In other news, add me to the ranks of the officially pozzed. I got nothing but a weak ass cold (weak cough, weak sniffles, a brief sore throat that hardly counted as sore), but I took a PCR test in the name of responsibility anyway, and here I am.
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I have covid
Now I got aids
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This is true, but only because the paper doesnāt have the data to investigate the existence and severity of imprinting from the vaccines, lacking a cohort of unvaccinated people who caught Omicron. Itās perfectly possible that imprinting (if it is a thing) is only a big issue with infection and not with vaccination, but I wouldnāt want to put money on it.
We know that imprinting can last decades, at least with influenza. There are a number of instances of this described in the piece I linked above. Whether this applies to COVID is anyoneās guess.
The study shows, if anything, no harm from 3 shots relative to infection alone or infection and two shots, and itās more likely that 3 shots are better from their data.
Some interesting new research on the brain fog aspect of long COVID.
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Thank you!
New mystery disease just dropped!
https://twitter.com/bbcworld/status/1537414719312744453?s=21&t=evlDWmpzNKl67cQfkNcSyg
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Every state but one has placed an order with the federal government for the under 5 vaccines.
It is not hard to guess the holdout
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Emily Oster and Katelyn Jetelina both have good summaries of yesterdayās FDA meeting that should help answer these and other questions that parents might have. (If I were going to read just one, Iād read Jetelinaās.) Both come down on the side of getting Moderna. Hereās Jetelinaās argument:
My girls will get Moderna for four reasons:
The confidence in Pfizerās efficacy is not strongā¦ at all. Efficacy was only based on 3 cases in the vaccine group and 7 cases in the control group. Pfizer didnāt meet the standard protocol of 21 cases. This means the ātrueā effectiveness is unstableāit could be anywhere between 14% and 81%. We donāt know exactly where. Take 81% with a grain of salt.
Antibodies with Moderna reach the same levels in half the time compared to Pfizer (6 vs. 13 weeks). Kids are not protected until Dose 3 of Pfizer, which is a while.
Moderna confirmed they already started testing Dose 3 (booster) and will have data by this summer. We know that this vaccine is at least a 3-dose series. So, once we get Moderna and Pfizer on the same playing field, efficacy will be comparable. Importantly, Moderna is testing an Omicron-specific booster, not the original vaccine. This is different from the Pfizer trial, in which Dose 3 is the original formula. This is huge. By the end of summer, Moderna kids will likely be on the same playing field as adults, who will likely get a bivalent vaccine this fall.
FDA said they do not know whether the primary series for Pfizer is 3 doses or if this third dose is considered a booster. In other words, it may very well be that Pfizer kids will need a fourth dose for primary efficacy.
Also of note: Jetelina predicts/estimates that shots could start going in arms as early as next week. (Except Florida)
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This I hadnāt appreciated in my review of the data, so thanks for highlighting it.
This is especially good news.
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One other important tidbit from the Jetelina link:
Should I wait for the larger dose if my child is turning 5 soon?
Do not wait. There was a key Moderna slide presented at the FDA meeting today which compared neutralizing antibodies (our first line of defense) across age groups, and thus compared dosages. The high level of neutralizing antibodies for 2-5 year olds (with the smaller dose) were comparable to children aged 6-11 years (with the larger dose). Moderna did test the larger dose (50 mcg) among 2-5 year olds in Phase I of the clinical trial but did not proceed because of high rates of fevers.
Iām with you on this one.
The messaging across the world for even the 6-12yr age group is starkly different to the US CDCās.
In the UK weāre max 2 doses for under 16ās and the JCVI bills the kids vax as āadvises a non-urgent offerā of two 10 mcg doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine (ComirnatyĀ®) to children aged 5 to 11 years of age who are not in a clinical risk group whereas the CDC recommend 3 larger (?) doses for everyone
Seems 75% of US kids already had covid
Over the same period, seroprevalence increased from 44.2% (95% CI = 42.8ā45.8) to 75.2% (95% CI = 73.6ā76.8) among children aged 0ā11 years
Whatās the messaging in Straya?
Does my child actually need the vaccine?
Yes. There is a tremendous burden of disease in this age group. Thankfully the rate of severe disease is lower compared to adults, but this is an inherently flawed comparison because kids donāt die as often as adults. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 442 children aged 0-4 years old have died from COVID-19. If we compare to other vaccine preventable diseases among children, deaths due to COVID19 are highest. We cannot become numb to these deaths.
In terms of hospitalization, children, and specifically those under age 5, did not fare well during our first Omicron wave. According to the CDC, children under 5 had the highest rate of hospitalizations compared to other pediatric groups. Among children hospitalized, 1 in 4 ended up in the ICU.
The rate of COVID19 hospitalization was particularly high in October 2021-April 2022 compared to previous flu years and compared to COVID19 hospitalizations the prior year (October 2020-September 2021).
Severe disease is not the only outcome of SARS-CoV-2:
- Long COVID19 does occur among kids, and vaccines reduce the burden of long COVID by 15-50%.
- We parents know that masking and social distancing very young kids can be nearly impossible. The layers of protection we can employ are less than optimal.
- We have frequent, unexpected disruptions in care and schooling of children that contribute to the daily burden of COVID. While not perfect, vaccines will help reduce infections and transmission, inching us closer to less family disruptions.
Thereās more in the link about how even kids who were previously infected saw a much bigger antibody response with subsequent vaccination compared with relying on past infection alone.
Vaccinate kids, please.
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Cite for the quote? I can see a couple of FDA links and yourlocalepidemiologist but not sure of the source.
The only meaningful difference is that NIH is encouraging boosters for 5-11 year olds and NHS seems to only recommend boosters for older kids. Both are recommending vaccinations for 5-11 kids, both use diluted version of the adult course.
Iād be extremely skeptical of this kind of work trying to demonstrate imprinting being relevant over decades. Diseases, viral and nonviral, have had hit various age groups stronger than others forever and the data presented here isnāt particularly compelling.
For example, the first thing the article talks about is the people who were children during the 1889 Russian pandemic did much worse in than 1918 pandemic. Sound pretty compelling, but thereās a very plausible alternative explanation repeated multiple times in history. There was also widespread famine in Russia 1890-91. Malnutrition as a child causes permanent issues, and that explains the issues in the 1918 pandemic just as well. IIRC this is an old pattern. In fact, that famine gets more death pattern was seen during the plague as detailed by The Great Mortality.
Iād be extremely skeptical of work trying to show something was imprinting without measurement of imprinting. Granted, the authors donāt have much in the way of options to further their argument, but thereās lots of variables that can cause those kind of associations.
NHS does not use the word ārecommendā, thatās kinda my point. JCVI āadvises a non-urgent offerā
CTRL+F āRecommendā = 0/0
And that for kids 5-15 -
Physicians donāt offer treatments they donāt think has a net benefit.
Itās the one spidercrab posted earlier: