mRNA Vaccines May Pack More Persistent Punch Against Covid-19 Than Thought
directorsblog.nih.gov
directorsblog.nih.gov
Who do we trust in that situation? There are qualified scientists on both sides, but why do they disagree on something so critical, especially on how to message it?
This is the scientific method.
But yes. Allow consensus to build before jumping to conclusions when we don't have a time pressure on that front.
None of them obese, the 45 years old guy was running half-marathons.
Please, don't say this kind of shit, it hurts people like me who don't fit your fake narrative for no good reason.
Current consensus is that vaccines are very effective, at least for 6 months, probably a year or more; however, chances are we will need booster shots, we don't know when. People at higher risk will probably need them sooner. If worse variants develop, we will all need them sooner.
Depending on how the question is asked, or who is writing the headline, they will either emphasize 'probably needed' or 'not yet'.
> “In Israel, the effectiveness of the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine against coronavirus has declined significantly in recent weeks, according to the Ministry of Health. [...]
> Since June 6, the vaccine's effectiveness in preventing infection and illness with symptoms in Israel has dropped to 64 percent, he said. However, the vaccine still wards off severe illness and hospitalization 93 percent of the time, according to the report. […]
> Israel is considered a model country in the fight against coronavirus because of its successful vaccination campaign.”
https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/medizin/israel-impfschut...
Consider the seemingly randomness of chemistry at the biological level is what determines this.
Although less deadly, highly contagious are more likely to spread for longer.
You can imagine if they did, the propaganda engine of 2020 would have used the concept to launch lies about how it'll eventually become so mild you really don't need the vaccine. A certain president was stating early on that it would just fade away. It didn't.
All the info floating about was already confusing (and even contradictory) to the general population. There is no need to muddy the water with details that aren't applicable at this time, and may never be.
What backfired is not so much what the experts were saying, but how there was always an 'anti' chugging away at the press and online to make sure nobody knew what was what. We spend way too much time debunking crap info instead of just dealing with the good-at-the-time info provided by the experts.
They aren't hiding anything from the public. They just aren't planning on teaching the public absolutely everything about pandemics - just what is needed to be known at any given time. Otherwise you end up with too much information for anyone to even begin to understand what they need to do.
Telling people that some viruses eventually weaken has no benefit to anyone. The current virus isn't doing that, and raising hopes that it might is bound to give propagandists more fuel to work with.
Mostly I've seen a very mixed bag of opinions, reactions and measures over the past year and a half.
I think people are pushed to extremes because there's a heady mixture of:
1. an invisible, unthinking enemy breaking through borders affecting everyone and causing an inflection in basic social etiquette that demands action in very grey and alien moral zones most people have no experience in
2. the internet increasingly dominating the human experience while still being a relatively new, mindfuck global network that (a) undermines basic instincts honed for thousands of years, (b) increases fringe and extreme communities by enabling distributed social networking, and (c) enables surveillance and individual targeting on a scale most preceding dystopian literature couldn't imagine
3. unsolveable, self-perpetuating issues such as racism (as a proxy for culture wars and systemic oppression), conspiracy theories / misinformation (as a means of fracturing and neutering political movements that empowers users and proponents like a heroin-dealer empowers the neighborhood) and wealth inequality (the 'meritocratic' cloak over the otherwise naked aristocracy of capitalist societies) all dominate discourse and news cycles with the apocalyptic 'slow' train of climate change coming into view that we can't avoid because the sheer scale escapes our petty existential crises and sadistic impulses that have driven history and gotten us here (wherever the hell 'here' is)
4. the release of the tiger king documentary
Viruses only become less deadly if they are so deadly that hosts die before they can pass on the virus. No such pressure exists for COVID as patients are infectious during the incubation period.
Citation needed.
> COVID is becoming more deadly over time because there is a selective pressure towards more transmissibility. More transmissibility can increase the severity of illness if the virus more readily replicates or more easy infects human cells.
I read that as talking about infection fatality rate (IFR). I'm not aware of any evidence that covid's IFR is increasing.
It seems that the Alpha variant is more virulent than the original, but it's hard to measure virulence to a high degree of confidence.
IFR is not quite the right thing to measure, we are interested in differences in mortality due to mutation of the virus, but there are many confounding variables in the quality of treatment and populations that get infected to remove. e.g. if a virus stayed exactly static you would expect mortality to decrease over time as better treatments are found.
If you're a developed country swimming in vaccines like the US, do you let the delta strain go for it? Drawing it out with lockdows only makes the vaccine less effective, and once you lock down, it becomes clear there is no exist strategy. What if you're a large city with 80% vaccination rates? Will there be anger over preventable lockdowns? What if you're facing a recall election?
What if you're Europe, have moderate vaccine coverage, but likely won't be able to vaccinate to herd immunity for the same reasons as the US?
In hindsight, knowing the virus would be 2.5x worse in a year and a half and half your population would have no interest in the vaccine, should you have let it spread?
Viruses mutate over time and they could become more or less deadly over time.
The Spanish Flu mutated into a more deadly virus overtime.
https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-second-wave-resurge...
^ not a scientific article, simply to prove how bad the viewpoint of "mutate to be less deadly".
More reasonable article:
https://www.aap.com.au/yes-viruses-can-evolve-to-become-more...
tl;dr: you're looking at an average trend that may or may not actually exist. There's no guarantee that it will follow the trend, that it is average, that it won't become worse in some aspects or that the trend even exists.
[1] https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/112920/will-the-co...
[2] https://theconversation.com/will-coronavirus-really-evolve-t...
[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-will-the-coro...
COVID already spreads very well, what with the ability for it to spread while incubating silently for a couple weeks. A more-deadly version that retains the slow and silent incubation, but then kills mercilessly, would likely still spread just as fine.
A mutation which alters the shape of the spike protein, rendering it protected against the vaccine will most likely render the virus less virulent.
Think of it as a hedged bet.
> That’s why it remains so critical that more Americans get vaccinated not only to protect themselves and their loved ones, but to help stop the virus’s spread in their communities and thereby reduce its ability to mutate.
I see this is a blog and not a journal paper, but this kind of motherhood statement lowers the overall credibility.
Also, it was interesting to see that pfizer was quick to say a booster was necessary soon. I hadn't thought about that before but it's no surprise that pharmaceutical companies would want to do everything they can to turn this into ARR instead of just a one shot fix. This is something that is going to require real vigilance.
I dont expect my point to be understood or appreciated (people literally looked into my comment history and downvoted past comments when I posted the GP) but I want to clarify my point. Treatment science as a religion is not a way forward, even if scientists say things you agree with.
When specialists tell you not to drink contaminated lake water, or to wear a mask when removing asbestos tiles, or to get a colonoscopy when you turn 50, do you reject those recommendations also?
Epidemiologists are not experts in political science, economics, mental health, education, public health, business, finance, behavioral health, law or anything else.
When these people make unilateral public policy decisions, they are operating well outside their expertise.
Unilateral myopic Technocracy ain’t what it was made out to be. It appears to quickly devolve into straight fascism.
OK, but the parent was complaining about recommendations that people get vaccinated, which is what I was responding to.
> no surprise that pharmaceutical companies would want to do everything they can to turn this into ARR instead of just a one shot fix
Are you suggesting pharmaceutical companies are creating the COVID-19 variants? Because if not then this line of complaint is confusing.
It doesn’t require a conspiracy to understand that pfizer will both provide a benign working solution and also try to leverage their position in the community to sell unnecessary things
This isn’t that hard