Good that we have something that actually works, bad that some assholes will use it as an excuse not to get vaxxed, completely missing the point (among others, trying to prevent something worse than Delta).
It's still quite unclear whether vaccinated or unvaccinated people pose a greater risk via viral evolution (especially w/r/t risk to people that are already vaccinated). Basically comes down to a comparison of a higher level of spread with "normal" genetic drift vs. a somewhat lower (but still fairly high) level of spread with selection for immune escape of the current vaccine versions.
It's still a good idea to get vaccinated to help your own reaction to the virus, and to keep hospitals at sustainable capacity, but the "UNVACCINATED ARE MAKING THE VIRUS MORE EVIL" claim is, at this point, more propaganda than fact.
Here's some discussion: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
https://www.google.com/search?q=hiv+mutation+rate&oq=hiv+mutation+rate&aqs=chrome.0.0i512l6j0i22i30l4.1834j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539923/
i.e. based on the PLOS study and the one above:
1. PLOS study constantly uses the word "risk" and "may", i.e. the authors don't know the actual probabilities of escape and use a mathematical model based on a far more mutagenic virus, HIV.
2. even if there's a low threshold for the virus to mutate, most of the mutations are not viable
3. so far we've seen only 4 dominant strains, the rest are being outcompeted : https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+dominant+mutations+of+covid+are+there
4. It makes more logical sense to me that if your unvaccinated body takes 10 days to mount a peak immune response (as mentioned in the PLOS study), that still gives the virus more time to mutate even if there are no pressures to mutate. There's lots of missing data in your study, particularly what exactly is the mutation rate for sars-cov-2 in vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations? But if we simply look at where the dominant mutations have come from so far, it's not from countries with high vaccination rates like Israel, New Zealand, or from asian countries that take serious measures at curbing the spread of the virus, singapore, japan, korea, china.This is a very dangerous road to go down. I strongly disagree that the government and media should have license to lie to people if it's a useful lie in the moment. All that does is erode trust in those institutions, the longer term results of which are the root cause of most of the anti-vaccine sentiment today.
> PLOS study constantly uses the word "risk" and "may", i.e. the authors don't know the actual probabilities of escape and use a mathematical model based on a far more mutagenic virus, HIV.
You're absolutely right. The experts are just guessing the odds of this stuff, and you and I are really only able to do the same, with even less certainty.
> It makes more logical sense to me that if your unvaccinated body takes 10 days to mount a peak immune response (as mentioned in the PLOS study), that still gives the virus more time to mutate even if there are no pressures to mutate
With all due respect, when dealing with probabilities like this, non-experts estimating what makes "logical sense" is completely useless.
> if we simply look at where the dominant mutations have come from so far, it's not from countries with high vaccination rates like Israel, New Zealand, or from asian countries that take serious measures at curbing the spread of the virus, singapore, japan, korea, china.
Israel and New Zealand have negligible populations on a world scale. The efficacy of social distancing in the east Asian countries you mentioned is clear, but completely unrelated to the question at hand. The delta variant came from India, a country of 1.4B people, before any of them had access to the vaccines. That tells us nothing about whether the vaccines net encourage or net discourage harmful virus evolution.
It's okay to say we don't know, and in fact far better to do so than to make up a politically convenient answer.
You say vaccination or serious measure, which is the truth? Could a mutation not occur elsewhere and infect a densely populated area? There isn’t evidence that the places most affected were the origins of the virus mutations.
So while on a personal level, there may not be dramatic differences in death rates etc., on a population level the differences are huge.
The reduction in transmission rate for the vaccinated is 89%. Even for someone with a breakthrough infection of the more contagious Delta variant being vaccinated means a 63% reduction.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294250-how-much-less-l...
First thing I noticed is these result actually select people who had the antiviral administered to them within 3 days of the symptoms appearing. I have personally known people who unfortunately died in a week tops after contracting the virus (they had pre-existing conditions, namely hypertension and diabetes).
Which brings me to my next point: Suppose the antiviral exists and is viable to even beyond 85%. How much will it cost ? I'm not a US citizen, but I'm thinking insurances will rush to trying not to cover anyone who's not vaccinated or some shady shit because they always do. And how about 3rd world countries like the one I come from. We can't even get RNA vaccines, let alone an experimental drug like this.
And now my final and target point: Suppose you don't want to get the vaccine and you can afford the drug. We do have proof that even if the vaccine doesn't protect you from the virus completely, even in the unfortunate case where you do contract it, you'll end up infecting less people. Now if you choose to not get vaccinated, then you really do risk potentially contaminating more people that will either have no access to the antiviral within a reasonable effective timeframe(and that maybe not vaccinated either) or just plain infecting more people overall.
Not the cleanest reasoning, and not a mathematical proof by any means, but I believe it's one of those "mathematical" problems where the proof is finding an edge case (sorry studied in french, really don't know how they say it in english).
What is a "rational society" and what threatens it?
My default view is Rawlsian: I'd like to live in a society which maximizes the well-being of the least well-off people, even if that's not currently me. In that framework one threat from a pandemic is that some at-risk people might die (people with some health conditions will die when infected and may not respond well to vaccination); that threat can be mitigated if people develop treatments, apply nonpharmaceutical interventions like indoor masking, and participate in community inoculation.
There are other very different notions of a "rational society". In some, the premature death of people who are elderly, medically at-risk, or choose to avoid vaccination might be preferred outcomes. Hmmm.
Also, the vaccines work on a principle that's somewhat well understood, accepted and deemed safe: training the immune system by giving it something that looks like the virus so it can learn. The only novel part is how this "something that looks like the virus" is created (mRNA as opposed to weakened but real virus). On the other hand this new molecule has a totally different mechanism of action and the potential for side effects may be higher.
Other than that, you mean?
Why would an anti parasitic drug exhibit any measurable response? Yet, it did.
That is when I realized that science was, if not dead, then severely wounded.
No interest at all, from the “scientific” people.
Now, it turns out we probably know why; it happened to (probably accidentally) be a potent protease inhibitors - and that happened to be important.
We could have found this out a year ago, and begun exploiting this attack vector.
But, no: everyone who found this interesting and worthy of further study was derided and threatened with job losses.
What a shit-show.
pills are basically just food(=good) to the subconscious lizard brain, zero negative connotations from evolution, zero conspiracy theories
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
Given that there isn’t a ton of data showing that vaccination actually reduces infection or transmission, and all of the clinical studies before approval were based on hospitals death, I don’t think you can claim that’s ‘the point’.
Edit: Actually I was confusing this with molnupiravir; this drug is presumably perfectly safe.
That is almost a non-statement that could be seemingly applied to anything with some pharmacological effect. I think you and I and every other layman are talking out of their ass when we make some kind of determination as to any side effects Paxlovid might have.
You're correct that almost anything with a pharmacological effect has such concerns, which diminish with time. That's why prevention is superior to treatment.
Also I wasn't talking about Paxlovid, but molnupiravir, which you'd also be taking.
Certainly the risk is lower than untreated covid, but it's just that if you can avoid the risk then all the better.
which ones are you talking about?
Which just proves, the anti-vaxxer moment is based on the primitive instinct of ”pain and needles=bad”
Being scared of vaccines should be considered the same thing as having a fear of dentists. Or pets hating going to the vet.
The group blesses and curses treatments based on contradictory criteria.
Ivermectin is blessed, supposedly because it is cheap. Molnupiravir is cursed, because it is a new drug Big Pharma wants you to pay more for. The vaccines are cursed, even though they're cheap. Monoclonal antibodies are blessed, even though they are very expensive, and are effectively just the products of vaccination.
I think it's more likely people are just doing what they are told by whoever influences them the most. None of it has to be consistent or make any kind of sense.
But just like I can trust the things I buy from the grocery stone to not poison me or to have stones embedded inside, I trust medical products taken by millions or even billions of people
People in rural areas see how food grows directly— from the ground or from livestock. They can get food from the grocery or from their backyard: sometimes the backyard food is fresher and better. These folks don’t trust the “API of the City” to provide for them. That’s OK too. The API tells them to inject themselves with a random concoction that they can’t independently verify and so they refuse.
Source: https://babylonbee.com/news/pfizer-releases-popular-new-drug...
Well, they've succeeded in holding out long enough, now that there's no longer a good reason to get vaxxed. Because, as most people are starting to realize, the pandemic is over (at least in the US).
That remains to be seen. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years will be the test of this hypothesis.