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SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

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Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#251

Post by ben_w »

thirsty-dove wrote: post #167
ben_w wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason I want to wear a seatbelt even though I’m still restricted by the speed limit: demonstrably lower chances of not merely death but also sub-fatal harm.

Doesn't seem like a good comparison, because seat belts have been tested for decades and don't seem to be insidiously harmful, whereas VAERS already has an off-the-charts number of reports of deaths and harm. Not a day goes by where I don't hear about somebody dying shortly after getting the vaccine, often in novel ways like described here: https://freewestmedia.com/2021/06/27/surgeon-who-operated-on...

Even if all of the VAERS reports were both causal (they’re not) and fatal (not even remotely) the vaccine would still be seven times better than the illness.

As the reports are overwhelming not about surprise deaths and not causal, the vaccines are somewhere between 170 times better and infinitely better than the disease.

> Not a day goes by where I don't hear about somebody dying shortly after getting the vaccine, often in novel ways like described here

And how many do you expect by coincidence in an ideal case where there are exactly zero side effects? Because it isn’t going to be zero coincidental deaths when there are 3.79 billion vaccination events. Not even zero per day.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#252

Post by lamontcg »

thomquaid wrote: post #201
lamontcg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that vaccinated individuals don’t stop transmission... No such fact exists. "Vaccination with BNT162b2 reduces transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to household contacts in Israel" https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.13.21260393v... > The overall vaccine effectiveness against transmission was 88.5%.

Israel's Minister of Health came out yesterday and said theyre seeing only 39% effectiveness now (delta). Based on prior reporting, Israel's vaccination program seemed to be the best in the world. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-23/pfizer-sh...

That is effectiveness against infection. The efficacy against transmission will be higher.

When the virus infects someone that is vaccinated there are less symptoms, less viral load and less risk of further transmission.

And I don't think anyone has done a study on the efficacy of vaccination preventing superspreading, but I suspect that vaccinated individuals are rarely, if ever, superspreaders.

Also that is contradicted by the NEJM study today that finds that Pfizer is still 88% effective against Delta:

https://globalnews.ca/news/8050563/pfizer-astrazeneca-vaccin...

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#253

Post by timr »

gibba999 wrote: post #203
timr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This one scared me since it was a large, relatively unbiased sample, with before-and-after imaging. It also showed brain damage even in mild cases of COVID19 in >10% of cases. It shows no such thing. It's an analysis of MRIs where the authors infer loss of gray matter in specific regions of the brain. This is in no way "brain damage", and representing it this way is leaping to wild conclusions. Lest you not believe…

I think a lot of this comes down to replication, effect size, and sample size. Yes, there are studies which show virtually everything, but in this case, we have: - >10% of mild cases reporting long COVID brain fog (without MRIs) - Visible correlations on MRIs with large n (cited study) - Lots of small-scale studies / looking at specific cases - Some understanding of a relevant mechanism-of-action (see: olfactory loss…

> >10% of mild cases reporting long COVID brain fog (without MRIs)

"Brain fog" is not a diagnosis. It has no definition. It has no test. Literally anyone could say they have it, and not be wrong.

It also overlaps substantially with "fatigue"...which we all know comes along with a lot of other common issues. Such as depression.

> Visible correlations on MRIs with large n (cited study)

The size of n doesn't matter if the thing you're reporting is not a meaningful metric. Here, we have a paper that has gone on a fishing expedition for a quasi-subjective metric with unknown levels of noise, which is widely "shown" to be associated with many common and uncommon issues across the research literature.

This is a low-quality data set. But yes, it is a larger low-quality data set.

> Lots of small-scale studies / looking at specific cases

Collections of anecdotes are not data.

> Some understanding of a relevant mechanism-of-action (see: olfactory loss)

...for a single symptom (loss of smell). But no, we don't know why that happens, and to the extent we do, the current best hypothesis has nothing to do with neurons, but rather, the scaffolding around those neurons.

> Together, that's about as strong evidence as you'd expect after 15 months.

Nonsense. We've been debating this "long covid" for more than a year now. There are apparently many sufferers. We could have easily conducted randomized, longitudinal, controlled trials. We have not.

The total evidence for "long covid" continues to be anecdotes and self-reported "symptoms", of indeterminate duration, amongst populations that are mostly self-selected for having "long covid". I believe that we'll eventually find out that some of these things are real, but right now, this is just hysteria.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#254

Post by timr »

ianlevesque wrote: post #86
timr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This one scared me since it was a large, relatively unbiased sample, with before-and-after imaging. It also showed brain damage even in mild cases of COVID19 in >10% of cases. It shows no such thing. It's an analysis of MRIs where the authors infer loss of gray matter in specific regions of the brain. This is in no way "brain damage", and representing it this way is leaping to wild conclusions. Lest you not believe…

Denial is quite a river these days. Where else are you going to get a brain imaging study with before and after data on thousands of people? If that's not persuasive and concerning to you I don't think anything will be.

> Where else are you going to get a brain imaging study with before and after data on thousands of people?

Why does the size of the study matter so much if the endpoint of the study is absurd, the gathering process was a fishing expedition, and the whole thing is subject to confirmation bias?

Even if you believe that these researchers are finding real signals in these MRI scans (which I don't automatically grant; even they admit that some of the "pathologies" they've identified aren't significant, and they didn't pre-declare the endpoints anyway, so you can't rely on conventional statistical significance thresholds), the fact that they know the outcome for each subject hopelessly poisons the data.

> Denial is quite a river these days.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore a truth they cannot accept.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#255

Post by timr »

gibba999 wrote: post #250
native_samples wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should a "study" in the abstract automatically be persuasive and concerning? Scientists get paid to publish studies, so the literature is full of nonsensical studies that show correlations between anything and everything. User timr just explained to you why this specific study cannot be used to conclude anything, but you're saying he's the one in denial?

A study in isolation should not be persuasive. There's a pipeline from idea to hypothesis the theory to fact, which includes many studies with many methodologies. On the other hand, a handful of studies, one correlational with large n, a few causal, a good theoretical basis, etc. do move us up that pipeline quite a bit. Mild and asymptomatic cases of COVID19 due seem to cause brain damage leading to brain fog. - Repo…

> brain damage leading to brain fog.

Define "brain fog". Tell me what the diagnostic criteria are, and how one might make an objective measurement of its presence and magnitude.

Bonus question: tell me how your stated criteria differs from the pre-established diagnostic criteria for depression.

One can survey a random sample of the population, ask them if they have ever "felt the presence of God", and find a strong signal confirming this. It does not make God a diagnostic factor in a medical study.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#256

Post by Izkata »

bsdetector wrote: post #96
kadoban wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they say how? Doesn't seem like it even makes sense anymore. I'm going to guess based on your youtube wording that their answer is not vaccines?

Bret Weinstein has been citing studies he claims show that ivermectin reduces spread such that even close family members are unlikely to be infected from a person with covid. edit: curious how hn readers feel they will be able to correct misguided beliefs if they don't even know what those beliefs are.

It's also how India got their insane case rate two months ago under control.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#257

Post by samus »

nikolay wrote: post #235
samus wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's of course not ideal that restrictions are unduly waived. But it is also recognized that many won't consider taking the vaccine because they don't see how doing so contributes to end the pandemy. Luring them with incentives like entry to bars without testing, or positive monetary rewards, changes the decision making process though. But many places maintain restrictions like mask wearing or mandatory testing for a…

Vaccination is too slow anyway. You need to vaccinate the entire world at once otherwise the reservoirs outside of the first world will keep the variant roulette spinning and more dangerous variants will nullify the first generation of vaccines and we'll back to where we started. Just today here on HN was a post about gamma variant escaping fully-vaccinated with Pfizer. And this is not even considering that we're abo…

This sumbission is actually about just that article ;-) But yeah, it's too slow. The only saving grace is that there are multiple vaccines. Unless they all work exactly the same way, new mutations are unlikely to be immune to all of them.

We indeed don't know that much about the virus itself, what happens when one gets infected multiple times and when multiple vaccines are combined. We are going to find out either way. The goal of the vaccines and the other containment measures is to keep our health systems from collapsing. Whether or not we manage to eradicate Covid or to just force it into low-level virulence is not so important. It is probably not feasible to convince the public to hunt down Covid to extinction as with Smallpox.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#258

Post by native_samples »

Grimm1 wrote: post #247
native_samples wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think smallpox wasn't eliminated by vaccines? mRNA vaccine is not particularly more dangerous than any other type I don't understand how that is consistent with the data from the various vaccine surveillance systems which show clearly that it's drastically more dangerous. It's also inconsistent with anecdotes that I've been hearing from people around me, of whom a disturbingly large number say that the vac…

Of course the vaccine made them feel sick, that's how immune responses tend to, much of the time, work. I felt like shit for about 12 hours, with fever and muscle soreness all over my body. Then it abated, as expected, and I went about my life knowing in two weeks I'd be at peak protection and could start participating in society again with a flipped risk profile. I read a lot of your other comments so far and I had…

No, you're mis-understanding cause and effect. I've had vaccines before and have no fear of vaccines in general. This round in particular does concern me, but that concern arose due to the data and anecdotes that I already mentioned. Concern follows reason for concern. You're asserting it's the other way around, which is:

a. Not very charitable.

b. Not the simplest possible explanation.

Occam would not approve.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#259

Post by native_samples »

sampo wrote: post #238
native_samples wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paragraphs would help me work through your questions. Firstly, the claims aren't extraordinary. There is a long history of vaccines being suspended for being more dangerous than is worth it, for example here's a CNN archival story about that: https://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/30/swine.flu.1976/ind... "ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- The man who led the response to the 1976 swine flu outbreak is defending the vaccinati…

> In 2010 there was another Swine Flu scare but not much was learned: Pandemrix was authorized and sold in Europe but turned out to occasionally create narcolepsy in teenagers. A protein in the Swine Fly virus triggered narcolepsy in some people. You can get exposed to this protein both from the Pandemrix vaccine, and from getting sick from Swine Flu. China didn't vaccinate, but there was a spike in narcolepsy cases…

Yes ... which leads where? Those teenagers probably wouldn't have got Swine Flu if they'd just done nothing. So it probably leads to the conclusion that if the vaccines have similar effects to being exposed to the virus itself, that's not obviously a win?

The whole point of vaccines is that they are much better than getting the virus itself, and for the classical vaccines that established the reputation of the technique, that's definitely the case. For cases like swine flu and now it seems maybe COVID, it's not at all clear that the vaccines are universally preferable to the disease, especially for the young. For one, COVID is mostly not dangerous to people under the age of 65 or so. For another, the symptoms are often mild. And the symptoms of the vaccine are often quite intense. mRNA vaccines create the same kind of cell death as the disease itself, they aren't just presenting the immune system with inactivated virus and letting it target practice on the vaccine particles: they turn the bodies own cells into target practice. That's a fundamental difference in approach.

When it gets into these sorts of grey zones of a vaccine with strong side effects and a not very deadly virus (for certain risk groups), a repeat of the Pandemrix disaster is not out of the realm of possibility.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#260

Post by scotty79 »

pigeonhole123 wrote: post #246
scotty79 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the reinfected people died. You don't die from false positive result on two tests. It's not stated in the article buy you can safely assume that some of the reinfected had symptoms other than death as well.

They presumably didn’t die from their first detected infection which may be a false positive. And I guess by “some” you mean a small subset. Other sources are saying around 30 confirmed reinfections worldwide. Which is correct?

Definitely not the ones with number 30 in the whole world.

Brazillian variant of vovid reinfects one in 6 people previously infected with earlier variant: https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1353

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