I kind of wish that all these companies which rely so heavily on OSS and are able to create these vaccines thanks to it, recognize the fact that this virus should no longer be a moneymaking machine, but something which should be fought in every possible way, including open sourcing the entire production process so that others can copy and improve it.
If remuneration is the issue, maybe they can be compensated properly through donations as well as government funding.
I wanted to watch the movie Songbird in December 2020 because I occasionally like the dystopian quasi-apocalyptic movie. It was panned for being insensitive to make a movie about COVID during the pandemic. Like making WWII movies or Vietnam War movies during those wars was OK. Funny thing is a some of the criticisms were about it being unrealistic and fear mongering because it takes place during COVID-23, has lock downs in a global police state, and people are selling false immunity IDs. Granted the movie is not at all that good by standard film critic metrics, but it is very amusing that the narrative is not too far from reality. COVID-22 now, not yet COVID-23. Let's see.
On another note, I am glad my family and I have innate immunity from previous COVID infection, so that we are not as prone to ADE (Antibody Dependent Enhancement) or to the variants that are arising as much as those who are dependent on the vaccine, since as far as I know, the vaccines are still based on the alpha variant (why haven't they produced boosters for delta, gamma, etc...) I know seasonal flu shots are a concoction of previous flu types, but this is not your regular flu shot. Given you can carry a substantial if not equal viral load, or suffer a breakthrough infection, it seems these variants will still spread with or without the vaccine, although you are hopefully still protected from hospitalization or serious illness from these variants. Time will tell.
What are you basing your view on? According to the CDC, previously infected, but unvaccinated people outnumber vaccinated people, when it comes to laboratory-confirmed covid hospitalizations.
>Among COVID-19–like illness hospitalizations among adults aged ≥18 years whose previous infection or vaccination occurred 90–179 days earlier, the adjusted odds of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 among unvaccinated adults with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection were 5.49-fold higher than the odds among fully vaccinated recipients of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine who had no previous documented infection (95% confidence interval = 2.75–10.99).
>What are you basing your view on? According to the CDC,...
There are many peer-reviewed studies that clearly show that natural immunity is equal if not better than the vaccine. The Israeli study for one, and that used 10 times the number of people then the study you are citing. Almost 700,000 people in Israel. The CDC study is from 9 states. The CDC seems to front page studies that ignore or counter natural immunity arguments, or cherry pick them like the Kentucky study. My common sense was telling me that natural immunity should be innocent until proven guilty, and novel vaccines should be guilty until proven innocent. And not just proving short-term "innocence", or safety as the analogy goes. Somehow this was flip-flopped in today's world.
There is also this non-sequitur argument against natural immunity going around that it's risky to get COVID to attain natural immunity. I, like a lot of other recovered people, are not arguing that we think people should get COVID to acquire natural immunity. That is stupid. Get vaccinated if you are in a higher risk group. We are saying recognize that we already have it through no choice of our own, and don't disenfranchise us from society. Then they say the vaccine plus natural immunity is so much stronger. Well, if I am not in a high-risk group (obese, diabetic, etc.), and I have natural immunity with current antibody tests still coming back high, why should I be compelled to take a novel vaccine with no long-term safety data? My nephew who is very fit suffered myocarditis/pericarditis for a month and a half within days of getting the vaccine. His mother came down with Bell's Palsy after her vaccine. Miraculously, nobody I actually know died from COVID, but I have many colleagues and friends who have had COVID, and none of them were worse than the flu or hospitalized. Pfizer and Moderna eliminated their control groups for long-term studies by vaccinating them. There are no Random Clinical Trial studies currently being done that I know of, and not enough time has passed for them to have results for long-term safety. How can public officials say it is "almost 100% safe". Impossible even after long-term studies are done. There's always risk, and you should be free to make that decision with your healthcare provider. This is becoming a social medicince policy debate in a lot of circles, not science, ever since the slogan "a pandemic of the unvaccinated", or "the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated"; it should be a "pandemic of the immune vs. the non-immune". Or a pandemic of "the young and healthy vs. the old, the obese and unhealthy", given serious illness, hospitalization, and mortality are disproportionately among that group. Download the data from the CDC yourself and remove anyone with at least one or two comorbidities and in the under 55 or so age group. Tell me the the actual risk, and compare it to the media hype. The 1957 and 1968 Hong Kong flu outbreaks were very similar to COVID's case fatality rate, and the world didn't shut down then. And it doesn't compare to the 50 million who died in the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic even if the US deaths are close. Global pandemic remember? Why are we pushing vaccines that have no long-term safety clinical studies on 5 to 11 year olds when the IFR (Infection Fatality Ratio)for 0 to 17 year olds puts an 11-year old in the same risk category of dying with COVID as being struck by lightning [2]?
My younger ones had COVID with me and my wife. We will not be vaccinating them, since they are not at risk, and given vaccinated people can get infected and infect others, the argument that I should do it for others is illogical.
Kind of circling around to my original post about the dystopian movie, 'Songbird', I just read about Australia's "remote quarantine" or internment camps [3]. Maybe the movie wasn't as far-fetched as some criticized.
> why haven't they produced boosters for delta, gamma, etc...
When I first heard of boosters, this is what I remember being part of the discussion. Then that somehow disappeared.
It makes sense to me, especially with mRNA vaccines. This is outside my area of expertise, but it seems to me making boosters that target variants, with some kind of expedited safety review process, seems very doable?
Some variant of this happens with seasonal flu shots, so I imagine something like this would be possible with the coronavirus vaccines?
I recall seeing that discussion disappear since the booster was shown to restore our immune system to a similar levels of response, even for delta, so there wasn't any expected advantage to it. (for example, see how Moderna recently discussed their clinical plans https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...)
The seasonal flu is different because it mutates faster and there are more variants of it. So each year is different enough that our bodies don't recognize it. While for COVID, so far, it hasn't mutated enough to evade our learned immunity.
Also, @eggy, your family may be more at risk from ADE because of their natural immunity than if you had gotten them vaccinated. The papers I've read discuss how the vaccines where designed to help your body avoid this problem, while the virus has no such consideration. ADE does occur due to natural infection by many viruses (such as the list near the top of this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement), but has not been observed to occur with any of the current vaccines for COVID.
@manwe150 I believe vaccinated or naturally immune people can exhibit ADE, and they don't have enough data yet to differentiate or quantify it [1]. It's variants like Delta and Omicron that may cause the production of inflammatory cytokines.
As far as my family being at risk for ADE or any one of the COVID variants, I bet on natural immunity. And I think history will prove me right and add to the already established track record of natural immunity with other diseases. They found people who had SARS 10 years ago still have a robust immunity system against it, and it is related to COVID more than non-SAR viruses.
Why countries are pushing to boost double-vaccinated young people is beyond me. Go ahead and boost the elderly and those with comorbidities, sure, but the risk is so low, even by the CDC's own published data for young, healthy people, that it is ridiculous. Even the CDC admits there are a high number of undetected cases in the young due to asymptomatic or very mild symptoms, which means that the published risk is most certainly even lower. Send more vaccines to other countries at this point rather than feed people's fear with another booster as placebo for those with natural immunity or previous vaccination. The FDA just voted before Omicron not to boost the young, 16 years and older at the end of September, but then Omicron comes along with admittedly no new data, and they flip instantly and approve boosters for the young. I'll take the 18 or so peer-reviewed papers that show natural immunity is as strong if not significantly stronger than vaccines, and the risk for healthy people under 65 vs. the CDC's two cherry-picked, self-published papers that try to knock natural immunity. It is very clear that COVID is a disease of the elderly and sick vs. the healthy and young. And it must be said that obesity is a leading comorbidity after age in COVID hospitalizations and deaths. Obesity has a medical code associated with it, yet doctors don't always code it for various reasons when someone is admitted with respiratory or other symptoms - we've gotten so used to it here in the U.S. getting worse and worse, we don't see it anymore; doctors don't want to be accused of fat-shaming (did we fear skinny-shaming of anorexia in the 80s and 90s? No, we called it what it was - a disease and tried to address it). So the 68% to 78% number of COVID hospitalizations with obesity as a comorbidity is probably even higher. I'll never forget when I came back to the U.S. after living overseas for 7 years, and how noticeable the increase in obesity was with fresh eyes. I grew up working class in Brooklyn, and most of my extended family were trim and active from work. My whole neighborhood in Brooklyn was like that. Now, I see so many people in electric carts, and handicap parking tags. It's no wonder a country as developed as ours has so many deaths from COVID.
Elimination seems to be the only viable strategy to go back to normal, and clearly the cheaper option (after 2 years it is crystal clear). With vaccines and more PCR tests, it would be easier to implement at least for the developed countries.
(Other diseases also have animal reservoir, but the outbreaks could still be sporadic after elimination measures.)
Elimination is impossible given rapid decay of immunity, whether vaccine-induced or post-case-recovery, to levels where it only prevents severity, not transmission chains.
There's thus a massive reservoir of diverse variants in breakthrough transmission chains of the vaxed, in addition to the hundreds of millions worldwide who realistically won't choose to be vaxed, and even pets and wildlife.
Transmission chains could be broken by quarantine (supported by grocery delivery), masking, simultaneous vaccination and mass PCR testing. It is a coordination problem but it is way cheaper than letting the virus evolve freely.
Why do we want to live our lives in waves instead of eliminating it once and for all?
The totalitarian German government has for example ordered a long light lockdown of the asymptomatic just last year.
The maximal time needed for such a lock-down would be something like a month at most 2 months (Wuhan started the lockdown on 20. Jan, on 26. Mar there were no more cases), even without fast PCR testing nor vaccines.
With a fast PCR testing infrastructure, you might not even need to lock the people up.
And you don't need a world government to do that. There could be COVID-free bubbles vs the rest of the world.
Honestly, all the essential travels could tolerate a 3 weeks quarantine. Business could be conducted remotely. We have internet after all.
Did it work? Is Germany now a COVID-free bubble? Are Germany's results even better than nearby countires who locked down less, or never?
Neither the US, nor its porous-border neighbor Mexico, is likely to accept any such measure.
And even areas that had fair bubble-like control early, like Iceland, New Zealand, & Australia have now given up on that goal. They have the most experience with such a strategy – and no longer believe in it.
File this plan away for when you're world dictator.
It's really very much like lego: the virus is a three-dimensional shape that fits certain elements on cells where it docks and enters. Antibodies are also shaped to to fit into some spot on the virus' surface. When the virus evolves, it changes its shape and, due to evolution, these changes tend to be in its favor.
Practically, it probably means a loss of about 3-4 months, i. e. the winter will be more like last year's than we might have hoped. Your vaccination is almost certain to still be effective in saving your life, but infection and retransmission could move from an exception to a rather common event.
I'd expect an update to the vaccines becoming more urgent now, and with all the resources that have been directed at the first round of that effort, the process will be quite fast, especially in the manufacturing stage. So: new vaccine around
February/March, but rollout to everyone in the rich countries within 6-12 weeks this time around.
Glass half full view: Thx to Omicron, the vaccine producers finally will be forced to distribute an updated version - something which ideally already should have happened with Delta.
How do these mutations happen if we're all vaccinated? I guess the answer to that is to give vaccines to those countries where the mutations can flourish. Here, Southern Africa.
And also significant rates of breakthrough infections in the vaccinated!
The nearly 2-year-old spike-protein formula in current vaxes quickly decays to 50%, or less, effectiveness versus mild (but still transmissable) infections.
(If you further think most breakthroughs are so mild they never appear in this statistic, the difference is even less. But even by the official numbers: San Francisco now has more cases each day in the vaxed than the unvaxed.)
This matches earlier case studies, for example of miners in French Guiana, or inmates in Texas, where after merely a month or few ater vaccination, a majority of people in confined spaces were infected by the Gamma or Delta variant.
> San Francisco now has more cases each day in the vaxed than the unvaxed
That's a common but meaningless way to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated case rates. It's a problem of class imbalance: 77% of SF residents are fully vaccinated (https://sf.gov/data/covid-19-vaccinations). Vaccinated people outnumber unvaccinated, so comparing absolute counts of new infections among these groups mixes the effect of vaccination with the effect of being the majority class.
Sticking to rate per capita within each group, positive tests are twice as common among unvaccinated than vaxxed. (Severe outcomes and deaths will be even more different.)
It's misleading at best to state that difference without specifying that it's a difference in unadjusted crude rates, and without the caveats to drawing conclusions about vaccine efficacy from them. From the footnote on page 24 of your source:
Comparing case rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated populations should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 infection. Vaccine effectiveness has been formally estimated from a number of different sources and is summarised on pages 5 to 8 in this report.
The case rates in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations are unadjusted crude rates that do not take into account underlying statistical biases in the data and there are likely to be systematic differences between these 2 population groups. For example:
• people who are fully vaccinated may be more health conscious and therefore more likely to get tested for COVID-19 and so more likely to be identified as a case (based on the data provided by the NHS Test and Trace)
• many of those who were at the head of the queue for vaccination are those at higher risk from COVID-19 due to their age, their occupation, their family circumstances or because of underlying health issues
• people who are fully vaccinated and people who are unvaccinated may behave differently, particularly with regard to social interactions and therefore may have differing levels of exposure to COVID-19
• people who have never been vaccinated are more likely to have caught COVID-19 in the weeks or months before the period of the cases covered in the report. This gives them some natural immunity to the virus for a few months which may have contributed to a lower case rate in the past few weeks
I made that same point about rates in my post, before also pointing out the absolute number disparity. (So what’s the point in repeating it as if it were a refutation, or new contribution?)
Vaccinations only cutting infections by half is pretty lackluster. (It's nice the still reduce severity, but leaving half the vaxed with transmissable infections is far from enough for ‘herd immunity’.)
And, at population level, the absolute number disparity is still relevant - & I’d even say of paramount importance - in refuting those who think we can ‘eradicate’ COVID with vaccinations. Even with 100% vaccination, there would be, in absolute terms, enough continuing transmission to keep COVID endemic indefinitely. Large absolute numbers of vaxed breakthroughs guarantee that, no matter the reduction in severity risk.
Vaccines don't make you immune to the virus. The reduce transmission and symptoms, and practically eliminate death risk. But you can still get the virus, and can still get sick.
Source: currently qpositive, mildly sick, doubly vaccinated.
Yeah this is important. It's not "19 new mutations", but 19 mutations compared to the Wild type. Compared to some of the previous variants there are fewer mutations.
> But the United Nations public health agency avoided Nu and Xi for two reasons, a spokeswoman told The Post.
>
> “[For] Nu the reasoning was people would get confused thinking it was the new variant, rather than a name,” Dr. Margaret Harris said. “And XI because it’s a common surname and we have agreed [to] naming rules that avoid using place names, people’s names, animal, etc. to avoid stigma.”
The reasoning is sound, but if they'd annnounced the exact roster ahead of time, there'd be less suspicion. But WHO is really, really bad at public health communication!
That's higher than 'Serrano', 'Meyer', 'Murphy', 'Parker', 'Çelik', 'Banerjee' - names I picked from the many other options because I know people with all those surnames who I'd not want to curse with a same-named disease variant.
Excluding many thousands of common given names, surname, place names, etc makes sense.
Greek and pseudo Greek letters are used for various financial quantities related to option instruments. Vega and vanna come to mind, or my personal favourite, vomma.
Our human tendency to discourage frank discussion of real, but uncomfortable, possibilities has contributed to the 5M-and-counting COVID-related fatalities.
This is true even if you assign little-to-no likelihood to the possibility any COVID variant was made worse, or introduced to the community, via research labs.
I'd been thinking the same thing, actually. Over 30 mutations in the spike protein huh? Why had we not seen it before at 10, or 25 mutations, etc, etc....
Because the spike has 10x more appearances in the genome. The spike is literally the thing that gets it in the door of the cells and without it, it doesn’t propagate.
It’s not useful to promote lab theories at this point, especially given the real lab (the world) is so large. Trying to make it appear the virus could only mutate in a lab, when there are literally millions of quadrillions of these thing loose in the population, only serves to spread irrational behaviors.
I'm not trying to "make it appear the virus could only mutate in a lab".
But, there are well-documented experiments in labs of the type that could create Omicron. And, only a small fraction of all experiments that are happening ever wind up in transparent sources.
Consider EcoHealth's creation of hybrid viruses with increased virulence. Or the 2020 research I linked, which bred the ancestral COVID strain for increased immunity-escape.
If a patient is suffering from a potentially-fatal disease, enforcing a taboo about enumerating all the possible causes is no favor to the patient. It could kill them. Squelching informed discussion of what enhanced-virulence disease agents are truly, actually being created in research labs is a similar false-decorum that can kill.
OK, but you're just supporting my point. ANY mutations in the spike protein could cause an increase in transmissibility. So we should have seen it much sooner if it was mutating naturally. Now suddenly there are 30 mutations in the spike protein alone. Let me be CLEAR though, I'm not SAYING it was a lab release. I'm just saying it's weird. I'm not conspiracy theory person.
My understanding is that variant monitoring in Africa, generally, is very low – even though it's supposedly quite good in South Africa.
And in enumerating possibilities, the hypothetical reckless experiment I described might also be simulated by other unwise medical practices.
For example, what if you had a ward of immunocompromised patients that shared poor ventilation with a next-door quarantine/COVID-treatment area? That'd also risk concentrating multiple variants into an area where co-infection, and long incubation periods for cross-hybridization & accrued mutation, could happen.
Long unmonitored transmission chains in the community, especially in populations where illness is barely noted (like young & partially-immune), would also have eventually have the same effect as those other accelerated, worst-case situations.
There’s no mystery, the median age in Africa is 18, the median age in NA/Europe is 40. Africa has a *very* young population and we all know that covid afflicts the elderly orders of magnitude more.
Check out "Overview of Variants in Countries" page too, it's quite cool:
https://covariants.org/per-country