One thing I have learned in my decades of adulthood is that processes get efficient by tedious repetition and slogging through unsexy Test & Learn & Correct cycles until the kinks have been worked out. I think there is a bit of a myth out there that great processes are achieved through Design Thinking by super geniuses but that has not been my experience with any processes. When a new process is established you can be sure of two things - it will break early and often and people who don’t know a damned thing about it will assume that means the people that designed the process are morons.
Anyway, it is disappointing that the cogs in the machine turn slow and it isn’t clear that the people in charge have workable plans. But if COVID goes endemic my guess is that the process around vaccines will gradually become more efficient until it’s “good enough”.
Yeah. Austria, Slovakia, and Slovenia are worse off on the 7dma than CR as of now.
When it comes to death’s per Capita from COVID, Eastern Europe is getting hit hard overall. Exactly what happens when you don’t have faith in your leaders in a time of crisis.
If this is your point of view, I don’t understand your complacency about immune evasion. If a new variant emerges that substantially defeats existing immunity, then it will spread unchecked for months while the RCTs and the meetings proceed. It won’t matter that the vaccine for the new variant will be created in a weekend. People will still die.
Think about it like this. Moderna/Pfizer only beat J&J to market by a couple months. They work better, but it’s not at all clear that that isn’t just a matter of dosing. The promise of mRNA, as I understood it, was that it was something close to a universal vaccine that could be customized, at least in principle, right away. But it looks like developing the vaccine is not really the long pole in the tent. Both mRNA and traditional vaccines need months of lead time to establish safety and effectiveness, so our ability to respond to new variants (or COVID-24) is still measured in months, not weeks. It’s a gee-whiz technology, but the practical impact is evolutionary, not transformative.
I don’t think it has to be that way. It’s not a law of nature that vaccines for deadly respiratory plagues need to be approved the same way as boner pills. (It’s not the regular law either.) FDA could have given an EUA for a Delta vaccine based on a safety trial, or even based on nothing at all. But the passive voice deemed the modifications “largely unnecessary,” as you say, so they didn’t. What will the passive voice think about the Omega variant, when it appears? Without a doubt, it’s going to be the exact same thing. Because the passive voice isn’t a real person or a decision maker, it’s just the inertia of a bunch of people doing their jobs the same way they always have, because no one’s been empowered to do anything different.
It’s completely unwarranted complacency. It’s inexplicable, because we’re standing in the wreckage of the worst natural disaster ever to befall our country, one where we demonstrably performed much worse than everyone else, and we’re telling ourselves we’ll do better next time. Why would you think that? Because this time we have mRNA technology? We had mRNA technology last time! The vaccine was invented immediately. It just didn’t matter, because everything else was comprehensively screwed up. We’re heading into the fifth wave, there’s a highly effective vaccine against it, and my youngest still can’t even get last year’s model of the shot! It may be that we’re living in the best of all possible worlds, but if that’s so we all need to be down on our knees praying to the gods of replication that Delta is the worst thing we see. If something worse comes along, we are not on a course to handle it.
I don’t think there’s any hard evidence yet, but the conclusion that waning and delta are different issues seems questionable. Isn’t it plausible that the original vaccine stimulates antibodies that effectively fight off Delta only when they’re in high numbers? That would explain high efficacy early on and after boosters, but would result in waning when the initial immune response fades and it takes longer to crank out a bunch of antibodies in response to infection. Maybe a better tailored antibody would remain effective at lower levels and would retain its potency indefinitely.
There evidence that monoclonal antibodies are ineffective with Delta+ (but that may be a different topic?) See Hawaii. Of course, US can’t yet see Delta+ will be a contender but it’s suposed to be the dominant strain here by end Jan 2022 as we can see it growing - it may already account for Euro countries seeing their highest ever case rates, even in these post vax times.
Yeah I’m greatly exaggerating for effect, but everywhere I look things are 100% business as usual, with some background grumbling about how much they hate COVID while doing little to nothing about it.
I’m at a swim meet in Ohio and about 80% or more of the adults here are complying with the mask requirement. It seems like a minor miracle and is completely unlike any other venue in Ohio I’ve been in, other than my campus. (This meet is at a college campus with a strict mask policy, so maybe that’s it.)
Right. But speaking from the perspective of my own lifestyle, the entire downtown business district of Toronto remains closed*. That’s kind of a big deal.
*Many companies have offices opened at 10% or 25% capacity.
What is my complacency about immune evasion? I don’t think vaccines need to be approved in the same way as boner pills either. They’re not, by the way, boner pills take years to approve. But the core method of “give a bunch of people in a given population the vaccine and test to see if it hurts them and to measure efficacy” takes a few months. I don’t see any way around that with current technology and i don’t think that you can skip that step.
I think people are seeing immunity as a kind of all or nothing proposition, like some new variant comes out and we’re all back to square one. It’s more like the virus changes in small ways to be somewhat more effective, the more exposure your immune system has to these types of coronaviruses, the better you’ll handle the next strain.
New strains that try to sneak past your immune system are an inevitability. The good news is that literally every other coronavirus and flu virus out there is also constantly trying to do this and most of them mutate much more quickly than COVID19, yet humanity isn’t being wiped out by killer viruses every year. Or, if you want to be pessimistic about it, we lose thousands of people to ordinary respiratory diseases every year but it’s become so normalized that few of us bother getting a flu shot or even staying home when we’re sick.
Re: FDA approval, as someone with no background at all, it certainly seems like it took far too long to get these approved, esp for children. It’s always tempting to vaguely complain about some bureaucrat somewhere dragging their feet. OTOH, controlled testing on humans is massive tricky and slow, looking for side effects in kids that happen on the order of one in a million is an extreme challenge. You can only fast-track thing so much before safety becomes a real concern. And then what do you tell people? How do you get an already hesitant public to get vaxxed when the Alex Jones crew has semi-valid points about the vaccine being rushed and untested?
I thought I’d already posted it here (might have been on a ban at the time, wasn’t sure it was overly relevant - gave you all you needed) - Damned if I do, damned if I don’t - lol
Anecdotal evidence on monoclonal antibodies (which I know is worthless, but still interesting): My secretaries daughter is pregnant. She is obviously vaccinated but she caught Covid anyway (this was right as boosters were being approved and she had an appointment for a booster but hadn’t gotten it yet, bad timing). Anyway, she had pretty severe respiratory symptoms. Obviously being pregnant she was high risk and it was very scary and I felt terrible for her. Because she was high risk she got the monoclonal antibody treatment. She improved drastically like 48 hours later. Night and day. She was back at work 5 days after that. I know she might have always been about to turn that corner and the monclonal treatment had nothing to do with it, but man, it sure seemed like it worked for her.
A former, now part-time poster, of UP had the same moniclonal treatment a few months ago and recovered well (prior to Delta+) - I’m more than Thankful that his detailed experience went well.
You have never been banned for linking to actual evidence. Never. Only when you’ve lied about what your citation says.
But there is a cavernous difference between “monoclonal antibodies are ineffective against delta,” and “One or two monoclonal antibodies are ineffective against delta, but others are just as effective (in a cell culture experiment as opposed to in people).”