B.1.1.529
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I know this is not a particularly popular opinion, but I think we have things like peer review, the three sigma rule of thumb, and so on, for good reason. It's disappointing to see scientists spew out an entire thread and then cap it off with "just my opinion, so who knows" -- just as dishonest as crypto pumpers and their "not financial advice" disclaimers. Give me a break.
I'm happy you got your Twitter engagement though, that's what it's all about.
It is true in many cases, but I feel like anyone who has contributed _as an expert in epidemiology_ has a good track record on correcting their statements. Did I miss anything worrisome?
I think this feeling would be misguided: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7447267/ -- retractions have been basically non-existent. On the scientist or the journalist side.
"Ioannidis estimated that deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19 could potentially be as low as 10,000—or they could approach levels not seen since the flu pandemic of 1918"
"writing to President Trump of his concerns about the lack of evidence regarding the efficacy of lockdowns"
And just like with the Y2K bug one of the issues with takes like this is that it ignores all of the work that people did to prevent it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If there were no vaccines, lockdowns or similar health measures maybe the predictions would have been accurate.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ioannidis-aff...
All considered I feel the point of the original comment.
My point still stand: I have not seen an epidemiologist write something that proved false without a clarification. Non-specialist write uninformed things but it’s not really new.
Specifically, Indy SAGE are eternal doom-mongers. Most of what they say is completely out of proportion in this vaccines era of COVID.
They also scream “close the borders” _all_ _the_ _damn_ _time_. This is (a) generally pointless when COVID is everywhere, and moreover the UK is doing worse than many countries. Also, (b), it helps perpetuate the UK's dangerous anti migrant rhetoric. Just yesterday people drowned in the English Channel as a result of the UK's hostility to refugees, and a bunch of xenophobic politicians feigned horror.
A good write up on him is here: https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-alarmist-eric-feig...
Feigl-Ding holds doctorates in both epidemiology and nutrition, with his professional experience in nutritional epidemiology and epidemiology of chronic disease. Since this professional experience and research work are not in infectious disease epidemiology, the subfield most relevant to COVID-19, Feigl-Ding has been criticized for offering viral social media and other media commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic.
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I think readers should form their own opinion on whether to label him a "scammer epidemiologist".
I'd prefer we stick to the research paper format for stuff like this where there is a distinct space for results, and a distinct space for conclusions. Let's make knowledge out of the information first.
For example look The Seattle Flu Study Story at https://stratechery.com/2020/zero-trust-information/
If the scientist is completely wrong then the impact is that governments and the public took precautions that were unnecessary. But most of those impacts e.g. banning visitors from hot-spots, stronger health measures e.g. mask-wearing come with limited downsides and potentially huge upsides i.e. saving lives.
So it seems like that scientists should do more to engage with the public and communicate any potential threats as clearly and early as possible.
You end up with aggressive, last-resort measures like extended lockdowns.
Hence my point that there is minimal downside to being overly cautious when you first hear about new variants.
Your entire framing of these policy choices as inevitable and the only option is baseless. Australia and New Zealand used to be held up as the shining lights of "just act fast enough and you can avoid the need for any sustained restrictions" and now we are seeing just how well kicking the can in that way actually works, and the lengths that must be gone to keep kicking it.
https://twitter.com/ungeneva/status/1244661916535930886 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234871709091667969
Also remember, it's not airborne and sanitizing surfaces is all it takes.
Edit: To clarify this is not a judgement on experts getting things wrong. Experts can't know everything.
Like, there is no call to action here. No one is looking to deceive you into buying an ape for the good of the arts.
(while i’m asking, why is everything in the future so heavy?)
Also putting that information out into twitter will get to the right people and the wrong people (i.e. people who can understand whats she's saying and people who aren't) and then the information gets used in multiple different ways.
Yes hot takes are risky.
While it’s fascinating to see this stuff out in Public, it’s the same kind of fascination I had when Trump started diplomacy via Twitter, or when I saw my neighbours have a shouted domestic argument on their front lawn…
As an individual that’s fine. As a society, we’ve got you and me who’ve learned to hold back, friends and alarmists who react to every signal to their own detriment and risk drowning out the real message, and we’ve got disillusioned trolls who cherry-pick the noise to “prove” scientists aren’t trustworthy.
I don’t know if it’s possible to have the open conversation while cooling off the side effects.
See: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-pandemic-is-over-again/
I knew that the pandemic was far from over with in the US even with the mass vaccination campaign being declared mostly a success this summer.
On a worldwide scale, given the rates plus the raw numbers in locales plus mobility within borders along with people crossing borders...it simply did not add up.
Plus, Americans are a very polarized group of people. (I say this as an American citizen living abroad who is also culturally American and has lived there the vast majority of her life.). Some counties in the United States had 25-30% vaccination rates at best right before the fall season. (I have not recently checked.)
But, I do recall reading that the US created a model (which of course is frequently being updated) for coronavirus spike protein mutations that would predict when the virus was statistically likely to evolve in such a way. I think it was a DARPA funded program or something like that. So, it’s not like this new “big news” came out of nowhere.
But, what is going on in the ascribed South African province in the above linked Tweet is unlikely to just be random coincidence. First, it is South Africa’s most populated province at around 15 million people. Second, it’s nearly summer in South Africa and it’s been hot there. Overall, we need people to investigate and for people to stop transmitting things that are not covered well and balanced, making many of us susceptible to confirmation bias.
But, stopping virus transmission altogether should have been our goal worldwide. Very few countries have succeeded. Yes, the WHO failed but so did the vast majority of the world’s countries.
See: Covid pandemic was preventable, says WHO-commissioned report: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/12/covid-pandemic...
However, had the link been one of the many news articles on this topic rather than a tweetbarf, I think this comment would not be at the top, and we'd be talking about the virus instead.
The problem is people considering twitter comments as facts and basing their medical decisions off of them.
FWIW my trust in academia, and specifically medical, will never return.
On Threadreader: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1463885539619311616.html (full thread)
I’m a bit fed up with coronaviruses tbh.
Yet we can already see that Delta binds better than the early strains and the efficacy of existing vaccines against it is like 60%, which contradict that. Does it make sense?
FWIW, coronaviruses have been around for a very long time. 30% of common colds are coronaviruses.
I feel myself slowly peeling off from reality.
> FWIW, coronaviruses have been around for a very long time. 30% of common colds are coronaviruses.
I can’t say I have a particularly soft spot for colds. They just don’t do it for me, I could easily live without them.
This variant has not had to compete with Delta at all.
It established itself in a vacuum of infections, and it may all be due to founder effects, with a new wave of infections due to behavior or other changes.
I'm also very skeptical that P681H is suddenly going to flip the script and start displacing P681R.
SA also has low vaccination rates and its not obvious that this variant arose because of selection for immune evasion (even if it did, immune evasion from NAbs is probably inevitable and will happen forever).
The nomenclature is called PANGO by the way. It is named after the software tool "Phylogenetic Assignment of Named Global Outbreak Lineages" (PANGOLIN) which is used to classify lineages of SARS-Cov2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_Assignment_of_Nam...
FWIW.
Got my 3rd shot a month ago but I can see we will get a new one in the spring. Rinse and repeat
https://www.timesofisrael.com/health-minister-suggests-fourt...
The problem if is this variant is different enough to the original variant for the vaccine to be effective against it or no.
“We do know that B.1.529 has many more mutations than other variants and has mutations seen in other variants that are associated with BOTH higher transmissibility AND immune escape.”
People seem to want to treat covid as if its a school assignment; as if there is a teacher giving you harder and harder homework in an arbitrary fashion who knows what is going to happen and you can ask them. Its not - this is the real world. Answers come when people test out theories and discover what's what. Its a process, and it takes time. What the article is saying basically is that there is a lot of uncertainty but what we do know so far is concerning.
If even one of them transmit to someone else, who transmit is themselves… this could spread like the Delta variant. There has not been any clinical test on the effectiveness of vaccines, of course; however, with so many mutations, in particular the mutations on the parts that code the spike protein, the vaccines that have proven effective so far (which focus on that spike) are likely to be far less effective. It’s likely we would develop new vaccines, but that presents more risk, so would need more tests, etc. Lockdowns are likely in the meantime.
What makes you think that a set of mutations like this can evolve only once? Even if this particular lineage of COVID goes extinct, its existence demonstrates that the virus is responding to selection pressure in the way you'd expect any organism to respond under conditions of natural selection. If evolution can pull of B.1.1.529 once, it can do so again and again.
This seems unlikely. It's usually considered that immunity to one variant gives you at least some immunity to other variants.
Could you provide sources for this claim?
If a new variant has a spike protein different enough, then you will not be in a better situation than an individual with no vaccine and no previous contact with the virus.
In contrast, someone with natural immunity would have the ability to produce a wider range of antibodies that target many different parts of the virus, therefore many more variants would be vulnerable to at least some of the antibodies.
(Caveat: the immune system actually is more complex than that)
That's quite a different claim to "it permanently reduces your body's ability to learn how to counter different parts of other versions of COVID".
> In contrast, someone with natural immunity would have the ability to produce a wider range of antibodies that target many different parts of the virus
This is a very different argument that natural infection gives more effective immunity than vaccination, and the empirical evidence does not seem to agree.
Here the argument is that, when the antibodies “learned” from the vaccine have a low, but not nil, effectiveness, then the immune system of a vaccinated person would continue producing only the same antibodies. A person with natural immunity would instead be able to modulate the immune response and use the most effective among the many antibodies that they can produce.
> This is a very different argument that natural infection gives more effective immunity than vaccination, and the empirical evidence does not seem to agree.
There is some evidence that natural immunity lasts longer, although it is not settled yet.
-higher virulence causes people to stay at home more, and less spread in community
-higher transmissibility means more spread person to person
-high lethality means people die faster and not spread as fast
SARS and MERS before SARS-COV2(COVID) all had high lethality and therefore those that were infected didn't get a chance to transmit to others that well, and likely helped slow the spread. COVID seems to have a good balance between the three.
The above is a big simplification, but the general idea sticks.
SARS-1 had low latency, and so people tended to become contagious and symptomatic at around the same time, reducing transmission. Whereas SARS-2 has a high latency which helps it to spread while people are unaware they even have it. This also insulates SARS-2 from selective pressure to reduce its virulence.
In both the natural and leaky-vaccine scenarios, the virus evolves towards an ecological equilibrium, but in the leaky-vaccine scenario, that equilibrium is shifted in the direction of greater lethality. See the linked article: as a direct consequence of mass vaccination of chickens, Marek's diseased evolved from a minor illness into a highly-virulent, highly-transmissible disease that causes 100% lethal cancer in chickens unless the chicks are vaccinated before they hatch from their eggs.
https://theconversation.com/amp/vaccines-could-affect-how-th...
From an 1998 article on Marek, there appear to have been at least 3 jumps in Marek virulence, one in the late '50s pre vaccines (mild => virulent) and two post vaccine availability (virulent => very virulent, very virulent => very virulent plus), see chart on page S50.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0307945980841929...
From Andrew Read's own 2015 article:
"MDV became increasingly virulent over the second half of the 20th century [19,21–24]. Until the 1950s, strains of MDV circulating on poultry farms caused a mildly paralytic disease, with lesions largely restricted to peripheral nervous tissue. Death was relatively rare. Today, hyperpathogenic strains are present worldwide. These strains induce lymphomas in a wide range of organs and mortality rates of up to 100% in unvaccinated birds."
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
The conclusion of the rebuttal article you linked to is rather terrifying. If there ever was a "the road to [chicken] Hell is paved with good intentions", this is it.
"In the history of human and animal vaccines, there have not been many cases of vaccine-driven evolution. But in every one of them, individuals and populations have always been better off when vaccinated. At every point in the 50-year history of vaccination against Marek’s disease, an individual chicken exposed to the virus was healthier if it was vaccinated."
But is that true? Which hot lethal variants arose post vaccine availability?
"The three major pathotype shifts are:
(1) from m MDV to v MDV strains in the late 1950s;
(2) from v MDV to vv MDV in the late 1970s;
(3) the appearance of the putative vv + pathotype in the early 1990s (Figure 4).
Each occurrence has been associated with greater disease losses which have persisted until introduction of the next generation of vaccine. The reason for the shifts remain speculative. Shifts in the 1970s and 1990s may have been in response to certain MD vaccines. Kreager (1996) has suggested vaccines may have only a 10-year useful life before new strains evolve. The shift in the 1950s occurred prior to vaccine use, but may have been related to changes in poultry husbandry, especially the move towards larger houses and the increasing density of poultry operations in certain geographic regions"
m = mild, v = virulent, vv = very virulent, vv+ = very virulent plus, as explained on page S46, Table 1.
To be very clear, Marek is not covid. I am drawing no equivalence. I just point out that Andrew Read's 2021 articlet is built around a weak argument.
There is selection pressure on the virus to avoid severe symptoms, because hosts that are up and being sociable are better vectors for the virus than hosts that are in bed or hooked up to tubes in hospital.
However, there is also selection pressure for the virus to infect cells more efficiently and reproduce in greater quantities. These traits tend to correlate with the virus being more dangerous to the host.
The way the virus transmits before the host becomes symptomatic is quite an effective strategy for the virus, and means the selection pressure for the virus to not cause symptoms is less than it otherwise would be.
To me this was more entertaining than a marble race.
Note I'm not saying we shouldn't trigger transfer bans (we should), but there should be a compensation mechanism that goes with them - like money or free vaccines. Otherwise poor countries have no incentive to cooperate.
It may not be this variant, but if such an escape variant emerged, it would quickly spread - assuming the mutations don't interfere too much with viability and transmission.
Vaccines, with other measures as necessary, should be used to suppress a highly contagious virus to nearly zero (trigger warning!!) to prevent this from happening.
Developing worlds, populations with millions living in poverty. Billions of people without the money to buy things two weeks in advance. Millions of food producers without the facility to produce and store 2 weeks worth of things for people. Now consider enforcement, healthcare, transportation, logistics, communication, borders, active wars and civil wars going on right now, etc. Let alone the normal international political cooperation needed.
It's actually totally impossible for it to happen simultaneously at a global level. I'd say it's probably also impossible for the majority of countries in the world (i.e. not rich) to have an effective lockdown at all at any time.
Some immunocompromised people can carry the virus for weeks.
Also, what about households where one person catches COVID the day before lockdown, incubates for a few days (asymptomatically), then transmits it to another person in the household, who also incubates for a few days...
At the end of the two week lockdowns, some people will still be contagious.
[1] https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-11-25-the-covid...
So in this case we need to rely much more on the circumstantial evidence (which admittedly seems pretty solid on a first skim).
Given that so much of the world is vaccinated.
When hearing about a bunch of cases discovered to have this new variant, it would help to assess the situation if we knew data related to each case: vaccination status, age, viral load, severity, etc.
All those details must have been collected already, and would indicate exactly how much of a concern the new variant is or isn't.