Pfizer and BioNTech launch trial of Omicron-targeted Covid vaccine
reuters.com
reuters.com
The best part is even the anti-vax crowd will be innoculated!
Vaccine-induced immunity is acquired through the introduction of a killed or weakened form of the disease organism through vaccination.
Natural immunity is what anyone who gets vaccinated or infected acquires, assuming that the immune response is successful.
Immunity acquired from infection is more regularly referred to as convalescent or infection-induced immunity; moreover the messaging has consistently been that while there have been some studies that convalescent immunity can potentially be as or even more effective than vaccine induced immunity, it comes at a significant increase of complications, ranging from organ damage to the fairly nebulously defined long covid, and most of the studies that are credible in the field that have endorsed the effectiveness of convalescent immunity still recommend vaccination to avoid the potential impacts of even "mild" infections.
The rampant claims about so-called natural immunity by people may be drowning out correct or rational voices, but that shouldn't indicate that the messaging has changed, just that the messengers are spreading misinformation.
So yeah, you're immune but possibly not for the next variant, and that variant may be more severe.
Hospitals are getting overloaded due to Omicron. People are dying in droves. Omicron is by no means mild.
"Omicron may be milder compared to Delta, but it’s not mild. " Source: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affa...
> There are two states and 618 counties that require circuit breakers (i.e. short-term mitigation measures needed to preserve hospital functioning) at this point because their hospitals are at or above 100% capacity (assuming that the number of staffed beds has not increased in the past week). Medical military personnel have already been dispatched to a number of hospitals across the nation. Nebraska also joined a short list of states that have enacted its Crisis Standards of Care plan. But community-wide efforts to reduce spread desperately need to be taken, too. Fourteen additional states are at high risk of exceeding 100% hospital capacity in the next 1-10 days.
Source: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/state-of-affa...
How much evidence do you need of this being a mild variant?
It really is not. It's mild to double- and triple-vaccinated individuals living in highly vaccinated populations. They get the shot, they brush it aside
The poor souls who didn't managed to get vaccinated, or didn't wanted to, represent the bulk of the hospitalized population and deaths.
The key factor is that the world has spent the last year bulking on vaccines, precisely to allow any infection to be at most mild. And now that we're seeing highly vaccinated populations being exposed and developing mostly mild cases are we now supposed to pretend that vaccines don't exist and the disease suddenly got tame? In whose head does this even compute?
South Africa vax rate is 52%. Their health officials have declared it to be mild.
It’s mild.
This is only part of the picture - it's actually the people that are unvaccinated and are very old or have comorbidities that represent the majority of deaths.
But we also shouldn't exclude that a large majority of people are dying with Covid-19 at the moment rather than because of Covid (i.e. as c20% of deaths at the moment are within a month of a positive covid test, and c5% of the population likely had Covid in the last month, we can imply that 5% of deaths would have Covid anyway if it had no impact on morbidity, so about 25% (at least) of those Covid deaths are people dying with covid. This is likely an underestimate considering Covid is probably spreading in hospitals).
You are right on your figures though - when you look at excess deaths over 5 years there has been much fewer deaths because of Covid than the official figures would have you believe, but the impact of lockdown will be felt for many years to come.
From your dashboard: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Be careful about who is in covid because of non-covid reasons that just happen to have covid, compared with those who are in hospital because of covid.
Choosing what certainly looks like a single dramatic outlier point which is 2 weeks older than the dashboard certainly seems like cherry picking.
Just look at the current dashboard data it shows ~440 deaths per day for the last 2 weeks. Again:
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
Also note that there almost aren't deaths from other flus over the last 2 years, likely because they don't have an R value >1 due to masking etc.
Look, I'm all for getting back to normal and letting the unvaccinated (and old, poor, sick) die off as god intended, but let's not pretend it's all due to a lack of joyful evenings in the pub.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/20/call-scrap-daily...
"Call to phase out statistics comes as it emerges that up to 70pc of virus patients in hospital being primarily treated for other problems"
In a “normal” winter there would be more regular patients in the hospitals.
The refrain that Omicron is "mild" is being parroted by people who don't understand what they are talking about. In fact, the Omicron variant (like other COVID variants) is relatively mild among individuals who have been vaccinated.
That hasn't stopped the vast majority of folks yeeting themselves off a dunning-kruger cliff and assuming that they are competent to discuss the topic because they read a medical journal or an opinion piece that aligns well with their own perceptions of COVID and the broad spectrum of economic, political, and medical topics (myself included sometimes).
I have 80 year old parents who need medical care and can't get it right now.
That's not the only variable. IIRC, South Africa's population is on-average much younger, less obese, and much more likely to have had a previous infection compared to America's.
Preliminary research indicates that Omicron has an 87% lower fatality rate. Of course that number is a little fuzzy because it's impossible to perform a real controlled experiment.
1. 87% less of a lot isn't a little. It can still be a lot.
2. "Fatality rate" isn't a number that just floats in the air by itself. It's a factor in the equation deaths = case_count * fatality_rate, and the case_count term has skyrocketed.
3. Deaths aren't the only thing to worry about. Hospitalizations that don't result in a fatality are nothing to sneeze at. Ditto for other kinds of bad outcomes. Where's the concern about COVID-caused myocarditis?
I'm sorry, but it seems you're complaining about a straw man that lives only in your head. Also, there are much easier and more effective ways to deal with things like that than wishing for a nuclear war.
Thanks for your comment, though. It felt nice to read it for reasons you almost certainly didn't intend.
In some contexts that may be true, but internet comments is not one of them.
The GP is just showing us the melodrama that's going on between some characters that live in his head. He was responding to them, not so much to me.
That is likely due to so many people being vaccinated or recovered.
If you dropped Omicron on the world population in the middle of 2019 I strongly doubt it would be any more mild.
> A lot of the deaths occurring right now are still from patients that were infected by the Delta variant weeks ago.
I guess natural immunity isn't as consistent as vaccination though (which produces exactly zero shock amongst the world's virologists and epidemiologists) and also suggests that Omicron isn't intrinsically mild at all.
That got done recently for transmissibility recently with the Danish study (which finds no difference in intrinsic transmissibility between Omicron and Delta and that the advantage Omicron has is entirely immune escape):
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...
Then your unvaccinated group that you're comparing to in the Delta and Omicron waves are equally susceptible to disease and any cryptic spread and immunity may be present but will be equal.
The South Africa study cannot do this which means they're comparing different time points and they have many confounding factors. That is not strong evidence.
Plus best they get is that Omicron is about 1/4 of Delta which is 1/2 of D614G which is still terrible. That is still just SARS-CoV-2 levels and not the factor of 10 that would turn it into influenza.
For some, but hardly guaranteed. Still a lot of hospitalizations happening and the extreme treatments have to be rationed because we’re running out so fast.
The thing is: You don’t get to choose or predict if you’ll get the mild case or the severe case. You can’t ignore the serious cases and make your decisions on the assumption that you’ll be in the “no long term effects” group. The vaccine is a much more predictable and tested response. I’d much rather have the vaccine.
It's insane to think about, but as our biological engineering skills mature, it's worth having a discussion about whether (1) mass vaccination + (2) release of highly-contagious, low-lethality strain should be in the pandemic playbook.
There are no sure things in biology, but a hypothetical reality where Delta (or god forbid something like MERS-CoV) is circulating with Omicron-rates of transmissibility... start to beg questions about what the least bad approach is.
political and ethical suicide
Yet when China does it (accidentally or not) it’s considered unthinkable for our political class. If you think people in Washington couldn’t be less worried about their electorates. If anything COVID has been a boon to hide their massive incompetence diverting discussions around mandates, vaccinations and other woke virtue signaling.
Ethically — assuming such engineering is even possible without unexpected consequences — it sounds like a trolley problem, only instead of 6 on the default track and 1 on the alternate it might be 6 million by default and 1 million with the airborne cowpox analogy. (Numbers completely made up, of course).
Procedure? When not doing the procedure will (to continue using my totally made up hypothetical numbers) cost 5 million more lives? That’s much less clear to me.
(Reality is more likely to be “we reckon it might save 5 million lives net, but then again it might combine with the original to make something both virulent and highly transmissive”, but the joy of hypotheticals is I can ignore that).
SARS-CoV-2, as terrible as it was, wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been: a better-adapted, more transmissible, and more lethal first wave.
And if that scenario were playing out, a human-engineered firebreak, even at the cost of many lives, isn't an obvious ethical wrong. Difficult decisions.
Of course, nobody would ever admit it if that's true. So it's just a curious thing to think about.
We could even blame it on wet markets ;)
(I currently have Covid, probably Omicron, triple vaxed, and would describe it as a rotten cold)
What happened--why did we go on to have delta, omicron, etc. surges?
Or put more bluntly--why should anyone believe that *this time* omicron will be any different than the past variants which were touted as finally bringing herd immunity, but failed to do so?
Why is it that every surge seems to bring the exact same arguments and people saying "don't worry this one will stop the pandemic"? I've been reading it for two years and still haven't seen it happen anywhere in the world.
Currently the 'mild' omicron strain of the virus is killing more people per week than the number one killer of Americans (heart disease).
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
Usurping the top spot for causes of death in a week is not mild by any means.
Bullshit. There is no data to suggest all of those deaths were from omicron, and no reason to believe that's the case either. Don't spread misinformation.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You have provided no evidence that 15k, as reported by one of the most reputable new organizations in the world, is wrong or should be considered misinformation.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...
Not true. You're referring to all Covid deaths, not Omicron. We are still seeing the Delta strain lethality in the numbers.
I don't know how much weight to put on this news snippet from yesterday from a Dutch scientist saying they're seeing people that got infected with Omicron getting reinfected with new Omicron subvariant BA.2: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/2022-01-21-ny-omikron-variant-spreder...
It's looking more and more like Omicron isn't mild. In particular it's producing worse infections in children. Not to mention it's immune escape means it's infecting vaccinated people. Mild infection in vaccinated people vs no infection in vaccinated people as you had with other variants.
> The best part is even the anti-vax crowd will be innoculated!
I don't think it's anything close to "highly attenuated":
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/01/25/world/omicron-covid-...
> The C.D.C. attributed the tendency of Omicron cases to cause less severe illness to the virus itself, as well as growing levels of immunity from prior infections and from the rollout of vaccinations. It said that roughly 30 million more people were fully vaccinated during the Omicron surge than during the Delta wave in the fall.
> As a result, a smaller proportion of coronavirus cases are ending in hospitalizations: The C.D.C. said there had been a peak of 27 hospital admissions for every 1,000 cases in January, compared with 78 admissions per 1,000 cases in the fall.
If it were "highly attenuated," I'd expect close to 0 hospital admissions for every 1,000 cases, not 27.
Exaggerating "less severe" to "near harmless" is one of those errors anti-vax people and other denialists commonly make in their arguments.
No, not really. Fully vaccinated individuals in highly vaccinated populations who contract covid tend to experience mild to non-existent symptoms.
Omicron is not a vaccine. The vaccine is the vaccine.
https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/health-emergencies...
Apparently the existing booster shot elicited a more diverse set of antibodies compared to the ones from just a two shot regimen. Which is kinda interesting. I forget what it's called, but there's this phenomenon in immunology where the immune system can get "stuck" with whatever initial antibodies it comes up with and doesn't adapt well. Seems that wasn't the case with the COVID boosters, thankfully. And that explains why the boosters have been so dramatically more effective against Omicron (80% versus <40% for those with just two shots, natural immunity, etc; IIRC).
But would an Omicron booster have elicited an even "better" set of antibodies? Would we get back to 90% protection like the good ole days?
And of course the big question; is an Omicron booster going to provide better forward protection?
The results of this study are going to be deliciously intriguing.
Note: 100% a gut feeling
> In a series of interviews with Israeli TV channels, Albert Bourla said it would “not be a good scenario” if people were to get boosters every four to five months. “What I'm hoping [is] that we will have a vaccine that you will have to do once a year,” ... Bourla argued that it is both easier to sell the idea and “easier for people to remember” if a vaccine is required only once per year, calling it “an ideal situation” from “a public health perspective.”
https://youtu.be/L2GKPYzL_JQ - "How many more adverse effects have been covered up during the trials? - Maddie de Garay's story."
It's promising that there will be slightly higher regulatory standards for the Omicron vaccine: clinical trial in humans must be completed before approval and clinical trial data must be submitted at the same time, i.e. no 75-year delays.
> the debate appears to have shifted with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) saying on Friday that international regulators now preferred clinical studies to be carried out before approval of a new vaccine ... Inclusion of clinical trial data in the regulatory filings may have an impact on the delivery of initial batches.
A major British medical journal just demanded that the raw trial data be released - but will it even be untampered with - like the Maddie De Garay situation insinuates happens widespread since there were no, and still no, government health agencies who have sounded an alarm - or caught it and put a hold on the vaccine release for different age groups until uncompromised trials were completed?
The system capture here is so obvious it's blinding.
There are many nested challenges, e.g. system/regulatory capture is not new, but can you think of a single historical example with pervasive lockstep censorship across media, industry and government in multiple countries? Did government relief/stimulus funding distort incentives for health outcomes, e.g. ineffective high-fee ventilators vs. early treatment with existing drugs?
Even in the face of lockstep censorship, as truth/facts surfaced in 2020-2021, why did no organized presentation achieve widespread public visibility? Without an accurate threat model (e.g. infiltration of health freedom groups, https://ccsfreedom.org/), truth will not be sufficient to prevail against organized opposition.
It's called original antigenic sin[0]. It's one of the reasons that mass vaccination against a variant that is no longer circulating may not be the wisest strategy. But anyone who dares mention it is shouted down as anti-vaxx.
Probably not very likely, but to say Covid-19 is somehow outside the scope of original antigenic sin theory is silly.
>I guess that’s a theoretical possibility for a different virus
Im not trying to claim it applied to omicron, current vaccine efficacy, that we should halt vaccinations, or any other strawman you are trying to put up.
You can simply acknowledge the correction
Original antigenic sin. However I don't think it predicts that the alpha-based boosters we have will be any more effective, and I don't think that we are observing particularly impressive effectiveness either.
Maybe it is part of an existing study?
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=covid-19&spons=p...
It appears for some vaccinated people Omicron is not mild either.
Before Omicron, two doses provided >90% protection, and held up well against Delta. Now, two doses provides only 40% protection against Omicron. Whereas three doses bumps that back up to 80%.
Given these trends it's clear that we need a plan forward, just in case, for whatever comes on the menu next year. It's likely to be an Omicron descendant, since Omicron is dominating the gene pool. It's a reasonable assumption that an Omicron derived vaccine would have provided >90% protection against Omicron. And so, reasonably, being Omicron-boosted in the future should provide something like 80% protection against whatever the next dominate strain will be, whereas the existing boosters might not fare as well.
That's the hope anyway.
Thankfully it's so much more virulent that this is going to happen whether we like it or not. Makes me think of the old chicken pox parties when I was a kid.
The virus is carried by animals and it's not going away. So we had better start figuring out how to more reasonably live with it, stop with the asinine one size fits all solutions; many of them (like cloth masks) that are actually anti-science based and stop destroying so many people's lives - especially children - I can't imagine being a child in todays idiotic overreactive and politically energized environments, especially since children had the least to fear even from the original, pretty nasty virus. Yes, there are even kids that are more at risk - but you don't screw everyone - you protect the vulnerable. Common sense seems to be utterly out the window as everyone is running around panicking; it's beyond nuts.
A self inflicted wound is hardly a reason for continued panic.
Now that the brain dead vaccine mandates are being shot down staffing should also start to resolve itself. Again, the VAST majority of issues with COVID are self inflicted - driven by politics and severely misguided social pressure.
The reality is that two doses of the existing mRNA vaccines still provide very good protection against severe disease for the vast majority of patients.
[1] https://deadline.com/2022/01/omicron-offshoot-ba2-in-us-1234...