COVID-19: Chapter 7 - Brags, Beats, and Variants

It’s not going to be equitable. You’re not going to be able to undo the baked in social determinants of health in the US in vaccine distribution. Anything that effectively gets shots in arms will do good.

Is this vaccine talk for yourselves or relatives? Have that many states just opened it up to everyone?

These R idiots and Trump. Jfc could they have botched the vaccine rollout any worse?

My dad, who has taken COVID precautions very seriously, sent me an email today with the subject “Double Masking”. Naturally I assumed it would be an article ezplain9ng how much more effective double masking is. Nope. It was this video of him:

SmartSelect_20210217-000600_Gallery

I think a year of this shit has broken his brain :(

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VA opened up “pre-registration” for the vaccine yesterday. I’m a healthy young person so should be at the absolute bottom of the list but put my info in anyways. They asked some basic questions that presumably determine priority and say they’ll contact you when a jab is available to you nearby. I’m assuming it’ll be many months for me. @PocketChads I know you’re in VA, not sure if any others are.

Vax.preregister.virginia.gov

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Czech Republic looking to remove a whole bunch of covid restrictions because basically nobody is obeying them.

Of course the real reason is that their continued existence is leading to the ruling party getting politically shellacked. Another is that the Minister of Health was forced to resign unless he removed some of them.

He thinks that this will placate those opposed to the measures but all it will do is give the opposition a foothold to work from when they push for others to be removed.

His decision to remove some restrictions is followed by him stating that the rest of the country is likely to look like a few regions in the country that are really, really bad now regarding covid. Like 1,064 infections per 100,000 people over the last 7 days bad.

In other words, back to school March 1st. Not full-on back but probably full-on by April.

My parents got their second shots a few days ago. There have been some side effects, as expected, but overall, nothing big.

Also:

https://twitter.com/LiamThorpECHO/status/1361959447971643392

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Officially crossed 500k dead in the US today. Sad milestone. On better news the 7dma for cases and deaths are plummeting so looking good on finally beating this thing if we can keep getting shots in arms.

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Yesterday, the Czech Republic had their highest number of new cases and highest percentage of positive tests since the first week of January. Granted, 37.5% isn’t too far from the norm here but it’s still the highest it’s been in a while.

Also the reproductive rate went up from 1 to 1.1

I think the point is mostly correct. Newspaper articles on anything I have ever known much about (solar or poker or housing) usually get something wrong and often something important and I think it’s mostly because the people writing the story don’t know that much and don’t have the time to do the necessary research.

Sometimes you’ll find really good long magazine articles because the way they get written allows a lot of time for research.

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https://twitter.com/tbridis/status/1362052772946968580

So the real number is about 700-750k then.

Lakewood ranch has only been a town for like ten years, previously it was just East Bradenton. lots of large expensive subdivisions found there.

since lakewood ranch became a town its commonly been known as Bradenton for white people.

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This seems like legitimately fucking spectacularly good news:

A hundred years from now, MRNA vaccines will be remembered as the most important scientific advance of the first quarter of this century at least.

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Not too surprising, tbh.

The ability to deliver a payload to produce a protein is going to have substantial ramifications over the next couple of decades. A lot disease have a component with missing or dysfunctional protein, in some cases simply have some normal protein will do the job.

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I’m not 100% sure, but I think that the mRNA itself has nothing to do with why the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work against the variants. It think it has to do with the sequence that was used. I believe that the vaccines all used slightly different sequences (this is the part I’m not 100% sure about).

For example, if Moderna used the sequence that AstraZeneca used, but delivered it via mRNA, you would* not really expect it to be any better against the variants. Similarly, if the AstraZeneca used the Moderna sequence but used its viral delivery mechanism, you would expect it to be about as good as the Moderna vaccine

*I’m hedging on this a little bit because there is a possibility that the delivery mechanism can somehow increase the effectiveness of the vaccine independent of the sequence used. I think that the technology is too new for anyone to have possibly proven that, but I suppose it is possible.

I don’t think you’re right here, but we can’t know for sure. It seems perfectly logical to me that an adenovirus vector could impact the fidelity of the genetic material delivered and therefore protein. It also uses DNA instead of RNA, which creates another step where fidelity could be degraded. Instead of going mRNA + rRNA → protein, you have to add on DNA → RNA which, IIRC my biochem correctly, is a far more regulated process.

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Yeah, like I said

Above effect may be due to a variety of mechanisms that we can hypothesize. Including the one you gave. I’m not sure I buy the one that you gave, but it is possible. The obvious objection that comes to mind is that mRNA is very unstable. DNA is far more stable and is more likely to actually make it into the cell intact. Of course, I’m speculating also. Obviously, the companies claim that their delivery mechanism overcomes the stability issue. The question is whether it overcomes it enough to make it comparable to (or better than) other mechanisms.

Until someone does mRNA vaccine vs non mRNA vaccine with identical sequences head to head, we’re not going to know for sure. If someone did that study, I’d bet they would find no difference. But I wouldn’t be shocked if they found one.