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Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#841

Post by notabee »

heavyset_go wrote: post #737
parasense wrote: post #698

I would imagine that a virus would eventually adapt/evolve to a point to where it co-exists harmoniously with the host organism. I've heard somewhere that herpes simplex virus used to have terrible symptoms, like genital blisters, but over the years the most common variant has no symptoms, and most people have no idea they have it.... and a huge proportion of human have it. I would imagine all viral contagions would…

Viral evolution can go down that path, provided there are selection pressures that select for weaker viruses. Viral evolution can also not follow that path at all. Evolution doesn't have a chosen path, and it doesn't have an end-goal. Evolution is the name that we give to the effect that chance has on genetics. The selection pressure that can select for weaker viral variants is the rapid and widespread deaths of vira…

Given all the other mammal reservoirs that Covid has found, we're just probably the most numerous one and it won't bat an eye (pun intended) if we die off.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#842

Post by Nursie »

tekknik wrote: post #834
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like the flu virus? For which doctors say that we should get every year?

Yet the flu vaccine isn’t required and social pressured, and also isn’t experimental at all. So probably a huge difference right? How many times has someone lost their job to not getting the flu vaccine?

The covid vaccines are not 'experimental' either.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#843

Post by spookthesunset »

landemva wrote: post #832
vkou wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't even get started on how our response completely decimated the working class Odd that you say this, when every blue collar place around me is having trouble hiring staff. Between stimulus checks, rising wages, and becoming way pickier about which jobs they are taking, this is the sort of thing that I would expect the working class to do when they are doing better for themselves. You know what actually decimate…

'You know what actually decimates the working class?' Is that theory or do you work a blue collar job? I was in a work truck as 'critical infrastructure' and lived it. The company owners got richer AT HOME while we kept working. And then some layoffs after the pandemic forgivable loan calendar window expired. I caught the 'rona earlier this year. I have a Dr. letter saying so. Now white collar woke-from-home wants me…

> No. I no longer consent. Go fix your own machines

Many of my blue collar friends feel the same way.

Getting bossed around by chicken shit triple vaccinated white collar workers too afraid to go into the office. They expect all expendable service class workers to do their bidding while they all “take this serious” huddled up in their fancy homes.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#844

Post by Nursie »

vmception wrote: post #548

Out of curiosity, do we really require these studies? Like it is good to have more and more sources, but wouldn't the expected outcome to be the following: - vaccines that replicated the spike protein will be less effective since omicron has a modified spike protein, because the immune system only was trained to notice the spike protein and not the payload - naturally induced immunity from prior exposure to Sars-Cov-…

> naturally induced immunity from prior exposure to Sars-Cov-2 will be more effective

This seems like a pretty big assumption TBH, and something that needs study. Is it better? How much? Why? How long does it last?

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#845

Post by wombatmobile »

tekknik wrote: post #831
wombatmobile wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mRNA vaccine technology is "agile". Yes and this means governments can quickly adapt to new variants by reformulating the vaccine, dumping old stock by "donating" it to developing nations, or dumping it, and buying new stock from big pharma. Since developing nations will always have far lower vaccination rates than first world countries, the virus will continue to mutate and proliferate outside of America and E…

> dumping old stock by "donating" it to developing nations A primary complaint is that “rich nations” hoard vaccines. doesn’t this exacerbate this?

If rich nations paid for poor nations to reach 95%+ vaccination levels, the virus would be tamed for everyone's benefit.

With the prevailing scheme, in which rich nations fund high vax levels domestically, and allow poor nations to languish, the virus is always going to have reservoirs around the world in which it can mutate, thereby requiring new rounds of vaccination in the rich countries periodically.

The total cost of vaccinating the whole world in 1 year would be far less than the cost of infinite rolling booster programs. And yet, we do the latter.

Why? That's the secret sauce of the sustainable business model.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#846

Post by jiggawatts »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #837
jiggawatts wrote: post #802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just 29% lower is nothing . NOTHING. Of all people, the YC News crowd really ought to understand that O(exp(n)) overwhelms O(1) literally exponentially. Not figuratively. Literally. If a virus variant has a constant factor reduction in its side-effects, but a higher exponential factor in infectiousness, the latter will overwhelm the former in short order, and then continue to overwhelm it even more . Exponentially. L…

That was an incredibly verbose explanation for something very simple.

It's a simple concept that about 95-99% of the general population does not understand at any level. This includes most politicians, civil planners, even scientists and medical staff.

When the pandemic first started, people were flabberghasted about how FAST! the numbers were going up. Faster and faster, new records broken every day! Meanwhile, on a logarithmic plot, it was a dead straight line. It wasn't changing, not really.

People don't "get" this. Even now, two years in, people are clinging to constant factors.

I've had similar conversations with people who just don't understand Moore's law, Nielsen's Law, etc...

I had to use pictures to explain to IT network professionals that upgrading a 15-year-old 2 Mbps site office link to 4 Mbps is hilariously under-specced when the mobile phone in my pocket can exceed 1 Gbps while I'm sitting at the bus stop. They just hadn't "grokked" that their mental models are off by orders of magnitude. They're used to x*2 instead of x*10^2.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#847

Post by emtel »

nostrademons wrote: post #642
oxymoran wrote: post #552

“ The study by Discovery Health, South Africa’s largest health insurer, of 211,000 positive coronavirus cases, of which 78,000 were attributed to omicron, showed that risk of hospital admissions among adults who contracted covid-19 was 29 percent lower than in the initial pandemic wave that emerged in March 2020.” 29% LOWER THAN OG COVID In other words, a bad cold or the flu. This is possibly our way out of this mess…

COVID is about 10x more lethal than flu across all age ranges, so if this is 29% lower than the original strain, it's still 7x more deadly than flu.

I think this is false for Edit: after looking at sources again I’m no longer quite as confident that flu is significantly worse, but covid is definitely not 10x worse for kids: https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#848

Post by Nursie »

bananabiscuit wrote: post #789
dragontamer wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you lie, or omit the truth and get caught, they will never listen to anything you say ever again. Hydroxychloroquine. Ivermectin. Yeah, right. Peddling the lies have cause these individuals to get more trust. People want their false hope and false cures, and snake oil.

The only studies that ever showed these 2 drugs to be ineffective were run on already hospitalized patients. There are plenty of small studies that showed these 2 drugs to have an effect in early treatment, but curiously, no large CRT studies that look at the effectiveness of these drugs in early treatment. Guess it’s not that important to know how many lives these drugs can save when nobody stands to make any money…

> nobody stands to make any money of off them.

LOL. Because Ivermectin and HCQ somehow aren't Big Pharma products? Hilarious.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#849

Post by s1artibartfast »

deelowe wrote: post #823
s1artibartfast wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean supply the population, this is not correct

My understanding is that the FDA is considering limited authorization in cases where there's not enough to cover all individuals.

I think that would be a first for the FDA, but I suppose it is possible.

Normally they approve based solely on safety and risk/benefit.

Sometimes products have limited approval for high risk groups, but for these reasons, not because of supply.

Pricing and availability is not their job.

Re: Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study

#850

Post by trutannus »

wombatmobile wrote: post #758
Animats wrote: post #676

Moderna is working on a vaccine targeting the Omicron variant for 2022.[1] The mRNA vaccine technology is "agile". There's a workflow from sequencing a virus to generating a candidate vaccine. It only took two days to generate the original COVID-19 vaccine. It's the clinical testing in small, then large groups that's the time consuming part. Also, the inhaled vaccines are entering clinical testing.[2] It's not like w…

> The mRNA vaccine technology is "agile". Yes and this means governments can quickly adapt to new variants by reformulating the vaccine, dumping old stock by "donating" it to developing nations, or dumping it, and buying new stock from big pharma. Since developing nations will always have far lower vaccination rates than first world countries, the virus will continue to mutate and proliferate outside of America and E…

Nothing you've said is incorrect. I have to wonder though if this dumping of old vaccines on people who wouldn't have gotten them in the first place might allow people to survive who might otherwise have not. Sure, the vaccines are not optimal, but they do reduce risk. And of course this situation isn't fair, but perhaps it's still better than the baseline conditions these folks would have had to live with.
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