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Comment by slumdev | Hacker News Reader

SARS-CoV-2 has four antigens. The existing vaccines stimulate the production of antibodies against only one of them, the spike protein.

The existing vaccines are proving ineffective against Delta because it has mutated significantly enough that its spike protein does not cause a neutralizing immune response. They may even be causing ADE, as evidenced by the most recent data comparing Israel and Palestine.

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Do you have a source for the recent data on ADE? I searched and didn’t find anything suggesting this. The only thing I see are studies that more vaccinated people are dying in Israel, but that is to be expected because the older people are, the more likely they are to be vaccinated and they have less immune response to the vaccine.

Source https://twitter.com/rzioni/status/1426178482569109504

See my reply to a sibling comment. The most damning evidence comes from the comparison between highly-vaccinated Israel, where there are many third-wave deaths, and mostly-unvaccinated Palestine, where there isn't a third-wave death spike at all. Having mostly-unvaccinated Palestine as a control group is showing us that we don't know what we thought we knew.

The graphs you've mentioned in your sibling comment does not separate deaths based on vaccination. Here is another source that takes this into account. Vaccination does reduce chances of severe infections even in delta, though it's not as good as before:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...

> The good news is that among Israel's serious infections on Thursday of this week, according to Health Ministry data, there were nine times more serious cases among unvaccinated people over age 60 (178.7 per 100,000) than among fully vaccinated people of the same age category, and a little more than double the number of serious infections among unvaccinated people in the under-60 crowd (3.2 per 100,000) than among the vaccinated in that age bracket.

Also do note that official numbers from Palestine could be undercounted because of the situation there

> existing vaccines stimulate the production of antibodies against only one of them

Is this true for the J&J vax as well?

Yes the J&J shot still works using only the spike protein. IIRC only Novavax uses traditional inoculation of using the weakened SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Novavax is a protein subunit vaccine, with the spike protein only. The Chinese CoronaVac and Indian Covaxin are traditional inactivated virus vaccines.

... Does that mean that CoronaVac and Covaxin might eventually prove better than current vaccines widely available in the US?

That seems very unlikely. If a variant evolves that has significant evasion of the vaccines, then we should be able to retool the mRNA vaccines quickly. And T-cell response is more robust to antigenic drift than the antibody response, though not as well studied. See [1] for a very detailed investigation into antigenic drift and vaccine evasion.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00573-0

weakened how?

Some of the current vaccines are produced by mixing batches of SARS-CoV-2 virions with beta-Propiolactone to make them inactive.

Uh... citation? And as you know, neutralizing response is not the only type.

A study demonstrating the mechanism for Delta ADE in vivo: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34384810/

Highly-vaccinated Israel's third-wave surge in both cases and deaths: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/

Unvaccinated Palestine's lack of third wave deaths: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/state-of-p...

> A study demonstrating the mechanism for Delta ADE in vivo: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34384810/

Not only is that article not a study but rather a letter to the editor, but also in their last paragraph they explicitly state that ADE in SARS-CoV-2 has never been demonstrated in vivo. Here is the relevant quote from the letter:

>[...] Although this potential risk has been cleverly anticipated before the massive use of Covid-19 vaccines6, the ability of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies to mediate infection enhancement in vivo has never been formally demonstrated. [...]

Here is a more in-depth counterpoint to that preprint:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/08/16/a-...

A couple things though - the median age of Israel is higher than that of Palestine by a pretty large margin. Secondly, how can we be sure both places are testing at the same rate? For instance, the percentage of cases reported in Palestine VS Israel is smaller when adjusted for population size.

Thanks for the Israel-Palestine comparison.

Palestine is ambiguous. I assume you mean Gaza or West Bank?

To Palestinians the entire country of Israel is Palestine. Hence the chant from the river to the sea Palestine will be free.

Obviously the OP is referring to West Bank and Gaza.

There are Palestinians living in east Jerusalem. There’s Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. His use of wording was ambiguous.

you know what they mean, don't be dense.

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