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

washingtonpost.com

881–890 of 1001 posts

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

#881

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing and clinical trials!

It would have been much faster if regulators and ethicists hadn’t been so squeamish about challenge trials. In order to save dozens of lives that might have been lost in challenge trials, we sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives so that we could wait for more ethically-sound vaccine trials to complete.

Were 100,000 of lives lost because of a delayed vaccine? Considering the third world hasn't had access to the vaccine and death rates are lower with delta I'm not sure skipping trials would have done much good.

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

#882

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…

Moderna CEO equity sales for the last couple years. Nothing to see here, no reason to distrust them pushing endless boosters: https://finance.yahoo.com/screener/insider/BANCEL%20STEPHANE...

Execs are paid mostly in stock, and it's a bad idea to leave all your money in one stock basket. Seeing how they are mostly round numbers on a regular schedule, it's probably a https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rule-10b5-1.asp sale on a schedule.

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

#883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ethical problems and risk of mutations Hopefully there's no direct work on them for exactly those reasons.

Certain restrictions and de facto vaccine mandates are also arguably ethically challenging. So... we're already there.

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

#884

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-…

Who needs scientific research and data when you have the HN comments section

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

#885
post #844

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?

There's a lot of research on it actually and ZDoggMD and Vinay Prasad MPH summarize it a bit in their latest collaboration.

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

#886
post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure they are; federal, state, and private entities are absolutely running active experiments on the broad safety and efficacy of these vaccines against new variants. That makes them "experimental".

We've got enough data to reasonably assert that they're safe. That doesn't mean they aren't experimental.

Its like saying gravity is a theory. It sure is. That doesn't mean my phone won't break when I drop it.

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

#887
post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before 2020, no mRNA technology platform (drug or vaccine) had been authorized for use in humans, so there was a risk of unknown effects.[79] The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic required faster production capability of mRNA vaccines, made them attractive to national health organisations, and led to debate about the type of initial authorization mRNA vaccines should get (including emergency use authorization or expanded acce…

Are you talking about Pandemrix? https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps... says there was a lot of follow up on that and no link to narcolepsy was found

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

#888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No vaccine would have been authorized on billions of people before 2020 if it had such prevalent incidence of peri- and myocarditis! But now it's authorized even of toddlers, which have even higher chance for future heart issues! And all this, because politicians didn't have the balls to keep the face mask mandates!

There have been a few (I at least found one case study in the literature, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34664804/ ) people to have died from vaccine-related myocarditis, but my impression from skimming a handful of relevant review papers and news articles is that the vast majority of vaccine-related myocarditis cases were mild and temporary, and that those were still extremely rare among vaccine recipients. By comp…

You're not wrong, but neither is the person you're responding to. You responded with logic for why the vaccine was a good idea, while they only talked about what was typical in the past. Past American medical philosophy has mostly been dictated by an attitude of "do no harm" rather than "optimize for least harm". These yield very different recommendations.

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

#889

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…

Aren't we likely to get animal reservoirs anyway with how easily it has spread to cats, etc.?

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

#890

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…

> I've read some where the common cold was probably a pandemic virus originally, and it mutated to a common cold we have today, and we mutually evolved to deal with the common cold. Something like that...

A factor that comes into play is the following. Diseases tend to be less dangerous to children. When a new disease emerges, no-one has immunity to it, so there's plenty of adults who may get it more severely. But, after a certain point, the people being born are exposed to that disease when they are young, where it won't affect them as badly.

This can look like the disease getting milder, but it's just that after a while most people will experience it when young when they will get milder effects from it. And after that point they'll have some immunity for it.

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