Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant • Hacker News Board

Re: Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant

#361

Post by timr » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #223

fullstop wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long does it take to ramp up production? I'm at 6 months and a few days since my 2nd shot. Do I get a booster now or wait a few months in hope of an updated one?

Get a booster when you can, it is worth it. I had mine last week. We don't know if and when there will be an omicron-specific jab, and a mRNA 3rd dose cuts your chances of bad outcome (severe illness, hospitalisation) from omicron or previous variants to a lot lower than 2 doses ever did. https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1458020957457731585 https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1460191035531878405

> Get a booster when you can, it is worth it.

If you are under 65 and not immune compromised, there's essentially no evidence for this claim.

If you are either of those things, there's some evidence that it takes your risk of severe illness (already low after vaccination), and divides it by another factor of ~20 [0]. That's great, but it's a tiny absolute effect, and we shouldn't over-sell it.

If you're under 65, there's essentially no evidence supporting widespread use of boosters, and the CDC ACIP was against recommending it for all people [1] (but was ignored by politicians). The WHO continues to ask rich countries not to give boosters to healthy young people, given lack of evidence and supply constraints. [2]

Not incidentally: your two tweets discuss infection, not severe illness. All current evidence is that you're well-protected against severe disease after two shots. Paper in the lancet as of last week found that boosters had a marginal impact on cellular immunity, with the primary benefit being antibody response. [3] Again, fine, but we know that antibody response wanes over time. It's completely unsurprising that you'd have more antibodies two weeks after vaccination. You'll have far lower antibodies 9 months from your third dose, too.

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114255

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e2.htm

[2] https://www.who.int/news/item/04-10-2021-interim-statement-o...

[3]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

> a mRNA 3rd dose cuts your chances of bad outcome (severe illness, hospitalisation) from omicron or previous variants to a lot lower than 2 doses ever did.

Literally no evidence for this statement. We simply don't know anything about Omicron and boosters. This is why this press release from Pfizer is on the front page of HN right now.

Re: Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant

#362

Post by jerf » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

mentat wrote: post #185

stolenmerch wrote: post #146

If I'm reading this correctly, this is "protection against severe disease" and has little to do with transmission. The National Airport Data from Israel seems to suggest "the absolute number of infected individuals in the Vaccinated (boosted) group is likely to be at least as high as in the Unvaccinated" [0] So it seems to me that as long as we all remain obsessed with case numbers and not actual hospitalizations and…

"Remain obsessed" with transmission of a highly contagious virus that has shown significant ability to mutate at scale? That sure seems worth being obsessed about. When it mutates to spread past all current defenses then consistently kill because we failed to stop current spread it will indeed be "depressing".

"a highly contagious virus that has shown significant ability to mutate at scale"

That doesn't uniquely describe COVID. It describes pretty much every virus you have heard of.

The gradient for viruses trends strongly towards trading severity for contagiousness. They do not generally "mutate past all defenses and kill", the generally "mutate past defenses and give slight to non-existent symptoms", for several reasons, the two most important of which is that killing means they can't spread anymore, and at the Pareto frontier (which viruses live on all the time), contagiousness and severity are in active conflict with each other; energy put into one comes right out of the budget for the other. And viruses have no particular interests in making you ill... they want to spread.

You've been amped up to a level of fear so severe for viruses that if your fear was accurate, there would be no multicellular life on Earth, because highly contagious and severe viruses would kill anything that provided such a big target. So, good news! Your fear is not accurate. You can verify yourself by checking your environment for multicellular organisms that have not been killed by viruses.

Re: Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant

#363

Post by Brybry » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

millettjon wrote: post #309

This paper from Africa Health Research Institute shows a 41x reduction in effectiveness of pfizer vaccine for omicron. https://www.ahri.org/omicron-incompletely-escapes-immunity-i... https://www.ahri.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/MEDRXIV-2021...

This preprint also shows reduced antibody neutralization of omicron in comparison to delta (including for double vaccinated + previous infection).

Note the sample sizes for all these studies is small. 12 participants for the AHRI paper and 8 to 20 per group for this one.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.07.21267432v...

Re: Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant

#364

Post by jmnicolas » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

swayvil wrote: post #351

jmnicolas wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Expert on tv explained it just yesterday.. 3 shots is actually what you need for most vaccines and is the common procedure for most if you remember.. The same so called experts that will say that now you need the 4th dose, the 5th etc. It's now obvious that it's a vaccine as a service. Pfizer ceo's hinted at it last year, saying it would probably be recurring every 6 months.

Checking out your replies that got flagged and killed. Mob style censorship is alive and well here.

It's a lost battle, the majority on HN decided to suspend doubt about the vaccines and the crooks at Pfizer (look at their judiciary past, the name crook is warranted).

It's funny how smart people can read regularly articles that show that 90% of scientific papers aren't reproducible (so it's actually not science) then will proceed to trust blindly the next scientific paper they read.

Re: Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant

#365

Post by tootie » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

nsxwolf wrote: post #128

Why haven’t they updated the vaccine? I thought one of the major benefits of this technology was the ease with which you can modify them.

Not an expert, but I think the problem is in the testing and distribution. Just from a public health POV, it's hard enough tracking who is getting doses of what and all the public communication about what to do that it really needs and deal with hate tweets from Rand Paul. Synthesizing the vaccine could possibly be done in a week.

Re: Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant

#366

Post by hef19898 » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:01 PM UTC

orbifold wrote: post #337

hef19898 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has quite some experience in running operations based on data, numbers and metrics the German approach to COVID on that front alone really puzzled me from the beginning. First the incidence of 50 that they pulled out of their ass for contact tracing, which was ignored basically the next day. Then the fact that resources weren't really increased to improve contract traceability. Then the decision to use…

It tells you a lot of the level of expertise in a country, if a physicist like Viola Priesemann previously not involved in any kind of disease modelling is able to be a significant voice in the national conversation. The 'experts' that are listened to are either numerically illiterate like Drosten or non-experts in disease control like Priesemann. Moreover the actual tools and quality of code that is used to model th…

You really think Drosten and Priesemann decide measures? That's politicians, the government decided on it. If I remember well, scientists were worried when hospitalization was declared the only truth.

And the RKI predicted the forth basically down to a T, they were a couple of weeks of so. Doesn't matter because they predicted, along with Drosten, already during summer.

Re: Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant

#367

Post by Gwarzo » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:01 PM UTC

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #145

silent_cal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the point I'm trying to make - it's just advertising, and you're all acting like it's an announcement from a public health authority.

TBH, this feels like a libertarian mindset of "Everyone will try to lie and cheat you!". Why should they lie? If their data had something different to their press release, lying and then getting caught (e.g. by a whistleblower) would damage their reputation. If their data shows it's bad, as responsible scientists why shouldn't they come out with the truth to protect the general public, and say "We'll continue work on…

Phizer is immune to bad reputation and they know it.

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

Phizer holds single largest criminal fine in human history at 1.3$ Billion USD (to my knowledge). They have many reasons to lie; while I'm not suggesting they are (I have no idea how I would determine truth from falsehood in the realm of scientific information) it's quite ignorant to make the statement "Why would they lie". They would lie because it's something innate to humans and Phizer is no exception. They stand to make ludicrous amounts of money if boosters become mandated - now boosters may ultimately be the best option for the protection of human life! But this doesn't mean we shouldn't be incredibly skeptical of every word that comes from this organization.

While I am fully vaccinated (ironically with 2x Phizer), I am and will remain hesitant at accepting information provided by pharmaceutical companies at face value until the day I'm dead.

Re: Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant

#368

Post by freeflight » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:01 PM UTC

nostrebored wrote: post #158

logicchains wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting, this differs from recent results suggesting that boosting with vaccines derived from the original Wuhan variant is relatively less effective against newer variants like delta: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.12.21261952v... .

Well the problem suggested by other research is that when vaccinated people are infected with a functionally different strain they don’t appear to create new antibodies. This is consistent with other research showing that people who are vaccinated then infected are more likely to get reinfected than those who were simply infected and recovered. The alternative outlook here is that vaccinated people are more likely to…

> Vaccine formulations that have been developed against SARS-CoV not only fail to protect animal models of aged populations, but also result in immunopathology in younger populations, where SARS disease is enhanced in vaccinated groups that are subsequently challenged with SARS-CoV.

> In addition, vaccines generate memory immune responses to specific pathogens, and no vaccine formulations have been developed that are effective against multiple CoVs. Due to the diversity of BatCoVs, it seems unlikely that current therapeutic strategies targeting specific SARS-CoV or MERSCoV antigens will be efficacious against future coronaviruses that emerge into the human population.

That's from 2019 [0] about the original SARS-CoV, I'm not aware of any research breakthroughs, since then and now, that suddenly made SARS-CoV vaccines more viable compared to back then.

All I see is how there was suddenly a massive political needs for vaccines, sold with unrealistic tales about sterile heard immunity, and an absolute insistence how side-effects are impossible.

Now we've entered a phase were big chunks of the world still ain't vaccinated, but the original round of vaccinations are already running out, with death streaks in elderly homes, so now "boosters" are supposed to be the solution.

And that's with the vaccination campaigns not being able to keep up in many places, even right at the source, in Germany [1].

[0] https://sci-hub.ru/10.1080/17460441.2019.1581171

[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/dachau/dachau-corona-im...

Re: Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant

#369

Post by beervirus » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

stolenmerch wrote: post #146

If I'm reading this correctly, this is "protection against severe disease" and has little to do with transmission. The National Airport Data from Israel seems to suggest "the absolute number of infected individuals in the Vaccinated (boosted) group is likely to be at least as high as in the Unvaccinated" [0] So it seems to me that as long as we all remain obsessed with case numbers and not actual hospitalizations and…

I find it encouraging. A virus that’s endemic and doesn’t kill people who are vaccinated is not a big deal. Like yeah it would be great if we eradicated it, but this is really fine.

Re: Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant

#370

Post by Retric » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #299

peter422 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is little evidence right now that immunity through a natural infection is better than immunity from a vaccine. Given the strains circulating now I don’t think your concern is valid. Vaccines are better and less risky than having your naive immune system deal with covid. Maybe that will change with a future strain (though I’d bet against it), but it isn’t the case now.

> There is little evidence right now that immunity through a natural infection is better than immunity from a vaccine. This is a very strong claim to make without any evidence or proof. To the contrary, there is strong evidence that natural infection brings considerably better immunity than any vaccination does. [0] Study analyzed: > 2.5 million people in Israel, spanning March 1st 2020 to August 14th 2021. Full stud…

Different is not the same as better. Multiple studies show benefits for each under different conditions such as time since exposure and consistency of protection. The best fit for available evidence seems to be that getting COVID (or at least a positive test result) doesn’t guarantee a robust long term immunity for every individual. But it can result in a better long term immunity for many.

This is why it’s recommended for people to get vaccinated even after infection. They might already have robust immunity, or they might not. The vaccines are so incredibly safe and cheap it’s simply not worth the risk.