variants. Undetected infections in the vaccinated might cause strains that evade the vaccine and possibly be more dangerous (because of the lack of symptoms and isolation.)

> And we are not vaccinating to avoid a pandemic, we are doing it during the pandemic making the risk of it happening much higher.

I bet you would like to go back in time and tell the people that vaccinated against polio that they were doing it wrong too?

We are vaccinating to stop the pandemic.

India is an example what happens without vaccines btw

You must be kidding me. This is proof that you pro covid mrna therapy are just mindless news consumers. Have you ever spent a second reading articles or watching the data about what you believe?

tot cases/1M pop -> usa 104525 india 22200 deaths/1M pop -> usa 1872 india 295

There is no single country in asia that did as bad as the USA in the deaths department. What's now your next extravagant excuse? That the usa has been overcounting its deaths to scare its people into covid mrna therpies?

Oh boy ... You must not know anyone in India...

I know people that have lost family members there. They were struggling to get them spots in hospitals, everything is mess of corruption, under reporting, overflowed hospitals.

They're not even testing properly... See the airplane full of corona positive people with negative 'PCR' tests.

I do know people from India. But these are the numbers like it or not. You seem to be cherry picking only the numbers that convalidate your vision.

I can't tell how much of it is undercounting in India, how much is overcounting in the USA, and how much of it is that the friends and family networks in India count hundreds of people as opposed to the westerner ones.

Numbers are usually fudged, especially in corrupt countries.

It's also easy to have good numbers if you issue negative results without doing the actual tests and if you count the deaths as that of something else.

Hints of the false tests are:

- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/20/49-passengers-on-in...

- all of the ones that were positive had negative PCR tests... done in india

Similar things were happening in Communist Romania, hence my skepticism of India's number (back then - record "harvests", everybody well fed and happy, etc, meanwhile everyone was starving as crops were sold off on external markets)

Either way, best of luck, this discussion was fun for a while.

When did we decide that sharing aljazeera and citing what your friends told you > official data?

I mean, I agree that official data can be forged and should be taken with a grain of salt but come on. You can do better than this.

Also it has been proven that there is a strong inverse correlation between vitamin D levels and covid severity. If we assume that you are right and many more people died in India, how can you prove that it's because the vaccine that in Europe the mortality is so much lower?

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/advance-article/doi/10.1210/cl... + https://revista-fi.com.br/upload_arquivos/201606/20160600681... + https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24054...

And I'm happy you mention polio because it's a great example of what can happen when we allow companies to rush their product without enough safety standards:

In April 1955, soon after mass polio vaccination began in the US, the Surgeon General began to receive reports of patients who contracted paralytic polio about a week after being vaccinated with Salk polio vaccine from the Cutter pharmaceutical company, with the paralysis limited to the limb the vaccine was injected into. The Cutter vaccine had been used in vaccinating 200,000 children in the western and midwestern United States.[76] Later investigations showed that the Cutter vaccine had caused 40,000 cases of polio, killing 10.[76] In response the Surgeon General pulled all polio vaccines made by Cutter Laboratories from the market, but not before 250 cases of paralytic illness had occurred. Wyeth polio vaccine was also reported to have paralyzed and killed several children. It was soon discovered that some lots of Salk polio vaccine made by Cutter and Wyeth had not been properly inactivated, allowing live poliovirus into more than 100,000 doses of vaccine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

1. Same site:

> The inactivated polio vaccines are very safe

2. Do you have to worry about polio now?, no, why?

3. We have processes in place to verify vaccines, that's why you got news about janssen or whatever throwing away millions of doses due to contamination.

You are not opposing my point: 1. shit happened 2. rules have been put in place to avoid it from happening again 3. we are now skipping these rules in the name of urgency.

These are not vaccines but gene therapies that have never been tested. History proves risks do exist when new therapies are given to people.

I suppose when a normal vaccine like the novavax is coming out there won't be as much opposition.

I don't understand your skepticism...

Alas... not my business... I took the vaccine and there are no side effects. Same for all people I know. Same for countless others.

If you bring up risk, I think a much bigger risk is the virus destroying a good part of your lungs/kidneys/heart/etc... Ending up in ER and dieing...

And without everyone vaccinating it won't disappear. Either way, good luck

> And without everyone vaccinating it won't disappear. Either way, good luck

There are big doubts about it.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.27.20240309v...

Also: many people that look into the data of how therapies are going, have high hopes for Novavax, which seems very promising and works in a more "classic way". Sure some people will never get inoculated with anything but that's a different story.

Also:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33688681/

Those are interesting, although they do not help your original statement.

> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

This in essence states that given a immune population (either vaccine or natural), virus will evolve strains to escape anti-bodies... which is logical... if one such variant evolves, it will have a huge potential for multiplication.

It then states that strategies for viral elimination should be diversified... I would argue vaccinating everyone will lead to viral elimination... Otherwise virus is free to mutate in non-immune people.

> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33688681/

It's a study on the viruses natural mutation potential... and it's worrying... nothing regarding vaccines and so on... it's basically a warning that it can evolve to bypass vaccines and we'll be back to square one...

Again... nothing to help your argument about 'leaky' vaccines...

Have you read them yourself?

1) Wrong. It does help my original statement: "In this context, vaccines that do not provide sterilizing immunity (and therefore continue to permit transmission) will lead to the buildup of large standing populations of virus [47], greatly increasing the risk of immune escape." ... "Thus, our findings speak to the need for both public health and biomedical intervention strategies targeting SARS-CoV-2 to be designed to account for the risk of rapid evolutionary response to biomedical interventions."

2)Wrong again: "In the presence of mixed sera from multiple previously infected and/or vaccinated individuals these infections would create the appropriate conditions both for genetic recombination to occur, and for selection to rapidly sort multiple recombination-generated combinations of input immune evasion, cell entry and replication impacting mutations."

My original point is that people that made use of covid mrna therapy can be the source of new versions of the virus (because the therapy doesn't prevent infection nor spreading of the virus).

While it's true that the second study talks about mutations in both vaccinated and unvaccinated hosts, the first is clearly looking into the spike protein based therapy:

"The spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV-2 is the molecular target for many vaccines and antibody-based prophylactics aimed at bringing COVID-19 under control. Such a narrow molecular focus raises the specter of viral immune evasion as a potential failure mode for these biomedical interventions."

> "vaccines that do not provide sterilizing immunity"

Here's the flaw in your argument. All vaccines provide immunity so the study does not apply.

> because the therapy doesn't prevent infection nor spreading of the virus)

Wrong. Biontech - 95% of the population is immune. It prevents spread to 95% of vaccinated people. The rest for some reason or another it doesn't work.

So you build your whole argument on a logical fallacy.

I think I repeated this a few times so no point in continuing if you can't wrap your head around this.

Wrong. Again: Pfizer's chief scientific officer, Mikael Dolsten, said the recently reported dip in the vaccine's effectiveness in Israel was mostly due to infections in people who had been vaccinated in January or February. The country's health ministry said vaccine effectiveness in preventing both infection and symptomatic disease fell to 64% in June.

95% is based on faulty/old data.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

> vaccine effectiveness in preventing both infection

Oh man... so you do agree with me it prevents infection...

You are contradicting yourself...

So, its not 95 its 64, it still gives immunity... check mate?

Wrong. Definition of immunity: Protection from an infectious disease. If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/imz-basics.htm

If it prevents infection in 64% of cases it doesn't grant immunity.

Damn man, you do have trouble with basic concepts.

64% or 95% or whatever of the population are IMMUNE.

It's not 'prevent infection 64% of the timr' as you would in a videogame... It's 'get vaccinated and you have X% chance to develop antibodies, if you do, you are immune.'

In this context, vaccines that do not provide sterilizing immunity (and therefore continue to permit transmission) will lead to the buildup of large standing populations of virus [47], greatly increasing the risk of immune escape

And this sentence is from the study. A study about Covid "vaccines". Not me.

> vaccines that do not provide sterilizing immunity

And those vaccines are which?, does the study allege any of the current vaccines does not provide immunity?, is so please put the quote and the study for that.

Otherwise this is a hypothetical... if x then y... when x is false in reality...

Wrong. The study cited in [47] clearly talks about the therapies from AstraZeneca/Oxford, Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.27.20240309v...

Oh boy... sorry man, don't have the time to continue this.

47 in link above is a study of the cruise ship, not what you think.

If you meant the actual link above, it clearly states vaccines give immunity but it might be waning, i.e: won't last, same as natural immunity

Best of luck, thought I might help with your logic, but I admit defeat there.

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