Covid vaccine immunity is waning – how much does that matter?
nature.com
nature.com
So clickbait. Also fearmongering from politicians and others.
Exhibit A: Canadian PM Trudeau who has signed contracts for boosters all the way up to 2024, in amounts that exceed the Canadian population by a factor of 2 (just in this one contract, never mind the other similiar contracts he has signed).[1] Of course, the full text of the contract, or the cancellation costs, will never be revealed.
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[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/news/20...
Also, I wonder how much the constantly moving goalposts, dishonesty regarding vaccines and politicising vaccines has fed the anti-vaxx movement?
I got vaccinated because the evidence suggests it seems to work, but you've got politicians lying about its effectiveness, signing secret contracts, moving goalposts, all the while shaming those who are 'hesitant' while giving no one any reason to actually trust them (the politicians that is).
Trudeau's top doctor at various points said there's no evidence that Covid transmits from person to person (when it was already clear it does), that it's not a concern, that masks don't work, and she's still the top doctor advising him... It's been a complete shitshow.
How anyone can look at those numbers and be against vaccines or question their effectiveness is...mindboggling to me.
Of 514 patients in Israel hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Aug. 15, 59 percent were fully vaccinated, according to an Aug. 16 article from Science that cited national data tracked by Israel's largest health management organization
this is in a country that had < 60% vaccinated at the time.
personally I think the vaccines are worthwhile for some people, but I wouldn't call them an unqualified success either. Most people are going to uncritically quote the factoids that they like and do mental gymnastics around the factoids they don't like.
I think that what has your mind boggled is mostly your bias (respectfully). I'm not even saying you're wrong fwiw.
The data shows that all groups of people at any age who are fully vaccinated are substantially less like to get COVID or end up in the hospital or end up dying from COVID. Not by a little bit but a lot. You can point to one day in Israel to make your point and I point to the entire US for the last 6 months that backs up what I am saying.
The Israeli data you cited is also is leaving a lot of other information out. How many of those patients were young or old and which were most likely to be fully vaccinated? It turns out that most of the fully vaccinated patients were over 60 with comorbidities and the unvaccinated people in the hospital were young people. Also, we know that the COVID vaccines would lose effectiveness over time and the patients in the hospital who are fully vaccinated would be the first group of people who would get a booster shot. I am also going to go out on a limb and say that if you end up in the hospital with COVID and you are fully vaccinated, I am pretty sure COVID would have killed you if you weren't vaccinated.
Everyone who is cleared to get vaccinated should get vaccinated.
you'd need to come up with a good reason why unvaccinated people were about 10x (or more) likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people
In any case, when more than half your population is vaccinated, especially the older aged folks, at that point it doesn't make a remarkable difference what it's from as the correlation is still clear.
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/health/coronavirus-vaccin...
> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...
edit: if you plan to downvote me, please know that i am open to feedback to understand your disagreements with my comment. thank you.
I have spoken with a few "anti-covid-vaccine" people who use this fact as a reason to not get it "It does not work, why should we get it?"
I wonder if this was better communicated at the start would have made more people, or less people get the vaccine.
The best strategy to get to 95+% compliance appears to be mandates.
The Delta variant may have changed the game but, based on the history of attempts to vaccinate against coronaviruses, plenty of people predicted that would happen.
a) This would require global collusion and conspiracy, since any vaccine maker who could make a durable vaccine would drive its competitors out of the market.
b) This greatly overestimates, IMO, the capabilities of our biotech/pharma industry. It's an amazing and spectacular achievement that they were able to make working vaccines at all in a < 1 year time frame. They don't have any secret immunity-boosting technology in ther back pockets.
c) There are several vaccines produced that DO provide lifetime or near lifetime immunity. Pfizer isn't making me get a new polio shot every year. If conspiracy theorists were to be believed, shouldn't we have an entire gamut of shots to take every fall instead of just the flu?
That's an error that's super common in conspiracy-theory thinking: focus on one hypothesized incentive (out of many) that usually has nefarious undertones, assume that's the main or only incentive at play, and assume the party in question is successfully acting on that incentive.
No it wouldn't. It would only require incentive for profit. If a company makes a highly durable vaccine, its competitors wouldn't make very much money, but neither would the company itself. Less profit. Make a vaccine that wears off after a slightly longer time than your competitors, and you can claim to be the best product on the market while keeping your users coming back for more. Guaranteed ongoing revenue stream. 'Conspiracy' is a loaded term that is used solely to discredit the opposing argument.
Sure, the stimulus exists. But unless you have a monopoly/cartel, this is very hard to pull off. And that's what antitrust laws are for.
People would obviously flee from your lousy product to the first manufacturer who didn't do that. If it was not hard to produce a established long-term vaccine, would any consumer/country stay with the short-term one?
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
Anyway, planned hardware obsolescence is a wildly different situation. Manufacturers get way with it because practically no consumers choose one product over another based on durability. To this day you still have all kinds of products with user replaceable batteries, but customers do not buy those in droves. They apparently prefer to have a 0.0001% thinner product. They buy those in droves...
Compare this with a vaccine that promises N years of immunity. To be an apt analogy, you have to think of some metric that is evidently visible, highly desirable by customers, yet literally no manufacturer offers it.
Except that they've backtracked: it no longer promises "immunity" and apparently it no longer promises "years".
The vaccine doesn't have to be the best possible. It's obviously hard to make a good one; the problem is, the biggest players are the ones best suited to put the work in for a good vaccine, and if they don't choose to, it's possible they can just swallow up a smaller player that does manage to pull it off.
There's been so many conversations on HN about the antitrust situation with the big tech corporations; is it so hard to consider that maybe there's a similar situation in biotech?
Consumers aren't looking for the best vaccine; they're looking for the first one available, so they can be less scared about dying. That's the metric that's visible and desirable.
Sure there is. Sure there are. You hear about them when the antitrust law goes into effect. And? We obviously don't live in a world where all the software is intentionally filled with bugs, so at best you can use that as evidence that the antitrust laws are doing _something_. You can hardly use that as evidence that they are ineffective and there are trusts everywhere.
> Consumers aren't looking for the best vaccine; they're looking for the first one available
Apparently not, since they seem to get angry if they've used the one that "lasts for 6 months". Certainly there is no practical durability information right now, but are you arguing that once there is, they won't flee to the one that promises longer-term "protection"?
People get mad when their cheap stuff breaks, too, even if that wasn't part of their purchasing criteria. Now they're scared about dying, again.
> You can hardly use that as evidence that they are ineffective and there are trusts everywhere.
I'm not making such an extreme claim, because it's not binary. There's a middle ground that you've excluded. I'm using the existence of some antitrust in one sphere as evidence that some antitrust might also exist in another sphere.
Edit: I think you might be misunderstanding my position: I'm defending the legitimacy of some very critical questions. Far as I can tell, you're arguing that my skepticism is flat-out unwarranted. Of the two, from a logic perspective, yours is the harder position to defend, because you're trying to prove a negative.
No, they don't. They just buy another iDevice with again non-removable battery.
> I'm using the existence of some antitrust in one sphere as evidence that some antitrust might also exist in another sphere.
Not really -- you are assuming the entire "another" sphere is entirely a big trust, since that is what would be required for your claim of not a single lab making long-term vaccines / claiming that they know how to make long-term vaccines / leaking that they don't make long-term vaccines for non-technical reasons. This is not a minor specialized market, it is the friggin vaccine-of-the-year market.
> I'm defending the legitimacy of some very critical questions. Far as I can tell, you're arguing that my skepticism is flat-out unwarranted. Of the two, from a logic perspective, yours is the harder position to defend, because you're trying to prove a negative.
This is ridiculous. You are the one making the claim, you are the one needing to provide the evidence. Most specially if it is a dubious claim that requires a big conspiracy of a significant amount of people (but you'd still need to provide the evidence even if it wasn't). Otherwise, this is just Russell's teapot all over again.
How are you going to disprove my very critical questions of there being a perfectly safe and very long term vaccine hidden inside a porcelain teapot which is floating around in the Lagrange point of Earth that NASA (and Elon Musk!) is hiding from us, for god knows what reasons? Aha! Unwarranted skepticism much, eh?
A great deal of SaaS is essentially just building in a "bug" that one must phone home to a central server over the internet to use the software, and pay a monthly fee for the privilege.
One of the big benefits of the mRNA technology behind the covid 19 vaccine was the ability to rapidly develop, produce, and deploy it.
Plus, people will lose confidence if the damn thing doesn't work. The optimal business strategy here is to demonstrate how effective this technology is, so that they continue to get contracts/grants to develop future vaccines.
Hear this rather funny story: someone wanted to visit their family member who was staying at the psychiatric hospital. They could only do that once vaccinated. What happened? The woman walked 100 meters, got the vaccine, and immediately went to visit the family member. Yes, no waiting required, which is the funny bit. The vaccine obviously was not mandated for what you and I would think it was, otherwise they would have given a crap about the time after vaccination.
It would only take one competitor to produce a long lasting vaccine and that competitor would take the entire market, so suggesting that all vaccine producers across national boundaries, not to mention all scientists involved are somehow in cahoots is absurd.
Maybe they ALL know that a cure could cut off profit, so they go with good enough boosters.
You're assuming a free market, not one that's stuffed full of highly paid lobbyists.
Someone in the US can lobby all they want, if someone in India or China, any public research institute, any state agency produces a superior vaccine they will lose.
Are you saying tens of thousands of scientists and competing businesses, from Cambodia to Cuba to Russia to the US, to organisations that don't even have a profit motive like public university researchers, have all conspired to lock away some magic vaccine in a box?
Let's say the entire US has been captured by the vaccine lizard people, do you think China or Russia would forego the opportunity to expose to the entire world that this has been happening while also capturing the entire global market with a better product?
I'm saying it's possible that a few extremely powerful corporations chose to develop a vaccine that is less useful than it could have been, and are profiting off the difference. I'm also saying that the big ones might have enough influence to get away with a less-effective vaccine than some smaller player who can get swallowed up, if needed.
I'm also aware that the scientific consensus you seem to think exists about the vaccine, doesn't.
I'm also aware that you don't need to get all those experts on board - just like 20 years ago when it was the tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists who thought the government was spying on them, all you have to do is make the dissidents look ridiculous.
Lizard people, eh?
Hyper-induction of pro-inflammatory cytokines, also known as a cytokine storm or cytokine release syndrome ... is not unique to the SARS-CoV-2 infection; it was prevalent in most of the major human coronavirus and influenza A subtype outbreaks of the past two decades (H5N1, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and H7N9).
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.6291...
"Our curation indicates that the cytokine response induced by SARS-CoV-2 is different compared to other CRS-causing respiratory viruses".