Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 354 posts

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#221

Post by armchairhacker »

NalNezumi wrote: post #123
hackingforfun wrote: post #73

I'm pretty surprised to still see some misinformation in some of the posts here. I have a friend who has a PhD in molecular biology and she described the mRNA vaccines to me. The mRNA is only a piece of the spike protein, and does not enter the cell's nucleus. It only interacts with the cytoplasm. Normally, if a cell had to deal with an actual SARS-CoV-2 virus, it would be dealing with the spike proteins and the enti…

I have never ever on HN seen an argument about DNA and mRNA, but then again I don't follow the conversation too much. As it seems like you know someone with correct background on the subject, so I wanted to ask you something I've always wanted to know as a young,(late 20s) healthy person with no existing risky precondition in this pandemic: Why should I take a vaccine, when it is now known that vaccinated people can…

The risk of suffering long-term damage from getting covid unvaccinated is way higher than the risk of any long-term side effects from the vaccine or getting Covid vaccinated. Even if the former is low, there's no downside to getting the vaccine anyways.

I can kind of understand if someone is avoiding the vaccine and also isolating themselves to protect against the virus, but I really just don't understand the risk-benefit analysis where the vaccine is too risky but catching Covid isn't.

Also, the risk of catching Covid unvaccinated may not be that low. But, the risk of any serious vaccine side-effects, or catching Covid vaccinated, is super low. IIRC Israel did a study and, the amount of breakthrough cases requiring hospitalization for under 40 was 0.3 per 100k, and the amount of people suffering myocarditis and other vaccine complications is in the double-digits, despite vaccinations being in the billions.

We know little about the vaccine, but we also know little about the effects of social media, random pollutants, etc. And that stuff is applied without your consent, and unlike the vaccine that stuff probably is harmful long-term.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#222

Post by nradov »

datameta wrote: post #209
nradov wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have the technology to stimulate that accurately in software. It would have to be done using transgenic animal models and/or human tissue cultures. Essentially it would be a form of gain-of-function research, and there are concerns that a lab accident could result in an even more dangerous variant escaping into the wild.

With ML-assisted drug discovery in, say, kinase inhibitors we search the molecule variation space for test candidates. What stops us from applying this to the protein scale by folding binding sites to discover variant candidates that would be more virulent? I'd like to understand this better.

Sure you can explore the solution space in software to identify candidates but at some point you have to create a live virus and see how it actually performs.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#223

Post by dgfitz »

mrtesthah wrote: post #169
sim_card_map wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true. There's an Oxford Covid risk calculator, and for an average 20 something person, the risk of hospitalization is ~0.002%. https://qcovid.org/

Has this been updated for the delta variant which is estimated be twice as likely to cause hospitalization? https://www.politico.eu/article/delta-coronavirus-variant-do...

So ~0.004% then. Are you suggesting that is statistically significant?

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#224

Post by SamTwardowski »

NalNezumi wrote: post #123
hackingforfun wrote: post #73

I'm pretty surprised to still see some misinformation in some of the posts here. I have a friend who has a PhD in molecular biology and she described the mRNA vaccines to me. The mRNA is only a piece of the spike protein, and does not enter the cell's nucleus. It only interacts with the cytoplasm. Normally, if a cell had to deal with an actual SARS-CoV-2 virus, it would be dealing with the spike proteins and the enti…

I have never ever on HN seen an argument about DNA and mRNA, but then again I don't follow the conversation too much. As it seems like you know someone with correct background on the subject, so I wanted to ask you something I've always wanted to know as a young,(late 20s) healthy person with no existing risky precondition in this pandemic: Why should I take a vaccine, when it is now known that vaccinated people can…

>Why should I take a vaccine, when it is now known that vaccinated people can still spread the virus, there's an almost neglible chance of side effect, and with no information about possible long-term side effect. If the chance of me getting hospitalized is so low to begin with, what's the benefit of the vaccine to me.

Simply put: get the vaccine or we will make you suffer.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#225

Post by [deleted] »

charbonneau wrote: post #157
hackingforfun wrote: post #73

I'm pretty surprised to still see some misinformation in some of the posts here. I have a friend who has a PhD in molecular biology and she described the mRNA vaccines to me. The mRNA is only a piece of the spike protein, and does not enter the cell's nucleus. It only interacts with the cytoplasm. Normally, if a cell had to deal with an actual SARS-CoV-2 virus, it would be dealing with the spike proteins and the enti…

> I'm pretty surprised to still see some misinformation in some of the posts here. Continues with anecdote of conversation with anonymous molecular biology PhD. - Isn't that the optimal breeding ground for misinformation?

[deleted]

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#226

Post by marcosdumay »

mfer wrote: post #89
meheleventyone wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's got to be something like how much of the population are getting sick. I presume when a disease is endemic you have a fairly steady rate of illness and death taking into account seasonal variation. Whereas right now covid still seems to be spreading quickly through the population and causing large numbers to get sick at once.

When I think about this I think of two parts of it. First, there are other endemics. Influenza is one of them. In the US along millions get sick from it and tens of thousands die each year. We live within that realm. There will be people with different degrees of risk and levels for being ok with going back to "normal" as COVID-19 is just out there. How do we decided (as groups in the world population) what we are ok…

> Second, what do we do to proactively push the population towards endemic?

Vaccinate people.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#227

Post by graeme »

bsaul wrote: post #133
graeme wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the original acute concern. Long run we still don’t know if it will have effects on brain function etc. There are some disturbing lines of evidence on this front. For example the UK biobank showing grey matter loss post infection including in mild cases: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v...

i remember this study, but i'm surprised we don't have more papers on the same topic since. It seemed like a pretty big news, and yet i don't hear people recommending mass-vaccination mention it. Any idea why ?

My guess is it takes a while to do this sort of study. UK biobank was unusual in having such a large database of scans.

Vaccination should reduce the risks. But there was a nurses study that 19% of the breakthrough cases had lasting effects. So I would not expect vaccination to eliminate the risk if a breakthrough happens.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#228

Post by dfawcus »

grey413 wrote: post #219
dfawcus wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was aware of that. From what I read, the mRNA vaccines manages to get the spike in to the cytoplasm, just like the real virus, so it to that extent mimics what is desired. Whereas the viral vector (a different delivery technology) used for the AZ vaccine manages to get the spike in to the nucleus, due to picking the "wrong" vector, so to that extents it could be said not to mimic what is desired. There was speculat…

mRNA vaccines deliver mRNA to the target cell, via merging a lipid bubble into the cell membrane and dumping the contents into the cytoplasm. The mRNA is then translated into a specially designed variant of the spike protein that is embedded facing out of the cell membrane. As it happens, the physical details of embedded protein translation means that the spike proteins never see the cytoplasm at all, being restricte…

Thanks.

That is what I read, just that I couldn't remember the term "endoplasmic reticulum", and so used "cytoplasm" as a hand wavy stand in.

:-)

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#229

Post by bart_spoon »

polote wrote: post #188
mrtesthah wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well the same can be said of the vaccine. In both case we have no idea. See https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19... * History tells us that severe side effects are extremely rare, and if they if do occur, they usually happen within the first two months. * COVID-19 vaccine technologies have been studied for years and used in other treatments without issue. * The vaccine development process, fr…

The same can be said of unknown longterm side effects of covid

Not really. There are multiple instances of viruses, such as HIV, Chickenpox, and HPV, which are known to cause increased health risks or outright disease years and often decades after the initial infection appears to fade.

There are also many instances of "long" Covid we are already seeing in which people struggle with lingering symptoms, sometimes severe, for months after initially getting ill.

And in children, the rare but serious phenomenon that's been called MISC, usually occurs weeks or months after the initial Covid infection has subsided.

You are right that we don't know the long term side-effects of Covid, or of vaccination, and won't for quite some time. But what evidence we do have based on previous experiences with vaccines and viruses, as well as what we have already observed in Covid infections and vaccinations, makes it clear that vaccines are a far less risky prospect than the disease is.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#230

Post by tinus_hn »

inglor_cz wrote: post #215
tinus_hn wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually do know that we can not get permanent robust immune response to COVID-19 from the vaccines that are in use because the statistics are already there, immunity starts wearing off after about 6 months. That’s why the new push is for ‘booster shots’.

To which degree is this statistic confounded by the Delta mutation emerging? The original strain upon which the current vaccines are based has basically died out and Delta carries a lot more viral load (400x or so?), which changes the game a bit. In comparison, smallpox virus was pretty much the same across centuries, so it was comparably easy to target and eradicate. No animal hosts helped, too.

Covid-19 is impossible to eradicate as it spreads through animals, forget that idea.

Pfizer themselves have performed studies that show immunity declining. I do know that they tell from the levels of antibodies seen in blood but I don’t know if the effect of variants has been measured (if it can be measured at all without unethical experiments).

Post reply on HN