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Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

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Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#91

Post by smt88 »

ncal wrote: post #61
smt88 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You cannot say it has "no long-term side effects"

What are the long-term side effects of the vaccine? Or are you saying that you expect us to discover some in the future?

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#92

Post by oliv__ »

maxerickson wrote: post #88
oliv__ wrote: post #84

What I'm curious about is: what happens now? When everyone starts realizing that vaccines and masks can't fully contain a spread, what's the next logical step to take? Are people going to insist that you keep wearing your mask, take booster shots and live in fear for the next 50 years or are we going to collectively change our mindset from "Zero COVID" to accepting that COVID is just another risk factor in the world…

Getting booster shots to lessen the risk to people that are at greater risk from the virus isn't a huge imposition. We should make it easier for more people to do it (people that don't have sick leave or aren't sure they can take it and so on).

> Getting booster shots to lessen the risk to people that are at greater risk from the virus isn't a huge imposition.

You may think so. I politely disagree.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#93

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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.

I don't know who was saying this (I wasn't personally reading it), but it was obviously dumb.

The question really isn't whether vaccinated people get sick, or even whether they spread the virus, but whether they end up in the hospital. Right now, if you're vaccinated, you are extraordinarily unlikely to end up in the hospital.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#94

Post by oliv__ »

wrl wrote: post #90
oliv__ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the downside? We don't know what we don't know. That's the downside. You've just taken an experimental drug which has yet to be approved by the FDA, and was designed using novel technology we haven't broadly tested on humans. What's more, the companies providing the shots cannot be held liable for these vaccines. Who's to say we don't discover issues with mRNA delivery 5 years from now? That risk seems much…

You realise that COVID, like other viruses, replicates by injecting mRNA into cells, yes? That mRNA does a lot more than print some spike proteins. Hell, we don't understand what most of the COVID accessory proteins do. Again, I stand by what I said – "foolhardy". > We don't know what we don't know. So you think we should all try our luck with live COVID and just hope for the best? Demonstrated long-term health probl…

> So you think we should all try our luck with live COVID and just hope for the best?

Not all: people at risk (older people, people with auto-immune disease and people with existing conditions), just not healthy, active, young people.

> Demonstrated long-term health problems vs potential ones?

The demonstrated effects you are referring to only affect a minuscule portion of people who get COVID. So it's not exactly demonstrated vs potential. One could also point to the minority of vaccinated people who got ill or died and call that demonstrated.

> It isn't. There's not really a nicer way to phrase it. Your sources are questionable, you should fact check them better, you should do your own research. The papers are free to read, there's no excuse. You're Dunning-Kruger-ing this. Get your shit together.

If anything, you're the one who's overly confident of their knowledge here.

Why didn't you quote some percentages on the risk of getting long COVID? Right, because there are none. Because we don't know what we don't know, just as much as on your side of the argument as on mine. The only difference is: you think what you say is the gospel.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#95

Post by smt88 »

_vertigo wrote: post #62
smt88 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're correct that it's possible for vaccines to be distributed in a way that promotes mutations[1]. You're also correct that there are many factors, including number of times the virus replicates and also selective pressure.

At this point, it looks like our mRNA vaccines:

- leave a short enough window between doses to minimize mutations

- reduce viral load within a vaccinated person[2]

- prevent many transmissions entirely[3][4][5]

...which, added all up, appears to net out the way you'd expect: the vaccine reduces the risk of mutations.

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/10/9659409...

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01316-7

3. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

4. https://www.physiciansweekly.com/covid-19-breakthrough-infec...

5. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-crucial-vacci...

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#96

Post by jollybean »

legerdemain wrote: post #66
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.

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.

"The people of today can do the same with Covid."?

The plague wiped out 1/2 of Europeans and Smallpox maybe the majority of Aboriginals. Or something like that.

Yes, 'we can survive' I don't think anyone doubts that.

The question is, is it going to kill several million Americans or more during it's run.

Hopefully not but I'm also someone can show us what the light at the end of this tunnel looks like.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#97

Post by graderjs »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #41
graderjs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard that as well. My feeling is that with all the treatments we are deploying against the virus, one thing we are doing is creating a selective pressure, forcing it to evolve to promote more resistant and transmissible variants. Whether those transmissible variants also contain higher mortality might be a crapshoot game of chance, but I don't hear this sort of idea spouted a lot and I think it's worth considering…

Vaccines are very different from antibiotics. Antibiotics are single molecules that bind a very specific target. A single mutation of a single protein can render an antibiotic useless. Vaccines induce the immune system to generate a repertoire of antibodies, each of which binds in a different way and each of which is then selected and "evolved" (hypermutation) for increased efficacy. And each individual person create…

That's interesting. it's a good argument. Maybe vaccines are the answer. But I don't think we can rule it out and say it's 'just wrong' tho right?

The delta and lambda variants emerged, and they were both more transmissible, and more vaccine resistant, is that right? I mean, why do you need to evolve vaccine resistance and transmissibility at the same time? Seems weird, and given the 'shotgun' quality of antibodies across individual and population, particularly so.

Which lets me feel that we are applying some selective pressure with vaccines. Compared to the other virus mentioned, what's different is the scale and rate of vaccine roll out here is unprecedentedly greater. Maybe in the previous cases our immune system had already evolved stronger defenses by the time the vaccines were given, 'patching more holes in the dam' so to speak.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#98

Post by smnrchrds »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #93
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.

I don't know who was saying this (I wasn't personally reading it), but it was obviously dumb. The question really isn't whether vaccinated people get sick, or even whether they spread the virus, but whether they end up in the hospital. Right now, if you're vaccinated, you are extraordinarily unlikely to end up in the hospital.

That's the topic of the article. You are much less likely to end up in a hospital or ICU if you are vaccinated, but it won't be extraordinary, especially if you are old.

> What is clear is that “breakthrough” cases are not the rare events the term implies. As of 15 August, 514 Israelis were hospitalized with severe or critical COVID-19, a 31% increase from just 4 days earlier. Of the 514, 59% were fully vaccinated. Of the vaccinated, 87% were 60 or older.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#99

Post by smt88 »

cickpass_broken wrote: post #56
smt88 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

the cost of these vaccines is largely hidden, no? Each country made deals behind closed doors AFAIK. I've seen some estimates of $12-$30 a shot, but have no idea the validity of this. How much do the treatments cost? Is it vastly different? > No long term side effects. How do you know? I thought the only study/data from Pfizer covered 6 months. That's not very long term? https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.0…

> How much do the treatments cost? Is it vastly different?

An average hospitalization costs $73,000 in the US, according to data collected from insurance claims[1].

That means that a single hospitalization costs the same as vaccinating 2,400 people (using your $30/shot estimate).

> How do you know? I thought the only study/data from Pfizer covered 6 months. That's not very long term?

Although I'm not an expert, a friend of mine is getting his PhD studying the immune system and explained it to me this way:

Any additional risk of mRNA vaccines would (with almost 100% certainty) occur shortly after vaccination[2], theorized to be as a result of a strong(er) immune response.

After the immune response has subsided, the vaccinated person's immune system would be hard to distinguish from someone who received a traditional vaccine because the goal of the vaccines is the same: to teach the immune system what the virus looks like[3][4] without actually requiring an active virus.

So to put that together, we can be fairly confident in an mRNA vaccine's long-term safety because its long-term effects are similar to other vaccines that we've studied for more than 100 years and because the mechanism of action subsides within a few months[5].

1. https://www.fairhealth.org/article/costs-for-a-hospital-stay...

2. https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19...

3. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-are-mrna-vaccines-so...

4. https://www.vumc.org/viiii/infographics/how-does-mrna-vaccin...

5. https://www.uab.edu/news/health/item/12143-three-things-to-k...

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#100

Post by tguvot »

berkut wrote: post #27

There seems to be some evidence that having a longer duration between the first and second doses provides better long-term protection, i.e. gaps of 7+ weeks, compared to the 3+ weeks the US and Israel have generally done. NZ is currently thinking about increasing the gap to > 6 weeks because of this. I wonder how much that would affect things.

The bottom line is, it's that after second vaccination amount of antibodies start to decline and at some point of time efficiency of vaccination going down with it. The "better" long term protection by longer gap between doses probably just buys extra couple of months or so of good efficiency at cost of lowered between two shots
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