SARS-CoV-2 variant A.30 is heavily mutated and evades vaccine-induced antibodies
nature.com
nature.com
That is, a vaccinated person could be exposed to a variant for which they are partially protected, not notice clinical symptoms, while the person's immune system still remembers the details of the variant.
As an iterative process, this is akin to software updates (for a running immune system).
So to say that variant A.30 isn't covered by the mRNA induced spike protein antibodies is a very different statement than to say it's able to evade an immune system primed by mRNA antibodies which then re-entered daily life and thereby was able to continuously adapt to variants.
We know the vaccines are not sterilizing so you can still catch and spread it. They do reduce the likelihood of hospitalization and that seems to be about that.
Saying "well you're just less likely to go to the hospital" underplays their importance and gives unnecessary credence to the completely false notion that if you don't get vaccinated the only person you're potentially hurting is yourself.
The chances of having a breakthrough infection and passing it to someone else are quite a lot smaller than the chances of getting infected while being unvaccinated and passing it to someone else, just because breakthrough infections aren't that high (Even if they are higher than we'd like).
42% (and even 58%) is still a huge improvement since the article says that the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread is around 67%.
The R0 value for Delta is between 6 and 7. So while an unvaccinated person might pass it on to ~6.7 people you will pass it on to only 4.2 people in the beginning (37% reduction), then to 5.8 people (13% reduction).
This calculation also assumes that your chance of getting Covid is the same as an unvaccinated person, which is not correct.
That’s a huge difference, and not just reducing the likelihood of hospitalisation.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v...
I think the only conclusion that can be supported truly at this point is that you seem to be less likely to get a severe disease progression.
And before anyone jumps on the whole political thing. Yes I have taken two doses of the biogen vaccine.
Unfortunately US media and government messaging at the beginning of this year touted the vaccines effectiveness as we historically understood vaccines to be, which was relatively sterilizing and a preventative. When Delta started infecting the fully vaccinated, it underscored the skepticism around these vaccines.
Ironically, right now, I know more people in my social circle that have had breakthrough cases then people who had Covid prior to vaccine’s release.
It's only a small portion of those receiving the AZ vaccine whose serum had no significant activity against A.30-- all of those with the mRNA vaccine did and most of those receiving AZ did.
How about those that received no vaccine, but have previously recovered from Covid? Is it an insignificant number because I rarely hear it discussed.
There is every reason to expect that natural immunity (derived from a previous infection) is better (than that conferred by a vaccine), simply because the immune system will recognize the entire virus and not just the spike cell.
This pre-print paper (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...) concludes:
"This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant."
If having pre-delta covid made it more likely that your immune system could face delta, then I think it would stand true for other variants, too.
However, for people who see the world through a lens that paints all public health policy with the brush of partisan politics, the distinction may be difficult to grasp.
I think you are missing the largest discriminator.
The US Vaccines[1], and the related vaccines, are highly limited resistance specific to a spike protein only, perhaps with boosters, to a number of spikes seen. Total = 1, perhaps 2 if it includes a delta variant spike booster also.
Natural immunity confers with it resistance to a number of different covid-19 viral proteins, not just the spike. We know Covid-19 has 29 proteins
Now, we know that researchers saw these antibodies, as they were the ones that said, "all these antibodies could be the target of future vaccines", and the idea is there. However, we don't know the exactly count of antibodies to all these viral proteins, we just know of their existence from research. [2]
But, to compare the strength of natural immunity to a vaccine is to fail at elementary math.
However, I am not saying that people at a high risk from age, comorbidities, or both, should not take the vaccine. That is their own decision. On the other hand, the vast majority of the research indicates that natural immunity actually provides superior immunity from a breadth perspective, since a legacy vaccine protection is comparatively challenged against a mutated spike.
[1] This is not true for all vaccines, merely "spike" vaccines. So, it wouldn't apply to an attenuated viral vaccine. However, attenuated vaccines do not prompt as strong an immune response.
This is a non-sequitur.
These vaccines are leaky & non-sterilizing; these are not remotely comparable to the vaccines we have had throughout most of our normal lives that grant something like 99.99999% protection with minimal side effects. I'm saying that as someone as who has had a number of vaccines during my life - I am not an antivaxx.
However, these vaccines are not comparable.
If you want to talk about how much better natural immunity is than vaccines, there are plenty of subthreads in these comments where your contributions--while possibly controversial--would not be completely irrelevant. But this is not one of those subthreads. I have not expressed an opinion on that matter and I have no intention of doing so in this particular context.
"Antivaxx" in today's context has nothing to do with whether you've ever accepted a vaccine in your life, and everything to do with whether you reject COVID vaccines. In fact, that's as much the meaning as anything: that people who were previously OK with vaccines (including the regimen of sometimes experimental vaccines required by the military) are somehow now vociferously opposed to COVID vaccines.
And, on that measure, even a cursory glance at your recent comment history reveals that you are unequivocally antivaxx.
My vaccine record says otherwise.
"You are, apparently, not even making a token effort to understand my comments"
That is actually an insult. Please refrain from insulting me.
I am not antivaxx. I am pro-vaccine, and as a veteran I am actually quite immunized. Heavily immunized in fact. Far more so than most of the civilian population.
However, this is a question of an unlike comparison.
I am vaccine hesistant in this case.
Thanks for prompting this clarification.
Nope. You voluntarily made the claim that you were "not antivaxx". I merely clarified for you that your previous acceptance of other vaccines has nothing to do with the definition of "antivaxx" in today's COVID context.
You are clearly anti-COVID vaccines, as indicated by a number of your comments here. That makes your assertion that you are "not antivaxx" untrue in any contemporary discussion.
Relentlessly searching for ways to discredit COVID vaccines and spreading FUD are not mere "hesitance".
If you find the plain identification of your own behavior "insulting", then I would offer that you consider not engaging in that behavior.
> Relentlessly searching for ways to discredit COVID vaccines and spreading FUD are not mere "hesitance".
Critical skepticism is an important element of science.
Do No Harm is a key part of the Hippocratic Oath
Just like Informed Consent with Medical Ethics.
> Informed consent is the process in which a health care provider educates a patient about the risks, benefits, and alternatives of a given procedure or intervention. The patient must be competent to make a voluntary decision about whether to undergo the procedure or intervention. Informed consent is both an ethical and legal obligation of medical practitioners in the US and originates from the patient's right to direct what happens to their body. Implicit in providing informed consent is an assessment of the patient's understanding, rendering an actual recommendation, and documentation of the process. The Joint Commission requires documentation of all the elements of informed consent "in a form, progress notes or elsewhere in the record." The following are the required elements for documentation of the informed consent discussion: (1) the nature of the procedure, (2) the risks and benefits and the procedure, (3) reasonable alternatives, (4) risks and benefits of alternatives, and (5) assessment of the patient's understanding of elements 1 through 4.
[1]
> It is the obligation of the provider to make it clear that the patient is participating in the decision-making process and avoid making the patient feel forced to agree to with the provider. The provider must make a recommendation and provide their reasoning for said recommendation
[1]
Maybe you're not familiar with the contemporary meaning of the phrase, but it perfectly encapsulates your behavior here and throughout HN.
Antivaxx is a syndrome. Some tell-tale symptoms are:
1) a scattershot litany of objections based on vague pseudo-scientific conclusions, cherry-picked de-contextualized data, and deployment of hypotheticals that, in total, amount to FUD;
2) Antivaxx denialism: that is, retreating to a position of nuanced skepticism when called on their clearly manic anti-vaccine FUD tactics, "hey, I'm just cautious/hesitant/skeptical".
3) an effort to characterize COVID vaccines as somehow nefarious or "illegitimate" versus previous vaccines because they seek primarily to prevent serious disease;
4) a relentless emphasis on natural immunity as superior to vaccines;
5) and the dispositive test that is perhaps the gold standard for an antivaxx diagnosis: deploying a range of pseudo-ethical arguments that seek to paint COVID vaccines or their advocacy as somehow immoral. This is usually deployed via vague rantings that, say, inexplicably invoke the Hippocratic Oath.
There's a continuum here. I guess we might say that at one end is blindly trusting whatever you're told, and at the other end is skepticism to the point of divergent irrationality, e.g. believing the Earth is hollow because you haven't personally been to the North Pole to check for a big hole leading to Inner Earth (where the meat goes on the outside of the sandwich). Of course, satellite imagery is all doctored to cover up the truth.
Interestingly, those extremes seem to curve back toward each other.
Skepticism is important, but it can be taken to harmful extremes, and it's important to examine "skeptical" impulses to make sure that's actually what they are. When you find yourself clinging to a "skeptical" position as evidence to the contrary continues to mount, squeezed into an ever-tinier corner of what-ifs and statistical improbabilities--or just cherry-picking data and presenting it out of context to rationalize your position--you have to know when to throw in the towel.
---
The above is presented as a reply to your comment about critical skepticism being important, because I think that's a line that's often used to defend irrational positions, often to the point of doing real harm when it's deployed in the public discourse. But I am not talking specifically about COVID or anything to do with it, so--again--please don't imagine that I've made any substantive statement wrt. the efficacy and/or risk profile of COVID vaccines, because I haven't.
I am personally closer to the antivax group than the provax group( at least in terms of mandates, because abrogation of bodily autonomy is straight up evil ), but I have to take issue with this statement.
While you are probably correct, we need to worry about biomechanics and effectiveness. If the S protein is the specific means of entry, that's definitely the one we should target. There's no reason to target proteins that don't actually bind to anything.
There are other issues regarding what are the limits to the memory of our circulating B cells. If my immune system has to "swap out" memory of, say, polio, in order to accommodate antibodies to eight different viral proteins, I'd rather it only remember one, if it's just as effective.
This is bogus. A broad spectrum of immune response develops through mutation and maturation of B cells. This is why we see broad neutralizing activity-- even against Delta without a Delta-specific booster-- against all variants from vaccination.
Can you point out an example of any country that exempts those who were already infected with COVID from taking the vaccine? As far as I can tell, no European country does anything of the sort, neither does the US and definitely not Canada, and a quick Google search returns no search hit.
This data is pretty easy to find. One tip is to look at the requirements of vaccine certificates in use in Europe. Modern life is all about knowing which keywords to search for.
In the Swiss system, if you have a positive antibody test from a previous infection, you get a certificate for 180 days. Then you need another test. As long as you have antibodies detectable by the PCR test, you will have a certificate for the next 180 days. No vaccine needed. If you have covid, odds are you will have antibodies for the rest of your life[1].
https://www.bag.admin.ch/bag/en/home/krankheiten/ausbrueche-...
The EU covid certificate is given along similar lines as the Swiss. You need either have a vaccine, have a PCR that detects antibodies (180 day validity), or received a negative test (72 hour validity). You can find details here:
https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus-re...
Actually, it isn't because your claim goes against pretty much all the information made available. Thus, the onus to substantiate your extraordinary claim is on you, specially because the odds that you've misunderstood or misrepresented your assertion are quite high.
> In the Swiss system, if you have a positive antibody test from a previous infection, you get a certificate for 180 days.
And here lies your mistake. Contrary to the original claim, Switzerland absolutely does not classify people who gained immunity from exposure the same as vaccinated. At all. If you take the time to read your own source, you'll notice that a) Switzerland supports both vaccine passports and certificate of prior infection, which are entirely different classifications, b) those who decide to only present a certificate of prior infection are forced to go through additional checks such as mandatory PCR tests prior to travel and after arriving, c) this only limited to international travel.
> The EU covid certificate is given along similar lines as the Swiss.
If you read up on the EU's COVID certificate you'll find out that the EU imposes high requirements for the certificate, such as not accepting PCR tests as proof of a prior COVID infection. Also, the same EU requires that those who were verifiably infected with COVID take at least a single vaccination dose to be deemed fully vaccinated.
Yes, like I pointed out, you need a PCR test every 180 days to get the certificate. But it's the same certificate as if you had a vaccine with the same access rights. That means that no, you don't need to get a vaccine as long as you got the disease (it's extremely unlike no antibodies will be detected if you were truly infected and recovered, but if you were diagnosed with a false positive, then no, a PCR test wont detect antibodies).
And expect to be required to get regular boosters on the vaccine side as well, so everyone will need to go through a process to keep the certificate, it does not last forever.
You should read your own source. Even though the swiss COVID certificate applies to those who "have had a COVID-19 vaccination, have had and recovered from the disease or have tested negative", neither case is treated the same at all. You already admitted that by referring to the additional requirements for those who did not took the vaccine, such as a series of mandatory tests.
[1] https://www.bag.admin.ch/bag/en/home/krankheiten/ausbrueche-...
Honestly there is a lot of bluster and emotion in your responses, and I'm having a hard time extracting signal from noise. Lots of people in the EU who had covid are doing just fine with getting biannual PCR tests and don't need to get a vaccine as they can get the covid certificate and have access to the same things as someone with a vaccine.
Please read your own source, particularly the section on "I am not vaccinated or recently recovered from COVID-19. What should I bear in mind?". They are quite clear in stating the additional requirements for continuous testing, both before and after entering Switzerland.
Fully vaccinated travellers do not have to deal with nothing of the sort.
Don't you agree that imposing entirely different sets of requirements to those who are not vaccinated demonstrates that vaccinated and non-vaccinated but recovered from Covid is a clear indication that both cases are indeed not classified, and treated, the same?
By reading the wrong section, you've come to the wrong conclusion as to how the recovered are treated.
Equating antibody presence to be the same as having been vaccinated would give health officials a much more accurate view of the pandemic and where resources need to be allocated instead of this odd ideologically driven need to demand conformity from everyone even if they already have immunity that appears to be an order of magnitude more durable than the jab. It makes clear that this is almost entirely about a pathological need to round off all the corners in the world and almost nothing at all about fighting the pandemic itself. But what a wonderful opportunity this pandemic has been for the authoritarian types. For them, this truly is the golden age and should be extended for as long as possible.
There have been over 45 million laboratory-confirmed COVID cases in the US. Basically all of these people can easily prove that they were infected and recovered by showing a copy of their positive result.
For those who believe they had a past infection that wasn't lab-confirmed, antibody testing costs around $50[1].
I'm sure some people will say "but lab results can easily be faked!", which is true. But the CDC cards for the vaccines aren't exactly forgery-proof either.
> AFAIK it's more of an issue of ensuring public safety...
To protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated? And how? Vaccinated individuals can get breakthrough infections and spread the virus to others too. And you could make the argument that some vaccinated individuals, overconfident in the protection they have, will engage in riskier behavior (having close contact with others, not wearing masks, visiting poorly-ventilated indoor spaces, etc.).
[1] https://www.labcorp.com/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/individ...
First of all, taking the vaccine is not political. What is political is the contrarian stance against vaccinating against COVID-19. This sad state of affairs was the direct result of an election campaign which was deeply invested in denying that COVID-19 was a public health concern, or even that it existed at all, and thus recognizing the vaccine's importance and effectiveness was deemed a sign of a political defeat and admission of responsibility for countless unnecessary deaths.
Secondly, natural immunity against COVID-19 is not a sure thing, with the risk of reinfection being as high as 17%, and subsequent infections are known to be more severe than the first[1]. In contrast, immunity through vaccination is believed to be not only more effective but also last longer[2].
Consequently, there is absolutely no reason at all, other than political beliefs, to refuse to get the vaccine.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01202-8
[2] https://www.immunology.org/coronavirus/connect-coronavirus-p...
> This sad state of affairs was the direct result of an election campaign which was deeply invested in denying that COVID-19 was a public health concern, or even that it existed at all, and thus recognizing the vaccine's importance and effectiveness was deemed a sign of a political defeat and admission of responsibility for countless unnecessary deaths.
You seem to be implying that the former president, whose administration helped fund the vaccine development, was responsible for all of the anti-vaxxer sentiment. Even as someone who is very happy Trump is gone, I must say this type of dishonesty has no place in a civil discourse about vaccination.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/04/rachel-mad...
> ...and subsequent infections are known to be more severe than the first
You have conveniently misconstrued what your own citation says:
> Reinfections have been reported, and in a few instances, the second infection was more severe than the first, but serological responses suggest that patients never seroconverted after initial infection and ADE is a less likely cause of a more severe second infection
Some people don't seroconvert after vaccination either. Using outliers to make broad claims is not appropriate.
> ...immunity through vaccination is believed to be not only more effective but also last longer.
Linking to an infographic that doesn't provide citations for its statements isn't exactly convincing, especially when there is evidence that what is claimed might not be accurate. For example see, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
Conclusion:
> This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.
More than 80% of Americans have coronavirus antibodies acquired through infection or vaccination, according to a new study of over 1.4 million blood donations across the U.S. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25398704...
And as reported on by Bloomberg and other media, the antibodies from past infection confer protection equal to or greater than Pfizer.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-27/previous-...
"Previous Covid Prevents Delta Infection Better Than Pfizer Shot"
And those are slated to last for decades. Source:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01442-9
"Had COVID? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime"
On the exact terms given to us by Fauci and other public servants, there is no more reason for these covid mandates to exist. Not from a scientific point of view based on these links.
Why are some hospital systems still overwhelmed? Where are all these very sick people coming from if almost everyone has been in contact with the virus?
No - we do not have "every reason" to expect, quite the opposite. As a starter, for many infectious diseases (incl. viral diseases) vaccine-induced immunity is better, see e.g. the commentary and examples here [1].
Regarding SARS-CoV-2, the picture is a lot more subtle. Directly from German virologist Christian Drosten:
"If you look closely at the data in the studies, the situation is much more complicated. What one should say and be aware of is vaccination, which provides a relatively constant protection, which is very well described in studies. You actually pretty much know what you have. While there is a greater spread in the case of infection. Quite simply, we get different amounts of virus in the infection. Some have a silent infection that they don't even notice, others have a symptomatic infection. And you have to be aware that in such studies, which are primarily based on PCR test results, there will always be a certain emphasis on symptomatic courses. That means saying that if I know I have survived an infection and it was confirmed by PCR testing, then that also implies that I had symptoms, otherwise I would hardly have had a PCR test at the time. So then I had a symptomatic course. I think that for this situation you can now say very well, whoever had the whole thing symptomatically, will be well protected afterwards, almost like a vaccination." [2]
The study you picked in its current pre-print form does not adequately address this obvious selection bias, nor does it address the inherent survivorship bias. I´m not a medical expert though, so we will see if it passes peer review.
In any case, please do not perpetuate the myth that natural immunity is superior per se. If you had a symptomatic infection plus a PCR test, you are likely well protected, very similar to (mRNA) vaccination. If your infection is more than 6 months old, get a booster.
[1] https://twitter.com/ENirenberg/status/1412865782862725125
[2] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/coronaskript334.pdf page 7 (via Google Translate)
Also, you seem to be rightfully cautious that the situation is fluid, but also calling natural immunity being better a 'myth'. This may just be the word you chose, but myth to me is something that is complete BS. Are you also intending to use it that way?
See e.g. papers mentioned here: https://g-f-v.org/2021/09/30/4411/
> myth to me is something that is complete BS
I chose myth to describe the pattern of something that seems correct for seemingly obvious reasons but is actually incorrect for more complicated reasons.
In particular the black and white belief that natural immunity is superior because
a) it is 'natural' (this is a such a great example of extrapolating from a kernel of truth and can have interesting notions packed into it, like the superiority of divine creation and/or nature),
b) the vaccine only encodes the spike protein (one of the reasons the spike protein was chosen is because it is more robust w.r.t. to variation relative to other components of the virus).
I see these "arguments" often politicised with terms such as 'gold standard immunity'.
Also, I'm curious if you read the studies you're linking to?
This is literally the conclusion from link #8
>This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.
There is no black and white argument why natural immunity should be superior - it can be worse, similar or better than vaccine-induced immunity. It all depends on the amount of viral particles you were exposed to in the first place.
Any study that compares natural immunity to vaccine-induced has to deal with a selection bias (as stated in the quote by somebody who is a professional at designing such studies).
Let me know if that clears things up.
Logical arguments for a position don't equate to empirical truths. Data is preferred over argument/opinion.
>Any study that compares natural immunity to vaccine-induced has to deal with a selection bias (as stated in the quote by somebody who is a professional at designing such studies).
Do you have any evidence that the study you linked to is biased? If so, why even link to it?
In any case, I think this thread is not going anywhere, so I will just let you have the last word.
When I was asked about this by a 'vaccine skeptic', I said having the vaccine after an infection was clearly a huge benefit over having just the vaccine or just the infection - so do it. I've also seen a study where the super rare, problematic responses to the vaccine seemed to be the same symptoms someone would experience with an infection sans the vaccine - only the effect would be dramatically worse with an infection. (Sorry I can't offer sources at the moment - moments from sleep.)
It's quite sad to see people now claiming it's some kind of novel scientific question about natural immunity vs not. This is basic, high school level biology. It's not advanced stuff and the people claiming otherwise are invariably using bad science to do so. For example, claims that infection doesn't stop reinfection are often based on studies with so few cases of reinfection that it'd fall below the noise floor for almost any testing system. The belief that these events are real relies on yet more bad science (the belief that mass testing has an FP rate of zero).
The reality is that natural immunity is suddenly being questioned because "vaccine zealots" are desperate to suppress any messaging that might discourage people from taking it. They've lost all perspective, which means they're making claims that are contradicting biology considered so basic and important that it's literally taught to children in school. Then they sit around looking confused, wondering why suddenly so many "anti-vaxxers" and "skeptics" came out of the woodwork.
Glad you mention chickenpox. Could you help me understand why the protein vaccine is much more effective than the attenuated virus vaccine? Following your argument there should be nothing better than the virus vaccine, because it is closest to infection?
Whether or not the vaccine or natural immunity is better protection isn't as clear as suggested either, generally the vaccines will give more reliable resistance.
Please read: https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/covid-19-studies-natural-i...:
"Natural immunity can be spotty. Some people can react vigorously and get a great antibody response. Other people don't get such a great response," says infectious diseases expert Mark Rupp, MD. "Clearly, vaccine-induced immunity is more standardized and can be longer-lasting."
Yah, perhaps it'd be best to talk about mean and variance.
For COVID-19, it looks like natural infection provides a somewhat better neutralizing titer of antibodies than vaccination on average. But there's a much larger variation in the response than vaccination provides. The people with the lowest responses are in the natural infection group, too.
Example: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v...
"Out of 149,735 individuals with a documented positive PCR test between March 2020 and January 2021, 154 had two positive PCR tests at least 100 days apart, reflecting a reinfection proportion of 1 per 1000"
So that's really incredibly low. Note that this paper, like so many others, assumes a false positive rate of zero: with such a low number of reinfections they could easily just be testing errors and thus the reinfection rate can easily be even lower still.
Remember - COVID is a mild disease for the vast majority. Having been infected reduces your chance of infection so low that it takes you from a very low chance of having serious problems to "you need scientific notation to express the probability of having problems". Vaccines can only make things worse for those people, not better.
Unfortunately our society has completely lost all rationality over vaccines. Your so-called infectious disease expert is a great example of that. Firstly, he's dead wrong that vaccine-induced immunity is longer lasting. It lasts months at most, which is why even vaccine-pushers have given up claiming it stops you getting COVID. And antibody titers are not the end goal here! The goal is to avoid getting sick. They've completely substituted the means for the end, which is the sort of contempt-worthy irrationality that makes people reject the vaccination programme.
This is wrong, the vaccines are safe and effective - much moreso than getting reinfected with COVID-19. As a former medical professional who works with medical professionals today, you are completely misguided. Please don't repeat this stuff.
> Remember - COVID is a mild disease for the vast majority.
If you had told me in 2019 that we will experience something like it in our lifetime I would not have believed you.
"Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history."
NB: The high estimates come from epidemiological modelling so should probably be ignored as such modelling has no legitimacy. But even for the USA alone, there's no agreement on how many died, especially as many people (especially in the USA) seem to have been killed by aspirin overdoses rather than the flu itself. At the time aspirin was new and considered a miracle cure. Doctors panicked prescribed doses that we now know are far, far too high. From a paper published in 2009:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091002132346.h...
High aspirin dosing levels used to treat patients during the 1918-1919 pandemic are now known to cause, in some cases, toxicity and a dangerous build up of fluid in the lungs, which may have contributed to the incidence and severity of symptoms, bacterial infections, and mortality. Additionally, autopsy reports from 1918 are consistent with what we know today about the dangers of aspirin toxicity, as well as the expected viral causes of death.
The motivation behind the improper use of aspirin is a cautionary tale, said author Karen Starko, MD. In 1918, physicians did not fully understand either the dosing or pharmacology of aspirin, yet they were willing to recommend it. Its use was promoted by the drug industry, endorsed by doctors wanting to “do something,” and accepted by families and institutions desperate for hope. “Understanding these natural forces is important when considering choices in the future,” Dr. Starko said. “Interventions cut both ways. Medicines can save and improve our lives. Yet we must be ever mindful of the importance of dose, of balancing benefits and risks, and of the limitations of our studies.”
Yes --- amazingly so. We don't have wonderful data for SARS-COV-2 yet, but some number of recipients of mRNA vaccines who are survivors of the original SARS apparently have strong antibody responses to all coronaviruses. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108453
P(Survive infection|Survive first infection) > P(Survive infection|Have been vaccinated),
in general the far more interesting inequality is
P(Survive first infection) * P(Survive infection|Survive first infection) << P(Survive having been vaccinated) * P(Survive infection|Have been vaccinated)
So it usually is still a better strategy to get vaccinated than to get infected.
It should be noted that this convalescent plasma was taken from ICU patients, not people that were asymptomatic or had minor symptoms.
Looks like a similar difference.
- People given AZ required 8.8x the concentration of their serum to neutralize A.30 vs. B.1
- For mRNA vaccines, this was 4.6x.
- Convalescent plasma-- those infected-- this was 4.4x.
- AZ dose 1, mRNA dose 2 was by far the smallest difference, 1.8x.
I'd caution in reading too much into these numbers. Comparing titers in general between the groups in this study is problematic because of vastly varying times since infection/administration. And the size of the populations is small.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
I recommend that everyone get vaccinated if they can, especially if they haven't had a confirmed infection. For most patients natural immunity provides protection as good or better than vaccination.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.12.21263461v...
What are the limits to the memory of our immune system? Surely there are limits, to the extent that our blood can only carry N number of Memory B cells, and those cells that still exist carry some degree of senescence, and we need M of them to mount an timely response to a recurrence of infection, how many protein antigens can our immune system actually remember and respond to over long periods of time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activation-induced_cytidine_de...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_maturation
^ and many more that will probably just end up amounting to a couple of years of study!
That is blatant fear mongering. :)
"VUI-21FEB-01 (A.23.1 with E484K), VOC-21FEB-02 (B.1.1.7 with E484K), VUI-21MAR-01, (B.1.324.1 with E484K), A.30, B.1.633, B.1.214.2 and B.1.1.7 with S494P have not been observed in the UK or within the international GISAID dataset within the last 12 weeks. These variants are no longer included in the data update."
In general, I'm disappointed that we are not rolling out updated boosters with variant protection. Flu vaccines are updated each year - and here we are almost two years from the initial outbreak, and we're still vaccinating people against the original form of the virus - which isn't even spreading anymore
That's not to say that it's not still lifesaving to get the current vaccine - but F - we can do better!
TL;DR: it's just a bit worse than the Beta variant.
Is there ongoing work here I'm missing? What progress has been made? I'm somewhat surprised that almost a year on from the initial vaccination roll-out in the UK we're now dishing out boosters which are .. identical to the vaccinations given out initially.
There's plenty of evidence that current vaccines work against variants:
- https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e4.htm
- https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891
- https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)01057-6#%20
> given that original antigenic sin is a long known and well documented phenomenon?
This could apply both to vaccines and natural infections. Not sure what you are trying to say?
I am asking specifically if there is any hard evidence of vaccine effectiveness to back statements made by biopharma corporations about variant-specific vaccines, for example:
"We have built a process that within 95 days from the day that we identify a variant as a variant of concern, we will be able to have a vaccine tailor-made against this variant," [Pfizer CEO] Bourla said.
https://www.insider.com/pfizer-ceo-vaccine-resistant-coronav...
My take of your entire thread is we let these natural processes kill millions because we fear a significantly smaller long term risk.
Seems to me that one doesn’t pause when being attacked by a bear, a big cat, or even a wasp. And unless you’re anaphylactic, the latter can’t fudge you up as bad as a virus. Don’t pause too long, leopards are on the prowl.
Yes, we all know that. Follow the scientific literature and you will find updated vaccine assessments soon after a concerning variant is noticed.
> "We have built a process that within 95 days from the day that we identify a variant as a variant of concern, we will be able to have a vaccine tailor-made against this variant," [Pfizer CEO] Bourla said.
That's likely closely guarded IP, so I don't think there is hard evidence for that statement. But the phase I clinical trials for Moderna's [1] and Pfizer's [2] started respectively in February and April 2020, just a few months after covid became a problem. This is IMHO reasonable evidence that 95 days is a plausible lead time.
"Original Antigenic Sin: How First Exposure Shapes Lifelong Anti–Influenza Virus Immune Responses"
And in case it is not clear, in this thread I am not advocating neither for or against vaccines, so we can end it here unless you have something of substance to add.
In terms of long term protection, I don't think we really know yet.
In terms of long term side effects - do we know of any past vaccines with notable side effects that only became known after 12+ months? Genuine question.
A picture from a recent preprint of 600k veterans over 6 months shows troubling VE against infection curves. J&J VE against infection is gone. Pfizer curve is just 2 months behind, at 53% and dropping.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2021/10/14/202...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.13.21264966v...
Fortunately VE against severe infection holds much better at 77% Pfizer for June-Sept 2021 time period. The clinical trials claimed 94%, so there is a drop there. Nobody knows what will be the VE against sever infection a year from now, and we appear to have decided to preemptively boost so we might never know.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7037e2-H.pdf
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
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Alas, none of this takes in account future virus variants and their interaction with OAS. OAS means that building an immune response against the virus today will prove ineffective for a virus variant 10 years down the line. The worst known scenario was encountered with dengue fever. An excerpt from a 2011 paper summarizing the dengue situation:
"Original antigenic sin has the advantage that a response can be rapidly mobilized from memory. However, the downside is that in some cases, such as dengue, the response is dominated by inferior-quality antibody. In influenza, original antigenic sin has been shown to reduce the effectiveness of vaccination (13, 34, 51). In dengue, the effect of original antigenic sin has considerable bearing on vaccine strategies. Once a response has been established, it is unlikely that repeat boosting will be able to change its scope, meaning that balanced responses against the four virus serotypes will need to be established with the first vaccine dose."
The clinical trials were run against the original version, while the data you presented seems to be overlapping with the spread of Delta, yet you never mention Delta in your comment.
Let's look at the weekly UK vaccine surveillance report, week 36 vs. week 42, afaik both within the UK Delta wave. For VE against severe disease, let's look at 'Deaths within 28 days of first positive COVID-19 test by date of death' tables. Let's pick age group 40-49 (older parents) and compute VE = 1 - vax_ratio / unvax_ratio.
week 36, VE = 1 - 0.4 / 3.1 = 87%
week 42, VE = 1 - 0.5 / 2.0 = 75%
FWIW, none of this makes me any happy. I wish the vaccines were holding effectiveness, that we didn't need a booster within 1 year of the initial shots and that the pandemic was over. Alas, reality does not cooperate.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
> These data should be considered in the context of vaccination status of the population groups shown in the rest of this report. The vaccination status of cases, inpatients and deaths is not the most appropriate method to assess vaccine effectiveness and there is a high risk of misinterpretation. Vaccine effectiveness has been formally estimated from a number of different sources and is described earlier in this report.
In particular, the reduction of death rates among non vaccinated over time may be caused by natural selection, i.e. the weak died already while the remaining ones have unusually strong immune system (aka survivorship bias [2]).
There may be other unaccounted confounders, too, such as a change of behaviour over time where the degree of change is dependent on the age group and/or vaccination status. For example, an apparent reduction of effectiveness for younger people may be caused by them going back to work/study, thus increasing their probability of getting infected, while older folks staying in care homes as before.
Funnily enough, both Simpson's paradox and uncorrected confounders can result in observed correlations that are opposite to the real causality effect.
And to clarify, I'm not saying your VE numbers there are wrong, just warning readers about the dangers of statistics.
OTOH this is not an isolated data point. We have: the booster push (why?), the veteran study, the PHE data. Something doesn't add up. For whatever reasons, the observed epi VE, after all the confouding factors are accounted by reality, is fading for both infection and severe infection, though VE agains severe infection is fading at a slower rate. To the point of J&J VE against infection (the weakest of the bunch) being almost gone in 6 months. I don't have a time machine, but I'm really interested to see how the Jan 2022 VE numbers hold up across the board.
Given OAS concerns (please re-read the dengue study excerpt I already quoted), near zero covid risk for kids, rapidly fading VE against infection and the general lack of long term data about covid & immune system (no time machines), what exactly is the rush to vaccinate kids against the original variant?! And why do we pretend we can just tweak vaccines to any new variant, when, while technologically we can concoct any protein we like, the immune system doesn't turn on a dime?
> Despite the persistent connotation of “sin” as a negative attribute, it is clear that OAS-like responses are neither inherently “good” nor “bad.” The desirability of OAS responses is instead context dependent
It doesn't really seem from that article like we have the means to predict what OAS will be most beneficial in the future, so I think everyone are just flipping a coin here. Either you get OAS from some random vaccine available at some point in time, or you get it from randomly catching some random virus at some point in time.
Is there any reason to be afraid of getting vaccinated?
There's plenty of reasons, do you mean to also ask how likely other people on the internet believe each one to be?
For example, if you ask me, this is my personal assessment:
Reason 1 - Vaccines could also contain microchips or other device for tracking, brainwashing and remote manipulating my body and mind by whoever mastermind is in charge of what goes in them.
I think that's very unlikely, I'd give it a 0.00000001% probability. I just dont know of any possibility for such advanced technology. And I can think of many different means that you can be more cost effectively tracked, manipulated or brain washed. I can also think of other ways they could have injected you with such things.
Reason 2 - The vaccines will result in worst long terms negative effects on your health than getting Covid.
I think this is a little more likely, but given all prior vaccines have shown to be quite safe, and even if they could be responsible for some long term effects, even some we haven't linked back to them yet, seeing as life expectancy and quality of life has grown year over year since the introduction of vaccines, it seems the equation would still play in their favor.
There are also more and more literature linking prior viruses as a possible cause of long term negative effects like dimentia, various auto-immune diseases, etc. So it would seem Covid is more likely to introduce long term negative effects.
So I'd give it a 1% chance.
Reason 3 - The vaccines will result in worst short term effects on your health then getting Covid.
I think this one has been shown that most of the time, Covid is more likely to kill you or make you really sick as compared to vaccines.
I'd give this one a 0.0001% chance.
Reason 4 - Vaccines can stop your pregnancy or your period and make you stink
I have seen zero cases of this, and everyone who's had a vaccine to my nose do not smell, and still have period and can get pregnant.
I'd give this one a 0.000000000000000001% chance.
There might be more reasons, but those are the ones I've heard most often, and this is only my personal risk assessment.
Argument goes along the lines that "all" previous coronovirus vaccines were found to have ADE effects. It took a long time for them to show up, but the effect was large and the trials were abandoned.
So apparently we're still all going to die. Spring/Summer 2022 (northern hemisphere time) will be the cataclysm.
I'm inadequately gnorant to evaluate the argument on merits, but I find it interesting because it fits the classic definition of "bullshit".
Not just bullshit, but millennialist bullshit!
Didn't tens of thousands of trial participants get covid vaccines back during July to September last year? They're still monitored I think. If what you said is true then they should be dropping like flies which they are not.
My intention is not to spread it, but to describe it because I think it's useful to understand the narrative. You cannot disagree with something you do not understand.
There's a faction of resistance which is neither shrill, nor obviously stupid, and they have coalesced around a narrative that is constructed in a way to be very compelling and frightening.
It's either an elaborate effort, or it's the natural result of smart people not trusting evidence, and extrapolating into authoritative-sounding "maybe"s.
In short, classic "bullshit".
But it would take someone more learned than I, to argue on merits. The promulgators of this narrative have read the Wikipedia article on ADE, and insist that that narrative is flawed, for reasons I cannot contradict.
Personally, I don't believe it for a second, but my reasons are rather prosaic: IME the more elaborately-cooked the future scenario is, the less likely it is to happen, outside of fiction. Nature tends toward the non-dramatic. I expect to be proven correct over the next ~year.
> Pfizer intentionally wipes out the control group as soon as they can by vaccinating all of the kids who initially got the placebo. They claim that they are doing this for “ethical reasons”. But everyone knows that Pfizer’s true aim is to wipe out any comparison group so that there can be no long term safety studies. Wiping out the control group is a criminal act and yet Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, and AZ do this as standard practice with the blessing of the FDA/CDC.
https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/ten-red-flags-in-the-fdas-...
The vaccine was effective/safe enough that it would cause more harm to leave them unvaccinated. If anything it means that there's more points of safety data by doing it this way.
> COVID-19 rates in children ages 5 to 11 are so low that there were ZERO cases of severe COVID-19 and ZERO cases of death from COVID in either the treatment (n= 1,518) or control group (n= 750).
The one point I'd add some clarification to is your .0001% chance of the vaccine having worse short term health effects. It's not that the number is wrong, exactly, it's that it's an average. It's contingent on a host of factors, but once you learn how rare side effects are, it's tempting to rhetorically bludgeon people with concerns over the head with this, even though in some cases they don't deserve it.
To give the most obvious example [1]:
> Some advisers were concerned that young and healthy Americans who don’t need a booster might choose to get one anyway. Side effects are uncommon, but in younger Americans they may outweigh the potential benefits of booster doses, the scientists said.
> “Those that are not at high risk should really be thoughtful about getting that dose,” said Dr. Helen Talbot, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University.
That's pretty strong language suggesting that if you are (1) young, (2) healthy, (3) already vaccinated, the risks might outweigh the benefits of getting vaccinated again (getting a third shot). That's extremely limited, of course, but it's important not to neglect the striking degree to which contingent facts can modulate the cost / benefit analysis.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/health/covid-vaccine-boos...
> I have seen zero cases of this, and everyone who's had a vaccine to my nose do not smell, and still have period and can get pregnant.
> I'd give this one a 0.000000000000000001% chance.
VAERS is tracking the following:
17,128 DEATHS
83,412 HOSPITALIZATIONS
92,017 URGENT CARE
127,641 DOCTOR OFFICE VISITS
7,532 ANAPHYLAXIS
10,179 BELL'S PALSY
2,631 Miscarriages
8,408 Heart Attacks
10,304 Myocarditis/Pericarditis
26,199 Permanently Disabled
3,875 Thrombocytopenia/Low Platelet
18,925 Life Threatening
31,753 Severe Allergic Reaction
9,734 Shingles
2,631 Miscarriage
15,158 Menstrual Disorders
5,401 Vaginal/Uterine Haemorrhage (All Ages)
The key question about VAERS data is, how bad is the under-reporting of side effects? The allegations of under-reporting ratios are all over the place, from as low as 1 to 3 undercount, to as bad as 1 to 100 undercount.
We really don't know how bad the situation is, or isn't. We just know there are side effects and some of them are non-trivial.
https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html
Also, where are you getting your numbers. When I search the database (after agreeing several times that I read and understood a disclaimer similar to the above), I found 8,225 reports of death
We also know that the usual mechanism for bad reactions to vaccines is allergic reaction, which is easily observed on a short timescale, and basically doesn't happen with the covid vaccines.
The question is really fundamentally simple for a massive vaccination campaign
Expected injury rates as a % of the population
Actual / Reported injury rates as a % of the population
Even while accounting for the low likelihood of even receiving reports of things.
We already know that some of the injury reports coming in have been independently verified by other nation's health departments. After all, there is a reason for some of the vaccine pauses among the young and healthy in the nordic countries.
Those would not be in VAERS. At all.
Everyone, go get vaccinated, please.
A friend of mine that happens to be a medical professional in a European country told me of the clotting related issues starting to show up in their own numbers far in advance of it being likewise confirmed in VAERS too.
That is why we know about these issues.
Country A and Country B have problems that show up, they ask which vaccine, which vector, etc, and they draw conclusions.
Reason 5 - Quality of vaccine, freshness, poor QA, defective dose
I think this is a likely concern in some countries. The vaccines are challenging to transport and properly keep stable and manufacturing of them happens in many places and was put in place and scaled up very quickly, quality control could be an issue, same as proper transportation and storage.
I would honestly give this one a 5% chance.
Though to be fair, and again, I'm a random person online explaining my personal assessment, but in my assessment I also take into account that I assume that smarter people then me have already ran all these numbers, and maybe I'm naive to assume that, but I also don't have the time, know how and the access to all the data I'd need to do so myself.
In that case, I have to either trust institutions and academics of multiple countries who seem to mostly agree +/- a few difference, or I have to trust volunteer effort from generally amateurs on the internet mixed in with some legitimate trolls. And since in my field of expertise, I see often that the internet is filled with more crap than accurate information, I don't really trust the internet as much, especially the information that's easy to find.
Side note: I hope we can do better than taking at face value investor press releases by the biopharma corps producing the vaccines.
You are correct that it isn't proving vaccine efficacy, but it is showing a different set of antibodies created by the variant vaccines that are more effective at neutralizing the targeted variant than the antibody collection created by the original, WT-targeted vaccine.
>Side note: I hope we can do better than taking at face value investor press releases by the biopharma corps producing the vaccines.
I hate science by press release too. I wish I was better at bookmarking the pre-prints and journal articles I find/read, but they'd just be a mess I couldn't find anything in either :|
Now, all the epi data we have indicates that the covid mRNA vaccines are effective against covid variants of concern. No need to panic.
"Original Antigenic Sin Response to RNA Viruses and Antiviral Immunity"
"Abstract: The human immune system has evolved to fight against foreign pathogens. It plays a central role in the body's defense mechanism. However, the immune memory geared to fight off a previously recognized pathogen, tends to remember an original form of the pathogen when a variant form subsequently invades. This has been termed 'original antigenic sin'. This adverse immunological effect can alter vaccine effectiveness and sometimes cause enhanced pathogenicity or additional inflammatory responses, according to the type of pathogen and the circumstances of infection. Here we aim to give a simplified conceptual understanding of virus infection and original antigenic sin by comparing and contrasting the two examples of recurring infections such as influenza and dengue viruses in humans."
Novavax has also been working on a Beta variant booster (and I believe has moved on to a Delta booster that hasn't started NHP trials yet) -- here's some info from a presentation: https://www.novavax.com/sites/default/files/2021-05/NVAX-WVC... (It's slides 17 and 18)
Pfizer/BioNTech definitely has a Delta booster getting ready for NHP trials, but my Google Fu is lacking today, apparently.
I think the quick (and overly simplistic) answer to this question is that models (e.g. convolutional networks) that predict which chunks of viral (or human) proteins are displayed to immune cells (HLA presentation), along with other kinds of models (like those predicting crossreactivity of T cell receptors against mutated epitopes) are really primitive (mostly because of low quality training datasets, it's not really a hard problem like e.g. protein folding).
Hence, rushing a new vaccine is not easy as there is a lot of labwork to do. As a matter of fact, all COVID vaccine designs had essentially the same payload (the whole spike protein). Modern subunit vaccines would typically include only little chunks of the spike (to increase efficiency and avoid side effects). But this was not trivial to do quickly without good in silico models.
Or do a mix - first shot ancestral, second shot Delta.
* It's hard to recruit non-vaccinated participants
* There will be safety issues to address on people that have received multiple shots and / or designed against different strains
This may of course change with new variants.
This goes against the paper:
>A boost with mRNA-1273.351 appeared to be more effective at neutralization of the B.1.351 virus than a boost with mRNA-1273, evidenced by the higher mean GMT levels in the Part C cohort 1 participants (1400) than the GMT Part B participants (864) against the B.1.351 virus. Additionally, the difference between the wild-type and B.1.351 assays at day 1 dropped from 7.7-fold prior to the boost with mRNA-1273.351 to 2.6-fold at 15 days after the boost.
Thank you for posting this though -- I was looking for it earlier for my own comment and couldn't find it! Bookmarking now.
Is it possible that the heavy mutations detected on the A.30 variant also make it less contagious?
There's a lot of variants of concern. Its important to keep an eye on new variants, but don't worry about them until they cross the 1% or 5% mark. At that point, you can better theorize that they might be outcompeting the dominant strain.
You _really_ don't know that something is outcompeting until it reaches 50%. But by then its too late. The 1% or 5% points are still a month or two in advance of the 50% crossing, in both Alpha and Delta.
So that's where I keep my attention: at the 1% and 5% points. A variant gotta get to 1% before it can reach 50% of the world ya know?
For me the only way a variant can be outperformed is that all people who get infected get also infected with the other variant OR the first variant for whatever reason stop being transmissible
What you are saying isn't logically sound.
Basically one spreads faster than the other so after a few iterations almost all of new cases are the new variant.
> How would Delta prevent A.30 from thriving?
Directly by driving up immunity, indirectly by coercing people to take steps to slow the spread of delta, which also slows the spread of a.30. Things like vaccination, social distancing, mask wearing etc...
> Why won't we become infected by Delta and A.30?
Because Delta probably give you significantly more immunity than a vaccine. Specifically infection gives both more robust and stronger immunity than the vaccines.
Isn't there evidence that says the opposite? And that immunity due to infection is much more variable between individuals and infections, due to how the immune system responds to the virus.
I 100% agree with you on the quality of information here vs. there. It is much, much more strictly moderated. But with that moderation, that subreddit does not recommend going out and getting COVID in lieu of a vaccine. Even if initial response is better for COVID.
COVID + Vaccine is by far the best, but that doesn't mean you should skip the vaccine to make sure you go the 'rona frst.
Vaccine + Vaccine (and maybe + vaccine) is, by far, the safest combination for pretty much everyone people.
> SARS-CoV-2 naïve vaccinees had a 5.96-fold (95% CI, 4.85 to 7.33) increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold (95% CI, 5.51 to 9.21) increased risk for symptomatic disease. SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected.
> Conclusions This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.
Also just in terms of baseline beliefs based on the physical world, I would assume that the vast majority of the time an infection would be more protective than a vaccine.
It is also orders of magnitude more deadly. Vaccines are proven to be much safer than getting Covid.
This is one preprint study comparing natural immunity to the Pfizer vaccine. It is interesting and may hold up after peer review. However, we have to be careful drawing broad conclusions and over interpreting these results.
The danger is that we are already seeing many groups pointing to this study and trying to read this as meaning we should not be getting vaccinated, because obviously getting covid is better. We should not forget that in 2020 and into 2021, despite significant lock downs and enforced/encouraged masking, and without widely and globally available vaccinations we lost about 5 million people to Covid. Skipping vaccines in favor of "natural" immunity is a path to continued carnage.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02795-x
>Those who had recovered from COVID-19 months before receiving their jabs harboured antibodies capable of defanging the mutant spike, which displays much more resistance to immune attack than any known naturally occurring variant. These peoples’ antibodies even blocked other types of coronaviruses. “It’s very likely they will be effective against any future variant that SARS-CoV-2 throws against them,” says Hatziioannou.
You should really check what people are saying on random posts on Facebook.
There are sooooo many papers that prove this -- stop pretending you are too important/lazy/etc to search for them yourself because you want to write some anti-vax BS.
Its not like "Delta-variant" gives you immunity to Flu Type B/Yamagata. But people around the world are masking up and locking down (well, in 2020 anyway). People's behaviors change when a large-scale pandemic like this occurs, and the weaker viruses die out.
Even ignoring that, COVID19 forces an immune response. Yes, this immune response includes memory-cells (which remember COVID19's signature), but it _ALSO_ increases other immune cells (Neutrophil, killer-T cells, among others) which will hunt down any virus more effectively. This effect is temporary, but still a big enough effect to see the body fight off other diseases a bit better after getting sick from anything.
So even though COVID19 / Delta doesn't give you any immunity (ie: memory cells / antibodies) to Flu B/Yamagata, you see Delta outcompeting it and driving Flu B/Yamagata to extinction.
--------
Delta transfers memory-cell responses + antibody responses (two attributes of "memory immunity") against COVID19, and Alpha, and other variants. Sure the disease is evolving, but its not like these antibodies are totally useless against the virus within the same line.
COVID19 simply doesn't evolve as quickly as the flu does.
--------
This effect, in reverse, was seen in 2020 where recipients of the standard Flu shot had something like a 5% lower chance of getting COVID19. The temporary "immune response" that your body built up for the Flu vaccine had a minor (but measurable) effect on COVID19.
Getting sick with _ANYTHING_ makes it harder for other viruses to attack you. Your body just goes into overdrive making various white blood cells.
If the lab finds that 87% of the samples from Adam's College are of the Omega Mu strain, then it's assumed 87% of total cases at Adam's College to be Omega Mu variant.
That said, if you just want to know what proportion of the population has delta, you don't need to sequence that many cases. The point of sequencing a large fraction of cases is to catch emerging variants, that wouldn't be likely to be caught otherwise. But to know whether Delta is 30%, 50%, or 70% of cases, you just need a good random sample, not a particularly large one, and I imagine you can do that at the labs where the PCR tests are being run.
(at one point, I recall that the UK had a test that matched on three distinct sites on the virus, and they found that one of those sites would turn up negative for a particular variant, so they were able to use that as a proxy for the spread of the variant. I don't remember if that was Alpha or Delta though, and obviously it's no replacement for sequencing)
[0] https://cen.acs.org/analytical-chemistry/sequencing/200000-c...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-exceeds-600000-covid-1...
US does statistical sampling and also prevents patients from being told about variants, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28419280
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/variant-s...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/cdc-role-...
There is also a way to differentiate on some RT-PCR tests (but not all), depending on how they are made.
See page [pdf] 5 on this: https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/...
It is updated every Wednesday
I've been watching the delta variant take over the world over the past several months here: https://covariants.org
(dark green is delta)
efficacy of Oxford, Pfizer, and hetero-innoculation with both were examined, indications were given of reduced efficacy of either vaccine alone vs CoV A.30. The combination of both vaccines[hetero-inocculation] was associated with higher efficacy vs A.30
the mutations appear in vitro; to confer inhibition of vaccine induced antibody binding; enhanced cellular entry; enhanced pulmonary[lung] trophicity[targeting]
relative efficacies of moderna; Johnson&johnson; vs Oxford; Pfizer were not examined.
That wouldn't surprise me. The spike is central to how SARS-CoV-2 is so infectious. If the virus mutates the spike too much, it might evade the vaccines, but at the cost of being less infectious.
What's surprising is this research says, in vitro, A.30 is more infectious.
Regardless, as you and others say, in real world conditions A.30 doesn't appear to out compete Delta.
100%. This strain hasn't been seen since May. It has already died out because of Delta.
All of these discussions are academic -- we really are only talking about if a Delta variant can gain these mutations and really wreck havoc. And the answer is "probably not" (for a while, anyways)
ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 is AstraZeneca
BNT162b2 is Pfizer/BioNTech
I suppose you mean the vaccine names are mainly useful for regulatory purposes, because the general population will continue to name the vaccines after the manufacturer or researchers?
In more normal times, most people outside of R&D would never encounter the name.
But I still maintain the official names are ridiculous. “Vaxzevria” is the trademark used by AstraZeneca in the EU. (As you say, not ChAdOx1.) And yes, the general population end up seeing Vaxzevria, on their vaccine information forms, and online at https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/human/EPAR/vaxzevria-...
For other drugs, an amazing amount of effort is devoted to finding something that a) sounds "promising" but b) without making legally-untenable promises.
The name `Viagra`, famously, is supposed to evoke ideas of vigor and Niagra (Falls). Pfizer had some trouble with Champix (varenicline), which some regulators thought was too close to "champion", and so was called Chantix in some markets instead.
Why couldn't they just be called Moderna/Pfizer/... Covid Vaccine?
[1] https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory/overview/publi...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210305190828/https://www.ema.e...
This is a speed-up that pre-dates the mRNA trick Moderna had been working on, a virus from chimps (so humans aren't immune to it because it wouldn't infect humans normally, yet chimps are similar enough that the virus can get into a human cell) but hollowed out to make whatever you want instead of more copies of itself. You put any payload inside it and it'll re-program the patient's cells to make that for a brief period until the immune system cleans up the mess. This vaccine uses the spike protein as payload to train your immune system.
IIUC, when COVID first gained notoriety, there was a large public effort to solve its molecular structure [0].
Articles like this seem to imply that they've solved the structure of numerous variants, making me think we (collectively) can do it much more quickly now.
If that's really true, what's changed? Does knowing the structure of other COVID variants give us a massive head start? Or has there been a massive investment in computing power for solving COVID-variant stuctures?
[0] https://foldingathome.org/diseases/infectious-diseases/covid...
Even if there were, changes of a single amino acid that don't induce significant conformational (shape) change are the sort of thing that you'd need a very good structure to discern, since they're mostly on the surface of the spike, and probably spin around a lot.
The most relevant thing to know is what a mutation / mutations looks like in the context of antibody binding, but that's even harder to get a good structure. It's not something that can be done quickly.
this ends up looking like the quantum physics conundrum where there is a central tendency rather than certainty, until you pin it down in some way.
this is why we have a vaccine to begin with, the realization that there are conformational frequencies to the S protien, and a particular locus in the sequence is associated with the conformational change that sequesters the binding domain of S protien. thus the 2proline version of S was used in subsequent vaccines, allowing the ACE2 binding domain to remain exposed to the PAMP recognition machinery.
it takes months or weeks depending on how well the supervising scientist receives a request, it used to take years and decades in many cases.
Yes, this is always true. Entropy is real, and loss of entropy affects free energy of binding. Even "structures" aren't really structures, but instantaneous pictures of a system in constant motion.
like any jigsaw puzzle, the more pieces correctly placed the easier it becomes to progress.
All the time from then to general availability of their vaccine was spent on testing and scaling.
This is not exactly what you asked. But if the question is whether we have a speed advantage on vaccines because of greater understanding of viruses now, the answer is yes. It’s one reason the COVID-19 vaccine was the fastest in history.
Should it become necessary to separately vaccinate against coronavirus variants, the same advantage would confer. And vaccine makers have said they are monitoring variants and ready to go, if necessary.
The question is, will it be necessary? And how much testing will variant vaccines need to undergo?
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
It's wild because immunity is useful for preventing infection (also, reducing the severity of infection). There's little point catching the thing you don't want to catch in order to prevent you catching it, because you still. suffer. the. harm. of having been infected.
There are way better options, like third doses of vaccines. Or revising the vaccines for Delta. Besides, if you want something 'like' a small dose of coronavirus, it would be far safer to attenuate the coronavirus first. Then you just have a classic vaccine.
No vaccine ever stops 100% of infections; stop making unnecessary preconditions.
[1] https://wintoncentre.maths.cam.ac.uk/news/communicating-pote...
A vaccine preventing the seriousness of infection is a precondition. If I get a vaccine and it does nothing it is pointless. While most vaccinated act like political drones, if you told them than the vaccine actually does nothing to prevent the spread and vaccinated people are still frequently dying from COVID then I'm sure a lot of them would not be getting it.
Normally you'd get colds 2-3 times a year (there are over a billion cases per year in the US alone), sometimes without noticing. These would "boost" your immune system from time to time and afford some limited protection against severe disease. That did not happen over the past 18 months for a lot of people, especially in countries like UK/NZ/Australia which went way overboard on lockdowns, to the point where there was no "flu season" last year.
I bet US will fare better just because enforcement is relatively lax, and 190M people already had COVID [2] (probably due to not really observing any lockdowns or whatever).
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-58624295
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
There's hope!
COVID19 is not lethal for the majority of people. We will all die of something eventually but if some people are particularly fixated on COVID19, they are welcome to spend more time at home (instead of going out to meet people) and they can try to find remote work or some job which doesn't require so much contact with other people. Anyone could easily bring their risk of catching COVID19 to nearly 0% by limiting social contact, proper distancing, hand-washing, mask-wearing, choosing the right kind of job (or retiring), getting plenty of sunlight, vitamin D supplements, living outside of urban centers, not travelling too much, etc... All of these things are going to be way more effective at protecting individuals from COVID19 than any vaccine and these things don't require ruining other people's lives.
Also, if you don't want to risk dying of COVID19, you can just go live in a remote village/town; nobody is forcing you to live in a densely populated city. Big cities are reservoirs for the COVID19 virus. Other people can kill you; this is a fact of life which we have to accept. If you choose to constantly surround yourself with many people, then you're taking the risk, nobody else owes you protection from whatever viruses they may harbor inside their bodies without their knowledge.
The hospital system will be fine. If hospitals become too crowded with COVID19 patients; they can just start turning them away! People will come up with solutions; temporary/makeshift COVID19 hospitals, home-delivered ventilators, etc... Maybe governments can fund this if it comes to that?
Secondary, the virus has no will of it's own, it will just randomly mutate, and if a stronger variant appears it will do so, if there are vaccins or not. However, you are advocating to roll the dice millions time more, just because there was already a very small chance this gets worse, and you think that is a good idea?
This pandemic has been blown out of proportion. The media emotional 'contagion' has had a bigger negative impact on people's lives than the actual virus. Did everyone suddenly forget the emotional 'contagion' study which Facebook did some years ago? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17470161155795...
The result of that study was that people's emotions could be manipulated without their knowledge... How do we know that what we're dealing with now isn't just Facebook and the media putting the results of that study into practice? It sure looks that way. I can definitely feel myself being manipulated by the media and I suspect that others who are more suggestible than me are even more so and less likely to notice it...
Using your math, there have been 738k deaths in ~1.7 years, or roughly 434k deaths per year yielding 15%, or 1 out of 6 deaths.
I just want to point out that death is not the only bad outcome of Covid. Medical researchers are finding evidence of memory loss and brain fog, long term disability, and long recovery times. https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-side-effects-could-incl...
Also, 2x chance of death is a pretty high threshold! (I don't mean any criticism, just surprise.)
But this all focuses on the role of an individual and not the on role of a community. Smokers don't just harm themselves; second-hand smoke harms other people. Indoor smoking bans are for communal health, they aren't primarily meant to impact the individual smokers, who just go outside. Similarly, Covid-19 harms others if they get infected, and it also harms people who have put off non-emergency surgeries when hospitals are overcrowded.
..
Re: Emotional Contagion. If I remember correctly, the effects that were reported in the Facebook study were small, on the order of a change from 5.1 to 5.3 positive emotion words. (But it has been a while, so take that with a grain of salt.)
> How do we know that what we're dealing with now isn't just Facebook and the media putting the results of that study into practice?
This is an interesting question. Consider that lumping 'the media' together with Facebook means that most media outlets in every country (hundreds of thousands of people with their own agendas, political slants, biases, motivations, and who don't speak the same language) are now cooperating with one of the few companies widely credited with decimating newsroom web-traffic and by extension newsroom profits.
> The hospital system will be fine. If hospitals become too crowded with COVID19 patients; they can just start turning them away! People will come up with solutions; temporary/makeshift COVID19 hospitals, home-delivered ventilators, etc... Maybe governments can fund this if it comes to that?
If someone has a 'needs to go to a hospital' case of covid, if the disease is affecting their lungs and body poorly enough, then they will need attention from people who have medical degrees. If they are all busy working in overcrowded hospitals which are in triage / ration-care mode, who will staff the alternative care solutions you've outlined? Especially if hospital demand outstrips hospital supply?
Except the live in the remote town, your other points have been refuted and are easily disproven with some basic research skills.
My home country with silly low vaccination rates just introduced 8pm curfew last week, a neighboring country is sending additional ventilators, routine healthcare and surgeries have been stopped, government is making plans of sending patients abroad if the infection and hospitalization rates don’t change and they’re now talking about targeted mobilization to help healthcare staff, who are crunching insane hours to save people lives.
But hey ho, “Honey, come look! I’ve found some information all the world’s scientists and doctors have missed.”, said an HN commenter.
Just makes me sad.
If you think you’re the smartest person in the world, you need to look in the mirror twice.
I have a bad feeling that with focus just on antibodies we're ignoring the important metrics. Which is outcomes.
Besides, the fact this variant hasn't spread much is telling in and of itself! Maybe we got 'lucky'. But maybe it just isn't that contagious, compared to Delta.
Or it could be overcounted by a sizable chunk too. Nobody really knows the actual count and we probably won't until the dust settles and cooler heads prevail. The only thing we can do at this point is take the numbers we have at face value.
The Economist has a model worth checking out: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
Also, I agree that focusing on the face-value numbers is a good call, practically speaking.
So, for it to be overcounted, you would need to have an explanation for the reason that not just the recent excess deaths not attributed to COVID-19 have jumped so much, but that the 'real' causes of death have overshot and bit into the COVID numbers.
Not even California undercounted that much and they are among the worst under counters in the western world, if we compare Covid deaths to excess mortality. Death undercounts are closer to 30% at worst.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
> Taken together, the researchers found that excess deaths were estimated to be in the range of 3.4 million to 4.7 million - about 10 times higher than India's official Covid-19 death toll.
Where I live is >80% double dosed, however there are far less than 5% that have been naturally infected.
A population with 5% naturally-induced/80% vaccine-induced immunity might see more spread of a new variant than a population with 25%/60%, however the total outcomes would still be better in the first population; so "less protected" was definitely the wrong thing to say.
Naturally-induced immunity for COVID is stronger because it targets more than just the spike protein, and it presumably[0] grants better mucosal immunity than our current vaccines induce, but of course the risk/cost of natural infection is very high.
https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/prevention/dengue-vaccine.html
The worst-case scenario for a vaccine is not "no immunity", it is negative immunity. If your adaptive immune response outcompetes your innate immune response in binding to antigens, but does not neutralize them, then your immune system will struggle to fight off an infection