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Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

sciencemag.org

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Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#171

Post by rsynnott »

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 doesn’t seem like a particularly likely path, given the… lacklustre performance of most antivirals. Like, no responsible doctor would ever say to an at-risk person “no need to get the flu vaccine; tamiflu exists”. Even if an effective antiviral shows up, realistically it’ll probably be more a tamiflu than a magic cure.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#172

Post by rsynnott »

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…

The prices the EU, at least, is paying are public. IIRC they range from about 2 eur for AZ to about 30 for the MRNAs.

Today, there are no particularly effective treatments. Monoclonal antibodies might do something, and cost a few thousand quid, but you wouldn’t want to be relying on them as an alternative to a vaccine.

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#173

Post by rsfern »

criticaltinker wrote: post #80
maxerickson wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have spread even faster without vaccination (it is considerably more infectious than other prevalent variants).

To be clear, the primary suggestion put forth by my original comment is: Strategies for viral elimination should therefore be diversified across molecular targets and therapeutic modalities Put another way: vaccines are a powerful and useful tool that can help us mitigate the pandemic, but if used indiscriminately they may actually work against us, so we need to proceed with caution and also use other tools where pos…

I agree with the general point that diversifying our vaccine targets is important for robust immunity, but you are sort of coming close to advocating that we not use the particular somewhat limited vaccine tech we have at our disposal now.

The best strategy against escape variants available to us right now is to reduce transmission rates (especially to immunocompromised people) as much as possible with high vaccination rates.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#174

Post by ashildr »

busymom0 wrote: post #136
wrl wrote: post #90

Earlier 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…

> 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…

> Reminder of the Thalidomide drug

Bringing up Thalidomide / Contergan in a discussion on current medicine is the best indication that you don‘t have the least idea on the topic. All rules and tests that eg the Biontech-Vaccine had to pass (and has passed) have been installed _after_ and _because_ of the Thalidomide catastrophy. Bringing up the topic of Thalidomide exactly disproves any point you are thinking you make, because the level of safety in medicine we have today has been raised to a level incomparable to what we had with Thalidomide.

What you are saying instead is: “Current medicine must be _very_ safe because todays‘ safety protocols are so much higher than what we had back then.“

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#175

Post by _y5hn »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #148
_y5hn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Not here. Diabetes and heart disease are both associated with worse outcomes for COVID. That said I don't think it's realistic to expect more than a few people try to become more fit to stave off COVID.

There's no evidence "becoming fit staves off Covid".

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#176

Post by rsfern »

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.

It seems unlikely at this point that there are unforeseen long term side effects. Historically vaccine side effects have emerged within a few weeks to months of vaccination [0].

I’m not personally ruling it out 100%, but is there even a proposed mechanism through which vaccine side effects could emerge like years later?

[0]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/vaccines-...

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#177

Post by busymom0 »

ashildr wrote: post #174
busymom0 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Reminder of the Thalidomide drug Bringing up Thalidomide / Contergan in a discussion on current medicine is the best indication that you don‘t have the least idea on the topic. All rules and tests that eg the Biontech-Vaccine had to pass (and has passed) have been installed _after_ and _because_ of the Thalidomide catastrophy. Bringing up the topic of Thalidomide exactly disproves any point you are thinking you mak…

The whole "you don't know shit because X can't happen again because it happened before" is exactly how X+1 happens. That logic gets used by intellectual authoritarians to make claims only to eventually fall flat on their face.

Here are more recent examples:

https://www.medicalerroraustralia.com/medical-disasters/10-w...

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#178

Post by grepfru_it »

twelve40 wrote: post #143
lamontcg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospitals are collapsing again, we can't ignore it. Get people vaccinated. Or else we're going to wind up "flattening the curve" again until we finally burn through enough dead people that everyone is effectively either recovered or immunized and then the endemic burden should be an order of magnitude lower. And hospitals only have so much throughput going through the ICU and into the morgue that they can sustain, wh…

> Get people vaccinated Repeating this line doesn't really work anymore. I vaccinated myself and my whole family months ago, my county has ~80% full vaccination rate, anyone and everyone who could and wanted to, got a shot already. Yet, there are 90 million people in this country that don't give a shit and will not vaccinate. Worse, soon the vaccine will probably wear out, and then the whole country will have to be c…

>don’t give a shit and will not vaccinate

Why would they if they just recovered from covid?

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#179

Post by grepfru_it »

graderjs wrote: post #118
lamontcg wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The immune system already does that and its the responsibility of CD4+ helper T-cells. The 2009 pandemic was significantly blunted because people born before 1957 had partial immunity from cross-reactive T-cells to H1N1 which was endemic in humans from 1918-1957. So after mutating in probably billions of pigs for 50 years the H1N1 virus that hopped back to humans was still sufficiently recognized by the immune system…

Oh yeah definitely of course the immune system that already does that, the idea is just enhance its ability so that everyone has sort of Best in class defence against these viruses. it can be kind of slow on an individual level, but on a population level you will have some people who have evolved better defenses, or more resilient immune systems. If we can share that around that's the idea. It's very interesting thou…

I think that was the idea that spurred monoclonal antibodies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody

Re: Vaccination blunts, but does not defeat Delta

#180

Post by grepfru_it »

lamontcg wrote: post #116
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?

> Where's my cherry flavored Covidquil? Where's my portable cold fusion generator? Vaccines just fucking work right now. Much like wind and solar. Effective antivirals are like thorium nukes and carbon capture. Very hard problems that nobody can adequately solve.

https://sanotize.com/
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