> But cellular immune responses are longer lasting — and as Jennifer Gommerman, an immunologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, explains: “Cellular immunity is what’s going to protect you from disease.” Memory B cells, which can rapidly deploy more antibodies in the event of re-exposure to the virus, tend to stick around, and so do T cells, which can attack already-infected cells. Both provide an added measure of protection should SARS-CoV-2 sneak past the body’s first line of defence.
So clickbait. Also fearmongering from politicians and others.
You say fearmongering from politicians, I say an excuse to spend billions more of tax dollars to the benefit of their cronies.
Exhibit A: Canadian PM Trudeau who has signed contracts for boosters all the way up to 2024, in amounts that exceed the Canadian population by a factor of 2 (just in this one contract, never mind the other similiar contracts he has signed).[1] Of course, the full text of the contract, or the cancellation costs, will never be revealed.
Well the fearmongering prevents anyone from questioning the corruption, among other things.
Also, I wonder how much the constantly moving goalposts, dishonesty regarding vaccines and politicising vaccines has fed the anti-vaxx movement?
I got vaccinated because the evidence suggests it seems to work, but you've got politicians lying about its effectiveness, signing secret contracts, moving goalposts, all the while shaming those who are 'hesitant' while giving no one any reason to actually trust them (the politicians that is).
Trudeau's top doctor at various points said there's no evidence that Covid transmits from person to person (when it was already clear it does), that it's not a concern, that masks don't work, and she's still the top doctor advising him... It's been a complete shitshow.
2024 means boosters for at least 2022, 2023, 2024. If covid becomes like the flu that requires a new shot every year then 3x (exceeding the population by 2x) is pretty much the exact number of shots you'd expect.
It's not just clickbait or fearmongering. As the article explains, the neutralizing antibody response does wane and there's some evidence that this does cause a fairly substantial reduction in protection from both disease and severe disease, including hospitalization. It's just not clear exactly how much of an issue this is.
Friendly reminder that the purpose of the vaccines was to reduce death and severe disease, which all of the approved vaccines continue to do, even as “immunity from infection” wanes.
Yeah. My county puts out hospital numbers about weekly. I haven't checked recently but a couple weeks ago, of current hospitalizations from covid, 203 were unvaccinated, and 14 fully vaccinated. And this is in a county where > 50% of the people are vaccinated.
How anyone can look at those numbers and be against vaccines or question their effectiveness is...mindboggling to me.
Of 514 patients in Israel hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Aug. 15, 59 percent were fully vaccinated, according to an Aug. 16 article from Science that cited national data tracked by Israel's largest health management organization
this is in a country that had < 60% vaccinated at the time.
personally I think the vaccines are worthwhile for some people, but I wouldn't call them an unqualified success either. Most people are going to uncritically quote the factoids that they like and do mental gymnastics around the factoids they don't like.
I think that what has your mind boggled is mostly your bias (respectfully). I'm not even saying you're wrong fwiw.
I can't believe we are this far into the COVID pandemic with vaccines available and people are still trying to play gymnastics with the data.
The data shows that all groups of people at any age who are fully vaccinated are substantially less like to get COVID or end up in the hospital or end up dying from COVID. Not by a little bit but a lot. You can point to one day in Israel to make your point and I point to the entire US for the last 6 months that backs up what I am saying.
The Israeli data you cited is also is leaving a lot of other information out. How many of those patients were young or old and which were most likely to be fully vaccinated? It turns out that most of the fully vaccinated patients were over 60 with comorbidities and the unvaccinated people in the hospital were young people. Also, we know that the COVID vaccines would lose effectiveness over time and the patients in the hospital who are fully vaccinated would be the first group of people who would get a booster shot.
I am also going to go out on a limb and say that if you end up in the hospital with COVID and you are fully vaccinated, I am pretty sure COVID would have killed you if you weren't vaccinated.
Everyone who is cleared to get vaccinated should get vaccinated.
Are the hospitalizations actually from covid? Or did they show up to the hospital for a separate reason and happened to have positive covid test as well?
A 203:14 ratio when the country is over 50% vaccinated would be more bizarre, not less, if it was "all hospitalizations" and not "all COVID vaccinations"
you'd need to come up with a good reason why unvaccinated people were about 10x (or more) likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people
I imagine, but cannot confirm, the latter. It's titled COVID-19 Hospitalizations for the week of xxx.
In any case, when more than half your population is vaccinated, especially the older aged folks, at that point it doesn't make a remarkable difference what it's from as the correlation is still clear.
Are you purporting that Covid numbers are overinflated only for non-vaccinated individuals, but not for vaccinated? Because otherwise it still doesn’t explain the discrepancy in hospitalization.
I assume that both vaccinated and unvaccinated people who were hospitalized were tested for COVID-19. I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of the vaccinated+positive were in this category.
currently, yes that is the purpose .. but the messaging has changed over time and was quite different at the start of the year.
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.
> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.
We know most/all of these people have a conclusion, and pick whatever argument they have at support that conclusion. There's no convincing these people with argument: they will just move the goal posts and/or claim any evidence is suspect.
The best strategy to get to 95+% compliance appears to be mandates.
The vaccines were originally sold as helping the "return to normal" by protecting against infection enough to yield herd immunity. Multiple prominent public health authorities framed it in these terms, and the trial results were stated in terms of protection against symptomatic infections.
The Delta variant may have changed the game but, based on the history of attempts to vaccinate against coronaviruses, plenty of people predicted that would happen.
As someone who was happy to get the vaccine (and would do it again if necessary), I find it eerie that there's basically no discussion anywhere in the mainstream about how any of this affects the bottom lines of vaccine producers. Why would they NOT want to develop a product that produces a neverending revenue stream?
So your theory is they know how to make a vaccine that will last for life, but they didn't because it would make them less money?
a) This would require global collusion and conspiracy, since any vaccine maker who could make a durable vaccine would drive its competitors out of the market.
b) This greatly overestimates, IMO, the capabilities of our biotech/pharma industry. It's an amazing and spectacular achievement that they were able to make working vaccines at all in a < 1 year time frame. They don't have any secret immunity-boosting technology in ther back pockets.
c) There are several vaccines produced that DO provide lifetime or near lifetime immunity. Pfizer isn't making me get a new polio shot every year. If conspiracy theorists were to be believed, shouldn't we have an entire gamut of shots to take every fall instead of just the flu?
That's an error that's super common in conspiracy-theory thinking: focus on one hypothesized incentive (out of many) that usually has nefarious undertones, assume that's the main or only incentive at play, and assume the party in question is successfully acting on that incentive.
>This would require global collusion and conspiracy
No it wouldn't. It would only require incentive for profit. If a company makes a highly durable vaccine, its competitors wouldn't make very much money, but neither would the company itself. Less profit. Make a vaccine that wears off after a slightly longer time than your competitors, and you can claim to be the best product on the market while keeping your users coming back for more. Guaranteed ongoing revenue stream. 'Conspiracy' is a loaded term that is used solely to discredit the opposing argument.
This is like claiming -- why it would it NOT be in the best interests of tech companies to create software that is extremely buggy so that people need to stay with them for upgrades?
Sure, the stimulus exists. But unless you have a monopoly/cartel, this is very hard to pull off. And that's what antitrust laws are for.
People would obviously flee from your lousy product to the first manufacturer who didn't do that. If it was not hard to produce a established long-term vaccine, would any consumer/country stay with the short-term one?
> This is like claiming -- why it would it NOT be in the best interests of tech companies to create software that is extremely buggy so that people need to stay with them for upgrades?
Even that article claims "works best on monopolies"...
Anyway, planned hardware obsolescence is a wildly different situation. Manufacturers get way with it because practically no consumers choose one product over another based on durability. To this day you still have all kinds of products with user replaceable batteries, but customers do not buy those in droves. They apparently prefer to have a 0.0001% thinner product. They buy those in droves...
Compare this with a vaccine that promises N years of immunity. To be an apt analogy, you have to think of some metric that is evidently visible, highly desirable by customers, yet literally no manufacturer offers it.
> Compare this with a vaccine that promises N years of immunity.
Except that they've backtracked: it no longer promises "immunity" and apparently it no longer promises "years".
The vaccine doesn't have to be the best possible. It's obviously hard to make a good one; the problem is, the biggest players are the ones best suited to put the work in for a good vaccine, and if they don't choose to, it's possible they can just swallow up a smaller player that does manage to pull it off.
There's been so many conversations on HN about the antitrust situation with the big tech corporations; is it so hard to consider that maybe there's a similar situation in biotech?
Consumers aren't looking for the best vaccine; they're looking for the first one available, so they can be less scared about dying. That's the metric that's visible and desirable.
> There's been so many conversations on HN about the antitrust situation with the big tech corporations; is it so hard to consider that maybe there's a similar situation in biotech?
Sure there is. Sure there are. You hear about them when the antitrust law goes into effect. And? We obviously don't live in a world where all the software is intentionally filled with bugs, so at best you can use that as evidence that the antitrust laws are doing _something_. You can hardly use that as evidence that they are ineffective and there are trusts everywhere.
> Consumers aren't looking for the best vaccine; they're looking for the first one available
Apparently not, since they seem to get angry if they've used the one that "lasts for 6 months". Certainly there is no practical durability information right now, but are you arguing that once there is, they won't flee to the one that promises longer-term "protection"?
> Apparently not, since they seem to get angry if they've used the one that "lasts for 6 months".
People get mad when their cheap stuff breaks, too, even if that wasn't part of their purchasing criteria. Now they're scared about dying, again.
> You can hardly use that as evidence that they are ineffective and there are trusts everywhere.
I'm not making such an extreme claim, because it's not binary. There's a middle ground that you've excluded. I'm using the existence of some antitrust in one sphere as evidence that some antitrust might also exist in another sphere.
Edit: I think you might be misunderstanding my position: I'm defending the legitimacy of some very critical questions. Far as I can tell, you're arguing that my skepticism is flat-out unwarranted. Of the two, from a logic perspective, yours is the harder position to defend, because you're trying to prove a negative.
> People get mad when their cheap stuff breaks, too
No, they don't. They just buy another iDevice with again non-removable battery.
> I'm using the existence of some antitrust in one sphere as evidence that some antitrust might also exist in another sphere.
Not really -- you are assuming the entire "another" sphere is entirely a big trust, since that is what would be required for your claim of not a single lab making long-term vaccines / claiming that they know how to make long-term vaccines / leaking that they don't make long-term vaccines for non-technical reasons. This is not a minor specialized market, it is the friggin vaccine-of-the-year market.
> I'm defending the legitimacy of some very critical questions. Far as I can tell, you're arguing that my skepticism is flat-out unwarranted. Of the two, from a logic perspective, yours is the harder position to defend, because you're trying to prove a negative.
This is ridiculous. You are the one making the claim, you are the one needing to provide the evidence. Most specially if it is a dubious claim that requires a big conspiracy of a significant amount of people (but you'd still need to provide the evidence even if it wasn't). Otherwise, this is just Russell's teapot all over again.
How are you going to disprove my very critical questions of there being a perfectly safe and very long term vaccine hidden inside a porcelain teapot which is floating around in the Lagrange point of Earth that NASA (and Elon Musk!) is hiding from us, for god knows what reasons? Aha! Unwarranted skepticism much, eh?
Software doesn't need to be filled with bugs intentionally. Software is basically the art of writing and selectively removing bugs. It happens naturally and if for some reason you find your software has evolved to a state of optimal bugginess then you fire your last developer. See! No intention required.
> This is like claiming -- why it would it NOT be in the best interests of tech companies to create software that is extremely buggy so that people need to stay with them for upgrades?
A great deal of SaaS is essentially just building in a "bug" that one must phone home to a central server over the internet to use the software, and pay a monthly fee for the privilege.
Nature has a never-ending supply of dangerous bugs to vaccinate against.
One of the big benefits of the mRNA technology behind the covid 19 vaccine was the ability to rapidly develop, produce, and deploy it.
Plus, people will lose confidence if the damn thing doesn't work. The optimal business strategy here is to demonstrate how effective this technology is, so that they continue to get contracts/grants to develop future vaccines.
What do people care? Look at how many people have already gotten the vaccine before they knew about their effectiveness or anything really. Many people got it just so they will not be trashtalked (to be part of the group, peer pressure, yadda yadda), to be able to visit cinemas, to be able to keep their job, and in some places because it was mandatory.
Hear this rather funny story: someone wanted to visit their family member who was staying at the psychiatric hospital. They could only do that once vaccinated. What happened? The woman walked 100 meters, got the vaccine, and immediately went to visit the family member. Yes, no waiting required, which is the funny bit. The vaccine obviously was not mandated for what you and I would think it was, otherwise they would have given a crap about the time after vaccination.
because it would be a subpar product and because this is conspiratorial thinking.
It would only take one competitor to produce a long lasting vaccine and that competitor would take the entire market, so suggesting that all vaccine producers across national boundaries, not to mention all scientists involved are somehow in cahoots is absurd.
It does not have to be a cure though, it just has to be better, right? Not that some (actually, quite many) consumers have a choice in the matter (availability, law, so forth).
Maybe they ALL know that a cure could cut off profit, so they go with good enough boosters.
I'm not at all assuming an idealized free market. Lobbyists can exist but even lobbyists for particular firms compete with other lobbyists. Again, for something like this to make sense you would need to show how every scientific institution on earth somehow coordinates to not produce a superior vaccine.
Someone in the US can lobby all they want, if someone in India or China, any public research institute, any state agency produces a superior vaccine they will lose.
Are you saying tens of thousands of scientists and competing businesses, from Cambodia to Cuba to Russia to the US, to organisations that don't even have a profit motive like public university researchers, have all conspired to lock away some magic vaccine in a box?
Let's say the entire US has been captured by the vaccine lizard people, do you think China or Russia would forego the opportunity to expose to the entire world that this has been happening while also capturing the entire global market with a better product?
> Are you saying [extreme borderline-strawman statement that is obviously not what I said at all]
I'm saying it's possible that a few extremely powerful corporations chose to develop a vaccine that is less useful than it could have been, and are profiting off the difference. I'm also saying that the big ones might have enough influence to get away with a less-effective vaccine than some smaller player who can get swallowed up, if needed.
I'm also aware that the scientific consensus you seem to think exists about the vaccine, doesn't.
I'm also aware that you don't need to get all those experts on board - just like 20 years ago when it was the tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists who thought the government was spying on them, all you have to do is make the dissidents look ridiculous.
Is Covid-19 unique to other respiratory infections causing a severe cytokine storm which causes severe lung damage in some people before the immune system can figure out the correct antibody ???.
Hyper-induction of pro-inflammatory cytokines, also known as a cytokine storm or cytokine release syndrome ... is not unique to the SARS-CoV-2 infection; it was prevalent in most of the major human coronavirus and influenza A subtype outbreaks of the past two decades (H5N1, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and H7N9).
> Can you show any evidence to your claim that natural immunity is superior?
Sure [1] this is pretty well known at this point.
From an elementary perspective, this is simple math
Spike-Vaccines = Antibody to Protein spike from original Covid
Spike-Vaccine Booster = Antibody to Protein spike from whichever variant
Infection Immunity = Antibodies to spike & other proteins inside the virus & the "Reverse Transcription Defense" [2]. The reverse transcription defense is not well-known at this point, but it is believed to be one of the sources of endogenous viruses found on the human genome (EHV)
One of the papers I read on it stated paraphrased 'these other proteins we see antibodies for in recovered individuals are potential vaccine targets for future vaccines'. However, at this point we do not yet have a vaccine that contains the respective strengths of previous infection based immunity.
I would think that's the default position, right? Vaccines are simply a trigger to try to replicate what happens during normal disease exposure. A vaccine that's as effective as natural immunity is a great success.
I remember seeing a few articles on the mainstream Reddit boards (/r/coronavirus and /r/medicine) studies coming out of Israel and Japan. But some say it's not peer reviewed yet?
I was curious if you were right. So I found numbers here instead of just claims. It’s been big money, that’s true.
- Pfizer revenue for the quarter ending June 30, 2021 was $18.977B, a 92.39% increase year-over-year.
- Pfizer revenue for the twelve months ending June 30, 2021 was $55.520B, a 59.83% increase year-over-year.
- Pfizer annual revenue for 2020 was $41.908B, a 1.79% increase from 2019.
-Pfizer annual revenue for 2019 was $41.172B, a 0.85% increase from 2018.
- Pfizer annual revenue for 2018 was $40.825B, a 22.31% decline from 2017.
As to Moderna, they were very poorly performing until COVID, their vaccine likely saved their business.
Good for them, I guess. I haven’t ever been a fan of big Pharma (textbook regulatory capture to start), and that hasn’t changed unlike some people who now cheerleader for them after years of skepticism.
As to boosters, and people’s tolerance? Nothing either way surprises me anymore.
Edit: factual Pfizer numbers, no “conspiracy narrative”, still not allowed, got it
Man you can wrap that up with the good ol'conspiracy theory what if it was big pharma that MADE the virus and were sitting on this vaccine?!
What you're saying is the same as saying that some US weapon manufacturer cashed in big whenever the US went to war - how the hell did they pull that off, right?
Yes, and all wars in the last few decades came about entirely naturally and by chance and certainly weren't provoked if not initiated by the US. That's just a good ol'conspiracy theory.
> it would be the US Weapon Industry that were causing the wars.
Is that out of the realm of possibility? The neocons might be the ones dragging the US into needless conflicts in the name of spreading the religion of "democracy," but I don't see why the weapons industry would be against these misadventures.
> Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
> Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
> This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence--economic, political, even spiritual---is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
> In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
The non-sense is that you're basically saying that the US created the armaments industry as a means to an end - NOT the other way around, which is what it's being labeled as a conspiracy theory.
It wasn't the "American makers of plowshares" that decided to pivot to the weapons business and started to make wars. They were funded to switch their production.
Why would the armaments industry be "creating wars" (what ever that means), if the country - per your Eisenhower quote - requires them to keep developing and producing armament?
Seems like most people here think hospitals and health care companies act purely out of the benevolence of their hearts and not for profit, judging by the down-votes on your comment ;)
Some people here really ought to replace Pfizer with Google or Facebook and re-read their sentences.
According to some comments here, we have a purely free market and all actors are benevolent, there are no profit incentives "for the worse" (at all, that is, let me quote: "conspiratorial thinking" to think that people are motivated by profits) and so forth, but only as so far as we are talking about COVID-19.
I typically read the exact opposites when there are discussions about Facebook, Google, or the market in general.
a) It was impossible to know the rate at which immunity would decay in January.
b) Even if the vaccine only lasts 6-9 months without boosting, why would that change your mind about taking it? It just means we need boosters. You only acquire natural immunity by getting COVID, and avoiding that is kind of the whole point.
c) In any case, if you read the article, the truth about immunity decline is actually still very unclear. Antibody numbers clearly decline within months, but cellular immunity does not. Decline of protection is probably most severe in the elderly, and there still seems to be strong protection against severe illness.
So clickbait. Also fearmongering from politicians and others.