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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

#911

Post by bananabiscuit »

Nursie wrote: post #848
bananabiscuit wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because they are out of patent.

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

#912

Post by asimpletune »

Is it just me or does it make perfect sense that the selection pressure would push the virus to do this? After all, it’s competing against other variants, as well as counter measures by other human beings.

I imagine even that the cold and flu may have started out thousands of years ago as much more deadly, even fatal, but that over the millennia the same process occurred.

Perhaps in the case of COVID the process is just greatly accelerated due to air travel, as well as existential threats to the virus’s well being, like vaccines and lockdowns.

Is there some kind of law in biology that predicts contains become more virulent and less deadly over time?

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

#913

Post by desine »

nikolay wrote: post #821
johnisgood wrote: post #788

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…

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!

It's not because of mask mandates, it's because every politician is invested in pfizer and moderna, it's because pharma has massive lobbying power, and because pharma companies make up much of the advertising revenue of the news networks in the USA

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

#914

Post by dragontamer »

bananabiscuit wrote: post #911
Nursie wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody stands to make any money of off them. LOL. Because Ivermectin and HCQ somehow aren't Big Pharma products? Hilarious.

Because they are out of patent.

So is Dexamethasone, except you know... Dexamethasone works vs COVID19 and isn't snake oil.

Why don't you research the RECOVERY trial? They tested plenty of cheap medicine, and some of it even worked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECOVERY_Trial

There's no reason to believe in the snake oil salesmen. Just look at the good research that was done and pick out the actually useful stuff with positive results.

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

#915

Post by Nursie »

015a wrote: post #886
Nursie wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

sigh.

In which case all medicine is experimental, because it's all being studied all the time.

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

#916

Post by robbedpeter »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #780
robbedpeter wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two primary factors driving virus evolution - not killing the host and defeating the host's immune system. Killing the host, at least with humans, is an evolutionary dead end, since we go out of our way to quarantine the body and destroy or permanently confine it. In humans, viruses typically evolve to be less severe and more infectious over time. There's significant evidence that omicron is less severe. At…

No human virus is known to have evolved to become more contagious and less virulent. Zero. None. Unfortunately this is just a (comforting!) myth. Feel free to provide an example virus if you think I'm wrong!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41576-018-0055-5

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/11/26/1413339111?wit...

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200918-why-some-deadly-...

https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/JVI.00694-10

Covid related links have saturated any searches on viruses in general, and the doom&gloom "reporting"is at the top. There are a lot of papers and examples of what I'm talking about, though, it's just irritating to get at.

Gain of function research gives us rapid and repeatable demonstrations of vital evolution. Viruses that don't kill their hosts and develop more and better mechanisms of infection or evasion of immune system defenses outcompete other variants. There are a lot of examples in animal viruses, but Sars and hiv are examples of recent relevance.

To be clear, I'm not making the claim that this happens to all viruses - evolution doesn't work like that. A virus that leaves you mostly functional for a few months before it kills you is not at all an unlikely scenario. Viruses also exist concurrent with other variants, and they can mutate rapidly. There's no hard and fast rule, just influences and constraints that can manifest as trends.

In my opinion, the ideal outcome for sars-cov2 at this point is that a super mild variant evolves that will confer robust natural immunity while spreading fast enough to prevent the spread of other variants. It could become more deadly - I hope it won't, and what we know of virus evolutionary pressures in humans hints that we could get lucky.

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

#917

Post by wombatmobile »

isignal wrote: post #895
wombatmobile wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

This is incorrect, cost of vaccines is not the only bottleneck. For example, India is currently manufacturing more vaccines than can can be sold to other countries. The bottleneck is apparently people on ground to get shots into arms. Most of the developed countries also used mRNA vaccines which needed low temperature refrigeration. Such facilities are cost prohibitive in poorer countries. Beyond all this, there’s a…

Yes, it is the total cost of vaccination programs ie the cost of the molecules + the cost of the rollout infrastructure.

Vaccine hesitancy can’t be measured until a country has reached the point where everybody who wants to be inoculated has been, and there are still excess supplies.

Australia is at 90% and still increasing, with plenty of incentives still left to try.

The most effective drivers have been the new variants - delta and now omicron. Each time the infection rate has soared, the take up rate for vax has followed commensurately.

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

#918

Post by Accacin »

jiggawatts wrote: post #802
bognition wrote: post #9

There are a few important bits here: First: "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." and second: "At the same time, the vaccine may offer 70 perce…

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…

Hi, I'll admit I didn't fully understand that, and your explanation helped. I'll also use this for when my friends and family miss the point too, thanks :)

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

#919

Post by raxxorrax »

mikeyjk wrote: post #835
tekknik wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yay, more injections of experimental vaccines!

What level of testing would make these vaccines non experimental in your mind, and what other vaccine do you know that has had that level of rigour applied? I'm genuinely curious

The timeframe of two years is simply not enough to be entirely sure, even with the large sample size. It is unlikely to have side effects, but the demand on proof is extensive and that isn't necessarily bad.

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

#920

Post by raxxorrax »

croes wrote: post #50
bognition wrote: post #9

There are a few important bits here: First: "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." and second: "At the same time, the vaccine may offer 70 perce…

Don't forget this part: "South Africa has a quite high seroprevalence of prior infection, particularly after delta, and in some parts of South Africa up to 80 percent of people were exposed to previous infection" So it could simply be that the mild cases were previously infected, what happens to an unvaccinated without prior infection is a different story.

South Africa didn't really have many Covid death in any wave because the population is quite young.
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