Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How is Taiwan doing? Edit: Looks like they had a huge spike in May but are now around 7-day avg of 20 cases. With 7 day average of deaths around 2-3. Vax rate 1st - 40% 2nd 2.9% Looks pretty good. Sweden has a rolling 7 of 500 ~ 700. Rolling seven of deaths 0. Vax rate 1st 69.5% 2nd 59.2% Interesting because they never locked down.
Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta
101–110 of 241 posts
Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 de…
Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Comorbidity is a fundamental driving factor in whether or not you survive this virus. We've not heard any recommendations from any health agency suggesting a healthier lifestyle would help - it most certainly would statistically speaking. And 18 months in I doubt we'll see anything like that because it has proven to not be politically expedient. (FWIW Ive been intermittent fasti…
Yup... it's beeen 18 month. WE'd have been better off with a run a mile a day mandate than any of the lockdowns.
Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. O…
This is a bad interpretation by the article's author. At some point (at 100% vaccination rate) we'd expect 100% of people in hospital to be vaccinated.
Talking about "breakthrough" cases and how rare they are depends on the absolute number of infections. This article doesn't have that data but it does say this:
> Yet the country is now logging one of the world’s highest infection rates, with nearly 650 new cases daily per million people.
The population is 3.9m, so 2500 cases per day. According to https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/israel it is actually up to 6000 cases per day.
So there are probably 100K+ active cases. 303 (ie, 0.59 * 514) cases of vaccinated people is 0.26%. That's a pretty low rate.
Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Reminder of the Thalidomide drug:
> Thalidomide is a sedative drug discovered at the end of the 50s, which caused a worldwide tragedy. The drug has been prescribed to many pregnant women in order to relieve pregnancy nausea. It was later found that thalidomide caused irreversible damages to the fetus and thousands of children were born with severe congenital malformations. Many of them did not survive more than a few days after they were born.
Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta
#106Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Long term side effects won't be known for 5-10 years, especially as vaccinated people have kids. Reminder of the Thalidomide drug: > Thalidomide is a sedative drug discovered at the end of the 50s, which caused a worldwide tragedy. The drug has been prescribed to many pregnant women in order to relieve pregnancy nausea. It was later found that thalidomide caused irreversible damages to the fetus and thousands of chil…
Good news, then. Viral vector vaccines (like the J&J version) have been studied and tested since the 1970s, and mRNA vaccines (like Pfizer) have been studied since the 1980s[1][2].
What ingredient in Covid vaccines do you suspect will become the new thalidomide?
We know that the actual viral vector and mRNA components of the vaccines will degrade and disappear from the body in the short term[3], so it must be one of the other ingredients, right?
It's also important to weigh the completely unknown long-term effects of Covid against the well-known long-term effects of training an immune system with a vaccine.
1. https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19...
2. https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga...
3. https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/where-mrna-vaccines-and-sp...
Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta
#108I am good friends with 3 doctors, and talk to them a lot about the amazing science behind the vaccines and the incredible speed with which those were designed and developed. All agree it was done at pretty much the software speed - custom designed on the computer in weeks and then built to order - and both them and I think it's pretty neat. It is very refreshing to talk to them because they, being good doctors, deal…
> 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…
Ultrapotent antibodies against diverse and highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variants
”Wang et al. identified four antibodies from early-outbreak convalescent donors that are potent against 23 variants, including variants of concern”
”The B cells isolated from donor-derived blood samples were sorted for antibody identification. This led to the identification of four potent neutralizing antibodies targeting the spike RBD. These antibodies showed a high affinity for the SARS-CoV-2 spike even at nanomolar concentrations.”
”The findings revealed that of 4 antibodies, two bound to RBDs in the “up position” and two bound to RBDs in the “down position.” Moreover, three out of four antibodies directly blocked the RBD – ACE2 interaction, and one indirectly inhibited the interaction through steric hindrance - the slowing of chemical reactions due to steric bulk.”
”By conducting multiple rounds of selection using combination treatments with two antibodies, it was observed that antibody combinations might reduce the risk of escape mutation acquisition and subsequent development of resistant viral variants.”
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/06/30/scie...
Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta
#109I am good friends with 3 doctors, and talk to them a lot about the amazing science behind the vaccines and the incredible speed with which those were designed and developed. All agree it was done at pretty much the software speed - custom designed on the computer in weeks and then built to order - and both them and I think it's pretty neat. It is very refreshing to talk to them because they, being good doctors, deal…
> 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…
According to this very article this isn't even really true any more. Of the currently hospitalized population in Israel 60% are fully vaccinated. With 78% of the population vaccinated that implies the protection is actually surprisingly weak.
" “There are so many breakthrough infections that they dominate and most of the hospitalized patients are actually vaccinated,” says Uri Shalit, a bioinformatician at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) who has consulted on COVID-19 for the government. “One of the big stories from Israel [is]: ‘Vaccines work, but not well enough.’”
Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta
#110I am good friends with 3 doctors, and talk to them a lot about the amazing science behind the vaccines and the incredible speed with which those were designed and developed. All agree it was done at pretty much the software speed - custom designed on the computer in weeks and then built to order - and both them and I think it's pretty neat. It is very refreshing to talk to them because they, being good doctors, deal…