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Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

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Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#61

Post by ncal »

smt88 wrote: post #20
loteck wrote: post #10

If we had effective treatments and OTC therapies for this illness, the pressure to vaccinate against every resurgence and new mutation would basically disappear. With so much social difficulty with vaccines, this seems like the most likely long term path. Where's my cherry flavored Covidquil?

This is absolutely wrong. A vaccine is a fraction of the cost of treatment, and it has no long-term side effects. Even better, a vaccine reduces the chance for a virus to mutate. Treatments, even if they work, are going to have side effects, and there are still unknown risks from a severe (unvaccinated) infection anyway. Vaccines are a miracle of proactivity, and there's no reason to try to replace them with somethin…

You cannot say it has "no long-term side effects". also a new flu vaccine is developed every year because influenza viruses naturally mutate quickly, as do any viruses. Don't just write things that you wish were true.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#62

Post by _vertigo »

smt88 wrote: post #20
loteck wrote: post #10

If we had effective treatments and OTC therapies for this illness, the pressure to vaccinate against every resurgence and new mutation would basically disappear. With so much social difficulty with vaccines, this seems like the most likely long term path. Where's my cherry flavored Covidquil?

This is absolutely wrong. A vaccine is a fraction of the cost of treatment, and it has no long-term side effects. Even better, a vaccine reduces the chance for a virus to mutate. Treatments, even if they work, are going to have side effects, and there are still unknown risks from a severe (unvaccinated) infection anyway. Vaccines are a miracle of proactivity, and there's no reason to try to replace them with somethin…

Honest question here, do vaccines actually reduce the chance for covid to mutate? Spitballing, I would expect a vaccine to decrease the number of total mutations that can occur but also simultaneously increase the selective pressure on the virus, increasing the chance that any mutations that improve the virus’ ability to resist the vaccine become dominant.

To make an analogy, does spraying every surface in a hospital with an antibacterial solution result in no bacteria or just make it more likely to see resistant bacteria? I’d guess it’s a function of how potent the solution was and how well every last surface was coated. If you start with a 10% solution, don’t achieve full coverage and keep ramping up slowly perhaps we’ll just see something like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8

Agree with the rest of your post though.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#63

Post by AndrewBissell »

pizza wrote: post #38
morpheos137 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would respectfully submit that the death rate of covid does not justify the scale of the response. It is unreasonable to shut down society for a disease whose median age victim is about 80 and whose whole population case fatality rate is in the low single digit percent at worse. The elderly and well off want to minimize their risk at the expense of the young and the poor. Who do you think delivered your Amazon pack…

Wuhan has been reopened for a long time now. We had every piece of information to make a good decision at the time in February 2020. Now we are thrashed about in a sea of half-measures, societal tension, and the total closing up of public life. We were so lost even by the time the CDC was encouraging people to not wear masks because it'll give you higher risk of contracting covid . Now our future's truly new.

Actually large sections of China are being locked back down again as they contend with new outbreaks. The whole concept of the Immaculate Covid Response has aged terribly as one "did it right" country after another either has had major outbreaks (Japan) or resorted to completely draconian and even militarized responses (Australia, NZ) to keep the spread down.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#64

Post by jfoster »

suchire wrote: post #16
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to mutate regardless of how many people are vaccinated. The entire point is to make it so that people don't have the runaway immune system responses that are melting lungs and brains.

The likelihood of mutation is directly proportional to how widespread a virus is multiplied by the amount of time it stays that way (more specifically, the area under the curve for infections over time). Vaccination and control of spread is critical to preventing further variants

Doesn't this mostly depend on 3 things?

1. Likelihood of breakthrough infections.

2. Mutation rate.

3. Initial volume of infections.

For instance, if the likelihood of breakthrough infections is low enough to overcome the reproduction rate, the mutation rate is slow enough, and the initial volume of infections low enough, you'd expect that the virus would die out if enough people have had the vaccine, right?

On the other hand, if the likelihood of breakthrough infections were high, mutation rate were high, initial volume of infections high, makes sense that you would expect to see ongoing mutation.

Another way I think this might go is that mutations happen & breakthrough infections happen, but the breakthrough infections further boost immunity, and the severity never re-approaches the original severity of covid.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#65

Post by anyfoo »

jfoster wrote: post #47
anyfoo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A less effective vaccination keeps COVID around longer and farther than a more effective one, though, giving the virus more time and population surface to mutate into further variants. (But still less than no vaccination.) I'm not an expert in this, so I cannot say how significant that issue is, but this is at least one potential downside that I am seeing to the vaccination being weaker for that variant. EDIT: To cla…

Is it analogous to flu? Do flu vaccines cause mutations as well? One interesting thing about covid is that it seems to be the first time humanity has collected so much data (eg. contact tracing, phylogenetics through genome sequencing, etc.) about this kind of virus, and applied modern medical knowledge in trying to combat it. It's very apparent that the overall response hasn't been nearly good enough, but it's proba…

> Do flu vaccines cause mutations as well?

That is not what I have written, please reread!

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#66

Post by legerdemain »

brodouevencode wrote: post #24
jdhn wrote: post #2

Is this necessarily a bad thing? If it protects the vast majoriy of people from going into the hospital and they gain additional immunity from covid, then I don't really see a downside.

The pretense all along as far as I can tell from most countries has been one of "zero COVID". Meaning a total removal/extermination of the virus. Whether or not this was ever realistic is really the underlying debate that hasn't yet fully surfaced.

Europeans learned to live with the bubonic plague, which has never been eradicated, and Native Americans, over time, overcame the smallpox that was introduced among them. The people of today can do the same with Covid. It is the only way.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#67

Post by criticaltinker »

maxerickson wrote: post #59
criticaltinker wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all 3 of them told me to expect something like that - the virus mutates ... and the vaccines will likely be needing to adjust Your doctor friends were informing you about a phenomenon commonly referred to as "immune escape". The current mRNA based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are effective at preventing severe outcomes like hospitalization and death. However, they do not necessarily prevent infection or transmission - and t…

The Delta variant emerged prior to widespread vaccination.

Yes the delta variant may have originated prior to widespread vaccination, but the dominance of the delta variant (and other VOCs) did coincide with mass vaccination campaigns.

Please see the first source I cited if you're interested in these ideas and want to hear more straight from the experts:

> "The spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV-2 is the molecular target for many vaccines and antibody-based prophylactics aimed at bringing COVID-19 under control." [1]

> "Such a narrow molecular focus raises the specter of viral immune evasion as a potential failure mode for these biomedical interventions. With the emergence of new strains of SARS-CoV-2 with altered transmissibility and immune evasion potential, a critical question is this: how easily can the virus escape neutralizing antibodies (nAbs) targeting the spike RBD?" [1]

> "Our modeling suggests that SARS-CoV-2 mutants with one or two mildly deleterious mutations are expected to exist in high numbers due to neutral genetic variation, and consequently resistance to vaccines or other prophylactics that rely on one or two antibodies for protection can develop quickly -and repeatedly- under positive selection." [1]

> "The speed at which nAb resistance develops in the population increases substantially as the number of infected individuals increases, suggesting that complementary strategies to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission that exert specific pressure on other proteins (e.g., antiviral prophylactics) or that do not exert a specific selective pressure on the virus (e.g., high-efficiency air filtration, masking, ultraviolet air purification) are key to reducing the risk of immune escape" [1]

> "Strategies for viral elimination should therefore be diversified across molecular targets and therapeutic modalities" [1]

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#68

Post by brodouevencode »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #45
brodouevencode wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pretense all along as far as I can tell from most countries has been one of "zero COVID". Meaning a total removal/extermination of the virus. Whether or not this was ever realistic is really the underlying debate that hasn't yet fully surfaced.

Of course it was realistic. China basically achieved it (I am not a China fan or defender), but the rest of the world failed. The whole world achieved it for the first SARS. However, that ship sailed a long time ago. Probably before the first surge in Italy of COVID-19.

You have a lot more faith in the data coming out of China than I do. The CCP has lied from the beginning and attempted (successfully in most cases) to silence the researchers from the Wuhan lab that attempted to report early on.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#69

Post by graderjs »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #44
graderjs wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if we have this, but it would be good if we had a technology that enhanced your body's immune system to identify and kill viruses, rather than prime it to respond to a particular viral signal, that then may need to be updated as the virus changes (that's how I understand how vaccines work, but that could be false). You might think it's a subtle difference, but I think the former technology would be leani…

Beefing up the immune system without garunteeing it something to do seems like a recipe for autoimmune disorders, no?

Yeah, agree. It would be tricky. I'm hoping that by 'enhancing' the immune system you lean into its natural self-regulation equilibrium system and avoid that mostly--but then again autoimmune disorders seemingly emerge from those stasis systems going haywire, maybe without external poking...so it would be tricky for sure.

I guess the intuition is that the human immune system is an incredibly sophisticated, evolving capability that over time, and over the mass population, can respond to become resilient against a wide array of pathogens.

So if you could somehow capture the best of that (like, for illustration, take the immune system of the healthiest, most resilient person, 30 generations from now in the future) and convey that benefit to many other people, that would be truly awesome.

Sort of like an idea of training an AI, more iterations are better, the immune system of any one person at any one point in time, might not be so great, but the best immune system of the population after encountering many pathogens, is going to be really great.

How can we short circuit that "natural training" process and enhance the immune system? But I agree that attempts to do so might run the risk of creating or exacerbating autoimmune diseases...But I still think it's worth it.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#70

Post by oliv__ »

wrl wrote: post #57
landemva wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I havent (needed) a flu shot in a couple decades. I'm not interested in yearly jabs. Better to lose the waist inches and high BMI. Few want the self-responsibility of healthy living. And I don't agree with headline of "grim", as it was obvious a year ago this was coming. Who lost any excess weight in the past year?

I live healthy. I built a home gym at the start of lockdown and have continued to train powerlifting and Olympic WL both throughout. I get my cardio in, I eat well. I didn't lose weight in the past year – I gained muscle, and my numbers are the best they've ever been. I got both Pfizer/BNT shots as soon as I could, and I'll get the boosters as soon as I can too. The belief that healthy living alone is enough to stymi…

As far as "belief" goes, you're the one on the side of belief here.

All the data and numbers show the risk is incredibly low for someone like you (provided you don't have an auto-immune disease)

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