I’m curious if we have data wrt to safety and approval process length. How fast (in terms of trial - size and duration) - can we go on approvals without compromising safety? Maybe a progressive approval is best. Approve for x% of population for next n months then study the data and lift limits. What if it was dangerous that we went from 0-100 with the current round of vaccines?
Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
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Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#82As far as I can tell is bad news for rare vaccine side effects. If the side effects are rare but you take a booster twice a year for 50 years, rare outcomes become much more likely. (Referring here to the high count but not that high stuff that shows up in VAERS like tinnitus.) Hopefully more vaccines are developed that become safer over time so that the danger falls faster than the repeated risk accumulates. Or perh…
> rare outcomes become much more likely. Citations needed. Alternatively if vaccine reactions depend on something like immunotype of the individual that isn't going to change, and if you tolerate the vaccine today you're likely to tolerate it for the next 50 years. Also if we apply the concept of Original Antigenic Sin, then once you've formed a healthy humoral reaction to a given antigen you're likely to continue to…
>Citations needed.
Well, like you point out it depends on how many of the rare effects are determined by variation from person to person, and how many are determined by variation from time to time. If it's all person-to-person then your chance of a rare effect drops to zero once you have a single dose, but if it's time-to-time, your chances of making it through without something weird happening drop as (P_safe)^n, i.e., exponentially.
Without any studies I know of that would tell us which was happening, we could assign a neutral prior of 50% to both cases. That leads to:
P(safe) = 1/2(1-0) + 1/2 (P_safe)^n.
Obviously this is an oversimplification, but it still leads to an exponential decay, just not to 0.
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#83I'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…
> My understanding is that eventually it will probably be a common cold, once humans have enough antibodies for it.
This can’t be right. Antibodies fade: for other coronaviruses within 6-12 months. They aren’t a thing the body keeps around forever.
Lasting immunity would be from memory T cells or memory T cells, if their long run response worked well and the virus didn’t change enough between infections.
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any source for the claim that any of the vaccines degrade your immune system?
I'm sure they can point you at some educational youtube videos.
As opposed to us educated people who point at studies that months later mysteriously fail to replicate.
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#85I'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…
That's because most people don't remember the basics from their Biology classes. I believe it's taught here in the US with the basics: DNA->RNA->Protein. The J&J vaccine does work with DNA I believe, so people may be confusing them?
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#86As far as I can tell is bad news for rare vaccine side effects. If the side effects are rare but you take a booster twice a year for 50 years, rare outcomes become much more likely. (Referring here to the high count but not that high stuff that shows up in VAERS like tinnitus.) Hopefully more vaccines are developed that become safer over time so that the danger falls faster than the repeated risk accumulates. Or perh…
People take the flu shot annually and are generally fine. Unless it’s showing that COVID-19 vaccines are much more dangerous than flu vaccines, this isn’t a big concern.
Given that it's a very different technology from flu vaccines, we shouldn't really assume that they're not. Too early to be sure of course but there are some concerning studies and anecdata already [1].
[1] https://www.scivisionpub.com/abstract-display.php?id=1811&fb...
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any reason not to increase vaccine production rates so we have the capacity to vaccinate the world population faster than every 9 months?
> Is there any reason not to increase vaccine production rates Intellectual property rights. It's not a "good" reason. But it's a reality that needs to be overcome. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/22/headlines/south_afric... Germany doesn't want the Pfizer vaccine made freely: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... and by som…
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Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
[edit] this is in response to the earlier version of your post where you wonder if the virus will ever go away: That I think is a given. Even if we had a bullet proof vaccine, you have such a large reserve of unvaccinated people across the world, plus animals, that the virus is endemic at this stage. Which isn't a problem. If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless, then it is just one more of the many endemic d…
"If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless" Note that even not vaccinated, the ultra large majority of people either are asymptomatic or don't get anything worst than a flu (which doesn't mean covid = flu in general) We seem to have forgotten that the original concern with the virus was the fact that it saturated intensive care units in hospitals, and thus prevented people from getting proper care.
Which, unfortunately, is still relevant - as seen in Louisiana and Florida. A frank and honest admission by one of the physicians on Reddit was that most people who stay in ventilator for weeks have no path to recovery but families don’t let them go. Essentially COVID patients hold up the beds for a long time as well.
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#89A question to consider is, how to we move from pandemic to endemic? COVID-19 isn't going away and will join the other endemic viruses like chicken pox, the other widely out there coronaviruses, etc.
It's got to be something like how much of the population are getting sick. I presume when a disease is endemic you have a fairly steady rate of illness and death taking into account seasonal variation. Whereas right now covid still seems to be spreading quickly through the population and causing large numbers to get sick at once.
When I think about this I think of two parts of it.
First, there are other endemics. Influenza is one of them. In the US along millions get sick from it and tens of thousands die each year. We live within that realm.
There will be people with different degrees of risk and levels for being ok with going back to "normal" as COVID-19 is just out there. How do we decided (as groups in the world population) what we are ok with?
Second, what do we do to proactively push the population towards endemic? Different groups will go toward different things with different levels of risk. There is no quantitative right answer. What things can we do and how does that affect things.
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#90I 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.
Perhaps the new government fixed things?