I see where you’re coming from, but if it turns out we need boosters perodically (for variants or waning immunity or whatever) then this becomes problematic.
Isn’t that the expectation? I know there’s a big mainstream push that Omicron is the end and we don’t need anything else, but do most people here buy that?
I think (at least) annual boosters are going to be key for a while.
Yes, I’d agree with that. It’s not a lock, but it’s approaching that.
When supplies were limited we were vaccinating high risk populations that definitely shouldn’t have been relying on natural immunity, especially from infections early in the pandemic/nearly a year before vax. His main premise that natural immunity is long lasting/quasi permanent is highly debateable.
But yeah, we should be changing the definition of fully vaxxed to essentially boosted, our vax mandates have been too lax for places we’ve decided to have mandates. There shouldn’t have exemptions for those to young to be vaxxed either imo.
Yeah, that’s really the only part I was interested in. He does cite some data for his position. I’m also aware of data that doesn’t support it. I’ll probably look over all of it at some point, but I figure someone here already had.
My (limited) understanding is that it’s the acidity of soda that makes the difference. It breaks down the testing compound into smaller parts. And those smaller parts are the ones that go glomming off on the wrong things.
Plus here’s the thing, if he made this argument and then wanted to argue we should all be N95 masking during this surge that was crippling hospitals, Id listen. Dollars to donuts based on his other article that CN posted that isn’t the direction he’s headed.
When you read the test you are reading a color. Lots of things can cause that color to get released. Please google lateral flow test contaminant. Pcr is also more specific and is currently the gold standard. False positives aren’t common, but they can happen especially when used by laypeople
I’m too tired to figure out what you’re misinterpreting in that cdc document. Your understanding is incorrect though
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Omicron is the setup feint.
yeah, covid is still very novel, so boosters are going to be in play for at least a few years. i’m coming around to the idea that the gov’t is going to need to start yanking the chain on public health, and still probably accept that 20% are going to be doing 80% of the damage.
we did worry about supplies, but it turned out that there was plenty of capacity after a couple of months, because it was an unprecedented parallel effort to push through many candidate vaccines, and most seemed to do a pretty good job. by now it’s clear that scarcity shouldn’t be an issue.
fun aside: russian sputnik hit a production supply cap, so another manufacturer stepped in, and it turned out to be a complete fraud. efficacy is shit, still being distributed to the motherland. putin continues to go undefeated.
standard wsj-conservative there is somewhere between “freedom isn’t free” and “but that’s socialism”. they are just reactionaries to anything liberal-leaning CDC nerds want to do, and work backwards to justify an op-ed. rehashing how rollout should have gone is just about the last useful thing right now, unless it’s done by a CDC nerd to other nerds in a journal.
I was overly optimistic about vaccines ending this all, for two reasons. One, coronaviruses including covid mutate slowly compared to many other viruses, but that’s overwhelmed by the effect of hundreds of millions of mutation incubators active at any given time. Two, I thought the vaccines could be updated more quickly – at least to come out annually, like the flu vaccine. But we’re into a will-they-or-won’t-they dance with updated vaccines that seems like they’re demanding more rigorous testing than I thought combined with uncertainty about updating the vaccine vs. boosting with the old vaccine that may have the updated vaccines pushed out to 18+ months for the first real update.
So, I’m not really sure why we can just always have an annual flu vaccine that, like, if it’s 60% effective one year, that’s not all that bad, but pumping out a new covid vaccine based on educated guesses (like the flu vaccine is) isn’t happening already. If it’s a problem with the FDA in particular, then why isn’t a new vaccine happening in the UK or Israel or South Korea or Germany or something? As much as I know about the science of all this, I don’t understand the politics and regulation and logistics and manufacturing and corporate bullshit and whateverall else that might be the rate limiting step here.
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Wait, what? I totally missed that.
vaccines in the near-future are likely going to be combos, no? like 2-3 flus + a couple corona, maybe a few more molecules. and they will probably vary based on what each country wants. US/India are huge obviously, but most countries are small enough to have a single supplier, so i’m sort of expecting there will be a lot of offerings. the current booster i think is thought of as annual, but i expect follow up ones to last longer just because i think science expectations are somewhat conservative.
I doubt we’ll see a combined flu + covid vaccine within the next few years. Flu vaccines operate on a very different principle than the mRNA covid vaccines, and the manufacturing of them is not at all similar. So while it’s no big deal to get both into your arm at the same time, I don’t think they can be mixed for just one injection. We might see an mRNA flu vaccine within the next few years, and that could potentially be mixed into a single shot. Right now, I’ve heard nothing about trying to make an mRNA flu vaccine.
Yeah this is really frustrating me. We know that Moderna and BioNTech can update to a new strain in days, if not hours, but there seems to have been no effort to streamline the approval process.
I have a feeling that the “Omicron is mild,” messaging won the day and there wasn’t a sense of urgency. I also think it was in most politicians, governments, and corporations best interest to rip the band-aid off in one fell swoop with Omicron. I think they preferred a one month crisis at an 8/10 on severity to a three month crisis at a 6/10. So I think that factored in as well.
If they said Omicron boosters would be ready in March, which in my opinion was the fastest possible timeline, a lot more people might have hung on and been more careful, thus flattening that peak and widening the curve out.
With either an endemic state or a more severe variant, those incentives change.
They don’t even need to be educated guesses, but could be. I mean on Moderna’s shareholder calls they talk about being able to have a more accurate and efficacious flu vaccine by being able to wait longer to pick strains and still hit production goals.
So… Yeah, something doesn’t seem to add up. I think Delta was kind of a false alarm for them since vaccines held up.
I think the limiting factor is at the intersection of politics and regulation. As usual, look at the incentives for all involved. The downside for regulators moving it fast is massive - they get death threats from anti-vaxxers even if they are 100% right. The upside is not significant for regulators.
Politically, I think we’re in the “just get it over with” phase and most Americans don’t care what that means. They’ve had enough and they don’t think they’ll die so they’re happy to roll the dice.
That means that slowing down a curve or the pandemic is a political loser.
There’s a strong case to be made that going stronger on vaccine mandates and mask mandates could poll well, but nobody here has the guts to actually do it.
Moderna has an mRNA flu vaccine in trials already and they’re combining it with RSV and COVID. They effectively matched existing vaccine efficacy, slightly better vs a few strains, slightly worse vs a few. They think they can improve on that.
yeah, it was a bit of a scandal, that went into the noise when the troops started accumulating. russia tried to supply sputnik v to south america, but couldn’t meet the second dose delivery due to production backlogs, so it suddenly disappeared across the whole country. domestically, they might have started giving out EpiVac and CoviVac, which have a lot less data available than even sputnik.
Are you saying the original Sputnik vaccine is a fraud? Or the info they gave other manufacturers?
Oh, that’s good news. If you have an article on the subject handy, I’d like to take a look. I’m especially curious about ages, because RSV tends to be a disease of the very young, for whom the covid vaccine isn’t yet approved.
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