Newsmax going ham on NYC vaccine mandates today.
No, I’m not going to say how I know.
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The discovery of the new form of Omicron prompted researchers to split the B.1.1.529 lineage into standard Omicron, known as BA.1, and the newer variant, known as BA.2. Prof Francois Balloux, director of the University College London Genetics Institute, said that 42 or roughly 6% of the 709 Omicron genomes submitted to the Gisaid genome database were BA.2.
“There are two lineages within Omicron, BA.1 and BA.2, that are quite differentiated genetically,” he said. “The two lineages may behave differently.”
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The state of California updates this data weekly on its covid dashboard.
Cases: unvaxed 7.2x more likely
Hospitalizations: unvaxed 12.5 more likely
Deaths: unvaxed 14.8x more likely
Pretty sure I’ve only seen this data just once on local news over the past few months.
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can we not wait until the midterms?
Hospital wouldn’t let me get booster before 6 months. Local pharmacy in grocery store looked it up they said but didn’t say a thing. First two Pfizer and Moderna booster. Flying should be fun tomorrow.
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Despite what this guy says, the preprint isn’t on his lab web page, but I’m posting here to save for later:
https://twitter.com/sigallab/status/1468325159501287434
https://twitter.com/sigallab/status/1468325162860826634
https://twitter.com/sigallab/status/1468346776583344132
I’m curious how he’s measuring neutralization, because much of the strength of these claims rests on that.
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https://twitter.com/MikeDeeeeeee/status/1468357938511331336
OK, (at least based on the one, edited figure that is hopefully from their preprint?), this sort of neutralization study has been done before, one example here: Neutralization of SARS-CoV-2 variants by convalescent and BNT162b2 vaccinated serum | Nature Communications
In Fig. 1b here, we see the same sort of data, for Wuhan vs. Alpha vs. Beta, which show comparable if not more neutralization dropoffs, but those variants didn’t show much immune escape in a clinical or public health sense. Seems like there’s decent room for antibodies to be technically less effective at binding but still good at keeping you healthy.
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So this OMG it goes to zero not as grave as it sounds?
https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1468344299184087045
the fear was that whatever your immune status, you have essentially no neutralisation against antibodies.
Who was saying that? Seems like very extreme doomcasting.
https://twitter.com/sigallab/status/1468346776583344132?s=20
I’m sure there were people out there with this fear. I don’t really know who Mike Dee is, whether author or rando. He just seems to have the one figure from the manuscript that I’ve seen.
A lot of the gloomier epi people on twitter have been posting things like pretend you are now unvaccinated, vaxxed today=unvaxxed vs wuhan version, and that we now have to redo 2020/2021, just hopefully faster this time.
Seems too doomcasting to me too, buuuuut these people have generally been more accurate about the last six months than, say, the CDC so I’m hesitant to totally write them off. Data doesn’t seem to support complete immune escape to me, but I’m not a scientist.
Maybe I shouldn’t even read these people, but the semi tail risk/downside here is so catastrophic that I have a hard time ignoring it. Especially given that here in the northeast we are already headed into what is looking like the worst part of the pandemic outside of perhaps the very beginning just from delta despite 70 percent adult vax rates. Even with delta I think there’s a good case that we should be back to capacity restrictions/WFH/closing nightclubs/bars again.
It was absurd to assume that a closely-related variant is going to render vaccines 100% useless. We’d be getting routinely massacred by non-novel coronaviruses if that was how any of this worked.
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By the way, thanks Mike Dee for chopping off that legend indicating what is orange and green. Green is a doubly-vaxxed with Pfizer AND a prior infection, while orange is just double-Pfizer. The reduction in green is down to…a level slightly above double Pfizer. From that, I’d bet strongly that someone who’s boosted is at least as protected as someone with infection + double-Pfizer against Omicron, which would put them at a level still at or above a simple double-Pfizer. This is actually really great news.
There was some risk that all the changes in omicron relative to Wuhan would make boosters with Wuhan less effective, but seeing that a triply-exposed individual retains a high degree of protection suggests that we can just keep boosting people, and that even boosting people with the same stuff is pretty darn effective.
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OMGicron, tho.
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Seems good for severity worries then, good to hear. Probably should be doubling down on NPI even for the vaxxed since seems doubtful we can get R under 1 (a continuing call for N95 masks for all indoors and mass routine rapid testing), but at least I won’t worry about dying in the meantime yet
https://mobile.twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1468310548609744904
https://mobile.twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1468310618226798595
Another team in Sweden has released neutralization assay results, this time against previously-infected blood donors.
https://twitter.com/BenjMurrell/status/1468341485229780992
https://twitter.com/BenjMurrell/status/1468341490632077317
These are better results than Sigal got - these were against convalescent plasma rather than vaccinated, but Sigal found that vaccines were better against omicron than natural immunity. Click through for discussion about why this discrepancy between labs might exist (different assay type and different exposure profiles of donor subjects, basically).
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Probably the biggest takeaway is this:
https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1468347257393197066
You can see in the image here:
Orange lines are Pfizer only, cyan lines Pfizer + infection. But the infection is ancestral variant, as stated in the text below. So Pfizer + booster should be fairly well analogous to Pfizer + infection here. The only reason it wouldn’t be is if the additional immunity from infection was from antibodies which were not against the spike protein. But if that were true, the reduction in effectiveness should be a lot less vs Pfizer + infection than against just Pfizer, which it isn’t - the slope of the lines is similar. The TLDR here is that it looks like the extra immunity conferred by a booster holds up well vs Omicron.
Wait you mean Eric Feigl-Ding might be trunpeting the worst of the worst case possible scenarios with big scary !!! emojis like it’s already a foregone conclusion? SHOCKED
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