The problem as I understand it is that it isn't profitable for either company to take a risk on producing these boosters at scale. They have to take a bet that the variant they target for the booster will be the one to dominate in the next months, and right now with variants like omicron mutating and growing at astounding rates it is quite risky. If they target the wrong variant that's a whole lot of completely wasted vaccine doses and they have to start over again. As I understand it their production lines are limited too and can only produce one specific type of vaccine or booster at once (i.e. wild type or new variant, but not both).
Honestly we need operation warp speed again. It needs to just never stop, at least while we are in such a critical stage and massive amount of virus spread. We need the government and the billionaires/trillionaires to bankroll parallel development of all major variant boosters at once.
This makes sense defense-wise, as well, because the arms race in vaccine development is also an arms race in producing vaccines for diseases you intend to use as weapons. A disease a group has a vaccine or cure for, but no one else does, could be weaponized.
For the initial wave of COVID-19, it was an absolute necessity, but unless our backs are pinned metaphorically to the wall, is it really worth taking a short cut? In the best case, COVID-19 will become endemic (prevalent every season, but not as harmful for the majority of the population)... so wiping it out by way of universal uptake of a given vaccine is not (and never was) on the tables.
A weaponized virus would inflict untold suffering, but there is nothing to stop another Operation Warpspeed. Having OW active all the time? I don't see that being a good thing.
IIUC: This means that they would essentially be supplying the new pressure and stressors required for the virus to be forced into mutating more and more since its current environment is not suitable for its current arrangement. Every time it replicates there is a chance for mutation, but greater stressors increase that chance of mutation. Depending on the stressors, the mutation may or may not occur in tandem to that stressor. I.E. Vaccines increase immunity? Virus gains ability to breakthrough easier.
Now that may be a rather simplistic understanding of it, I admit; but this does seem to coincide with what is essentially happening so far this past couple years.
1. New variant emerges. 2. More people get vaccinated. 3. Old 'new' variant dies off 4. New 'new' variant picks up. 5. More people get vaccinated, or re-vaxxed. 6. Old 'new' variant dies off, again. 7. New variant emerges, or a subvariant, or double mutation. Repeat.
Eventually we will all be vaccinated 3 times or more, easily. Or at least a very large majority of us. What happens when some super variant emerges and has the capability to breakthrough all that resistance?
More vaccines?
You do see where this is going, right? Doctors and scientists were concerned about a very similar situation with anti-bacterial resistant bugs. Stuff like H.Pylori in hospitals if I remember correctly. Well, now we have the same situation potentially occurring on our hands.
We can only hope that the mRNA vaccines or something better is/are able to keep ahead of the game. The only way we are beating this thing out, is by completely snuffing it out. And that's going to require removing all its potential hosts.
That means we might have to vaccinate wild animals, because deer have been catching it for instance. And apparently spreading it in some cases. Once so far for sure is confirmed I believe. So yeah, Deer-vid is a thing now. Hooray?
It's going to be either a lot of animal vaccinations going on out there... or a huge culling. Of all sorts of animals. Or letting them catch it and suffer through it for better resistance for a time being; and then hoping to snuff out the virus finally at that point.
I'm sure you can see how hopeless this all is at this point. It's part of why the politicians are now saying "we need to learn to live with Covid."
And I agree, I guess. Not really much choice at this point. It's here to stay in its current forms, and further. For now at least.
So, huge advantage? Sure, maybe. Depends on your goals.
And the hospitalisation rates for Omikron are still way too high compared to how fast it spreads, at least for most healthcare systems.
I hope I get better without having to visit a hospital.
What should I get tested for after getting better?
Did you go for this as routine checkup or after some symptoms, or you wanted to see what damage was caused by COVID?
I'm gonna do an electrocardiogram next week, and based on that the GP might do some other tests. So you should listen to your body and try to have little stress, no drinking, no hard sports for a few weeks, and contact your GP if you don't feel good.
Now fever is down. My 5th day of symptoms today. I’m going to repeat CRP and then additionally do a chest CT scan today. She will see whether all is well or almost well with me or do I need specific care as of now or later as part of recovery. I think I technically I am still a covid patient.
And god, why is it difficult for every doctor out there to understand and accept that my “normal body temperature is below 98.6 F”!!
However, it does seem like it's not necessary to make people get 2-3 vaccines if they caught it.
> The large majority of the cost (about $850) was the peptides
If we could produce just the peptides at scale then everyone is free to produce local vaccines. Not sure if the peptides themselves have the same extreme storage requirements as the vaccines do. If we can give every country the techniques to build their own vaccines we wouldn't depend on mega-corps and some of the "anti-vax" arguments would become moot.
Updated vaccines are being looked into, but the original ones still work well enough that there is not the push to expedite the process we saw with the original one. With the virus slowing down to herd immunity, it is likely we won't see another such a push for this pandemic.
my understanding is that going from something in the lab to something that is produced at scale requires significant chemical engineering work, similar to, but likely harder than hardware which is based on parts availability and cost.
all warp speed did was release money and allow process development and testing phases to overlap, is my understanding.
1. It's still pretty effective against COVID
2. Clinical trials showed variant specific versions weren't that much more effective
3. Protecting against the granddaddy strain has a much broader effect than protecting against a new strain.
Well, besides imagining, we're also doing science, so what does the data that you've seen say?
Perhaps there is a reason the original vaccine would be expected to be more broadly effective, as my parent said. It's not intuitive to me, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Hence my question.
Specifically I was objecting to "Given X, we wouldn't expect Y to happen" aspect of your argument. Its never so simple with the human body! It works in many other domains, and so as a former programmer myself I have to catch myself trying to apply such reasoning to biological systems which can't be modeled like that.
https://www.technologynetworks.com/vaccines/articles/the-hun...
Perhaps there's a fear that an Omicron targeted vaccine would allow a more deadly variant to take over again
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/28/pfizer-covid-vaccine-was-jus...
Delete your comment to save face?
Think of COVID as a human being. The mRNA vaccine teaches your immune system to recognize and destroy hands instead of a whole person. As a result your immune system can detect all shapes and sizes of people as long as they have hands. It is possible for the virus to mutate to use claws instead of hands, but then it isn't as effective at grabbing cells to infect them.
In the case of an incredibly rapidly mutating virus like COVID-19 it's just not worth it to go through that whole process every time it goes from hands to claws to hooves.
It's not that it's not worth it, it's that this approach doesn't work. Evolution is a remarkable force, and unless there's a good reason for the part of the virus/bacteria/amoeba you're targeting to stay that way, it will change to escape the selective pressure against it. We're more-or-less seeing this with SARS-CoV2, even though the virus is a relative amateur at genetic drift.
OK, you may say "let's target the vaccine against a part that doesn't change"...that's great, except that those parts tend to be so common -- so "evolutionarily conserved" -- that you see them all over the place, including, often enough...your own body. Train your immune system to (over)react against common antigens, and you're going to cause problems.
The primary reason that vaccine development is difficult is because you have an extremely high bar for effectiveness, coupled with an extremely low bar for side-effects. And even if you find such a unicorn target, you have to make sure it stays magical over time. The mRNA technologies are great and do accelerate things, but ultimately, the speed of the Covid vaccine development process was more about our willingness to throw huge money at the problem and eliminate all development and liability risk, than it was about any particular technology platform.
Nope, the Moderna vaccine was designed in 2 days after getting a full DNA sequencing of the virus. Very rapid design is a particular feature of mRNA vaccines (with the caveat that sequencing to find the right proteins is required).
Said differently: the slow part of creating a vaccine is doing the trials to make sure you have safe and effective target.
The conclusion said it is less effective.
The messenger RNA (mRNA) boosters were highly effective against symptomatic delta infection, but they were less effective against symptomatic omicron infection. However, with both variants, mRNA boosters led to strong protection against Covid-19–related hospitalization and death. (Funded by Weill Cornell Medicine–Qatar and others.)
Don't get me wrong, I believe in the vaccine, but I think we are still far away from one vaccine that kill all the the mutations.
In this study, mRNA boosters were highly effective against infection with the delta variant but were less effective against infection with the omicron variant. However, these boosters led to strong protection against Covid-19–related hospitalization and death due to both variants.
We vaccinate in order to prevent severe disease, hospitalization, and death. The original vaccines, per the link you shared, are extremely effective at this.
There seems to be a pervasive thought that our leaders ought to somehow become superhuman and obtain clairvoyance about how to solve any problem we have. They are no different from any of us, who think a bug has a simple solution before we spend a lot of time figuring out more complicated things were happening under the hood.
The new information, that the world is globalized, with many countries not being able to afford vaccines and also many militant anti vaxxers around?
How was wiping out covid, a realistic goal in the first place?
Similarly, a lot of people have been claiming we're evilly withholding patents from the world, but that can't be a real issue or China and Russia would just have stolen the IP from us. They literally can't produce them any faster even with the rights.
The CDC needs to be explicit and clearly admit that it was wrong or the data changed, and that vaccinated/boosted people can and will get sick or even spread disease to others. The new 'deal' is that they will likely not be hospitalized or suffer severe disease if infected.
Far too many people are still walking around thinking their shots and booster, now nearly 6 months old for some, are an impenetrable force field against any sickness.
I remember last year when this news hit, that bit about 90% effective *against infection* was amplified and played nonstop for the public. The message was clearly get vaccinated and you will not get sick.
It was not until July and the CDC MMWR report on the Providence, Rhode Island, bear week festivities that lead to unexpected breakthrough infections that the CDC admitted the vaccines were not 90% effective against infection anymore. Unfortunately this updated message has never been clearly told to the public, at least not as clearly or loudly as the original 90% protection against infection message.
Btw, I’ve had both shots, had COVID and will get the booster.
That is unfortunate that we switched to directly getting mask policies etc. from them, because it's not their job to consider tradeoffs and they aren't good at it.
> Walensky was referring to a new CDC study of nearly 4,000 front-line workers, some vaccinated and some not, who tested themselves weekly for COVID-19 infections between December and March.
> But more data is still necessary to say so definitively, which is why researchers are recruiting thousands of college students across the country to find out more about the likelihood of asymptomatic spread of this virus among vaccinated people.
The article is explicit that the CDC was talking about the findings in a new study, and that more research still needed to be conducted before being sure of their findings.
> It was not until July and the CDC MMWR report on the Providence, Rhode Island, bear week festivities that lead to unexpected breakthrough infections that the CDC admitted the vaccines were not 90% effective against infection anymore.
Because of the new delta variant that those very same festivity goers helped the CDC with[1], and that changed the CDC's guidelines:
> The speed of the investigation — and the exceptional participation from the mostly gay men involved in the outbreak — helped the CDC learn new information about the delta variant. And it was that new information, in part, that prompted the agency to change its guidance for how vaccinated people should keep themselves safe at this stage of the pandemic — including a return to masking indoors.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/08/06/1025553...
That's a direct quote from the head of the CDC, it does not get more official or more of a primary source than that IMHO.
Since the immune response is for the older versions of the virus, getting the updated vaccine still ends up having the same effectiveness of the original vaccine.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/monkey-study-casts-d...
Effectiveness of the original vaccines against Omicron infection, in particular, is essentially zero after a few months:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...
It should be noted that the vaccines appear to remain highly effective against severe illness, even without boosting. The mRNA vaccines, in particular, seem to raise a robust, long-lasting cellular immune response, even though antibody levels rapidly fall. One of the downsides of the unusually rapid approval process for the Covid vaccine was that it was impossible to see this pattern in a randomized trial that lasted only a few months. This led "experts" -- people who really should have known better -- to oversell the shots as a form of sterilizing immunity. They are not.
There are good reasons vaccines take a long time to develop.
In the future they might prepare a wide number of vaccines targeting common coronavirus ahead of time so there can be quick response when an outbreak appears.
The answer is a "pancoronavirus" vaccine that'd work against all of them, but it seems that using mRNA or not doesn't actually help with that.
There's a prioritisation issue. There are so many diseases, and many more proposed treatments. Without a good reason to jump the queue there are bound to be delays.
There's also the efficacy testing issue. Your phase 2/phase 3 test subjects are mostly young european males (Uni-students). Without deliberately exposing them, how likely are they (and the control group) get infected? It could take years for a statistically significant number of the control group to catch the disease.
When there's a pandemic on you might hit those numbers in a few weeks.