Cannabinoids Block Cellular Entry of SARS-CoV-2 and the Emerging Variants | Hacker News Reader

Cannabinoids Block Cellular Entry of SARS-CoV-2 and the Emerging Variants

pubs.acs.org

176 pointsleephillips132 comments

Yesterday's discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901799

This reminds me of William S Burrough’s “Cities of the Red Night,” in which a deadly plague appears suddenly. The character Dr. Pierson is a heroin addict, and helps discover that heroin is prophylactic against the fever:

“A top government official bluntly warned: ‘Virus B-23 now loose in our overcrowded cities, is an agent that produces biologic changes in those affected – fatal in many cases, permanent and hereditary in those who survive and become carriers for that strain, which as a matter of survival they will spread as far and fast as possible to destroy enemies and quite literally make friends.’ Junkies, however, are only lightly affected by the virus and remain characteristically unchanged.

…

“He recovers in the fear because of his addiction, and the word went out that the junk was the only insurance against the fever. No stemming the black market the Government concedes and legalises. Now begins a deadly war to extermination between the junkies and the fever-freaks.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_of_the_Red_Night

Thank you for remdinding me of this fantastic book! One of my favourites.

Then you’ll love this — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOa8I7vJJec

I first heard it in this collection, which I bought 20+ years ago — https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/721207. I can’t recommend it enough; Burroughs is fantastic at reading his own work, even blind drunk as he clearly was in some of these recordings.

Similarly, Fiend by Stenson. Meth prevents zombification but introduces plenty of other disfunction.

It's important to note that the chemicals they tested with were the cannabinoid acids (CBDA, THCA). When smoking or cooking those acids are converted via decarboxylation. These final chemicals were not part of this study.

In other words, this study only tested people eating raw uncooked cannabis. It does not tell you much about whether any benefits will be provided to your average smoker.

Tinctures are an option too. And a lot of edibles like chocolates and gummies wouldn't hit decarboxylation temp.

https://wayofleaf.com/education/decarboxylation

As your article mentions, decarboxylation is a required step for cannabis extracts to have any psychoactive effects. So, presumably commercially marketed edibles are decarboxylated.

I've always been a little fuzzy on this and would love for someone else to chime in.

It's my understanding that raw marijuana contains both psychoactive cannabinoids as well as precursors which require decarboxylation.

If that's the case, I am not sure that decarboxylation is _required_ - however it is recommended as it increases the _amount_ of bioavailable cannabinoids (i.e. best bang for your buck.)

It's unlikely for cannabinoids other than THC to bind to the CB1 receptor strong enough to cause the psychoactive effect.

Only THC binds very well to the CB1 receptor. THCA does not bind well to either receptor.

Cannabinoids that bind to CB2 receptors in the immune and gastrointestinal systems affect inflammatory and immune responses.

I was commenting on possible delivery mechanisms for the compounds described in the study, CBDA and CBGA. Smoking or eating "cooked" edibles isn't going to get enough of those compounds into the bloodstream.

Edit: added compound names

Something that was confusing to me while reading the paper was that there were other compounds they talked about having high potential, but didn't actually test, such as THC-A. Am I misunderstanding this part of the paper?

I am explicitly not recommending that anybody try cannabis for COVID although I don't think it will place you at significantly greater risk (I doubt there is enough high quality evidence to show that cannabis consumers are at high risk of respiratory problems associated with covid).

That said, a standard e-nail vaping rig comes with a temperature controller that is very accurate and precise (degree resolution, 10 degree accuracy according to my tests). In pratice you could get high purity THCA (99.9% THCA), set your vape slightly below 220F, and inhale the generated steam.

I have a background in biochemistry and did a fair amount of research into cannabis chemistry and it's pretty amazing how underutilized cannabinoids are.

I picked up a cannabis habit in various forms lately, on a daily basis. It has been wild to feel my body react in positive ways. Today I woke up without significant gut discomfort, which is the first time in nearly a decade. Happened immediately after switching from edibles to smoking (just as a temporary experiment).

The relationship between the endogenous cannabinoid system and the gut is extremely deep and complex. Note that some number of heavy users actually experience problems (hormesis syndrome), so if you had gut discomfort from eating, that could possibly be related.

For me, eating just puts me to sleep. Like, 12 hour nap with crazy dreams. Not what I want.

The next experiment might be from smoking to vaping it. If the benefit is lost, there may be some other active element that arises from its combustion; if not then it might be safer since vaping it would not create any tar.

Note that smoking cannabis does not have the same cancer health problems as tobacco, tar is not really the issue here. In fact cannabis has a very slight but detectable protective effect for nearly all cancers. Generally, most of the problems with smoking cannabis involve heat-induced damage to the lungs, not the same things that make tobacco smoke dangerous.

You just described my exact plan. I’m hesitant even to vape due to health effects but for now I’m just investigating.

the study did not involve testing on humans, and it even did not involve testing on rats (which imo would not have worked anyway), it is cell assays and binding constants only

Totally anecdotal but my girlfriend and I recently went to wedding and even with pre testing and everyone vaccinated, a lot of people got Covid.

I was super high that night (as most nights) and walked away unscathed. Obviously this could be due to a lot of things but that hasn’t stopped me from rubbing it in all my friends faces.

It’s been of the few times in my life where my weed habit looks smart, and I’m loving every minute of it.

A year ago my wife got Covid. She isolated in our bedroom and I was quarantined in the rest of the house. I spent my time getting high and watching movies. I took multiple PCR tests and an antibody test and they were all negative.

> It’s been of the few times in my life where my weed habit looks smart, and I’m loving every minute of it.

Indeed :)

There were some early studies that showed that nicotine had a higher affinity for ACE2 than SARS-CoV-2 and that smokers had a lower risk of catching covid.

I told everybody that while ripping my camels.

Worth repeating that this study was retracted. Authors failed to disclose a conflict of interest in their funding from the tobacco industry:

https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/57/3/2002144

In fairness, the study was retracted not due to the data but because "The European Respiratory Society, as a leading medical organisation in the respiratory field whose mission is to promote lung health and alleviate suffering from respiratory disease, has bylaws in place that do not permit individuals with ongoing relationships with the tobacco industry to participate in its activities" and in other situations, "The journal editors acknowledge that COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) guidelines state that failure to disclose a potential conflict of interest is not normally sufficient grounds for retraction of a published article."

I understand the journal's actions but I'd hesitate to say the study is wrong or has been retracted for anything beyond politics.

I’m not sure what you mean by “politics” here, so I’d rather be explicit and say what it looks like to me.

The tobacco industry has a rich history of trying to manipulate public opinion in their favor, and this article and authors’ undisclosed conflict of interest fits that pattern well: a study shows cigarettes are actually good for you in some way, and might even save you from the current pandemic; and then whoops, authors were getting paid by the tobacco industry, and then whoops again, they didn’t mention it when submitting for publication.

If the study was retracted even though the CoPE guidelines don’t require a retraction, it implies to me that this case was more egregious than just some protocol mixup or forgetfulness. The most generous reading is that the retraction was made out of an abundance of caution and concern for the journal’s reputation. I suppose that’s possible, but I don’t see any further evidence in favor of exonerating the article, especially knowing the industry’s history.

>I’m not sure what you mean by “politics” here, so I’d rather be explicit and say what it looks like to me.

I mean that they explicitly said they retracted the study (in the journal, the authors haven't retracted anything) because they refuse to take any research from anybody who has ever accepted money from tobacco companies regardless of the rigor of the data or research. Non-academic reasons.

I understand their stance because, as you said, the tobacco companies have a long sordid history of research and it's a journal of lung health with a strong "anti-smoking" bent, but calling the study "retracted" implies that it was somehow false or disproven when it has not been.

> the authors haven't retracted anything

Why would you trust the authors, though? They really should know better. To me, the omission is either the product of general incompetence (they forgot?), or intent to deceive. Both of those seem pretty disqualifying.

Worth noting that this may or not have any bearing on the conclusions...

"The manuscript presents some new data on, and provides a section of discussion of, the effect of tobacco consumption on patient susceptibility to COVID-19, and cites other studies that claim SARS-CoV-2 infection is less prevalent in smokers or tobacco users." Perhaps reading those other studies would be prejudicial.

I once spend the better part of a day online looking for actual data on the known dangers of second-hand smoke. I found the not-so-surprising answers in a hard-to-find article in Lancet. It ... contradicted the mainstream tale.

Could you share a link to this Lancet article?

I've noticed a correlation between heavy herb smokers and not getting the virus or having mild symptoms. People that primarily do hash haven't had the same benefit, which is kind of weird. This is all anecdotal.

How does THC intoxication change social behaviors? Are you more or less social?

Personally I doubt it was a direct pharmacological effect, but rather a secondary behavioral effect

I'm a long-time THC consumer. The effects differ tremendously based on a wide range of variables. I've also retrained myself after many years to override my natural THC behaviors.

Let me give some examples. College days, my first real year of smoking, I got really high. I mean, really really high. Close to a psychedelic experience. I went to the cafe to get an ice cream sundae and when I walked in, everybody in the entire room stared at me. Or, it felt like it. 30 people making eye contact looking at me AND THEY KNOW I'M HIGH. It was extremely uncomfortable- for my entire life growing up, I hadn't really ever made eye contact with people and having a lot of it was intense.

A few years later, I get really high at a Grateful Dead show. Completely different experience- everybody was getting high and having a great time with strangers and I didn't feel judged and it was GREAT, socially speaking.

Following college I began my professional career, but I am also a full time smoker, so I had to learn how to deal with the "OH GOD THEY KNOW" feelings and forced myself to be highly social at parties, etc. It can be really weird to be a person who is very introverted and wants nothing more to curl up in a ball far from people, but walk around a party introducing yourself to everybody and making intelligent conversation.

Im interested in the psychopharmacology of cannabis and why so many people get the paranoia effect. I suspect it's probably a side effect of tweaking your endogenous cannabinoid system, in combination with the social pressures associated with cannabis consumption.

I'm glad you're interested! I'm also a long time cannabinoid user, but I don't smoke anymore. I dose multiple times per day with edibles.

If you want to dive deep into the pharmacology, I can recommend this book:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-74349-3

It makes sense that it would reduce symptoms since cannabis is a systemic immunosuppressant, whereas COVID generates runaway inflammation.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/eji.2010406...

Thank you for posting what I wasn’t going to, because I’m in the same boat. Recent wedding, many people positive, I’m somehow not, and I was stoned the whole time.

Anecdotal of course, but fascinating to think about.

Stay safe y’all.

How does THC intoxication change social behaviors? Are you more or less social?

Personally I doubt it was a direct pharmacological effect, but rather a secondary behavioral effect

If you're going to copypaste a statement saying you doubt it had a direct pharmacological effect on a post about a direct pharmacological effect, why not state what you think the issue with the study was?

I'm not referencing the study, I'm talking about the comment that I'm replying to. The study is specifically about the acid versions of the compounds which are not psychoactive

CBDA, THCA, and CBGA are all the carboxylic acid forms of the compound which is what is naturally produced by the cannabis plant. When we consume these, we make them psychoactive by heating. This turns them into CBD, THC, and CBG which are different compounds

The non acids interact with proteins differently than the carboxylic acids. I'm saying that the people who say that they got stoned and this prevented COVID is highly unlikely and not at all related the the posted study at hand.

Again: you don't get stoned off the compounds that were used in this COVID study. Full stop.

This isn't even mentioning the fact that the concentrations of the carboxylic acid compounds used in the study are multiple orders of magnitude larger than what you can accomplish through smoking (micro vs nano-molar)

PS. If you have an argument on why I might be incorrect I'm all ears, but down voting tells me nothing

Fair enough as to your objections to linking these anecdotal effects to the study, though it's not the only of its kind and others point to actual CBD as a suspected mechanism[1]. As to your getting downvoted, the way you worded your objection you seemed to be implying the people you were responding to were pointing to THC as the mechanism. If you had been would have been strawmanning, medical uses of Cannabis are rarely about THC alone.

[1] https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202004.0315/v1?fbclid=I...

If you smoke cannabis you aren't getting much carboxylic acid cannabinoids at all, for sure nowhere near the amount required to hit micromolar concentrations at an in vivo receptor. Actually the same with CBD because its such a minor component.

I definitely won't argue about the numerous cannabinoids having an assortment of medical uses, but based on my knowledge of behavior and pharmacology the likely mechanism of people avoiding COVID when using cannabinoids for their psychoactive effect is the change in behavior rather than a direct pharmacological action affecting some mechanism of SARS-Cov-2. If its even related at all and not just anecdotal correlation, which is a seriously major possibility

I commented on a comment about using cannabis for the psychoactive effects very specifically, rather than commenting what I stated on the article itself

Now onto the article you posted, I just finished checking it over and I have some concerns.

First, considering this is a supposed pharmacological study I don't see concentrations of active compounds (THC or CBD) listed anywhere. These would be listed as something like uM or nM for micro or nanomolar. Perhaps I missed them and I'm open to anyone pointing out these values to me.

Secondly, this is a preprint study and when you look at the bottom under "competing interests" you can see that it was funded/performed by a cannabis company with skin in the game.

I'm not saying write it off entirely, but I'm very suspicious of the study for these reasons.

The study is mostly about the effect of CBDA and CBGA, maybe THCA, but not THC. The "A" (for acid) forms are what you actively try to get rid of (by decarboxylation) if you want to get high.

Also, the doses the study suggests are really high.

Unless the study seriously underestimates the effect, it is unlikely that you will get a pharmacological effect by smoking joints. You may get an effect if your way of getting high is eating grams of raw (not decarbed) cannabis.

More than just grams of flower: grams of raw hash oil

And that's assuming that tissue distribution is desirable! These are single cell studies where they just slap the compound right into the dish, no mention of what happens pharmacokinetically

Amusing anecdote of my own:

My wife and I are daily cannabis users. My wife far more than me. She uses it for chronic neuropathy caused by a genetic condition and has a medical card.

We all caught COVID in February of 2021, before we were eligible for vaccination. I was the only one with any form of symptoms (loss my sense of smell) the rest were fully asymptomatic.

My wife and I joked that maybe cannabis could be protective.

Funny enough, I wasn't using much cannabis at all before the pandemic hit. I was 20 lbs heavier than I am now, and decided to start exercising rigorously to get as fit as possible with the expectation that a vaccine was 5 years out and we would all eventually contract the virus. I wanted to reduce my risk as much as possible. As part of my exercise habit, I would consume a 10mg THC/10mg CBD edible every night before going to the gym. I noticed it had bronchodilatory effects, and also made doing tons of cardio more fun on an emotional and mental level.

All of this is anecdotal, and I have zero idea if the weed helped me or not. But I can say with certainty it helped me achieve a level of fitness and reduced body fat that almost certainly mitigated my COVID infection, based on the science around fitness/obesity and it's impact on severity.

Ditto. I'm a heavy(ish) user and I've never tested positive, despite being exposed more than once. Though admittedly I'm very cautious (always wear an N95, et al) and vaccinated.

I'm not a user and never tested positive. Though admittedly I'm very cautious (always wear an N95, et al) and vaccinated.

This reminds me of the movie “a cabin in the woods” where the dude with the collapsible stainless steel baseball bat sized bong/coffee mug is rendered immune to the mind control gases by the cannabis he smokes constantly.

They're showing inhibition at 100 ug/ml, but it looks like high doses result in serum CBDA concentrations in the low 100s of ng/ml [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7498943/

I did't know anything about the journal. I must admit, that something titled "Journal of Natural Products" didn't inspire much confidence. But it does look like it has been around for quite a long while, and has a respectable impact factor for a specialized journal too.

It's a pharmacognosy journal: not crank/fringe at all. (Pharmacognosy is the study of drugs of natural origin -- about half our small molecule pharmaceuticals are either extracted from or synthetic but based on modifications of drugs of botanic origin.)

Classic example of scientific terms overlapping with common terms and confusing the hell out of lay people.

People hate when scientists use jargon (often with good reason), but how many times will I have to listen to the 'all food is organic, it was once alive' joke?

Journal of Natural Products is a great journal when it comes to natural products, for example when you elucidate the structure of a complex novel natural product this is a good journal to publish it in (alternatives being eg organic letters). I follow natural products chemistry and together with nat prod rep this is one of the journals where I will make sure to not miss any abstract, this is a top of the line journal in it;s niche. However in natural products chemistry there is the tendency to inflate the importance of measured biological activity, often you will see it reported this or that new compound is cytotoxic against some random cancer cell line but when you read the fine print the compounds are weak and/or not selective. Often this later can prove as the justification of a total synthesis attempt or as the starting point for optimization into an actually potent drug (which does not succeed that often).

Note that they are talking about CBGa and CBDa. While these are present in whole flower and some concentrates, heating it up for vaporization or combustion leads to decarboxylation meaning you’ll be ingesting CBD and CBG.

Can’t wait for more research. Anyone wanting to act on this should go for non baked edibles such as tinctures.

Since 2018, a lot of these products are actually legally available online in most of the States.

Check the Certificate of Authenticity to see the tested levels of CBDa and CBGa.

You need to consume CBD crude oil as an edible here.

You won’t find CBG crude in any commercial products. CBG is almost exclusively converted to isolate or distillate prior to sale.

Now South Park makes sense.

It wasn't Randy's "secret ingredient" that healed people, it was the Tegridy product itself! Brilliant.

some of these studies published data in 2020. i wouldn't be surprised if the writers simply did research.

Surprisingly high number of happily married stoners in here.

Helps when it's destigmatized/decriminalized a bit.

> Surprisingly high

;)

"Our infection inhibition assay results clearly indicate that CBDA and CBGA are both able to block cell entry by SARS-CoV-2. The concentrations needed to block infection by 50% of viruses is high but might be clinically achievable. For example, CBDA administered orally to human volunteers at 0.063 mg/kg showed greater bioavailability than CBD and produced maximum plasma concentrations of 0.21 μM. (32) In beagle dogs, oral administration of CBDA at 1 mg/kg was well tolerated, was 2-fold more bioavailable than CBD, and produced serum levels up to 1.42 μM. (41) Although no data on the bioavailability of CBGA are yet available, the data for CBDA suggest that μM plasma and serum concentrations for CBGA should also be possible."

Note that [1]

> Even when smoked, THCA-A is only partially transformed to THC. The conversion rates during smoking range from a maximum of 70% under optimized analytical conditions (temperatures higher than 140°C) to simulated smoking processes, where only 30% of the spiked THCA-A was recovered as THC.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5549534/

Anecdote: Wife has had very mild covid for 5-6 days now. Been sharing a bong with her and I have no symptoms. I smoke much more than she does. She is boosted. I stopped after the second dose.

Also, I heard somewhere, and I forget where now, that hot smoke could play a role in this, but this study seemed to indicate it was orally bioactive as well. I would assume the in-vivo test wasn’t blowing hot smoke in a test tube but rather bathing in a cannabinoid solution?

As another comment mentioned, this was with non carboxylated cannabinoids. If you’re smoking the leaves then it doesn’t really apply to you.

Not all cannabinoids in the smoke are carboxylated, or at least lets agree that the efficiency of your average conversion is not 100%. Some degree of non-carboxylated cannabinoids can ride those particles too .. for example at the beginning of a joint, the smoke is being drawn through THC fields which have not yet been burned, but may be dislodged and part of the draw as the heated substrate is pulled into the lungs ..

Agreed, there may be some applicability of this study on smokers (albeit at a reduced effect size). Worth betting on it being protective? Or just a rationalization?

I don't know if its protective or not, but I do believe its worth finding out.

Wouldn't it be strange if, indeed, weed was the answer to everything.

The IC50(reported as 24 μg/mL for CBDA against wild type in the live virus assay or 76 μM in more typical units) is far too high to have a relevant effect, you would probably have to use infeasibly large amounts of hemp products (orders of magnitude higher ones). I would not count on cannabinoids to help with preventing or treating sars-cov-2 infections. I expect some pushback against this result in a few days.

Cannabis mandates now!

It might be even simpler - reducing inflammation lessens the effects of Covid.

Oh yeah? Why are there any infections at all in British Columbia?

Because Bonnie Henry more than make up for any pre-existing cultural countermeasures like weed smoking prevalence.

Xmas special [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6-shclv2wE

https://xkcd.com/1217/

Good idea. Right-wing lunatics, QAnaon believers, anti-vax crusaders should get high and fcking relax already.

see also, Cannabidiol Inhibits SARS-CoV-2 Replication and Promotes the Host Innate Immune Response

Preprint. 2021 Mar 10.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7987002/

Any idea if amount of cannabinoids produced by our own body is high enough?

Too much to read dude, should I get stoned now or not?

I sense a new startup opportunity: Pizza-as-a-Service.

But it has to be on-chain so you can invest in the coin of your favorite decentralized pizza.

Pepperomicoin.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1217/

> Obligatory XKCD

It isn't.

Off-target XKCD

I've been ignoring the weed freaks spouting off about this. Great to see they were talking about something sorta science based at least.

Too many "promising" studies like cannabis, vitamin D, chloroquine, ivermectin, etc have been later fact-checked by the CDC as bad science, to rely on anything but the CDC's word (or Fauci). Until the CDC says so I won't believe it. Right now it seems like mass vaccination is our only way out of this pandemic and back to normal.

The American Chemical Society is a pretty reputable source.

Edit: Thanks jinto36 -- I was wrong on JNP -- ACS is actually a co-publisher.

More to the point -- the dose always seems to be the issue -- no affect until you're past 10 micrograms/mL (https://pubs.acs.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/achs/jou...) but that's hundreds of times higher concentration than almost any available method of consuming CBD (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2018.0136...).

Doesn't seem too useful unfortunately.

Original Comment started with this: Its just a link on the ACS website -- it was actually published in the Journal of Natural Products.

ACS is the parent/publisher of the journal.

Evaluate the methodology first, then the authors, then the publication source; scoring accordingly.

I would not listen to a federal govt source's opinions on weed, tbh.

That is painting with a very broad brush. For better or worse, federal government is huge. It is not exactly a monolith. It is made out of people and, not surprisingly, not all of them agree with one another.

Except when the CDC is saying something, it's on behalf of the federal govt. They're also limited in what they can or can not say because of how they've classified weed.

So, if it's coming from an official US govt source and its about MJ, I'm going to be extremely skeptical of it. If they didn't want this reputation, they can actually go ahead and fix the criminalization now, but they're not. So...they deserve that reputation

Since the vaccinations are stopping the spread?

They very likely are stopping the death, yes.

They reduce chances of hospitalization by at least an order of magnitude, and the chances of death by even more.

COVID is almost certainly never going away. It will become endemic, joining the other endemic viruses such as the couple hundred cold viruses (including 4 other coronavirus that were once deadly pandemics) and the various flu viruses we reluctantly live with. Something we all get several times over our lifetime, that most of the time just make most of us pretty miserable for up to a week or so.

How many people die during the transition from pandemic to endemic depends greatly on how risky it is to acquire your first immunity, and how strong that first immunity is when it comes to preventing hospitalization and death. The lowest risk way to acquire that first immunity is by vaccination. It's also the way that provides the highest chances of strong immunity--when you acquire it by an actual infection it depends on how severe the first infection was.

So yes, mass vaccination gives us the best chances of returning to normal sooner with less death along the way.

>They reduce chances of hospitalization by at least an order of magnitude, and the chances of death by even more

Want to point out this was your response to the question, "Since the vaccinations are stopping the spread?" in case you wanted to re-read your answer.

That was the answer. People vocally cynical about the vaccines have always been using a strawman argument, in case you need a refresher a strawman argument requires two things:

1) creating a standard that was never used by the proponents

2) criticizing the made up standard to discredit the proponents

on a medical level, it is clear this wasn't to stop the spread, it was to slow the spread as vaccinated infected have smaller viral load for shorter time period compared to unvaccinated infected, as well as reduce severity and deaths of those that contained a viral load.

On who we call the "proponents" for this topic, I will concede that I've heard many local influencers, radio hosts and others reduce this to "stop the spread" in reference to any viral mitigation measure, such as masks, distancing, quarantine, and vaccination all part of an amorphous overarching program. But its clear that the people that latch on to "stop the spread" as a reference to the vaccine as a technical term advancement would never have looked at the technical supporting data due to either trust issues with the institution or plain ignorance of how it works. The researchers and their research has always been clear about what performance to expect from the vaccines (except duration of effectiveness which is unknown for both the vaccines and natural immunity, compounded by the variants)

Fauci himself did claim the vaccinated are "dead ends" to the virus[1]. He dangled the carrot of "herd immunity through vaccination" around but then moved the threshold further and further, even admitting to being dishonest in the process[2]. Of course, we now all know herd immunity with vaccines is impossible and that they do next to nothing to inhibit spread. Perhaps some experts accurately predicted this, but that's not how it was communicated to the public. To suggest otherwise would be gaslighting.

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...

[2] https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/90445

We should make fun of them, instead look at Pzifer, Moderna and the publications around them and other specific vaccines. They are very consistent about their proposed efficacy before they came out, their actual efficacy as they were rolled out, and now their actual decreasing efficacy over time including in the face of other seasonal variants, since we don't have seasonal vaccines.

Well that's great, but the same authorities that just lied to me are also responsible to ensure safety of these vaccines. They're the same ones who tell me it's "safe and effective". Why would anybody trust them now?

They have a lot of work to do, I would say look outside of the US and also technologies used by different vaccines worldwide.

A lot of the consternations fall apart, to me, when the aggregate response reaches the same conclusion, something impossible to be done by any guiding hand due to geopolitics.

> A lot of the consternations fall apart, to me, when the aggregate response reaches the same conclusion...

Does it though? The other countries that went all in on MRNA vaccines obviously don't have an interest in finding more problems with them.

I have yet to see a single good study that determines risk/benefit stratified by age and risk factors. This rather new study shows that risk of Myocarditis is higher with vaccination rather than infection, in males under 40:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268209v...

Furthermore, the risk appears to increase with each dose. Yet, many countries are now advising all the 12-17 year-olds to get a third dose - to speculatively decrease an already minor risk. This suggests to me that proper precaution is not actually being pursued, neither in the US nor elsewhere.

I’m not sold on third doses or more either. Its a mRNA vaccine for two variants ago and we dont use that standard for other viruses.

Decent example but this is a separate issue than the premise I started with or replied to.

I think myocarditis is a good example of remaining objective with data. At risk people know what they need to do and it is no longer selfish for the rest of us to not help that. Nobody can kill as many grandmas as Cuomo’s nursing homes, its impossible now and a booster also assumes additional risk whereas the initial doses did not.

> Decent example but this is a separate issue than the premise I started with or replied to.

I disagree. The question is, is the the system broken or not? To me, this example suggests that it is indeed broken. Then, did it just break or was it broken all along? Is it possible that we mandated vaccinations to millions of people that were more likely to be harmed than helped by these vaccines? If so, would we know, eventually?

The status quo in the pharma industry is to never do more trials than absolutely necessary, lest you risk discovering something that runs counter to business interest. I suspect a very similar attitude would exist among regulatory bodies that risk discovering that it has been advocating a potentially harmful medical intervention to people that didn't need it.

The only entities that have a vested interest in figuring this out are private health insurances. If these vaccines are worth taking, let them charge a premium for refusal.

> That was the answer. People vocally cynical about the vaccines have always been using a strawman argument.

No, we were repeatedly told that vaccines prevent both transmission and infection, and anyone trying to cynically rewrite history now is using a strawman argument.

The whole point of the OSHA vaccine mandate was to prevent spread. If it was just a matter of how severe the disease is to you, then there is no rationale for forcing people to take the vaccine or any of these mandates, anymore than there would be a rationale for a mandate to force people to lose weight or exercise more. The AMA said in its amicus brief: "the widespread use of those vaccines is the best way to keep COVID-19 from spreading within workplaces".[3]

Here is Biden: "You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations."[1]

Here is Fauci: Vaccinated people are "dead ends" for virus[2]

CDC director Rochelle Walensky: "Vaccinated people don't transmit the virus"[4]

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/ap-fact-check-biden-inflates-01184362...

[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...

[3] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21A244/206954/2021...

[4] https://fortune.com/2021/04/01/its-official-vaccinated-peopl...

> the widespread use of those vaccines is the best way to keep COVID-19 from spreading within workplaces

[at a greater viral load than without the vaccines because all documents from Pzifer, Moderna, J&J, AstraZenaca, SinoPharm, and the people analyzing those documents made the same conclusion]

Except they didn't make that point at all, because it's not relevant to a mandate. Please don't try to rewrite the quotes I am citing to make them support your point as that is literally trying to rewrite history. We have a word for that, and it's "gaslighting".

the reason we are talking past each other is because you chose the wrong influencers, sorry thats been your experience. you should be dismayed at public facing communication for the broad audience, since the one time we needed them they messed that up.

> on a medical level, it is clear this wasn't to stop the spread, it was to slow the spread as vaccinated infected have smaller viral load for shorter time period compared to unvaccinated infected, as well as reduce severity and deaths of those that contained a viral load.

this was my goal post, it has not moved.

This comment chain represents so many conversations I've seen on HN / Reddit.

The understanding I've come to (flavored by my media diet) is very similar to yours...It is just really hard to have a conversation with each other about events when we can't even agree on the base facts.

It'd be nice if we could figure out how to reduce that gap, especially because a lot of these things are simply facts, not opinions.

And that is not to say I am free from blind spots! I am not saying my media diet is the "right one" that gets to the truth, I know I have them, but I do try and reduce them as best I can.

I agree that public health officials making overstated claims are doing net harm to the country by sowing distrust. That said, I think that the people who constantly complain about the accuracy of public health statements regarding the vaccine's effectiveness, and who decline to acknowledge the public health benefits of mass vaccination, are people who are predisposed to distrust in authority or anything they can't conceptually understand, like mRNA.

That question was in response to the statement "Right now it seems like mass vaccination is our only way out of this pandemic and back to normal". My response is explaining to the questioner why that statement was correct.

“ They reduce chances of hospitalization by at least an order of magnitude, and the chances of death by even more”

So does an omicron infection compared to delta, even to the unvaccinated. I am not an anti vaxxer, I have two doses of Pfizer in me. The vaccines are simply going to be obsolete in a matter of weeks/months because everyone is going to have gotten and recovered from omnicron at that point. It’s that contagious, it’s futile to try to avoid it. Get vaccinated if you are scared and move on with your life.

The increased contagiousness of omicron makes it more important for people to get vaccinated.

The chances of hospitalization if you have omicron are lower than they were if you had another variant, and same with the chances of death, but the factor by which they are lower with omicron is quite a bit lower than the factor by which omicron is more contagious.

The net result is that omicron is greatly increasing the number of hospitalizations way past what they saw with delta, which is overloading hospitals in way too many places in the US.

I'm vaccinated and boosted, but that doesn't help much if I get in a car accident or have a heart attack and I can't get treatment because the hospitals are full of COVID patients.

95% of people in New Zealand that are eligible for a vaccine are vaccinated. A population of five million are getting ~30 new cases a day when excluding cases at the border on entry (50 including the border cases).

People are causing the spread, not the vaccine.

Why are all of our vaccinated getting omicron, then? What is the differentiator?

Not enough people getting vaxxed.

Yes, when we compare the rates of transmission between vaccinated and unvaccinated communities, vaccinations are stopping the spread. More questions?

The intramuscular vaccinations currently available were never going to stop the spread and anyone familiar with animal studies of similar approaches to CoV vaccination knew that. Stating bold claims unsupported by balance of evidence and knowledge of mechanisms was a deliberate choice of messaging in hope of increasing campaign uptake.

They're helpful for preventing severe disease and death, for now -- this effect seems to be significantly offset by reduction in risk avoidance behaviours and government support for said behaviours.

The first gen vaccines do appear help somewhat with reducing infectivity period somewhat.. but once again this benefit is diluted when people are told to burn their source control (masks) and get back to the office.

We need better vaccines deliverable to mucosal membranes for infectious aerosol entry point protection and released under open source licensing. We also need better early treatments with sound scientific basis, and better post-acute-'recovery' sequelae treatments developed with the basis of a growing understanding of endothelial and immune pathology downstream of SARS2 infection.

Second from last but not least, we need efficacious airborne transmission interrupting non-pharmaceutical interventions that don't rely solely on individual behaviour. Finally, it would be nice to have fewer grifters and influencers blocking sound action while spreading nonsense.

Well it is a single scientific study. To believe it as fact would be a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works.

I agree with the spirit of your comment in that I would hold out for more scientific replication of these results to increase my confidence beyond the level of simple curiosity.

Has there been any such replication of the "natural immunity protection is equal or greater to vaccine protection" study(s) yet?

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

As a lay-person and not an epidemiologist, what logic is there for the idea that mRNA treatments that synthesize a single protein could be better than an actual infection which produces hundreds of those proteins per replication along with dozens or more proteins that may be used by the immune system to identify the virus?

Traditional vaccines at least dump most of the target viral proteins into the body.

Focusing on a single protein that may mutate in the target virus has always seemed myopic to me, let alone the assumption that this approach could possibly be more effective than an immune response to the actual virus. I’m not saying that this approach couldn’t work, just that it would, by definition, trigger a subset of the immune response of a whole virus vaccine.

Edit to add: by better, I mean better at triggering an immune response. I’m not arguing against the idea that a targeted, single protein approach is or is not better at reducing illness or death and therefore shouldn’t be pursued, just about the idea that recovered individuals would be less protected than a vaccinated individual on average.

> just about the idea that recovered individuals would be less protected than a vaccinated individual on average.

I don't think its so much about the idealized immune response, but that in general, people's immune response to natural infection seems to widely vary, with many not having much of a robust response.

It very well may be that a good immune response to natural infection may be better than one from an mRNA vaccine targeting the spike protein - but in aggregate the vaccine will be more successful because its induces a more consistent response.

Again, this seems counterintuitive to me. If infected, the immune system reacts to foreign bodies. If jabbed, the immune system reacts to foreign bodies. The intention of the shots are to stimulate the same system as a natural reaction, minus the threat of disease. If an individual wouldn’t have a strong response to infection, why would it be any different from a subset of proteins?

Is there academic research on this topic that existed prior to SARS-Cov-2?

>Until the CDC says so I won't believe it.

I lost that urge after the 'masks are only useful for medical workers' kerfuffle.

now, you can explain to me how I lost something in translation, how they didn't mean exactly that , and that I am misinterpreting history -- but then I would counter with 'One of the primary jobs of the CDC is to translate medical advice into something easily consumable for the citizenry they serve.' -- and I wholeheartedly disagree that happened in any effective or successful manner across this event.

110% this.

The CDC says whatever they think is most likely to influence the public to do the whatever they think is best for public health in general.

Whether or not what they say is the truth is entirely incidental.

Did the CDC say so about this study? Source?

The same CDC that said early on that we don't need masks when the WHO advised them. It wasn't to keep the general public COVID free, it was to make sure there were enough masks for healthcare workers. CDC incentives aren't aligned with individual health, it's more for social health and getting people back to work without maxing out healthcare systems.

The scientific community should be fact checking and reproducing these studies.

The thing with cannabis, vitamin D, ivermectin, they have been around for years and have low risk profile in human use with billions of doses. Even if it is experimental and there aren't long term studies, all the science for mRNA vaccines in humans is new and there are no long term studies. So why not throw everything at the pandemic instead of hoping and dreaming for vaccines alone to save us.

We are a few mutations away from omicron contagiousness with delta symptoms. I don't see how vaccines alone are going to stop this thing. This current wave is not dropping to zero.

You are too funny.

Look at this great thread I started. It's like groupthink kryptonite.

The CDC now says you can cough into someone's mouth if your boss says it's alright.

The last two years of second order effect guessing miss-steps has seen those at the helm of the organisation burn through generations of credibility like a hand launched bottle rocket.

You are welcome to outsource your critical thinking skills to the Federal government all you want.

Meanwhile, in most of Europe, previous infection with COVID in the past 365 days (it was 180 days until recently, but was updated due to scientific recommendations) "counts" as "being vaccinated" when it comes to getting a green pass. But the CDC ignores this completely. That's not based on science, but convenience of achieving the policy goal and other reasons that probably are logistical in nature.

It's also ironic that we are in a thread talking about cannabis potentially reducing COVID infection, and you are "appealing to authority" with an organization that, to this day, has cannabis classified as a Schedule 1 narcotic for reasons that have zero to do with science. Cannabis prohibition has been backed up by government funded, incredibly biased studies for decades. Because at the end of the day, scientists aren't going to easily be able to report study results that contradict the current political goals of the entity that funds them. Not unlike scientists working for Big Tobacco, the people paying for the work will have undue influence on steering the results of studies.

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