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Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

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131–140 of 241 posts

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#131
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair critique. I feel like I've heard concerns about the potential for the virus to mutate because of the high level of vaccinations, but like you, I don't know how significant of an issue that is.

The virus will not mutate because of the high level of vaccinations. The virus will mutate because of the high level of unvaccinated people. The risk is when the high level of unvaccinated are in the same population with a high level of vaccinated, of the many mutations in the unvaccinated there is a greater chance that a mutation that randomly has greater tolerance to the vaccines will be naturally selected and flou…

>mutations created in the unvax population benefit from resistance to vaccines.

I cannot see how this is correct. Because it should be the mutations created in the vaccinated that will help the virus to survive in similar vaccinated hosts..because first of all, the mutated virus need to survive in the vaccinated host, and become the dominant one in that host and thus giving it a better chance to jump to another host...

So this mutations must be happening in Vaccinated hosts. In unvaccinated as you said, any mutations that gives the virus immune escape capability does not give it an advantage over the other mutations in the same host, simply because there is no vaccine generated antibodies to kill the other mutations, for it to gain dominance.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#132

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 current mRNA based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are effective at preventing severe outcomes like hospitalization and death 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 dom…

Wouldn't you have to look at the age of the population that is in hospital and that populations vaccination rate to accurately gauge this?. The overall vaccination rate could be vastly lower or higher than the overall population depending on what priority groups israel had.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#133
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…

There's an airbag in my car, but I also wear a seatbelt, obey the posted speed limits, use turn signals, stop at red traffic lights, and abstain from consuming alcohol while driving. This isn't "living in fear," it's observing reasonable caution in my daily life. I don't expect there will be "Zero accidents," but I want to avoid being injured and avoid causing injury to others. And I expect I'll keep taking these precautions for the next 50 years if I live that long. It just never ends. It's psychologically exhausting, come to think of it.

But wait, now you have me thinking, what if speed limits, traffic lights and all that other stuff were optional? Shouldn't they be? I mean, if I want to risk dying in a car accident, that's my business, and if others are concerned about my reckless driving, isn't that what their own seatbelts are for? I'm not forcing them to drink behind the wheel, why should they force me to not drink? Bottom line, if they want to live in endless fear of me and other freedom loving drivers, I won't stop them, they can just stay off the roads for all I care. So why should there be any safety mandates...for anything? My state governor should follow in the footsteps of DeSantis and Abbott, and make it illegal for localities to even impose speed limits.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#134
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> > 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. This is a bad interpretation by the article's author. At some point (at 100% vaccination rate) we'd expect 100% of people in hos…

> 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.

The population is 9.3 million, so 650 cases/million is indeed about 6000 cases per day.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#135

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 current mRNA based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are effective at preventing severe outcomes like hospitalization and death 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 dom…

If vaccines bring hospitalizations down they are already a win. The percentage doesn't say much about the number of hospitalizations. In a country where lots of people are vaccinated, I would expect lots of vaccinated people in the hospital too. Like others said, it also depends on the cohort (age, vulnerability, etc.).

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#136
post #90
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…

> I fully acknowledge that there could be some side effect from the vaccines down the line that I'm now on the hook for. However, people who have been working in this field for their entire careers say it's unlikely, and that's the best information we have right now. I trust the experts who have trusted their own expertise enough to get their own shots.

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 late 1950s, 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.

https://thalidomide.ca/en/the-canadian-tragedy/

Many of the scientists have now admitted that they refrained from publicly acknowledging the evidence that the virus may have been engineered in the Wuhan lab. Alina Chan was one of those experts who says this now:

> "... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory...

It never occurred to these "scientists" that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats in China is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling by "scientists".

The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" And if they can be so easily manipulated based on politics, what else are they and the dissenters being silenced on? Did they silence scientists who were finding flaws during the vaccine development process?

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#137
post #127
post #91

Earlier 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?

We don't really know because the even the phase 2 trials for these vaccines have not been done..

How come there are phase 3 results of Moderna?

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2035389

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#138
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.

Yet you will have a period of time where the person that waits for second dose would have an increased risk compared to normally schedule one.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#139
post #70
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I would love to see the "data" for incredible low risk? BTW low risk of hospitalization or long covid and brain fogs?

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#140
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pandemrix was also similar to previous vaccines but caused an increase in narcolepsy, no? Immune systems are complicated.

Yes, and the reason it caused bad side effects was the strong immune response[1], which is a short term effect. That is exactly what has been extensively tested for the Covid vaccines. 1. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/why-pandemic-flu-sho...

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by short term effect, the first sentence in the article you linked mentions it's an incurable disease and it took them years to admit it was linked to Pandemrix.

English is not my native language so maybe I didn't understand what you meant by that.

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