Live data from Hacker News

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

science.org

261–270 of 354 posts

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

#261
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I never thought it was logically sound, and my impression is that the the data has borne that out, basically all along (and that it was quite valuable to have Sweden and New Zealand as the two outlier examples for what it looked like to handle the pandemic especially poorly and especially well). A recent example with some hard numbers: "Sweden has recorded more COVID-19 cases per capita than most countri…

>roughly 11 out of every 100 people in Sweden have been diagnosed with COVID-19, compared with 9.4 out of every 100 in the UK and 7.4 per 100 in Italy If the goal is to shoot for herd immunity, then you would need 40-60% of population to have antibodies. No way to get from A -> B without people 'catching it' At some point it needs to be accepted that Covid is now endemic and is 'never going away'. Trying to stave it…

Why jump to an assumption that there's a dark profit motive here? Isn't that what has led to people clinging to snake oil miracle cures like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin?

Certainly there was never any profit motive for anyone (except maybe Amazon and Uber Eats) when people were encouraging to stay home, or wear improvised masks.

In any case, there is lots of study going on in this area— it's not like Pfizer and friends have somehow squelched research into it, particularly when the makers of the other drugs under investigation stand to make a giant windfall from a successful result:

https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/...

Yes it's endemic and we're all just going to get it now. But getting it is much, much less bad for the vaccinated than the unvaccinated, and at least as a parent of young kids, I know I won't be rushing them out to a pox party until there's an approved vaccine they can take first in order to prepare.

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

#262
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annual flu jabs aren't exactly uncommon. Obviously the mechanism isn't quite the same but there's no real reason to expect a high chance of issues at that rate of revaccination.

I wouldn't exactly call a comparison between gene therapy "isn't quite the same". Flu shots contain inactivated/weakened flu virus (depending on the version), to the presence of which/antigens the body reacts by creating antibodies. RNA vaccines are a different technology, which transfect (reprogram in IT speak) your own cells to produce spike proteins similar to the ones sars-cov-2 does (the consensus seems to be th…

That’s not how mRNA vaccines work.

mRNA isn’t gene therapy, it induces cells primarily the dendritic cells of your immune system to produce antigens and their antibodies.

Dendritic cells are essentially your body’s CSI they roam around Hoovering stuff that is floating in your body and analyzing it.

The mRNA is picked up through phagocytosis, is decoded by the ribosome and the cell begins to produce antigens.

The cells in your body then attack the antigens with proteasomes, once the antigens are broken down they’ll be presented in the cell membrane of the dendritic cells for other immune cells to sample and produce antibodies for.

This is really not that different than how deactivated virus or protein based vaccines work, dendritic cells swallow them up analyze them, break down the antigens and present the evidence to the “cops” that then go and hunt down the baddies…

The mRNA vaccine doesn’t hijacks the cells of your body in the same way as viruses do, it doesn’t interact with your DNA or nucleus the same way that retroviruses or well actual gene therapy do.

I really don’t understand why you are spreading this misinformation.

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

#263

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…

> The mRNA is only a piece of the spike protein The mRNA produces a piece of the spike protein once inside the cell, it’s not the protein itself.

Yes, thank you for correcting this.

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't exactly call a comparison between gene therapy "isn't quite the same". Flu shots contain inactivated/weakened flu virus (depending on the version), to the presence of which/antigens the body reacts by creating antibodies. RNA vaccines are a different technology, which transfect (reprogram in IT speak) your own cells to produce spike proteins similar to the ones sars-cov-2 does (the consensus seems to be th…

>your own cells to produce spike proteins similar to the ones sars-cov-2 does Does this destroy the cell used to make the spike proteins? Or does your immune system destroy the cells that made spike proteins?

No, it doesn’t work like that mRNA isn’t a virus or virus like it doesn’t hijacks the cell. The mRNA fragments are picked up by dendritic cells and antigens are produced. The antigens (and the mRNA itself) are then attacked by special proteins within your cells that are designed to destroy foreign or malformed proteins and the fragments of those destroyed antigens are then presented in the cell membrane for T and B cells to inspect and produce antibodies against.

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

#265

I was unaware Isreal repaired their relationship with Pfizer. Last I saw Israel was trying to stiff Pfizer for 2.5 million doses and Pfizer execs were calling Israel a 'banana republic' and were going to cut them off entirely.

Citation needed

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

#266
post #44

Great, let's degrade our immune systems in an over reaction to this by vaccinating every five months in a never ending saga.

Do you have any source for the claim that any of the vaccines degrade your immune system?

This suggests it might not be a sure thing: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33959318/

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

#267
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wearing a helmet in a car is a PITA. Getting vaccinated causes literally no ongoing inconvenience 24-36 hours later. It's effectively a cost-free intervention with enormous upside in terms of protection from death and hospitalization. Helmets are better compared to interventions like masks and social distancing, as they must be used constantly. Edit: taking your analogy less literally, it seems the issue here is the…

I was comparing the helmet to the seatbelt. So the comparison between helmet an seat-belt is not ok, but the comparison between the seat-belt and the vaccine is ok ?

See my edit.

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

#268
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We might also see the first batch of medicines appear in 2022, if we can successfully prevent ICU visits with effective medicines for starters, that would mean a lot to healthcare professionals worldwide.

Is there any actual development here? It's definitely not a given that we can do this.

While obviously complicated, Pfizer is working on a promising medication and I know of a dutch trial using antibodies that’s starting a next phase.

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

#269
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the rapid and informative reply. I appreciate it (esp when the topic is a bit politicized right now) I'm not from US so I haven't checked the stats closely for those states. My current city of residence is Tokyo. Afaik right now hospitalization seems quite bad, and there's no strict lockdown. I'm trying to work from home and dodge rush hours as much as possible to reduce the risk for now. Do you have an…

> But last I heard the vaccine is not that effective to Delta variant. It is not as effective as it was against earlier variants when it comes to preventing you from getting infected with COVID, but it is still very effective at preventing you from getting seriously ill or dying from COVID. COVID is likely heading to endemic status where it is something we all get now and then, but we all have immunity from previous…

As someone going through a second infection now, I hope that’s not the case. It isn’t as bad as the first time so far but it’s still no fun. I’m a healthy 33 year old.

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

#270
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indiana currently has about 44% of overall population vaccinated (3.0M out of 6.8M). Since January the state has recorded the following numbers of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths: [1] Unvaccinated Vaccinated C 278,508 6,740 H 16,322 226 D 5,709 78 (The article did not provide a full breakdown by age, but did note that Indiana’s vaccinated population skews older and would have higher baseline risk for com…

I'm not trying to deny that the vaccine has a positive effect, but this data as presented (aggregated across the entire year) is extremely misleading. Here's why: 1) The infection/hospitalization/death rates were highest last winter, and relatively few people were vaccinated during the peak of the infection 2) A large proportion of the people in the Unvaccinated column here were infected long before we reached the cu…

More recent data would also be good for reflecting any impact from delta becoming the predominant variant.

That article only provides cases from the week of August 15:

    Unvaccinated  Vaccinated
  C       13,990       1,417
Post reply on HN