Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
Sam Lowry said:
ATL Bear said:
The vaccine type is/was a problem. That's what is playing out. There is a lost perspective from the expectations, and some are trying to defend something that will continue to disappoint.
When you design a vaccine based upon recognition of a small component of a virus versus the actual virus (or at least more genetic detail), it's going to be less effective against variants and mutations. I think that's proven to be a strategic mistake and has hindered vaccine effectiveness.
It was already near impossible to have an effective vaccine against coronaviruses, primarily because of the upper respiratory nature of them. A vaccine built around a lab created antigen of a piece of the spike protein meant our immune system was looking for something very specific to fight. One alteration to an amino acid, which is a simple not complex variation, and the immune system loses its vaccine induced advantage.
This even plays out with our flu vaccines because we use lab created inactivated viral pieces versus live attenuated. Chosen for safety and production expediency primarily. While it contains many more antigen identifiers than the COVID vaccine, mutations trick it regularly and why it sits around 50% effectiveness. Influenza is much more genetically complex than COVID.
With the mRNA vaccine they took a small sliver of the spike protein of one variant and used that as the antigen. Sure our immune system responded well to primary variants, but the highly infectious coronavirus moved way faster, and since our immune system wasn't given the full story on the virus, it doesn't recognize many of the latest. Again, safety and expediency has played a large role in this outcome. That's the overhanging politics/bureaucracy that's there.
What happened with boosters isn't that the vaccine was any better, but the immune system was "hyped" up thanks to a vaccine and was ready to respond faster. As it settled in over time the immune system did too and couldn't respond as fast, especially for those most vulnerable and in need of having their immune system primed. But continuing to falsely "hype" immune systems has a negative impact as many studies have shown.
The problem I have with this "all hail the vax" mentality is it is creating a complacency toward new answers in both therapeutics and vaccines by trying to convince everyone how great it works, when at a macro level it is fading out exactly as this progression would expect. Farther and farther away from advised and expected performance, especially when you consider COVID has mutated to weaker and weaker strains (thankfully).
They're doing the work they need to do as far as improving the vaccines and exploring other strategies. Normally this would be uncontroversial. The limitations of the current vaccines aren't shocking to anyone who's followed the science. But anti-vaxxers reliably seize on every new factoid and misrepresent it as proof the vaccines are a total failure. This is what prolongs the debate and leads to the necessary rebuttals that you may perceive as cheer-leading.
They're struggling to pivot from the original approach. And something doesn't need to be a total failure to have failed in its intended purpose. Each piece of data that mounts over time is part of the broader evaluation of the vaccine and approach. We intentionally went at "warp speed" to get the vaccine to market, but most if not all medications take years of evaluation before going to market. We are a gigantic live human trial, so these "factoids" are important in the evaluations.
They succeeded in their intended purpose. A broad evaluation of the approach is important, but it's not really what clinical trials are for. It's sure to be ongoing as this and other drugs hit the market.
I can't see how you can honestly say that. We're benefitting from a weaker mutated strain at this point more than a vaccine. Unfortunately places like New Zealand that quarantined their island early on in the pandemic are suffering greatly now that they've been exposed en masse to the virus.
Another ironic twist is your warped sense of clinical trials, which yes they are supposed to evaluate the vaccine approach and it's efficacy. Yet all you use is clinical testing data to support your positions on effectiveness that continue to be undermined the more data is captured across the globe.
Outside of the die from the vaccine part, I feel like we're living the satire of this conversation on the vaccine.
We're benefiting from both, and the two are related. It's more than likely that the vaccine contributed to the emergence of the weaker variant. And vaccinated people are still getting sick, getting hospitalized, and dying at much lower rates. The virus was going to hit New Zealand eventually. They are far, far better off now than they would have been otherwise. Even now their cumulative death rate is about one-tenth of ours.
The video tweet has three falsehoods in the first 30 seconds and goes downhill from there. If I were as confused as that guy, I'd think the world had gone crazy too.
Thank you for that link. It's fascinating how much our understanding of outcomes have changed in the past year plus. You keep referencing articles Pre Omicron that aren't following the "science" given for the opinion. We are in a series of prevailing understanding that prior research becomes no longer relevant. Sort of like a vaccine that's efficacy wanes.
However I did appreciate the technical explanation of how the vaccine and virus work in conjunction for the virus to defeat its protective measures. The problems of the mRNA spike protein approach are clear, and relate back to an earlier post of mine about not really supporting the T-cell immunity that truly stops viruses.
But the vaccine had nothing to do with weakening the strain anymore than it will likely strengthen it. Viruses mutate to survive, and the vast majority result in weaker versions. The problem is the type of vaccine we chose that is losing its priming capability for antibody resistance.
RE the satire, no real lies. Maybe exaggeration for effect, but touches on uncomfortable realities some aren't willing to acknowledge.
You're welcome. I don't quite understand your first paragraph, though. It was written before Omicron, predicting weaker strains, and that's what happened. How viruses evolve depends on their environment. The problem with Covid, as I pointed out a couple of years ago, is that it was under less pressure to attenuate because of its high transmissibility and the long course of the illness. The vaccines seem to have provided some of that pressure.
Vaccines had nothing to do with that as the author says in the article. Basically concludes that you really can't predict how a virus will mutate. Which is correct. The only argument he was trying to make is that since viruses will always mutate toward avoiding antibody resistance, which vaccines induce, you can't assume it will mutate to a worse version.
That's not what the author says. He predicts that the vaccines will strongly decrease the chances of a more dangerous variant. They also induce a robust T-cell response, by the way.
Most vaccines take five to ten years for testing. If you're talking about the entire research and development process, as with the examples in your link, of course it can take decades. It did with mRNA vaccines as well. There were many failures for many reasons along the way, but it was never halted across the board because of animal mortality. Evidence of the technology's safety and effectiveness has been gradually accumulating since the 1980s.
And these are just the problems in the first 30 seconds of the video. The whole thing is such a Gish gallop of misinformation that it would take days to respond to it all. I can see how it's funny from a certain point of view, though.
You're not understanding the underlying issue. T-Cells are involved with killing viruses. All vaccines end up with a "robust" response from T cells because that's what our bodies do when antigens appear. The issue is the vaccine doesn't have a full scope of genetic information on the actual virus as it was an mRNA code that told our own bodies to generate a spike protein in order "to train" our body to react to that, as opposed to a natural genetically scoped COVID spike protein or a full live virus profile. It mimicked the alpha variant pretty well as that's the coding we knew of during development, but after that it's effectiveness waned because what our immune system had as the "wanted poster" was very minimal and subsequent mutations were farther and farther away from the vaccine's coded stimulator. Therefore, it isn't a robust long term genetic imprinting in the T cell which helps the natural immune system recognize variants better because variants may have different amino make up on a spike protein but still have other recognizable traits elsewhere that our T cells would log to react to. That's what natural immunity is at its heart.
Right now, Novavax is touting its use of an actual COVID spike protein as it tries to gain traction. That would certainly provide a much broader genetic identifier than current mRNA vaccines, but not as much as a live attenuated vaccine. It's sort of "live virus lite". I understand the safety concerns of live attenuated. The most effective flu vaccine is the nasal spray, which uses a form of live attenuated. However, it is not used on the immuno-compromised and certain elderly demographics because it could generate negative responses in those groups. Therefore, those groups are stuck with the usual flu vax, which suffers from the same type of aforementioned vulnerability to variants, and the real reason it at best has a 50% effectiveness ratio.
As to the article, the author has actually been proven incorrect on many of his assumptions because of the outcome of omicron and stealth omicron. The vaccine did not resist infection as he assumed with data he used from April 2021, and severity of the vaccinated did occur well beyond his predictions. But he literally said he (you/anyone) can't actually predict whether a virus will worsen or weaken as it mutates to avoid the detection of vaccines and our natural defense mechanisms. Stronger variant mutation is rare regardless of the presence of a vaccine. Therefore, vaccines aren't preventing stronger variants anymore than they are creating weaker ones.