It's so interesting watching this get picked up by the news.
Many aren't aware but interestingly these variants are identified and designated in the open on GitHub, here is the GitHub issue for this B.1.1.529 designation https://github.com/cov-lineages/pango-designation/issues/343. I've recently started watching this repo as it's quite interesting reading about the different variants popping up across the world.
That’s not quite accurate, they’re identified in GISAID [0] and other platforms, which is where scientists upload sampled genetic sequences. It’s also out in the open and free to access.
This GitHub repo is just about registering the Pango lineage, based on data already collected and published at other locations.
GitHub is being used by many governmental agencies as a repository for information, especially numeric and usable for automation (not just for code). Another contextual example is "how many contagions per district, daily", but you could also have "how many herons observed in that territory", etc.
Whenever you hear news about mutated COVID and how fast it spreads there are a few important things to remember.
1. Viruses are constantly mutating, its kind of their thing.
2. Most mutations do absolutely nothing or are actually harmful to the virus.
3. When a new mutation is noted to be spreading fast its usually because of the nature of super spreader events and not because the new mutation is more or less transmissible.
4. Scientist and health officials should absolutely be keeping an eye on these things.
But Vince from YouTube was of course completely wrong there. At the time they recorded that video, there was overwhelming evidence that the Alpha variant was more transmissive. It was astronomically unlikely that it could have been explained by a founder effect or individual super-spreader events. Unsurprisingly, the evidence was correct while the uninformed pattern-matching from a non-epidemiologist was wrong.
For this new variant it could still plausibly be a founder effect. But that's because the circumstances are different this time (the variant became dominant while cases were surging from almost nothing, not when the cases were already at a high level). Not because that checklist is actually correct.
> But Vince from YouTube was of course completely wrong there.
Claiming Vince was wrong in the video also means the researchers that discovered the variant were wrong. After all he was just parroting their findings in the video.
This article was on the same day as your YouTube video and paints a very different picture. So what's your source that the YouTuber has accurately parroted scientific findings?
17 minutes in, dismissing the R value that the UK scientific advisors calculated based on unpublished data, that we now know was correct: "you can't use epidemiological data to prove a biological effect of an amino acid..."
Yeah, that's a virology point of view all right. That something has to have a proven biological mechanism before it can be taken as fact, or even considered as a risk. That's bad public policy though. With his reasoning there would have been no reason to increase restrictions in the UK in Dec/Jan, but in fact the restrictions were extremely necessary and the variant caused tens of thousands of extra deaths.
The R numbers coming out of UK epidemiology are garbage, Racaniello is right about that. They aren't physically grounded in any way, they're just arbitrary fudge factors brute forced to make their equations plot graphs that look like reported government stats so far. The same model will routinely calculate totally different values of R for different areas of the same country at the same time, without variants or anything like that.
Also the claims about variants being "more infectious" are - when you dig in - hopelessly confounded by seasonal effects that many epidemiological papers were at that time still ignoring.
The seasonal effects are trivially controlled for by comparing the growth rate of the variant to the growth rate of the wildtype at the same time. And that's exactly how the original analysis was done, because the people doing it were not incompetent.
For your seasonal effect explanation to make any sense, the effect would have to have only applied to Alpha but not to baseline Covid at the same time. And then it's not a seasonal effect, is it? It's an actual difference in the behavior of the two variants. The same goes for any other similar confounder that you try to manufacture.
Not the analysis I saw, where Delta's growth rate was compared to Alpha in the same time window, not the start of alpha's own growth period. Because yes, they are totally incompetent. You can look at graphs of the changing proportions to see visually that that's not much difference in how fast they took over.
The modern issue is that most of experts are with very narrow expertise, which is not carrying that great weight as you might think and such expertise also doesn't mean that much in responsibilities.
My mother at 14 after a car accident was considered as lost cause and by opinion of expert she should be dead, but survived only because her relative with much less medical expertise believed in second opinion and got her in different hospital. Sometimes, these stupid parroted ideas about expert opinions can only be proven wrong by personal experience only. But quite many people do not learn from their own mistakes, so, meh - there is no cure for stupid people, who can't think by themselves.
PS Every covid mutation so far has put scientists on alert...
They are only allowed to be an an expert in 2021 if a majority of anonymous Twitter followers agree with their assessment, and if their stated political opinions for their entire lives lean in the correct direction. Please note those two conditions correlate.
Not saying this is you. Normally your comment is a trope by the right to paradoxically imply how they are such victims in 2021, but the other side are snowflakes and want to cancel every one.
There’s an overlap with hard left and a few other niche political views as well. Though with less victimhood and more consistency at times.
Personally, I care very little for appeal to authority myself. The bias among experts based on their political views is generally going to be very high.
No you're not understanding the logic correctly. The GP was wondering why he has to trust a YouTuber to accurately parrot a research article and I point out that he's not a random YouTuber. Of course he can still be wrong?
Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, no? Because that's exactly what the claim is. I understand that it makes him less likely to misunderstand the research (probably) but its not a guarantee and is naive to depend on that fact.
Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy, although some people argue that it is. Put more correctly: experts know better, but aren't perfect. For example, were I to cite Peter Duesberg, a well known virologist, about HIV transmission, I'd be wrong, even though he's an expert virologist.
I assign higher priors to subject matter experts until I have reason to believe otherwise.
> Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy, although some people argue that it is.
I mean, it is a logical fallacy. An expert isn't right only because he's an expert, he's right only when the evidence supports his position. Do all experts only make conclusions based on evidence, or do other beliefs factor in? I think the answer is clear, hence the fallacy.
No, it's not a logical fallacy. Nor would the fact that experts don't make conclusions purely on evidence mean their citing their statements fallacious.
For any given scientific question, select two populations. One populaton is enriched in subject matter experts, while the other is selected at random. Have them make blind predictions about scientific facts. It is not fallacious to sdtate that the first group's predictions will have a higher posterior probability.
I've actually studied a lot about logical fallacies, and so I can tell you with certainty that appeal to authority is, indeed, a logical fallacy.
Source: Myself, an authority
Joking aside, you are just misrepresenting what the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy is. An "appeal to authority" is when one argues that "X is correct because <insert some expert> said it was". In really, X is either correct or incorrect, regardless of what any authority has said about it.
So yes, appeal to authority is absolutely a logical fallacy. Changing the definition of those words and then arguing that your definition isn't a fallacy is called a fallacy of equivocation. And yes, a fallacy of equivocation is also a logical fallacy.
What's really going on here is two different meanings of the word "argument". Appeal to authority is indeed a fallacy if you're dealing with a logical argument meant to prove something absolutely and undeniably true.
That's not the only kind of argument that exists though, and we're pretty unlikely to be in that kind of argument on the internet talking about current events. When trying to tell from incomplete facts what's more likely to be true, listening to what an expert says is a pretty good start.
I agree with everything you said. But I still say that “appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy” is a false statement, regardless of whatever shinanigans is going on in this discussion.
you can't provide anything absolutely and undeniably true, except maybe in math. I mean, I used to do debate and after some time I noticed that none of it was based on truly logical arguments; everything was about persuasive seduction and coming up with the minimum to cast doubt on your opponent's position.
But yeah, I like the way you put this; we're just arguing on the internet about things which are too messy to have a true false dichotomy.
You really need to look up what "logic fallacy" means. Any invalid logical inference is a fallacy. An appeal to authority is not a valid logical inference because an authority's claim is not necessarily true; the definition of a valid inference rule is if it's result is necessarily true if it's antecedents are true. Therefore an appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, by definition.
Appeal to probability is also another kind of logical fallacy. Don't get me wrong, there's value on knowledge and judgement that resides outside of the logic domain but you don't know what's a logical fallacy.
What does the logic domain have to contribute to human arguments? There is nothing, other than pure math, which follows logic. Nothing in our society is logical in a way that people arguing objective facts could resolve a problem.
A lot. It's the language of pure reason and a tool for abstract thought. It's a pillar of any STEM field like math, computers, physics, engineering, etc. Our society was built on top of it. I think you're misjudging it's value because you're mistaking it for a way to achieve non-falsifiable claims, which it's not as any logical claim only hold as much as it's premises, while ignoring it's value as a framework for though.
Where is the appeal to authority? I made no such claim and have explained what I meant in considerable detail? I have explicitly mentioned several times that he can be wrong. Appeal to authority means authority isn't wrong because authority.
On its own you can interpret it like that, but this is a bit unfair. I have already explained what I meant with my comment, I even have a comment that predates the one you cite where I explicitly claim that he can be wrong... My point was not to say that he's right because he's a professor. It was to clarify that he's not a random YouTuber.
It seems silly, to me at least, to take external statements to this given thread and apply them as if they were said here. I took your comment at face value, all seven words and the URL. That was the entire statement, there was no mention of "he's an expert but he could be wrong"
When asked for evidence, the ONLY evidence that you provided, was that he IS an expert. Full stop.
Why does it matter? Researchers are wrong all the time, improving upon that is kind of the point of science.
It's a bit unfair that the GP calls him Vince from Youtube. He's a professor of virology so not just some nobody giving his opinion on Youtube. This doesn't mean he can't be wrong of course.
I did feel a bit bad writing it, but it was for the purpose of countering the appeal to authority. This is a epidemiological question, and being a professor of virology doesn't make you an expert at that. So the outcome was that Racaniello ended up recommending inaction, since he'd only accept evidence from his own field (i.e. lab work).
Thanks dude, now I have to deal with lots of replies that misunderstand what I wrote in response to you. While you knew who he was! :P
But all good. I used to listen to his podcast at the beginning of the crisis but after a while I stopped because I felt they were ignoring reality while waiting for science. Which felt like a strange way of working when reality was what we had to base decisions off of.
I think it matters that he’s wrong because you’ve already given him such a high stature. Him being wrong means a policy that depends on him being right should also be reinspected. But policies aren’t that flexible.
The question is: what do you do in the absence of data, or with only very preliminary data? By the time the scientists have had chance to fully investigate the moment for action has often passed.
'... what do you do in the absence of data, or with only very preliminary data?'
Stop shoveling carbs at every meal. Lose 30 pounds. Start to exercise and increase cardio-pulmonary performance.
It appears most people in developed countries became couch potatoes and gained fat.
To each his own. My body, my choice. Your body, your choice.
I think we are misunderstanding each other. I asked why it matters if Vincent being wrong means that the scientists that wrote the article would be wrong. To me it is a natural thing that happens in science. Of course the scientists can be wrong?
because I was getting the impression the person I replied to was trying to frame the situation as a YouTuber vs Scientist argument. That of course wasn't the reality.
But the actual commonsense evidence is that Alpha isn't more transmissive, which makes Vincent right. Alpha, Delta, and every other variant has turned out to be the same when practically speaking as experienced in our actual cities and populations across the world. So Vincent is ultimately correct: the "evidence" based on modeling was lacking, and his second point was that politicians and the media should not
be rhetorically distorting the scientific positions that can be taken. There's a difference between taking reasonable precautions and oversimplifying scientific positions in order to "motivate" the public or to make media hype (both of which are TWiV's pet peeve, as anyone who has been watching their videos can see).
Delta’s quick growth rate has been especially dramatic, says F. Perry Wilson, MD, a Yale Medicine epidemiologist. Delta was spreading 50% faster than Alpha, which was 50% more contagious than the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, he says. “In a completely unmitigated environment—where no one is vaccinated or wearing masks—it’s estimated that the average person infected with the original coronavirus strain will infect 2.5 other people,” Dr. Wilson says. “In the same environment, Delta would spread from one person to maybe 3.5 or 4 other people.”
> Alpha, Delta, and every other variant has turned out to be the same when practically speaking as experienced in our actual cities and populations across the world.
This claim is wildly false, and you've already been refuted by someone else.
> 3. When a new mutation is noted to be spreading fast its usually because of the nature of super spreader events and not because the new mutation is more or less transmissible.
Mostly true but in some very major cases it was because the variant did spread faster in general. Such as Delta and the British variant before hand.
Yeah by the time fast spreading variants get picked up by the press, they usually are indeed more transmissible, rather than merely founder effects / super spreader events. We've seen this time and time again to the point that the rational evaluation is to assume the new variant is indeed more transmissible. Especially for this variant which is overtaking Delta so quickly that it can't really be explained by super spreader events.
If such a variant was not spreading faster, how would it ever become a dominant new strain? Just because of some unlucky incident on the other side of the world?
I think the initial fast spread can be incidental, a super spreader event. But if it has lasting ability to displace other variants, especially across multiple countries, then it is likely just easier to spread.
Basically superspreader events can artificially boost a variant for a bit -- it is basically noise. You need to look at a longer time frame to be sure.
Viruses sure fail fast, truly fascinating. Tirelessly mutating to spread and (I assume) survive. Do they serve as purely a "cleaning" function of nature, restoring balance... or do they seek global domination... even if it means destroying the host organisms they depend upon? Are they simply mindless, unintelligent organic micro programs or do they have some kind of plan?
They’re the paperclip maximizers of the animal kingdom. All a virus does is make more of itself. If it does, there’s more, if not, it goes extinct. They do it sloppy and mutate. If it does the thing better, there’s more of the new thing. If not, that new thing goes extinct. Once that’s been happening for billions of years some parts of these viruses will look pretty clever.
"Goal" kinda invokes intentionality, which can't exist at the size viruses are. (Of course it's an open question whether it exists at all but let's leave that aside.)
Viruses don't have goals. If a virus successfully makes more virus, then there is more of the virus. For viruses that don't do that, there are less of them. That's all there is to it.
It so happens that making more virus often requires resources that were previously in use by other organisms. But that's incidental, not by design.
You only see viruses that are good at making more virus because the other ones died out.
It may be very unlikely, but claiming intention is not possible given virus size feels a little short sighted. Simply because we as humans don't know why or how doesn't mean it's not possible.
Viruses are what viruses do, they don't have any of these properties that you could assign to them, they just do their thing (replicating using some combination of mechanisms provided by other organisms), and if they do it well they get to do it some more. There are no motivations, there is no plan, there is no function and they don't seek anything.
If they're too successful at what they do their host dies before they can be passed on, if they're not successful enough then the infection wave loses momentum and dies out. Effectively we have been helping them for the last year and a half do do this, without our help this particular virus would die out within a couple of weeks. It needs us for transportation and to be brought in contact with new viable hosts. On its own it can't do much of anything.
From what we know, there's no "plan" or designed function for viruses. They're just crafty pieces of information that get copied and spread in living organisms and sometimes wreak havoc on the hosts.
As I understand evolution: life has no plan, goal, aim or intention. It’s endless amounts of parallel and random experimentation over billions of years. And this has led to biological structures that have certain tendencies that work well: cells, reproduction, energy consumption, sexual reproduction. On top of that life has evolved to have behaviour and other attributes that work in certain context: immune systems, locomotion, fur, gills, adaptability, use of tools, creative problem solving.
I would say they have meaning in a different sense - not as a message but their origin as proof. They are fundamentally proof of the "tautological mechanism" of evolution. It isn't a matter of life but that things which can survive over time and are produced over time will have a higher number existing at once than ones which perish and are not produced. This holds regardless of the how and why.
Native copper ore got largely picked up and used by humans rendering such deposits "extinct" from early civilizations and lead to the practice of mining after the low hanging fruit was used up.
Dekhn is correct in ascribing this to complex information systems though, it is the storage, copying, transmission and expression of DNA that gives viruses their opportunity. All of these mechanisms can be hijacked.
Not necessarily, if they kill their host after a couple of weeks they will spread very effectively indeed, the longer the asymptomatic spread period the better for a virus' chances of moving on to a fresh host undetected. During symptomatic spreading there is at least a warning that someone might be contagious so this is a harder way to spread. And for some viruses it is even possible to spread after the host has died. What happens to the host itself after the virus has spread doesn't really matter. If a host dies before spreading and the virus can't be spread from the corpse then that will work against the virus.
I am not a virologist but it sounds to me that this is an observation and not a law/axiom.
The virus does not decide a strategy, it is random mutation and selection and even if it is less likely it might be that we could have a variant that is super transmissible and super deadly. This effect could be obtain in the delay between transmission and visible effects on human body. Example: virus is transmissible with N days before we can see signs of infection.
Of course we can fight back by testing everyone weekly even if they show no signs.
Mutations which improve transmission and longetivity will, in general, become more prevalent. Proliferation begets proliferation. You cannot transmit a strain if you are at home in bed from its severity.
Help me understand how a virus can replicate without being detected but can also increase its lethality.
We already have an asymptomatic and infectious incubation period. If that kept stretching longer then you are delaying the lytic cycle even longer? Or does propogation and ultimately viral load also happen as a slower burn? Eventually you will have damaged too many cells.
I said “visible effects” which is different than detecting a virus in human body. That mean pre-symptomatic transmission.
I am not up to date with latest research but it seemed to be that SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that can be transmitted before symptoms onset.
Regarding replication without being detected but also increased lethality this you might be right that doing the math maybe the hypothesis I present seems far fetched.
Still I guess that a slight bump in mortality will create a lot of deaths due to its transmission.
Of course like I said I am just expressing an opinion that might be very wrong.
I'm wondering why we don't start producing mRNA vaccines targeting this other variant now. Seems like there could be some safety and efficacy protocol put in place to target emerging variants so we don't have to start from scratch in the approval process, requiring 30k-40k adults alone every year.
>I'm wondering why we don't start producing mRNA vaccines targeting this other variant now.
People are developing mRNA vaccines for 'flu now. Moderna, Pfizer and Sanofi all have mRNA 'flu vaccines in clinical trials, and there are a bunch more in the pre-clinical stages.
It doesn't bother you yet. Wait until you are say sixty or seventy years old. I am of course making a few assumptions here 8) Flu rarely kills young 'uns in reasonable to good shape with no other indicators or whatever doctors call it. I mean risks associated with a particular individual.
The point of vaccines is not perfection but more like a war of attrition. A vaccine has several potential purposes, some of them are these:
* Reduce the possibility of infection
* Reduce the effects of an infection
* Reduce the infectiousness of an individual to other people
The first two effects affect you personally and the third one affects society as a whole. The third one is the thing behind the "Don't kill grandma" meme. Your comment implies to me that you may not have considered it. If you have and are happy with that, then that is your prerogative.
Each of those items above have various probabilities associated with them and rather a lot of external factors and so on. A vaccine's stated effectiveness in each area will obviously be some sort of average across a population.
That's the thing: Vaccines inoculate societies as a whole and not just individuals when you look at statistics. The phrase "anecdotes are not data" is particularly true here.
Even a "lol sad" 40% effective (whatever that means) vaccine will slow the spread of the thing across a population and reduce the possibility of individual deaths or other non optimal outcomes. When you start to look at the population as a whole you see huge numbers of people living instead of dying.
With luck, one of those survivors might be you or me one day. This is the only time I will advocate a sort of communist approach to things. By "risking" inoculation, you reduce the possibility that someone else might catch the disease. You also get some additional abilities to fight off the bloody thing too - nice!
The flu didn't bother me 'til it knocked me on my ass for two weeks and I had brain fog for several months afterwards. The cost of a flu shot is a few bucks, a few minutes to get the jab, a sore muscle and mild symptoms for a day. That for 20-50% efficacy chance to avoid that 2-week monster flu? I'm in.
One big issue is that colloquially "the flu" is used to describe bad colds and other illnesses. Almost no one who has "the flu" has influenza. Thus people underestimate how bad influenza actually is
Actually I believe that in itself is a misunderstanding. Flu may be more likely than a cold statistically to hit someone badly, but it's quite possible to get the flu mildly, and it's quite possible to get really, really bad cold. The same way Covid being statistically more dangerous than the flu doesn't mean that every person getting infected by Covid has a worse time than every person getting the flu.
when I get the flu shot I typically spend a week with a non-functioning arm and feeling like I'm very sick. However, I still get flu vaccination because it seems likely that this maximizes the overall health of humanity, and I'm more interested in the health of humanity than my own, in the long term.
Good that you get the shot, but I'll just note that the symptom you describe is far worse than most people who get the flu shot. Most years I get it I have no symptoms at all besides slight arm soreness. Maybe one in five years I have a mild fever for a day.
Yes. The CDC has this to say about flu virus mutation:
How Flu Viruses Can Change: “Drift” and “Shift”
Influenza (flu) viruses are constantly changing. They can change in two different ways.
Antigenic Drift
One way flu viruses change is called “antigenic drift.” Drift consists of small changes (or mutations) in the genes of influenza viruses that can lead to changes in the surface proteins of the virus, HA (hemagglutinin) and NA (neuraminidase). The HA and NA surface proteins of influenza viruses are “antigens,” which means they are recognized by the immune system and are capable of triggering an immune response, including production of antibodies that can block infection. The changes associated with antigenic drift happen continually over time as flu viruses replicate (i.e., infect a host and make copies of themselves). Most flu shots are designed to target the HA surface proteins/antigens of flu viruses. The nasal spray flu vaccine (LAIV) may target both the HA and NA of a flu virus.
The small changes that occur from antigenic drift usually produce viruses that are closely related to one another, which can be illustrated by their location close together on a phylogenetic tree. Flu viruses that are closely related to each other usually have similar antigenic properties. This means that antibodies your immune system creates against one flu virus will likely recognize and respond to antigenically similar flu viruses (this is called “cross-protection”).
However, the small changes associated with antigenic drift can accumulate over time and result in viruses that are antigenically different (further away on the phylogenetic tree). It also is possible for a single change in a particularly important location on the HA to result in antigenic drift. When antigenic drift occurs, the body’s immune system may not recognize and prevent sickness caused by the newer flu viruses. As a result, a person becomes susceptible to flu infection again, as antigenic drift has changed the virus’ antigenic properties enough that a person’s existing antibodies won’t recognize and neutralize the newer flu viruses.
Antigenic drift is an important reason why people can get flu more than one time. Drift is also a primary reason why the composition of flu vaccines for use in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres is reviewed annually and updated as needed to keep up with evolving flu viruses.
Antigenic Shift
Another type of change is called “antigenic shift.” Shift is an abrupt, major change in a flu A virus, resulting in new HA and/or new HA and NA proteins in flu viruses that infect humans. Antigenic shift can result in a new flu A subtype. Shift can happen if a flu virus from an animal population gains the ability to infect humans. Such animal-origin viruses can contain HA or HA/NA combinations that are different enough from human viruses that most people do not have immunity to the new (e.g., novel) virus. Such a “shift” occurred in the spring of 2009, when an H1N1 virus with genes from North American Swine, Eurasian Swine, humans and birds emerged to infect people and quickly spread, causing a pandemic. When shift happens, most people have little or no immunity against the new virus.
While flu viruses change all the time due to antigenic drift, antigenic shift happens less frequently. Flu pandemics occur rarely; there have been four flu pandemics in the past 100 years. For more information, see pandemic flu. Type A viruses undergo both antigenic drift and shift and are the only flu viruses known to cause pandemics, while flu type B viruses change only by the more gradual process of antigenic drift.
Really simple: If this new variant does nothing more than previous versions to increase mortality, particularly among the increasingly vaccinated population, obsessing over its spread should be considered pointless and absurd. For one thing, it wouldn't work without endless other streams or authoritarian security theater measures (that in any case themselves don't really work most of the time) And for another thing, "stop the spread" is an idiotic notion without heavy qualification. Stop death? Sure, Stop large quantities of hospitalizations? That too, albeit with cost/benefit calculations applied to all measures, but stopping spread itself for its own sake? Absurd paranoia that has no merit the moment the thing spreading stops being a truly widespread threat. We have lived with colds and flus for all our history without obsessing over their spread. COVID among those who are already immunized or vaccinated is comparably dangerous to common flu strains.
"South Africa has asked Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) and Pfizer (PFE.N) to delay delivery of COVID-19 vaccines because it now has too much stock, health ministry officials said, as vaccine hesitancy slows an inoculation campaign."
The evidence isn't yet in for immunity persistence post-booster, with Pfizer or Moderna. There's a chance that immunity wanes less quickly with the booster's 6 month+ window vs the original 2nd shot's 3 week window. Of course, if a mutation evades the vaccine's design then it doesn't matter much, but for the moment I'm hopeful that 5 months out from a booster is still a relatively high protection %.
"...protection against hospitalization and death persisted at a robust level for 6 months after the second dose" (from the above linked article)
This is the important part in my opinion and I've heard it explained thus: the level of antibodies circulating in the body goes down after six months, so you may be susceptible to infection. However, the immune system creates something called "memory cells" which live in the lymphatic system and will activate a robust immune response if they come into contact with the antigen again.
That's how it's meant to work. If that were true you wouldn't be seeing so many people getting COVID after being vaccinated.
In reality all these explanations we're being given are nearly junk value. Public health researchers don't understand the immune system or mRNA based vaccines well enough to predict things like how it adapts or learns, and in particular they just ignore any factor that they don't have a fast/cheap test for (or sometimes any test).
Memory cells do not prevent infection, they live in the lymphatic system and are only activated if a pathogen gets past the "innate immune system" and gets to the point we typically refer to as "infection". So, to re-use your phrase: if that were true we'd be seeing vaccinated people getting infected but recovering quickly and generally not dying, which is exactly what we see.
I don't expect a schedule that tight, mostly because infections naturally wane in the summer months anyway. My (un)educated guess is that it will be rolled into the flu vaccine at some point and become a once-a-year occasion.
Well here in the local news they were saying that it really starts waning at 6 months and the EU is planning to reduce the validity of the certificate to 9 months because of that. So I do expect it to be a 6-monthly affair. But probably just one shot every time because it's a booster.
But I'd be ok with every 3 months too though I agree there should be no need for it. I'm high risk and my work did an antibody test after 3 months, and I was full of antibodies still at that point.
Variants will continue to to be generated as SARS-CoV-2 is almost certainly endemic. We should be focusing on developing and testing therapeutics and treatment protocols to help as many people as possible, rather than focusing so heavily on vaccinations.
Therapeutics and treatment protocols require a lot more medical staff to implement than a simple jab.
The only way to keep cases to a low enough level to be successfully 'processed' by the health system is to maintain fairly severe social restrictions - and maintain them forever.
Didn't vaccination require huge spending as well? I think governments over-relied on vaccination for their own reasons, even long after it became evident it wasn't going to magically solve the pandemic. At the very least, vaccines should always be combined with some sort of restrictions to prevent the appearance of new variants (since the vaccines themselve create a pressure for the virus towards an escape mutation)
Absolutely - to my mind vaccines should be used to drive infections to very low levels, if not complete eradication, for the reason you state.
I believe that all of our successful vaccination campaigns (against highly contagious viruses) have by necessity resulted in (near) eradication. E.g. Polio, Smallpox, Measles, Rabies (in animals)
Is Nu /ˈnjuː/ (en) /niː/ (cz) a good name? I assume that most people have heard first few letters of Greek alphabet. Yet after Delta they should have switched to Pokemon names. Would be much more robust. I can already imagine all the misspelling in Twitter rants.
I think the Greek letter Xi is where we'll hit real trouble. "zai", "k'see", and "she" are all likely ways people will pronounce the letter.
I think most Americans have at this point enough exposure to news about China that they'd pronounce it "she", as if it were pinyin. In the fraternity/sorority system, I think most people pronounce it "zai", but my understanding is "k'see" or "ke-see" is closer to classical (and perhaps modern) Greek pronunciation.
I had an analogue control systems professor with a very strong accent (his catch phrase was "Quitch dewice wuh you choose?") who pronounced Xi close to correctly. I presume a huge chunk of the class (about half of the men, and many women at MIT were in fraternities/sororities/independent living groups at the time) probably dismissed his pronunciation of the Greek due to his accent in English and their prior exposure to the Greek alphabet in the "Greek" living system.
Given the stupefying number of anti-vaxers and rapid viral mutation rates, the only way we get out of this pandemic is by a relatively harmless variant out competing the more deadly ones. Same as with the Spanish Flu.
Fortunately this is the trend for most viruses. I have seen no evidence that the delta variant was more lethal, but that it was more transmissible. I have also seen numbers from my locality sequencing that suggested lethality was significant chunk less than that of alpha.
Increased risk [compared to non-variant-of-concern SARS-COV-2] with the Delta variant was more pronounced at 108% (95% CI 78%–140%) for hospitalization, 235% (95% CI 160%–331%) for ICU admission and 133% (95% CI 54%–231%) for death.
Compared with non-VOC SARS-CoV-2 strains, the adjusted elevation in risk associated with N501Y-positive variants was 52% (95% confidence interval [CI] 42%–63%) for hospitalization, 89% (95% CI 67%–117%) for ICU admission and 51% (95% CI 30%–78%) for death.
Pretty much. The R0 was high from the onset and has only gotten worse with new mutations. This isn't surprising either. To get to herd immunity, we'd need a very high percentage of the population to be immune. The one difference from before the vaccines is that we now know they don't make you immune.
No, but the chance of breakthrough infection with the current vaccines is high enough that it's unlikely to allow good herd immunity at realistic vaccination rates, which sucks.
Immunity is always the goal if you can get it. It's not how you judge success though, you're right.
Thankfully the vaccines do drastically reduce severe illnesses though, so that's something.
Has anyone ever attempted to intentionally spread a less lethal variant of a virus in order to speed up the crowding out of other strains? I could see us trying this if a quick spreading but innocuous strain is found.
Dr. McCoy : Who knows? It might eventually cure the common cold, but lengthen lives? Poppycock! I can do more for you if you just eat right and exercise regularly.
That is a rather hopeful chart. Even the very virulent Delta, in a country 25% vaccinated, has receded to almost negligible levels after ~4 months of flaring up.
If "update" refers to updating the mRNA message to create the new S' protein in order to prompt your immune system to produce S' abs then I think you will be disappointed. This sort of "update" will almost certainly trigger a recall of the former S abs due to immunogenic imprinting. See also: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28479213/
Yes. And there is a small possibility that something even worse happens for those previously infected/vaccinated called antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). ADE occurs when the antibodies generated during an immune response recognize and bind to a pathogen, but they are unable to prevent infection. Instead, these antibodies act as a “Trojan horse,” allowing the pathogen to get into cells and exacerbate the immune response.
The worst case with a new covid strain would be if people who were vaccinated by a previous vaccine or infected by an older strain experience antibody-dependent enhancement after being infected with the new strain. This is where the body recognized the new strain as the old and starts producing anti-bodies. These anti-bodies actually assist the new strain in infecting your cells, making the disease worse.
ADE has not been detected with any covid strains/vaccines so its not something to worry about for now but who knows what may happen in the future. I've been keeping my eye out for any news of ADE with any of these new strains.
Certain viruses like dengue fever can be much worse if you had previously caught a different strain due to ADE.
Since the current vaccines are based on recognizing the spike protein, and since this South African (Nu?) variant has many mutations on the spike protein, what are the odds that a vaccinated person's immune system would recognize the mutated spike protein as being the same as the original one?
It's not surprising people are unaware of this. Part of the pitch was that these vaccines could be updated as easily as software and be rolled out quickly to combat whatever variant.
If you trigger a memory response why would it matter if it was recalling a different similar protein? Wouldnt your immune system also remember and respond to a real pathogen, suggesting that the orginal vaccine was sufficient? In what world do you identify a pathogen but the fail to respond to it? Its not as if your body responds significantly differently to distinct illnesses.
Perhaps my understanding here is too cursory but this claim is pretty extraordinary for what I know.
Your immune response can be triggered by a specific epitope but provide a less than optimal response. I'm not pulling this out of my ass. Moderna tried making a beta strain specific booster but noticed the original wild strain antibodies elicited from previous vaccination were activated. See also: https://www.cell.com/trends/immunology/fulltext/S1471-4906(2...
I suspect this is part of the reason why we never saw an "update" for the delta variant.
I'm curious to what extent this sort of data depends on positive tests. It seems there's kind of a contradiction here: we can detect huge numbers of mutations, but only if someone tests positive as otherwise a sample will be ignored by the labs (presumably?). Yet the tests are supposed to be extremely precise.
Does anyone know how the need to detect mutations is balanced against the need for the tests to be precise to a specific type of virus?
Even if there was trust sufficient to accept any arbitrary mRNA as the proper target without testing logistics doesn't turn on a dime. Meanwhile here in the real world we have many idiots who think mRNA modifies their DNA.
Well it kind of does the same thing that modifying DNA would do, but without actually modifying it, so I can't really hate on people for that. But I don't care that much if other people get it. I want it for myself.
We could make the new vaccine in days, but then it would take many months to pass through all the regulatory barriers.
If the GOP had been smart they'd have been hammering Biden for that instead of doing whatever the hell they are doing. This was a prime opportunity to go "see? Government regulation is bad."
I too miss the good old days before the FDA was established. If a person taking a lethal snakeoil medicine dies, he has only himself to blame (posthumously).
Who would make sure the regulators don't prevent a necessary and life saving vaccine or drug from reaching the marketplace in a timely manner?
Errors exist on both sides. In a time critical scenario like a pandemic, the cost of retarding availability of a vaccine could be enormous.
I don't see the problem with making vaccines (or drugs) that have not received FDA approval available, as long as they are clearly marked as such and informed consent is received.
Experts seem to be freaking out about Nu's genome. It's far out, and also it includes some of the nastiest mutations to come up in virus evolution studies, such as this:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00954-4
As far as I can see, we don't have any idea as yet how well current vaccines will work against this new variant, although there is reason to suspect they could be less effective.
if this variant is more contagious than Delta Plus, we will see it spreading in the UK. The UK seems to be the hub for corona variants. Alpha and Delta variants went haywire, if this one spreads in the UK we should be on alert.
> So far, the threat B.1.1.529 poses beyond South Africa is far from clear, researchers say. It is unclear whether the variant is more transmissible than Delta
this is danger porn. pay it no mind and have happy holidays.
Everyone has made errors, yes. Ideally we will make fewer in the future.
To that end, we should consider the amount and directionality of errors made by individuals as we consider what weight to give their current predictions.
So when Fauci had this https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387 published in March 2020 that included the words "This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)", what weighting should we give to his current credibility, would you say?
You’re stripping out important context there. He was comparing it to SARS and MERS with CFRs of 9-10%, so saying COVID-19 would be closer to the influenza end of the spectrum if, and only if, some of the early info on the infection fatality rate was correct.
What you did isn’t a good faith move. There’s tons to criticise Fauci on in any case, you shouldn’t need to selectively quote stuff like this.
I didn't think I was stripping out important context, but I will add more for your:
If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.
I don't think that really changes things. The orders of magnitude are 0.1%, 1%, 10%, and he's saying it may be considerably less than 1%, i.e., much closer in relative magnitude (and obviously far nearer in absolute terms) to a seasonal flu.
You are the one who is missing the larger context of this thread, which has been an unfair bullying of someone going back over what they had said 2 years ago about covid and claiming he should "sit this one out". Given this is the position that the experts had back then, clearly having an opinion that it was like a seasonal flu was not way out of line.
And my question to OP about Fauci stands too. Given that is what he wrote, and I provided the link for full context, what credibility should we assign to his current statements.
Again, note the language used. First, it’s a summary of what’s suspected at the time, but with a lot of caveats around what’s uncertain. The statement being made the quoted portion is that it’s likely to have a CFR a lot closer to flu than to MERS or SARS 1. That’s still not inaccurate, what they missed was how infectious it was.
The piece also doesn’t argue against action or vigilance. It highlights the unknowns, risks, and some potential outcomes. As more information came out Fauci and others adjusted their reviews, predictions, and recommendations to suit.
It’s hardly the same thing as the group of people who’ve spent the last two years trying to downplay this virus every chance they got, and refused to learn from getting it wrong. Telling us it wasn’t serious, that it would die out on its own, that we didn’t need interventions like masks and social distancing, and all the rest.
Yep that's what was suspected at the time which is why these experts were saying it's probably more like a seasonal flu than a serious pandemic of other sorts, don't wear a mask, keep traveling, etc. And they were wrong (well, to some extent -- it's still probably around a 1% mortality rate so still arguably closer to a seasonal flu going by Fauci's same reasoning).
Clearly bullying here of a person for pretty much repeating what many experts like Fauci and politicians like Pelosi were saying at the time is way out of line. Hopefully you can agree on that.
Experts don't always get it right, but what differentiates those we trust from those we don't is that they're cautious, curious, and learn from new information to adjust their views and recommendations.
Plenty of scientists have admitted that they underestimated aspects of this pandemic, from the effectiveness of masking, to the likelihood and severity of variants, to how quickly vaccines would come on stream. But they learnt from it and moved on.
Someone who downplayed the pandemic from the very beginning and who, in response to a new variant that has virologists and epidemiologists extremely worried, says "this is danger porn. pay it no mind and have happy holidays" is neither a serious person nor worth listening to on this subject. They clearly haven't learnt from their past mistakes, or don't want to.
> Experts don't always get it right, but what differentiates those we trust from those we don't is that they're cautious, curious, and learn from new information to adjust their views and recommendations.
I don't think they do necessarily. I have heard very little in the way of contrition or reflection or honest explanation as to why so many got it wrong for so long. Wrong about the virus, wrong about how it spreads, wrong about vaccines, etc. And yet so many of them still act like they are absolutely certain of what they are saying, when it's clear they in fact don't.
Scientists and experts can be egotistical, dogmatic, inflexible, and rusted on to old ideas. That whole Planck's principle thing, you know.
> Someone who downplayed the pandemic from the very beginning and who,
Someone who said what many experts were saying, you mean?
> in response to a new variant that has virologists and epidemiologists extremely worried, says "this is danger porn. pay it no mind and have happy holidays" is neither a serious person nor worth listening to on this subject. They clearly haven't learnt from their past mistakes, or don't want to.
I disagree, I don't see how that follows. The media certainly have certainly hyped things up and exaggerated and peddled this danger porn. The OP was referring to a sentence from a news article, not a quote from a scientist. The claim is not that covid doesn't matter and this variant is harmless, it's that the news article is danger porn.
Which it is. If it's nothing there's not much we can do, if it's bad news there's not much we can do. As other top level comments say, mutations happen all the time. Look how many major variants there are https://www.who.int/en/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-varian... what is there to gain by panicking every time a new one is found?
Prominent scientists signed their names to articles saying that implying the virus was released from a lab (intentionally or otherwise) was racist and factually wrong.
Those scientists, by and large, have walked back their statements and admit that the hypothesis that this was a lab leak that occurred in Wuhan is not impossible and that stating it is not necessarily racist. Also, those folks aren't considered "experts" any more (everybody else lowered their priors about those expert's beliefs).
I've heard multiple references to experts/politicians/media "calling border closures racist" in early 2020, but only from conservative media claiming that liberals were espousing this viewpoint. Can someone provide sources or evidence for this?
*But critics from WHO and elsewhere have said the bans are unnecessary and could generate a racist backlash against Chinese people.*
*Before long, Trump was running for president on an anti-immigrant platform. One message he pushed was that immigrants carry contagion. In 2015, he put out a statement warning that “tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border,” a claim unsupported by fact.* [ha! That hasn't aged well: https://news.yahoo.com/dhs-dropped-40-000-covid-190800213.html ]
*Just a month after praising China for its handing of the COVID-19 outbreak, U.S. President Donald Trump has sent out a racist tweet terming the coronavirus as “Chinese Virus”.*
*President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are using racism to try to distract from his disastrous preparations for and response to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of taking responsibility for and addressing early failures, they're blaming the crisis on China.*
The reason was that the GOP was allegedly looking for an excuse to close the borders and further their anti-immigration agenda, and used the pandemic as an excuse.
"The president’s chief adviser on immigration, Stephen Miller, had long tried to halt migration based on public health, without success. Then came the coronavirus."[1]
"The idea that immigrants carry infections into the country echoes a racist notion with a long history in the United States that associates minorities with disease."[1]
This article comes from April 21, 2020, not Feb 2020 as GP mentioned. Apparently it was a Democrat response to a tweet announcing a border closure after the US had already seen 42000 deaths (fta). This looks like Democrats criticizing a policy of shutting the barn door after the animals had already left the barn.
No it doesn't it looks like recklessly spreading disinformation during a crisis purely for personal political gain.
The US has had strict border restrictions on foreign citizens through most of 2021 too. So unless you are going to call the Biden administration racist and xenophobic as well, then this reasoning doesn't work. But even if you did, then what you're saying about barn doors still contradicts what most experts have said in terms of reducing the movement of people to slow the spread.
Around the time the Trump administration announced the travel restriction, Biden said that Trump had a “record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.”
In late January, the Trump administration implemented a travel restriction from China, where the coronavirus originated.
Some on the left described the move as a racist or xenophobic ploy aimed at punishing a country that Trump has clashed with over trade.
I mean, it was true that shutting down the border to China was mostly a policy based on xenophobia than any actual facts, because at that point the vast majority of people spreading Covid into the US werent the Chinese. The huge NYC early spike started from an traveler from Europe.
This is unlikely to be true and probably an attempt to rewrite the history based on current knowledge and hate of Trump.
The reality is, that back then, there was simply no better information than "coming from China". It wasn't based on xenophobia at all, just on common sense (that seemed to defy the Democrats / mainstream media). In beginning of March, Trump also closed borders to Europe. Xenophobic? No, Europe was having a spike (e.g. Bergamo, Italy). EU "president", Ursula von der Leyen, criticised the decision. 2 weeks later, EU closed its borders. (Ursula is another person that prefers politics to common sense.)
There's some evidence in retrospect that a lot of the spread to the US was from Italy. There wre two huge problems with using that as proof Pelosi and co were right to call the travel bans xenophobic. Firstly, it suggests the US policies basically succeeded at stopping the virus spreading there from China whilst Italy failed (and likely doomed the rest of the world in the process). Secondly, in order to block travel from Italy early enough, the US would've had to do it when Italy was consistently reporting zero cases week after week. Given that pretty much the entire US mainstream media and political insisted that it was xenophobic and unjustified to stop travel from Europe even after there was evidence of a major outbreak, I can't imagine there'd be much support for doing so when Italy reported zero cases and the US had cases from China - even though the reason for that was that Italy was doing worse at detecting outbreaks and those local cases turned out to be much less of a problem than ones from zero-case Italy.
Something seems to have gone really badly wrong in Italy and it's somehow gone entirely unexamined by the media, despite the fact that it did more to doom the rest of the world's efforts than any of the countries that have been blamed for doing so. Entirely unrelately, Italy is lead by the kind of boring technocrat that the media likes rather than some Trumpian populist figure.
Yes, but none of those "experts" were calling it "a normal seasonal virus", they just didn't believe such measures were necessary. SARS-COV-1 didn't require widespread border closures or masking, and it very much wasn't "a normal seasonal virus".
I'm not, no. As more evidence is accumulated to support a hypothesis, it is rational to strengthen one's belief in it. All beliefs should start out weakly held, until sufficient evidence is gathered to either reinforce or change them. And of course even strongly held beliefs should be re-examined if sufficient evidence piles up to the contrary.
So the incorrect opinions based on weak evidence that the experts had over the past years of covid should not have been "reinforced to others"? That sounds to me like a criticism of the experts.
No, the experts were disseminating the best available evidence at that time. I will criticize some steps by policy makers, like stating initially that masks were ineffective when in reality they were trying to discourage mask shortages to keep them for essential workers. I think in cases like that it's better to be honest with the public. But I don't have any criticism for scientists who accurately portray the best available evidence at a given time.
My criticism was for the the hypothetical that the OP may have rationally stated that the virus was nothing more serious than a seasonal flu, based on experts stating that borders should not be closed. The statement that borders should not be closed was based on the most relevant research at the time; it turned out to be incorrect and was later reversed. But as a lay person, making the jump from that statement to the opinion that the virus is no big deal, and then echoing that opinion to others as fact, is not rational. One might have taken it as weak evidence in that direction, but no more than that.
If "experts" were saying not to wear masks, insisting that border restrictions were racist and xenophobic, telling people to go out and gather in large groups in public, then OP said absolutely nothing wrong by claiming it was no more serious than the seasonal flu.
Now we know that some "experts" were just totally wrong and had no idea what they were talking about, and others were in fact spreading misinformation abouta pandemic for political gain. But that is not OP's fault. You can't condemn him and absolve the actual people who reinforced that incorrect information to him in the first place. Ludicrous.
From the very early days of the Wuhan outbreak it was clear, and was the consensus of experts, that the virus was much more serious than a seasonal flu. There was indeed disagreement as to the best ways to combat it, but it was not said (by anyone credible that I saw) nor implied that the virus itself wasn't serious. I'm sure you could find an occasional counter-example, as there are going to be people in any field who are wrong about any given subject, but the consensus was pretty clear. (Note that I'm talking about actual experts, not politicians or pundits.)
Studies like this one, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal..., do not support what you are saying. Experts predicted 30,000 people would die from covid in the UK by the end of 2020, compared with yearly deaths from influenza which is usually quoted at about 25,000-30,000.
Bill Maher said it best. "Before you get sick you are sick. This is a very sick country, still is, I don't mean mentally, but physically"
We were already dying before February 2020. America is fat and we'll never get universal healthcare because people can't take responsibility for their actions. 80% of people who died from this thing were obese. If it hit 40 years ago it would have been nothing or similar to Hong Kong Flu
in feb 2020 I knew this wasn't going to be an existential crisis (IE, it wasn't going to kill 90% of people,and if the economy tanked, it wouldn't be because the virus itself was so virulent) and that ultimately it would begin to look more like other persistent viruses. This whole thing has played out more or less like I expected based on my prior experience with viruses.
I am not happy that the people announced this did so with scare tactics (specific wording) rather than emotionless facts.
Ok, but that leaves the option that it kills up to 10% of the people and I can guarantee you that if that ends up being the case a lot of people will feel that we should have probably taken things a bit more serious in March 2020.
Emotionless facts can be scary in their own right.
10% of what people? That doesn't match up with any stats that I'm aware of. Unless you mean "it kills up to 10% of people within certain population demographics" which is my point- and it's entirely uninteresting.
I think US public health officials and generally in europe the leadership all pursued the most reasonable path and it's unlikely we could have reduced the overall death load significantly through any intervention short of extreme isolation. It is very unlikely that mainstream science will conclude, in a decade, that we could have taken actions that would have greatly reduced the spread and impact, without also applying highly restrictive rules.
> Unless you mean "it kills up to 10% of people within certain population demographics" which is my point- and it's entirely uninteresting.
Then I don't think we're going to end up being in agreement. To me the world isn't a science experiment where some outcomes are interesting and others are uninteresting when it comes to the deaths of millions of people. Call me a softie if you wish.
Obviously it's terrible that millions of people died. But then, millions of people died from the black plague, many die from car accidents, and preventable (via lifestyle changes) diseases. As an ex-scientist I work hard to take the long view on disease- that is, billions of years. Once you adopt this perspective and look at COVID, you realize that many aspects of it have been overreported in the press and that led many people to overestimate its relative danger compared to many other things we face on a regular basis.
The current reporting about the newest virus is a great example- the language is scary, but we have absolutely no data to tell us that this will have any global impact, nor that this represents any sort of phase change into a new situation.
Your own comment. 100% - 90% = 10% and that was marked as just a possibility.
> As an ex-scientist I work hard to take the long view on disease- that is, billions of years.
That's fine, but that timescale is not the timescale at which our lives are unfolding.
> Once you adopt this perspective and look at COVID, you realize that many aspects of it have been overreported in the press and that led many people to overestimate its relative danger compared to many other things we face on a regular basis.
Well, even if I take the most conservative figures I end up with millions of 'front-loaded' deaths, and 100's of thousands of deaths where 'premature' is probably an accurate figure. And that's before we get to take into account that this is long from being over.
> The current reporting about the newest virus is a great example- the language is scary, but we have absolutely no data to tell us that this will have any global impact, nor that this represents any sort of phase change into a new situation.
That is absolutely true. But at the same time we also don't have any data for the opposite: that this will not affect things at all. Policy makers are in a bind, anything they do that helps will come with a price tag, the cost of doing nothing is likely political suicide, the cost of doing too much is going to come at the price of a massive global recession (and possibly set the stage for future wars).
So now we get this stretched out slow motion train wreck, which is far from ideal as well. What would you suggest we do instead?
My suggestion (and I strongly recommend nobody takes it) is to immediately go forward with no masking, no vaccination, special triage centers for people with COVID (so they aren't infecting people with comorbidities going to hospitals), accept the catastrophic loss of life, and then watch carefully over the next ten years. My belief is that if this happens, the entire global population will have enough natural immunity that this disease will become endemic.
As I said, nobody should follow my advice. it would be political suicide- in the same way that people who promote "death panels" (to allocate limited resources rationally) get shut down, even though it's the most rational approach that would maximize global health.
Further, everything I suggested above is merely intuition based on several decades of experience working in public health/medical biology, rather than hard epidemiological data. I could be completely wrong and my strategy could instead lead to a black death scenario or existential situation (death rates of 30+% due to virulent variants with high transmission rates and very long infectious periods). Again, I must say that nobody should follow my recommendation because it's based entirely on a lifetime of systems thinking and working with complex biological entities.
It's a bit strange to see a suggestion like that accompanied by the disclaimer that it shouldn't be taken. What scenario would you suggest that is not accompanied by such a disclaimer? In other words, say we put you in charge of public policy tomorrow without the option to abdicate, what would you suggest we do, assuming it would actually be done as you advise?
Build a time machine and invest more in the CDC and the NIH back in 1985?
Seriously though I can't think of a more reasonable strategy than that carried out by the US, Sweden, and China (each represents a different experiment).
China's extreme level of population restriction and high level of testing seems to have greatly reduced transmission and impact (I don't know how to interpret China's published numbers, and I don't really trust them that much). This is probably necessary in any area where population density is high enough that rapid transmission can occur. However, my guess is that it also led to a large number immune-naive people and I don't think that any current vaccine will be useful for more than a year, so I think they're at constant risk of explosive disease growth that they can only address through strict policies.
For countries with fairly small number of dense cities, like Sweden, I think what they did was excellent. They stated their prior beliefs and more or less stuck to them and, in my interpretation, they did not suffer any more than other countries, when population density is considered.
Finally, the US. The US did fairly well even though there is a large noncompliant population for a number of reasons. First, we've invested heavily in disease management infrastructure (research, hospitals, strong public health) which meant that we could deal with (to some extent) the massive surge of patients going to hospitals who then infected others nosocomically, and have industries that developed vaccines and other treatments quickly. Second, we actually have a well organized public health system that is relatively powered to implement unpopular but reasonable policies. But, I worry that our court system moves too slowly (for example I would really like to see the supreme court making an extraordinary decision that the US has full rights to mandate vaccines for its entire population) and we have a large number of people who seem to actively fight reasonable public health measures.
So in short, the best approach is to have a large amount of resources (public health researchers, medical folks) combined with excellent realtime knowledge about spread, a largely compliant population which is willing to suspend civil liberties in emergency situations, and political leaders who are willing to risk their long-term careers by providing cover for the researchers.
Finally, thank goodness that the US had the foresight to make and fund the NIH and CDC for so long, providing us with an excellent foundation with which to respond to diseases like this. I am in awe of the folks who pushed for the creation of a new field (molecular biology) in the 30s and 40s which led to the elucidation of the genetic code and development of structural biology, which ultimately provides the foundation for much of our understanding of viruses.
Fair enough, thank you. I like to keep things grounded in reality, theoretical considerations are fine for after the fact analysis but in a fluid situation decisions need to be made. They'll never be perfect but not deciding is abdication and that isn't really an option.
Where I live the health care system has been weakened to the point that we can't really deal with such levels of calamity in a responsible manner any more, the result of years of neo-liberal cost cutting and attempts to create a market situation around health care. The end result is a terribly fragile mix of high density populations, extreme mobility and very little cushion to absorb mistakes. It remains to be seen if either one of the three scenarios you sketched will work for us in the longer term, so far it's not looking all that good but it also could have been far worse.
Let's look back at those deaths in about 10 years. I predict that over time, epidemiologists will have much better estimates on who died of what and when and what the risk factors for death are. From what I can tell, much of the deaths are front-loaded (IE, we saw them over a few years instead of decades), and concentrated in people who had comordibities.
People evolved to respond to the flu over millenia before there was widespread travel. I think that explains much of the dynamics of covid.
We've been working hard as society to allow people to continue to live with chronic disease. Co-morbidities is just another way of saying 'they would have died sooner or later anyway', but for all of these cases you are looking at individuals and people that have family and dependents. In the long term all deaths are 'front-loaded'. Every person that dies of traffic, obesity, terrorism, disease, famine and so on would have eventually died anyway from some other cause. That doesn't stop us from trying to address these causes of death resulting in people living longer. We don't call those who live to an older age with diabetes 'time stealers' any more than we should call people that die early of COVID+some other factor 'front loaded'.
I really hate this argument (that people who die of Covid would have died soon anyway). Everyone will die eventually, so let's not treat any disease? Let's withhold all medical care from people over 80... almost all of them will be dead in 10 years, why treat them?
A premature death is a premature death, no matter how many years it cuts off.
On what basis? Have you offered evidence of your thoughts during that time? Does that even matter?
Hindsight is 20/20. I hope that most of HN will forgive me for questioning the notion that u/idlewords is somehow entitled to disqualify others from this discussion about variants.
I am definitely alarmed. What I learned while doom-scrolling
* SA has a <50% vaccination rate, so its not quite clear whether its spread could be circumvent vaccine-induced antibodies
* SA is past its delta-wave, so this variant has made relatively huge gain over delta, but absolute numbers are still fairly moderate.
I'm all in for taking necessary precautions for slowing down the arrival of the new variant in other countries, but it seems it isn't clear yet that the effect we see in South Africa will replicate elsewhere.
A variant outcompeting other variants isn’t in and of itself concerning. Viruses mutate in order spread more effectively, not surprising. Does it produce milder or more extreme symptoms? That’s the interesting part and the article doesn’t go into any specifics.
Hmmm I'm totally just babbling here but this makes me think if it'd be possible to just engineer a harmless strain that is more effective at being transmitted (or perhaps even circumvents vaccines better). Then instead of worrying about vaccinating people we could just try to have that strain spread faster than the harmful ones
A similar thing happened in some South American countries with a cholera outbreak. Strains that made people more sick forced them to stay inside whereas the more harmless strains allowed people to socialize more and the harmless ones ended up spreading faster
That's not an entirely new idea, and it's not entirely crazy, but it has a lot of issues.
What are the ethics in engineering a new virus and deliberately infecting people?
What happens if some of those people die?
What happens if your variant that has been engineered to spread extremely effectively mutates into something more lethal?
How do you test your engineered virus? Large-scale tests on people? How would that be faster or more effective than producing a new vaccine and testing that instead?
What happens if your tests show that the engineered virus is not as benevolent as you hoped, and is actually rather horrific? Can you put the genie back in the bottle?
>What happens if your variant that has been engineered to spread extremely effectively mutates into something more lethal?
This alone should make it a non-option, there will be no way to contain it or stop it from mutating, I fail to see how it wouldn't just be a question of time the same way COVID variants are. The consequences could be disastrous and simply worsen the situation.
I'm not an expert at all, but I don't think viruses are mutually exclusive. Spread of the new strain can be fast and can became widespread, but can't decrease or affect the harmful one.
It would be likely to have engineered itself if that was the case. Unfortunately, afaik so far there isn't a correlation between any specific mutation and milder disease
Ehh - the majority of times I've seen researchers claim this, the variant has turned out to be more transmissible than other variants. Researchers seem to have a track record of being really hesitant to rule out founder effects and acknowledge higher transmissibility even when a variant is clearly spreading faster than its competition.
> What would you do now that you’re not doing already?
Well, if you're a policymaker then suspending travel to prevent it from spreading internationally. If it's the worst case (more infectious than delta + immune evading) then buying a little time to adapt vaccines or produce the recently announced antivirals could save a lot of lives.
The locations of the spread of this variant might inform whether / when I choose to get a booster (third dose). If it starts spreading in the US, I might get a third dose to be safe. Until then, I'll avoid doing so as I do not want to contribute to domestic vaccine demand (which induces the US to stockpile more doses and export fewer doses to the rest of the world where they're more urgently needed).
I think responses should be local, instead of countries essentially waiting and coordinating themselves in a cascade. If possible new variants should be contained at least until it is clear if they are more dangerous or not. So far china has been able to basically be covid-free by using local strategies, something we havent seen in the west
>So far china has been able to basically be covid-free by using local strategies, something we havent seen in the west
This was effectively the approach New Zealand took but it wasn't sustainable. Maybe it would be more effective when implemented by an authoritarian regime (although difficult to measure given issues with transparency) but even then it won't last. China's going to have to start learning to live with Covid like every other country has had to.
The EU is already acting to stop flights from south africa in an attempt to contain the spread. I think the world is finally adopting the New zealand strategy: local, stringent lockdowns. We are not yet ready to try to "live with covid", because it's too dangerous and we can't treat it "like the flu" until we have widely used effective antivirals.
don't socialize as much. if you have to have an event try to do it outside or ensure certain safety measures. make sure you and people you're hanging out with have their booster shots, etc. There's a lot
I have never considered the calorie-burning benefits of screaming while running before, opting for just simple running without any type of noise-making before. Maybe I've been missing out on amazing health benefits this whole time! I think I'll have to try tomorrow.
Note the UK government, who are incredibly slow and incompetent, reacted within hours to the news breaking with a travel ban from six countries the variant has been identified in. That speed of reaction makes me think there’s something to this.
That just means there's not enough data. The data from South Africa itself shows it's spreading dramatically faster than even Delta did which is already showing itself in the increase in new cases rapidly spiking up. Whether or not this new variant causes more or less sever disease is still to be shown
I worked with someone (this is in astronomy) who said that papers in nature were the most likely to be wrong. They are in nature because they have a dramatic (new/unexpected) result. One good reason for a new/unexpected result is a mistake somewhere.
Edit: I'm not saying anything about this paper. I know nothing about this. Just a meta comment that, in really hard to get published in journals, there might be a bi-modality of papers. Really important and really wrong :)
This is correct. Think of nature as a journal that publishes papers with a high rate of false positives (claims that turn out to be untrue) on purpose,to intentionally stimulate the state of the art of science.
I have actively ignored Nature and Science papers for my entire career (with the exception of my one Nature publication, and W&C 1953 of course).
It likely says something that, as an epidemiologist, the only way I've ever gotten a paper into Nature/Science is during a scary infectious disease epidemic. The rest of the time, they're largely uninterested.
Over a decade ago there were articles in there which were so obviously terrible tuat even a freshman could refute it. Sadly I can only vaguely recall a few curves from the cover and that it was shockingly bad.
Extremely dangerous view. It happened twice until now that humanity thought like this and we paif a heavy price. Time for "better panic than sorry" approach.
On the other hand the earlier pandemics were over much quicker. For example I read about the anti mask league in San Francisco. The masks were only mandatory there for a couple of months! After that things were already getting back on track. After 3 big waves it was all over and things were back to normal. Death toll was high but during a short period. And very localised. Here in the Netherlands the Spanish flu was hardly a thing at all.
I wonder if in the end we're just prolonging the agony. And the measures have a human cost too. Depression, loss of economic welfare which leads to poorer health conditions.
There's more and more talk of letting things slide more ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29337373 for example) and I'm personally wondering if this isn't the right thing too. Corona isn't going away and if we have to keep living with constant lockdowns and masks there isn't much quality of life left. And really eventually we're all catching it anyway. I'm totally happy taking as many vaccines as needed but long-term behavioural changes into directions which are not human nature is a big price to pay.
We can't do this right away (we need more vaccination levels and effective medication) and we have to seriously invest in healthcare but as an end-goal this looks like a much more positive future perspective to me than continuing to fight against every infection.
Personally I'd gladly take a bit higher chance of dying instead of having to struggle with these measures every day.
We still don't know if Delta was much more transmissible than Alpha actually. We have only observed that Delta spread faster than Alpha at some point in time.
Not only have happy holiday, but also have happy return to normal. Most adults are vaxxed, if we don't remove restrictions now we will never remove them.
Fully agree with your second paragraph but your first paragraph is nonsense.
We have evidence that Delta has a much larger viral load and that it has outcompeted the Alpha variant everywhere in the world. You have to be in total denial to pretend the Delta variant might have been no more transmissible than Alpha.
Delta will spread faster. We know this from seeing it spread in countries that have low vaccination rates and easily outcompete other variants. This can also be seen in laboratory experiments.
Yeah that's definitely worse than normal. Though not wildly out of the norm either. A significant fraction typically are diverting to ICUs at other hospitals, but normally not half the hospitals.
My [numerous] friends in South Africa say that anti-vax superstition is extremely common, and current vaccine participation is purely based on fear (everyone who agrees with science has been vaccinated). The variant may well be ravaging the unvaccinated alone.
Of course, you're right, the unvaccinated are a fertile ground for mutations that eventually evade the vaccine.
Yeah, South Africa apparently postponed their upcoming vaccine deliveries recently because they're running out of willing people to vaccinate and the current stockpiles will last half a year at the current rate: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/exclusive-south-africa-...
Good comment, also: the vaccinated are a fertile ground for mutations that eventually evade the vaccine.
Unless you have a study that backs up the claim that this mutation phenomenon only happens in people not vaccinated for Covid-19, you should probably stop singling them out. The phenomenon occurs in both.
The virus spreads more rapidly among and lives for longer inside the unvaccinated, as a result getting much more exposure to human immune systems, and thus giving it more opportunity to evolve.
I don't think we even know that it's "fast spreading" yet. It's just different enough to have set off various scientist's personal danger detectors.
The thing is that mutations probably occur all the time, most don't provide any evolutionary advantage and probably never get passed on, the fact that something with this many mutations being viable is a bit worrying - equally I think that the evolutionary pressure that vaccines represent is going to result in mutations that work better in vaccinated people - and as a result we'll make better vaccines - one of the great things about mRNA vaccines is that we can knock out new ones really quickly
> I don't think we even know that it's "fast spreading" yet.
We do know:
> A new coronavirus variant has been detected in South Africa that scientists say is a concern because of its high number of mutations and rapid spread among young people in Gauteng, the country’s most populous province. “Over the last four or five days, there has been more of an exponential rise,” he said, adding that the new variant appears to be driving the spike in cases. “We can see that the variant is potentially spreading very fast. We do expect to start seeing pressure in the healthcare system in the next few days and weeks.”
Every sequence is distinct almost certainly. It just matters if the important parts of a sequence are changed or duplicated.
So two versions which are sequenced as a certain variant may actually have many differences in practice.
I will also add that there are many variants that just havent hit the news cycle. Iirc there was a gamma variant with higher lethality but was much less transmissible.
I wish we could delay the news until we knew basic facts like that. If there is a new variant I really don't care unless it is likely to get past my vaccine, and is dangerous.
It seems like viruses always tread a spectrum between infectivity and lethality. Does or could a virus exist which:
- has a 100% fatality rate, like rabies
- can keep the host alive long enough to spread and
- cannot be defeated by any prospective vaccine or can evolve fast enough to evade them?
Basically, airborne and human-to-human rabies, with no vaccine. Or vaccine resistant ebola, but even more lethal, infectious, and a longer incubation period.
Put more concisely, could a virus exist with the potential to wipe us out.
I remember when a major leader at Google told everybody once the vaccine was widely available we'd all go back to work and things would be normal.
I laughed and told them that they should stick to CS, and that biology and medicine don't work like computers. They didn't like it (and have since moved to New Zealand).
Ok, but please post substantive comments rather than supercilious putdowns. If you know more than others, that's great, but on HN the thing to do with that is to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Putdowns don't do that—the only thing they really say is how much better you are than someone else, and that is not really information.
it wasn't a put down. I've had to spend much of my life educating computer scientists about biology. my statement was an anecdote consistent with the reality that the leadership at Google is clueless when it comes to the virus and has repeatedly had to confront reality after making unrealistic claims.
If you post a comment that just says somebody said something dumb, you laughed and told them they should stick to $other-thing, and they didn't like it and have since moved, that's a putdown even if you didn't intend it that way. You've actually done this again with your reply: all it tells us is how much more you know than other people, how clueless other people are, and how you've had to spend your life educating them. That may all be true, but a comment like this doesn't teach us anything—it just makes the environment more acidic.
IMO the basic problem is that we all tend to read our own comments as informed by all the information that's in our own head. You have direct access to your knowledge and experience, so for you it's implicitly included in what you posted. No doubt that that makes your comment very rich and meaningful—but it's not the comment the rest of us get to read. We don't have access to any of that—all we have is the information that you explicitly include in your message. That makes for an enormous difference between how your comments appear to yourself vs. to readers.
it's an isolated democratic nation-island with immense physical beauty and resources and relatively large amounts of land available for rich people to build compounds. Also they have better internet connectivity than before. Further, early on they had almost no transmission because it's fairly straightforward for them to close their borders.
Yeah they were able to live without masks for a long time, I was really jealous of them.
But we're at the point now where the zero-covid countries are at a disadvantage because they've had almost no natural exposure so they have to rely entirely on vaccines. The increased travel and the high contagiousness of the new variants now make the zero-covid policy a guarantee for infinite lockdowns. I don't envy then anymore.
Perhaps we could have killed covid like that if we'd all done it like them but that time has passed.
Ps the country is indeed the most beautiful on earth. I hope I get to see it again some day. But I live on the opposite side of the planet between covid and the climate crisis I doubt it'll ever be feasible again.
1. Many high ranking people suddenly started leaving USA and move to other countries and New Zeland is just one of them.
2. High ranking people have been always leaving USA to other countries.
3. High ranking people are moving to New Zeland because of reasons which are not necessarily the same for everyone.
4. High ranking people are moving to New Zeland because of one common reason. The reason being.
Some possibilities.
4.1 Because of quality of life. Is New Zeland experiencing a sudden influx from non high ranking people as well?
4.2 Because of its remote location and if things go wrong in mainland it might be the safest bet and they think things are going to go wrong bad. Very bad.
> 4.1 Because of quality of life. Is New Zeland experiencing a sudden influx from non high ranking people as well?
I doubt it because immigration is extremely tough there. You either have to be under 35 with desirable qualifications or be some VIP at a major corp. Otherwise you can forget about it.
New Zealand only offers a high quality of life if you bring money with you.
Our productivity and wages are low, and we have some of the least affordable housing in the world - our median house price is around 600usd (and the quality of that housing is very poor).
Maybe it is, but assuming it's still there a comment saying "We aren't wearing masks in Miami anymore, good luck making us" or something to that effect seemed even more smug
> healthy sportsmen and women seem to be dropping like flies
Just to avoid perpetuating a potential bias: can you provide numbers on this? And then if you can, provide the number per 100k of unvaccinated COVID deaths in their areas for their age
I read something like that. There was link to Wikipedia article, list of active sportsmen who died in last 150 years, about 50 people. And list of 100+ professional sportsmen who died in last 2 years with sources. Mostly from heart related stuff.
Year 2021 does look like it could stand out more than other years, but I would like to see the deaths normalized by the number of matches that year. Presumably, there have been fewer football matches during the pandemic, which would make 2021 stand out even more if it is true.
For deaths is actually 3 potential out of hundreds of millions of doses. Number 3 is a 17 year old woman in WA state who before receiving her vaccine had just gotten over symptomatic covid meaning her heart damage was likely pre existing from the disease not the vaccine.
Making no judgments as to the accuracy of the source or the underlying data, I believe this[1] is what’s being referred to. A fivefold increase in sudden cardiac deaths among FIFA athletes is pretty weird if it’s true. Presumably these athletes have pretty good cardiovascular health as well as proactive medical care relative to the general population.
GP made a valid point. The 5x increase of cardiac arrest after 2 shots might be OK if that risk was very low, but if you need to keep getting boosters twice a year, that risk will also grow (how? exponentially?), until one day it becomes a bigger problem than covid. That's my reasoning for waiting out on those booster shots.
Going to assume you meant this seriously; but just to enumerate the things you aren't certain about:
- IF the cardiac arrest risk indeed rises 5x
- AND that is not related to study effects (perhaps the risk of those athletes using performance enhancing drugs which you presumably aren't using was many time higher than 5x)
- AND the chance of of 5x higher cardiac arrest risk is higher than the increased risk you run of dying from COVID
- AND the risk of booster shots increasing cardiac arrest risks (which has not been proven yet) is indeed exponential, which seems quite unlikely at first glance (since the dose of boosters is only increasing linearly over time)
And several other factors I can't think of off the top of my head. It looks like you are assigning a very high risk to booster shots and assigning a very low risk to dying of COVID. Given the amount of people who have died of COVID vs the amount of people who have died from booster shots this seems like a misassignment of risk.
One also must control for physical fitness and age. Those are by far the most powerful factors correlating to severe covid morbidity or mortality.
The comparative disease vs vaccine risk assuredly differs between fit young FIFA players and obese geriatric persons. It may well be that even in the former case the vaccine reduces overall risk, but surely the effect is smaller than in the latter group.
I don't need a study to learn that Pfizer/biontech vaccines mess up with heart rate, especially when excercising. I know that from personal experience. The heart rate issues seem to be long lasting, but the vaccines are no good after 6 months, as we know now. My problem is that if just 2 shots cause such effect, then after a few boosters I'll have to take heart rate control pills. I'd rather pass on boosters and use the good old masks and social distancing.
I don't know, but just to throw this out there, I believe very cardiovascularly 'fit' people have a risk of death because their heart rate can drop dangerously during sleep(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT8GZlBBv5k). I would also think soccer players are more likely to use performance enhancing drugs. I wouldn't blame it on the vaccine without more data.
Unless there’s also a corresponding increase in somnambulism, “sudden collapse” doesn’t sound like it’s related to sleep.
The increase is over the last year. I don’t follow soccer so for all I know there has been an increase in PED year over year too. Or it could be any number of other confounding factors.
As for the cause, I feign no hypotheses. I just think that if and only if this increase is real it merits further research by persons with far greater subject matter expertise than myself. If the science ends up showing it is vaccine related than we should accept that, just as we should if it shows it isn’t. Fortunately, for the sake of the science, we’re going to continue gathering a great deal of data.
Emergency situations have come up again and again in the last few weeks and months:
Game abandoned due to in a game of Lauber SV (Donauwörth district)
A 17-year-old soccer player from JSG Hoher Hagen has to be in Hannoversch Münden
The has to be reanimated after a cardiac arrest.
An assistant referee of a Kreisliga Augsburg game in Emersacker
A district league player of the SpVgg. Oelde II has to be
A player from the Birati Club Münster collapses in a regional league game against FC Nordkirchen II.
17-year-old soccer player Dylan Rich a heart attack during a game .
The suffers a heart attack after a training session.
Lucas Surek (24) from the BFC Chemie Leipzig club is unable to attend due to .
Kingsley Coman (25) from FC Bayern Munich .
Trainer Dirk Splitsteser from SG Traktor Divitz sidelines
Rune Coghe (18) of the Belgian club Eendracht Hoglede (Belgium) suffers
At the World Cup qualification match between Germany and Serbia in Chemnitz, an English line judge
Team leader Dietmar Gladow from Thalheim (Bitterfeld) suffers before a game
The 53-year-old football coach Antonello Campus .
Anil Usta from VfB Schwelm (Ennepetal) collapses on the field .
Dimitri Liénard from FC Strasbourg collapses with heart problems .
Diego Ferchaud (16) from ASPTT Caen suffers in a U-18 league game in Saint-Lô
Belgian football player Jente Van Genechten (25) suffers
The Belgian amateur soccer player Jens De Smet (27) from Maldegem suddenly suffers a heart attack during the game and dies a little later in hospital.
A 13-year-old soccer player from the Janus Nova club from Saccolongo (Italy) collapses
Andrea Astolfi, the sports director of Calcio Orsago (Italy), suffers He dies at the age of 45.
Abou Ali (22) collapses during a two-tier game in Denmark
Fabrice N'Sakala (31) from Besiktas Istanbul collapses on the field without any action from the opponent
Similar cases have happened for decades. Perhaps the frequency has changed, but the phenomenon is rare enough that is hard to tell. Linked an article from 2012.
Why would they do that when it's not certain that the vaccine will work against the virus. I would suspect such news promoting hesitancy and people waiting a while longer.
Would you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
I mean what I am about to ask honestly. Why do you think of vaccinations in this way? From my perspective they are bringing us closer to a normal society at minimal risk. Vaccine mandates have been part of American society (and I assume others) for many years. Why is this one so different for you?
a) this vaccine is not highly effective at preventing the disease (especially after 6 months+)
b) long term effects have not yet been studied
c) fatality is still much lower than for diseases where vaccines are mandatory
I'm vaccinated myself twice by I feel extremely uncomfortable to force other people to vaccinate. I don't think liberal democracies should go this path.
'Statistically insignificant' until it affects you.
>> Do you have example where they actually force you to get a vaccine like George Washington forced his soldiers?
Is this a genuine question? Do you not know? Both government and employers have numerous mandates in many places now and thousands of 'essential workers' have been fired already.
In my area (Oregon), there are vaccine mandates for diptheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, varicella (chickenpox), measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis A/B, and hib (Haemophilus influenza B) that the vast majority of people have to get. In fact, I'd say they're more strict than the COVID vaccine "mandate" -- especially in a lot of states/areas not taking COVID seriously.
The standard mandates were largely the same when I grew up in Missouri/Iowa and I imagine they're similar across most of the US as a whole. If you don't get them, you can't e.g. go to school. I also had to get additional vaccines (tetanus, pneumococca, etc) in order to land some jobs over the years.
Requiring an additional vaccine doesn't really seem that different to all the others already mandated, IMO.
You basically cannot attend a higher education institution in person without having gotten mmr, hep b, and meningitis vaccines, and those requirements have been in place for quite a while.
Aren't many vaccines required to attend public schools, which is, in essence, a mandate? You either get your kids vaccinated, get an exemption, or choose alternative schooling. What's the fundamental difference? I've also been required to show proof of vaccinations for certain jobs.
Do you see much difference between a fairly porous policy surrounding well-understood, olden vaccines and k-12 education and requiring a novel vaccine in order to engage meaningfully in public life at all?
So weird that folks seem to think these things are at all equivalent.
In New Zealand you will not be able to work (remote or not) if you don't get the vaccine.
>In New Zealand you will not be able to work (remote or not) if you don't get the vaccine.
>Is that similar to the k-12 "mandate"?
Yes. In the US, you largely can't attend k-12 (remote or not) without proof of all your vaccinations either. Ironically, those required vaccines don't include COVID yet. Many jobs also require proof of non-covid vaccinations. If you aren't vaccinated for something, you put those around you at a higher risk for it -- even if they are vaccinated. COVID isn't a special case here.
Covid is different because it forces all businesses over a certain size and it puts mandates for adults. This vaccine is a special case not status quo.
The vaccine is an effective method to return to the status quo, AKA not being in a global pandemic / public health crisis.
Any time you have a contagious outbreak of anything (for example, outbreaks of any of the many other things we require the general public to vaccinate against) you see very similar measures taken to contain and eradicate it: isolating & controlling an area's ingress/egress, required quarantines, mandated vaccinations (when they're available) and/or widespread, repeated negative tests and a reduction in spread before returning to a "status quo".
This vaccine (and other infectious control methods) are an existing, by-the-book response to an epidemic-turned-pandemic disturbing the status quo. The Supreme Court ruled [1] way back in 1905 that it was lawful to punish and "infringe upon personal freedoms" of those who refuse a vaccination during a public health crisis. This is nothing new.
That was a theory but with the new variant making the vaccine ineffective puts us back to square one. Now reports that those with the vaccine do not have the same ability to respond as someone unvaccinated we are further from returning to normal.
This new variant (B.1.1.529) isn't widespread enough to definitively say what effect vaccines have on it, and the Nature article doesn't go into any detail about it (other than saying it's a "question" and the threat it poses is "far from clear") with the bonus quote "at this stage it’s too early to tell anything". Some of the mutations are concerning (particularly wrt transmission and antibody resistance), but it's not the first variant of concern with those properties.
B.1.351 (Beta) and P.1 (Gamma) and several other variants also reduced vaccine effectiveness, but vaccinations proved still more effective than not being unvaccinated. The possibility for a mutation that completely avoids a vaccinated body's preparatory methods has always been a concern -- however, 1) no variant so far has come even remotely close, and 2) that's exactly why everyone needs to get vaccinated: to cut down on spread and, therefore, potential mutations (and ultimately, of course, to contain the outbreak and get back to a relatively normal status quo).
I'd love to see whatever "reports" you're referring to about those with the vaccine having a lesser ability to respond as those without it. That's something I haven't seen, nor am I seeing anything from a few searches online or in recent publications, nor does that really even make sense with how vaccines as a concept (or in real-world applications) have worked for centuries.
This shows that a very high percentages of children are vaccinated by the time they are 2 years old (e.g., 90% for MMR). Too me, this strongly indicates that those policies aren't very porous at all.
Are the covid vaccine mandates any less porous, especially given that only about 60 to 70% of adults are vaccinated, even though pretty much all adults could be vaccinated by now.
The old vaccines were new at some point too, and I would wager that development and testing regimes weren't as robust as they are now. I don't see any good reason to trust the new vaccines any less.
Finally, I didn't say the policies are equivalent in every way, but I still contend that they are fundamentally similar with regard to mandates.
The SCOTUS ruling they are talking about was about police giving mandates to random people on the street for not being vaccinated. I don't see how that's not more extreme.
I've already got natural immunity. Lock yourself down. I (and millions of others) won't participate in lockdowns. This kind of cowardly response is reprehensible.
Thanks for taking the time and understanding the point I am trying to make. I think if the SARS-Cov-2 virus continues to mutate faster than we can produce and distribute booster shots, then it might be our only option left. Or we just accept that many millions of our (grand-)parents are going to die. We are already now running into supply chain problems around having enough syringes for 2022.
Being immune doesn't mean that the virus doesn't "attach" to you, or that you somehow repel the virus. You still get the virus and you can transmit it too. You won't get Covid-19 (the pulmonary decease) but you still carry and spread sars-cov-19.
>> Your behavior is not 'bravery', but selfishness.
I never claimed my behavior was brave, but rather OP cowardly. Not sure how you interpret living life normally, as though the statistics of the disease are what they are is selfish. What do you expect to happen, elimination of Covid? When exactly, would it cease to be 'selfish' to live life normally?
The virus is quite new, and a statement like "this information is not collected" from just one health organization in the world (CDC), people like the one from your link, which is clearly biased, exaggerates the topic for his freedom-oversensitive audience.
Note that "this information is not collected" doesn't mean it is not happening.
Or perhaps it's being collected but by some university, somewhere in the world. I don't know.
Of course "CDC Admits Crushing Rights of Naturally Immune Without Proof They Transmit the Virus" is just incorrect and misleading. It's a title targeted at a specific audience. Some fall for this kind of content.
> What do you expect to happen, elimination of Covid? When exactly, would it cease to be 'selfish' to live life normally?
You ask the wrong questions. What you ask doesn't have an answer, and you know that.
I expect adults to be able to read between the hype in the article. What is a 'freedom-oversensitive audience'? The term reeks of privilege at first whiff.
It sounds to me like you (and many people) are OK with abandoning/suspending the constitution (assuming U.S.) because of a slightly more deadly flu. It sounds like you're amenable to pushing authoritarianism as long as it suits you. That dog won't hunt bro. A lot of people are fed up with the blatantly unreasonable responses to this virus. You have offered nothing substantive in your reply and no reasoning for them.
There is no escape from this unless you attempt to mitigate all your personal health risk factors (diabetes, obesity, etc).
I will say this because it is not talked about enough, taking zinc LOZENGES will help right when you get sick because it stimulates the ADAM17 enzyme to cleave ACE2 off of the cells to make Soluble ACE2. The virus attaches to Soluble ACE2 and cannot enter the cell.
Are there studies which back this? Are we sure that reducing virus in solution will improve immune response? Has any study been conducted on the efficacy of zinc supplements when sick with covid?
Studies? Why? Why would a pharmaceutical company study zinc lozenges?
And it’s not to take it when you were sick, if you take it when you were sick it’s already too late. You have to take it at the very beginning of infection. It stops replication in the nasal pharyngeal passages.
So you all must think I ma some anti-vaxxer with all these downvotes. Well, I am not.
If you are not a mental coward then debate me on the logic and the studies that back this up. The vaccines help, just as much as the flu vaccine does, and even vaccinated people (flu and covid) die from the virus.
Vaccines are great but you need to take some responsibility for yourself.
More studies on Soluble ACE2 and COVID that are constantly ignored:
Killing Two Birds with One Stone by Administration of Soluble ACE2: A Promising Strategy to Treat Both Cardiovascular Diseases and SARS-CoV-2 Infection
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/13/11/2243
Natural immunity (including from variolation and small doses of the virus that everyone is constantly being exposed to — acting as a constant low level booster) is formed in response to MANY proteins on the virus, and not just the spike protein.
Most vaccines based on an inactivated virus throughout history have stimulated such a response.
By contrast, the mRNA vaccines induce a far more limited range of responses — only to a specific protein. So the surface area for the virus needs to mutate escape the immune response is far smaller than from natural immunity or “inactivated virus” vaccines such as the ones which eradicated Smallpox, or Salk’s Polivo vaccine.
Why doesn’t this article or many others delve into a distinction between natural immunity / inactivated virus (J&J) immunity and mRNA vaccine induced immunity? It seems like all the reporting is rigged, with almost everyone including scientific journals like Nature seemingly staying away from criticizingmRNA vaccines, and ready to carry water for them even in the absence of evidence in their favor.
With the LARGEST studies out of Israel and UK showing thatnatural immunity is far more robust while vaccine immunity wanes and is more limited against mutations, most articles IGNORE this in their reporting and often even claim the opposite — that you should get vaccined even if you have been immune for a year.
Homeless people and those constantly exposed to low levels of viruses have more robust immune systems than those who were isolated from everything.
J&J (and AZ) is a vectored vaccine, but also delivering the spike protein.
Spike was chosen because it is crucial to the entry of the virus to the cell, and so should be relatively well conserved. Certainly seems to be the case with Delta - but apparently not this new variant.
My understanding is that disease induced immunity can be a bit patchy - if your body develops antibodies to a conserved region, or a wide range, then fine. If to a region that is presented only on the particular virus that infected you, then you may still be vulnerable to further infections.
It has been found that vaccination after infection gives perhaps the best immunity - as if the vaccine focuses the previously too broad immune response somehow.
Region of the virus - e.g. capsid, spike etc. Even within a variant such as Delta there are sub-lineages with slight differences. Most diffences make no difference to the transmissibility etc of the virus, so can arise (and disappear) fairly randomly. If your immune system preferentially produces antibodies to proteins on the virus encoded by such a difference, then the next COVID virus it encounters may not have these proteins, and so your antibodies won't bind.
The largest studies have shown the opposite — natural immunity is far more robust and long-lasting (but perhaps more variable in the population — which is why they want everyone to be vaccinated, even if they just recovered from a severe case of the virus last week - it’s ridiculous).
> Combining vaccination with natural immunity gives you a “hybrid immunity,” which provides even more protection than vaccination alone
No that's cutting edge science hypothesis. Geez why are people posting that like it's a fact. Most of all this stuff is cutting edge. There's a danger that the vaccine can override natural immunity which is...not ideal
Natural immunity isnt viable for the people likely to perish if they are infected.
Yes you should get vaccinated even if you tested positive because false positive tests can occur.
There is no verifiable record of anyone having been sick with covid in the same way that there is for vaccination.
"Immune system robustness" is not something quantifiable or comparable in human populations to my knowledge. We can identify immune system weaknesses or compromise but I do not know of a metric to rank individuals relative to each other.
I thought it would be clear — I am talking about the push for people who already got immunity to the virus from beating a serious case, to get vaccinated. While there are still tons of people who need the vaccine, they are pushing everyone indiscriminately in many cities like NYC and not allowing people into establishments unless they had been vaccinated. But in Austria they are looking to simply force everyone to get it.
I found it quite striking, that while infections here are balanced through age groups, fatalities are only 60+ and mostly 80+.
e.g. seen on the "Dashboard" on rki.de, chart "COVID-19 cases by age group and sex".
Stats indicate old people die. Duh. A tragedy in each case, but that's what will happen eventually, right?
And a mutated virus mostly is more contagious but less fatal, isn't it? A virus optimises for spreading, not killing it's taxi. Was like that with delta.
> And a mutated virus mostly is more contagious but less fatal, isn't it? A virus optimises for spreading, not killing it's taxi.
Not necessarily. In fact the better the virus gets at infecting our cells and evading immunity, the more likely it is to also spread to dangerous / lethal levels before our immune systems are able to stop it.
>In fact the better the virus gets at infecting our cells and evading immunity, the more likely it is to also spread to dangerous / lethal levels before our immune systems are able to stop it.
Can I ask for some related literature on this topic? This contradicts my understanding.
than what? If age < 60, e.g. car accidents are orders of magnitude more deadly in my county here. There are just no (= 0) fatalities < 40 years here. So even swallowing hammers is equally or more deadly in that group.
Alpha was more lethal than delta from the sequencing reports posted by my State in the U.S.
.4% lethal compared to .3% lethal when I last checked.
So thats one goalpost. Another litmus test is that if delta was more lethal it would have been a very popular media talking point. Fear is unfortunately a successful motivator for clicks.
Are you looking at a small enough time span? Because vaccination drives IFR down, and vaccination rates were higher during the main Delta outbreak than during the main Alpha outbreak.
Alpha variant was already deadlier than the original strain, and delta variant at least caused higher hospitalization rates than alpha:
Posting like this will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please review the rules and don't do anything like this again.
Many aren't aware but interestingly these variants are identified and designated in the open on GitHub, here is the GitHub issue for this B.1.1.529 designation https://github.com/cov-lineages/pango-designation/issues/343. I've recently started watching this repo as it's quite interesting reading about the different variants popping up across the world.