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Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

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Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#91

Post by mistersquid »

015a wrote: post #68
credit_guy wrote: post #19

What I don't understand is this: with tens of millions of people already vaccinated, why aren't we seeing a huge drive to collect plasma from vaccinated people with high level of antibodies? In the early days of the pandemic (about 1 year ago), I remember China sent a large amount of plasma to Italy. Why can't the US do the same now? The US is sitting on millions of AstraZeneca vaccines (that are not even approvad by…

The United States has administered 2.3 million vaccination doses. Oh, lol no, not cumulatively. I mean Yesterday. We administered 2.3 million doses in about 14 daytime hours on March 12th. Naturally, the number of vaccinated individuals grows every day. That's what vaccinations do. But the number of doses we are administering every day is growing every day. One week ago, on March 8th, we administered about 2.05 milli…

> the US was hard-hit, but the US will be one of the first countries back to normalcy, and the rest of the world will quickly follow.

Though I very much like this optimistic take, this is a bit revisionist.

Specifically, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and a few others (including parts of mainland China) have already returned to “normalcy” in that their economies are growing and that all have high public confidence that contagion has been controlled.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#92

Post by erik_seaberg »

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #87
1996 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe you are getting downvoted! This is a real risk! Relevant quote: > Under normal conditions, highly virulent strains of the virus are not selected. A highly virulent strain would kill the host before the virus would have an opportunity to transmit to other potential hosts and replicate. Thus, less virulent strains are selected. These strains are virulent enough to induce symptoms but not enough to kill…

> Under normal conditions, highly virulent strains of the virus are not selected. A highly virulent strain would kill the host before the virus would have an opportunity to transmit to other potential hosts and replicate. Thus, less virulent strains are selected. This is not correct. What is selected against is deadliness, which is not correctly referred to as "virulence." By example, the virulence of the kind of her…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virulence is how harmful it is, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infection#Contagiousness is how readily it spreads. They’re related because a lot of the harm a disease does is a side effect of using your body to become more contagious (e.g., coughing due to chest congestion).

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#93

Post by erklik »

spyspy wrote: post #53
inglor_cz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. The study may even be valid in certain conditions, but still fail to replicate elsewhere. People differ. Healthcare systems differ. Too many small details, too small to document, differ.

Journalistic interpretation of these tiny, rushed studies has also been god awful since the beginning. This is true during the best of times, but every clickbait headlines spreading disinformation during an actual pandemic should not be tolerated, especially amongst the more reputable news sources (looking at you NYT).

This right here. If people look at the actual study, they'll see the number of caveats and various exact conditions where the study proved something, whereas the media tends to pretend that those caveats or conditions don't exist therefore, the study works everywhere. That's why people don't trust science, "oh, its probably wrong again".

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#94

Post by gher-shyu3i »

Trasmatta wrote: post #25
stormbrew wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last pandemic with a death toll anything like (actually much worse than) COVID-19 is the still-ongoing HIV pandemic. It's entering its 40th year .

It's crazy to think about how HIV has killed some ~32 million people, and yet we rarely hear about it anymore. COVID probably won't even hit 4 million deaths (barring some much deadlier variant that we can't easily produce a new vaccine for).

Because any attempt to address the underlying cause of spread of HIV will be deemed as homophobic or backward in today's culture.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#95

Post by erklik »

015a wrote: post #68
credit_guy wrote: post #19

What I don't understand is this: with tens of millions of people already vaccinated, why aren't we seeing a huge drive to collect plasma from vaccinated people with high level of antibodies? In the early days of the pandemic (about 1 year ago), I remember China sent a large amount of plasma to Italy. Why can't the US do the same now? The US is sitting on millions of AstraZeneca vaccines (that are not even approvad by…

The United States has administered 2.3 million vaccination doses. Oh, lol no, not cumulatively. I mean Yesterday. We administered 2.3 million doses in about 14 daytime hours on March 12th. Naturally, the number of vaccinated individuals grows every day. That's what vaccinations do. But the number of doses we are administering every day is growing every day. One week ago, on March 8th, we administered about 2.05 milli…

>US will be one of the first countries back to normalcy

I live in Australia. The country has been to normal for a long time now, and my state specifically had a lockdown at the start of the pandemic, and since August 2020, we have not had a major lock down (except for one week in Jan 2021 due to a outbreak scare) and have been living in normalcy since then.

Just saying because it seems like people erasing and forgetting history that somehow America is the first out of this. No, many countries have done fairly well and have managed to be relatively normal.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#96

Post by XorNot »

Trasmatta wrote: post #41
monoideism wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that's > 3 million over 12 months vs 32 million over 40 years, the majority before 2010. AIDS was a huge deal back when there was no treatment for it.

Right, I don't mean to downplay the severity of COVID at all. It's just interesting that we generally don't hear a lot about HIV/AIDS anymore, even though there were still 690,000 deaths associated with it in 2019. I also realize that probably depends largely on where you live.

HIV is not a proximity transmissible disease so the reality is it's well controlled anywhere you've managed to get the use of barrier contraception methods into widespread adoption.

And at the end of the day if it can't spread through casual contact then it's impact on wider society will be limited once it's understood.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#97

Post by ketamine__ »

graeme wrote: post #46
walterbell wrote: post #43

> the immune system has an array of other defenses... including antibodies that attack other parts of the virus, and, importantly, T-cells that attack the infected cells the virus hijacks in order to replicate. “What we’re seeing is that these variants don’t seem to affect T-cell immunity all that much and they [the T-cells] seem to be as effective in recognizing these variants as they do the original virus” People w…

Don’t remember the study but pretty sure that cross reactivity thesis to common cold eventually didn’t pan out. Believe Derek Lowe wrote about it.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/10/do...

> But here’s the key part: “cross-react” does not mean “neutralize” and it does not mean “provide protection from”. These antibodies may or may not have been neutralizing against the other coronaviruses, but they don’t seem to have any such effect on the current one. And in keeping with that, having such cross-reactive antibodies seems to provide no protection against catching SARS-Cov2 or against being hospitalized with it if you do. There’s no difference in the infection/hospitalization rates of the people who had cross-reactive coronavirus serum antibodies ready to go versus those who didn’t. They’re basically useless.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#98

Post by mlyle »

randomsearch wrote: post #10
superkuh wrote: post #3

This is a hopeful but possible take. But the 501Y.V2 (B.1.351) and 501Y.V3 (P1) lineages have the mutation within the conserved region for coronaviruses near the spike protein cleavage site. These show massively (1000x) decreased monoclonal antibody binding for original genetic sequence designs. It's better for the mRNA vaccine produced human-body-made antibodies which show only 5-10x reduction in binding. But antibo…

How does a 5x reduction in binding actually impact infection?

The vaccines create a much more potent antibody response than the titers we see in convalescent plasma. 5-10x less binding probably translates to somewhat reduced efficacy (no one really knows, but 75% vs. 95% might be a reasonable guess). Of course, this is a really complicated thing, because it's not just the immediate antibody response, but also the T-cell response, and also how quickly on a subsequent infection the set of antibodies develops and broadens even more.

We do know that e.g. in Israel where there's very high amounts of vaccine deployed and nasty variants, that case control studies show a large effect still.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#99

Post by Izkata »

Trasmatta wrote: post #25
stormbrew wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last pandemic with a death toll anything like (actually much worse than) COVID-19 is the still-ongoing HIV pandemic. It's entering its 40th year .

It's crazy to think about how HIV has killed some ~32 million people, and yet we rarely hear about it anymore. COVID probably won't even hit 4 million deaths (barring some much deadlier variant that we can't easily produce a new vaccine for).

Also tuberculosis, which kills 1-2 million people per year.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#100

Post by XorNot »

mhh__ wrote: post #88
fhunt wrote: post #77

OT: Imagine "experts" from our industry explain the mainstream our world: e.g. what's the right programming language, or database technology, why types matter, or not? Why do we trust "experts" from other industries?

Because no two fields are alike? We don't do anything even remotely scientifically in this industry because it's one of the few where we don't need to for various reasons

Basically compare how software is developed by all of us to how software was written for the space shuttle.

There is just absolutely no comparison in process or methodology. Space shuttle programming is what true software engineering looks like.

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