Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]

[Shifty Geezer]

Yeah that's a novel theory, that you have to have some exposure to pathogens so your immune system is ready for it.

Problem with that is that we had all kinds of exposure to pathogens, especially in crowded cities, for all our lives. Then a novel coronavirus came along and turned the world upside down.

Our previous exposure to beta coronavirus wasn't cross-protective enough.

The theory isn't making you stronger against all pathogens, but pathogens you already know.

Nor all the flu strains which have circulated for hundreds or thousands of years, every flu season we're vulnerable.

Far less so than those who have never been exposed to Influenza. Once you've survived a pathogen, you are generally better able to resist it on future exposures. That's the whole point of the cellular immune response. If that did nothing, every year pathogens would tear through the population like they did the naive populations of the Americas etc.

And if you take that attitude, think about the days before we had things like polio vaccines. Did getting exposed to polio unvaccinated make those people stronger or just more liable to become paralyzed?

Hyperbolic argument just to make an erroneous counterpoint to an argument I never made. Have I at any point advocated against vaccination? No. Have I suggested 'natural immunity' is better than a first vaccine? No. Especially for novel viruses with no prior species-wide exposure.

As far as avoiding infections and especially reinfections, we don't know the true cause of Long Covid but one of the theories is that not all the virus is cleared by the immune system. Even inactivated virions may not be benign, for instance one of the problems is micro clots suspected of being caused by covid.


I don't mean live in a literal bubble to avoid infection. I mean just taking those practices to minimize the odds of getting infected.

Unless you live in a bubble, you'll get (re)infected. If you are living in a way that prevents exposure to Covid, you'll be avoiding exposure to all disease. Deaths among children from common disease, Strep A and RSV, are significantly higher than pre-lockdown levels. Coincidence? There's no clear best course of action.

However, 1) on the species level, deactivating the immune system by negating all exposure to disease seems a bad idea and 2) on the individual level, different people reacting different ways should be allowed to follow their best nature, no? If some people develop better resistance and cope best by maintaining a healthy immune system by living in amongst all the pathogens, they should be allowed to do so. We shouldn't assume a one-size-fits-all solution where the base principle of effective evolution is diversity.

 

[wco81]

An overview of approaches to "next-generation" vaccine design for mucosal respiratory viruses, including not just covid but RSV, influenza and others.

The authors are affiliated with the NIAID and NIH and one of the authors is Fauci.

Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenzaviruses, and other respiratory viruses

Despite the successful deployment of vaccines during the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, viruses replicating in the respiratory mucosal environment continue to present a particular challenge for developing effective vaccines with strong protection. Morens et al. discuss approaches that need to be...

www.cell.com

Seems to be layout out general ideas, like using combination of vaccines (systemic or intramuscular as well as nasal vaccines to strengthen mucosal immunity).

Their suggestions include for instance looking at using live attenuated viruses.

In general, and when feasible, mucosal immunization seems the optimal approach for respiratory viruses
however, in contemplating next-generation vaccines we also may need optimized formulations, higher vaccine doses, greater frequency of vaccine administration, and overcoming immune tolerance challenges.

It is important for each virus to answer key questions such as:
(1)
Can non-replicating vaccines, which may be considerably less effective at eliciting IgA,
82 be as efficacious as replicating vaccines, such as live-attenuated virus vaccines and live vaccine vectors expressing key viral proteins?
(2)
Can single- or pauci-antigen vaccines provide protection equivalent to more antigenically complex vaccines?
(3)
Can higher antigen doses or repeat vaccinations elicit better immunity?
(4)
What are the differential effects of soluble versus particulate antigens?
82
(5)
What are ideal relationships between vaccine antigen load and systemic or mucosal adjuventation?
118
(6)
What are the optimal strategies for routes and timing of vaccination: mucosal/systemic “prime-boost”? Newer strategies such as “prime-pull” and “prime-deploy” (vaccination strategies to elicit systemic T cell responses followed by recruitment of activated T cells via attractant or recruitment of resident memory T cells, respectively, to lung)

One thing that they acknowledge is that it was expected that non-replicating vaccines like the mRNA ones, along with the fact that covid was going to mutate often, made it unlikely we would ever have durable immunity from vaccination.

When they rolled out the vaccines in early 2021, they didn't really acknowledge this fact. They said maybe it will endure. But based on their knowledge of vaccines vs. other mucosal respiratory viruses, the expected answer was that vaccination-induced immunity wouldn't endure.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Statistical basis for vaccine efficacy completely undermined in UK. The ONS has reportedly skewed the data and obfuscated the cost/benefit ratio of vaccination for COVID19.

Misclassification creates anomalous patterns and nonsense mortality rates, resulting in massive increase in non-covid mortality numbers - if true, vaccinating some people would cause non-vaccinated people to die of non-covid causes!

The UK Statistics Regulator has responded agreeing this fault of the ONS conclusions. The end conclusion claims mortality in younger people is increasing in vaccinated but that data is not available post-May 2022, with the question as to why the ONS has changed their reporting and isn't making this data available. The video concludes with a report of an 8.4% excess deaths increase in 20-44 year olds with the implied hypothesis.

In short, it seems another thing we know from Science, we don't actually know.

 

[Mariner]

I'll preface my comments with a note I haven't bothered to watch most of the video, in part because I've read the OSR response to Fenton's letter, but also in part because of the interviewer/interviewee. I suppose I may be missing out on something big, but tend to doubt it.

This isn't just ad hominem, it's judging the actions of the two past and present.

John Campbell started as a useful source of information/analysis in the early stages of the pandemic and I watched quite a few of his videos back in the day, but he has jumped the shark a little in recent times. When he was pushing the Ivermectin narrative by interviewing many of the US folks who promoted it, it was fair enough as it was during the early stages of the pandemic, but he did seem to dwell on it somewhat and has shifted towards more controversial stances in recent times as well. Whatever gets the page hits, I suppose.

Norman Fenton is a member of HART which damages his credibility given what we know about the group. As a HART member, he obviously has history of downplaying the severity of the virus, casting doubt on efficacy/safety of vaccination and so forth. The report in question was co-authored by Clare Craig from HART, who is so anti-vaxx that, in the HART leaks, she suggested the group should try to "seed the thought the vaccines cause COVID". Yeesh.

Anyhow, a quick scan of the OSR's reply seems to indicate that some of Fenton's complaints about the ONS data are that it doesn't show what it doesn't claim to show:

Ed Humpherson to Norman Fenton, Martin Neil, Clare Craig and Scott McLachlan: ONS Deaths by Vaccination Status statistics

Ed Humpherson responds to Norman Fenton, Martin Neil, Clare Craig and Scott McLachlan regarding ONS' Deaths by Vaccination Status statistics.

osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk

Fenton and his anti-vaxx colleagues want the ONS data to be withdrawn because they say the data is being used as continued justification for vaccine efficacy and safety. However, the ONS report they refer to specifically notes:

The ASMRs are not equivalent to vaccine effectiveness and both the COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 ASMRs can be affected by other various factors, such as health status and changes in mortality rates over the year.

I'm presuming this note has been included in the reports for a while. Haven't the time to check now. The suggestion is that the UKHSA vaccine surveillance reports should be used to determine vaccine efficacy and safety - it's what they are designed to do. And they show that the vaccines are still pretty effective in keeping people out of hospital and the morgue, even if not so good against stopping the spread of the various Omicron strains now dominant.

The post-May 2022 data hasn't apparently been published yet because, according to the ONS:

There will be a delay in publishing the next edition of the deaths by vaccination status dataset. This is because we require data on subsequent booster vaccinations and will be updating to the Census 2021 populations. We are updating the linked dataset used to create the statistics to use Census 2021 data so we can be representative of a much larger percentage of the population. This will include people who have migrated since the 2011 Census and people too young to be included in the 2011 Census. We are also updating the data pipeline so that we can identify spring and autumn booster doses and include these in our publication.

Now, I'm not saying that there isn't anything to see here, but the OSR/ONS responses seem pretty reasonable to me. HART will, of course, do their best to cast doubt on the responses because it's the reason the group exists, but it seems reasonable to me.

 

[wco81]

Oh they have a history of anti-vaxx advocacy?

Easy enough to dismiss.


In other news, Jacinda Arden resigned as prime minister of NZ. Her tenure has been marked by her policies on the pandemic, which leaned heavily towards the interventions recommended by epistemologists, meaning closely limiting people coming into and out of the country.

Her party is behind in the polls and likely to lose the next elections in September. The policies became unpopular but the following inflation and other problems following the pandemic, which certainly wasn't her fault that there were global supply chain disruptions, added to the unpopularity of the incumbents.

 

[Globalisateur]

Statistical basis for vaccine efficacy completely undermined in UK. The ONS has reportedly skewed the data and obfuscated the cost/benefit ratio of vaccination for COVID19.

Misclassification creates anomalous patterns and nonsense mortality rates, resulting in massive increase in non-covid mortality numbers - if true, vaccinating some people would cause non-vaccinated people to die of non-covid causes!

The UK Statistics Regulator has responded agreeing this fault of the ONS conclusions. The end conclusion claims mortality in younger people is increasing in vaccinated but that data is not available post-May 2022, with the question as to why the ONS has changed their reporting and isn't making this data available. The video concludes with a report of an 8.4% excess deaths increase in 20-44 year olds with the implied hypothesis.

In short, it seems another thing we know from Science, we don't actually know.

Yes long ago I posted about one of the particular bias they are talking in the video. This bias (with others) has created the (false) narrative of the pandemy of the unvaccinated (when it's actually the contrary and right there from the start of the vax program). Dr Fenton and his colleagues have being very clever with how they analysed official data and showed this very important bias.

From the start their way of classifying all shortly vaxxed as being "unvaccinated" was a very smart and evil way to hide side-effects. But it was also very obvious as many people could see how it would alter data. Shifty I am not suprised YOU would be one of the first (AFAIK) on this forum to talk about those new sad developments in an open minded way (and that you actually know and watch Dr Campbell channel).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Now, I'm not saying that there isn't anything to see here, but the OSR/ONS responses seem pretty reasonable to me. HART will, of course, do their best to cast doubt on the responses because it's the reason the group exists, but it seems reasonable to me.

At this point, the take home for me who isn't following who belongs to what organisation and has no prejudice for information sources, is that the data presented doesn't show what it was claimed to show and we need better data. The video is particularly asking for more data so conclusions can be drawn, and isn't claiming the vaccines don't work or anything of the sort. It's just saying that the proof of effectiveness is dubious, which is a viewpoint supported by the Stats Regulator.

The impact of vaccines would be easy to determine if that data was available but by accounts it isn't, not since May 2022. Once the data is there in front of us, all this postulating can end. By that I mean instead of having to interpret effectiveness from small-scale studies, the raw population-wide experiment actually showing results will give valuable insight. Although said results should also include things like 'long covid' and go on for years to determine is increased/decreased levels of other morbidities associated with vaccination or not.

I guess the other take-home is sheer amount of noise and confusion and lack of any obvious, trustworthy, transparent sources. Perhaps the ONS is still genuine and unprejudiced and just needs better communication to present the data-driven summaries people need?

 

[Mariner]

Yes long ago I posted about one of the particular bias they are talking in the video. This bias (with others) has created the (false) narrative of the pandemy of the unvaccinated (when it's actually the contrary and right there from the start of the vax program). Dr Fenton and his colleagues have being very clever with how they analysed official data and showed this very important bias.

From the start their way of classifying all shortly vaxxed as being "unvaccinated" was a very smart and evil way to hide side-effects. But it was also very obvious as many people could see how it would alter data. Shifty I am not suprised YOU would be one of the first (AFAIK) on this forum to talk about those new sad developments in an open minded way (and that you actually know and watch Dr Campbell channel).

I'm not sure you're correct with this point. The OSR response to Fenton's report which I linked contains the following quote:

Turning to the underlying data recording, we do not consider that there is evidence to indicate that ONS has systematically undercounted deaths within the first two weeks of receiving the COVID-19 vaccination. ONS have confirmed with us that they do receive data in these instances, and that the individual would fall into the ‘vaccinated’ category.

I'm working on the assumption that the ONS is telling the truth here.

Regarding Shifty's comments about the amount of noise and confusion in the public area - this is entirely the reason that groups such as HART exist. They are there to spread doubt and mistrust. The HART chat leaks are eye-opening and prove it without doubt - this particular group have been pushing their agenda almost from the start of the pandemic (Fenton was in the same camp as Ioannidis, making statements early on that we could be near herd immunity) and have deliberately spread disinformation in an attempt to achieve their aims.

What has surprised me is the way in which these anti-vaxx groups (whether openly or tacitly anti-vaxx) don't seem to give the first crap about the millions suffering from Long Covid? Lots of talk about vaccine injuries including many ludicrous numbers which simply don't add up, but no interest in the orders of magnitude greater number of people suffering long-term effects from infection. Unfortunately, as the authorities are treating Long Covid with an almighty shrug as well (hoping it will go away without them having to do anything), there are a lot of people suffering without anyone much to help them. Perhaps a case that so much of the noise and media attention is taken up by the pro/anti-vaxx and pro/anti-mitigation arguments that there is little room left for these poor people? That's my biggest concern these days. Almost a year since I had Covid, well over 12 months since any sort of a booster but I'm not really concerned about becoming seriously ill from the initial infection next time I catch Covid. Things are difficult at present due to other health issues in the family and the knock-on effects for work and it would be incredibly difficult for me to keep everything on an even keel if I was to even be a little unwell for a few months.

I did hope and even assume that we'd see a real effort to understand Long Covid and other such post-viral symptoms following the worst of the pandemic given the huge numbers of people suffering, but there has been little research and we've seen the same old gaslighting with symptoms being dismissed as being psychosomatic. I do wonder how much of this is because of the rush to return to 'normal' without considering things still aren't really 'normal' at present.

 

[Davros]

Yes long ago I posted about one of the particular bias they are talking in the video.

 

[green.pixel]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1615623116667097089

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I did hope and even assume that we'd see a real effort to understand Long Covid and other such post-viral symptoms following the worst of the pandemic given the huge numbers of people suffering, but there has been little research and we've seen the same old gaslighting with symptoms being dismissed as being psychosomatic. I do wonder how much of this is because of the rush to return to 'normal' without considering things still aren't really 'normal' at present.

I find doctors/medical science, at least in the West, are very quick to dismiss anything they can't explain as 'psychosomatic'. Almost as though if there isn't a drug they can sell to address it, they'll just ignore it. But on the wider level I think the efforts go where they feel it's needed. People dying generates responses from the voting/funding public, so everyone's focused on that. People feeling unwell doesn't, so it doesn't get the attention. Without a social-movement to address Long Covid, it'll just be background chatter among medics. You probably need a bunch of high-profile sufferers to get people interested in understanding. Across all the nations affected, how many are investigating Long Covid in a significant way?

The whole Long Covid outcome needs proper investigation at an immunology level, to understand how and why it's different, and long term outcomes, and how that ties in with other potential (naive-population) pandemics. How prevalent is it in Africa and Asia? It's part of the whole data-gathering and analysis that isn't happening.

 

[wco81]

Katie Porter railed against Pfizer and Moderna wanting to quadruple covid vaccine prices.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1618420277389529088

Well the answer may be next generation of vaccines, not just for covid but for other respiratory diseases.

Moderna is working on cancer vaccines.

BTW, good data coming in about bivalent vaccines, even against BB-1.5 and lower incidence of symptomatic infections.

They are moving towards recommending annual boosters but where these companies may make more money would be for at-risk individuals who may opt for 2, 3 or 4 booster shots per year.

I want to see Big Pharma reined in as much as possible. More Medicare negotiations of drug pricing.

However, these companies will need to make big investments not just in R&D but supply chains and manufacturing and distribution infrastructure if they really recommend that the entire population get annual boosters.

Sure only about half to 2/3 of the population will bother gettin boosters, maybe less in some countries.

But they have to maintain capacity to manufacture billions of doses a year.

That infrastructure will become valuable for the next pandemic -- and the expectation is that there will be others within the lifetimes of most people under 50 or 60.

However, critics of Big Pharma probably believe that they will only use their profits for executive compensation and stock buyback programs.

Or spend more on advertising than R&D.

That may be what happens with Moderna and Pfizer. Or just maybe, Moderna rolls some profits into cancer vaccines.

Or they have incentive to produce more boosters for newer variants, which, until we get pan-coronavirus vaccines or effective nasal vaccines may be our reality for awhile.

Also, it's possible that vaccine profits helped fund development of Paxlovid, not just bigger bonuses for Pfizer execs, though no doubt they are getting rewarded for that.

What is your preference, that they make profits from vaccines and antivirals or that they make profits from Viagra, which was their big moneymaker until covid vaccines and antivirals?

Of course, BioNTech, the German startup which developed the Pfizer vaccine, also gets profits. That is not some Big Pharma behemoth. They have been doing R&D on mRNA for other uses, like cancer vaccines, not respiratory infection vaccines. So they have more money to fund other important work.

 

[wco81]

Here's another article on the vaccine pricing, federal govt. was paying $26 and the companies may raise it to $110-130 when it goes to the commercial market.

Sanders tells Moderna planned COVID vaccine price hike is ‘unacceptable corporate greed’

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is calling on Moderna not to quadruple the price of its COVID-19 vaccine, saying Tuesday that the plan amounts to “unacceptable corporate greed.” In a Tuesda…

thehill.com

The loudest criticisms of the vaccine companies are coming from progressive politicians -- Sanders, Warren, Porter, etc., who don't support health care based on private enterprise as opposed to health care funded and/or run entirely by government. So they're not going to be genial to the prospect of these pharma companies reaping greater profits from these vaccines.

Probably true that Moderna received subsidies and leveraged a lot of NIH-funded research.


Yes, drug company execs and shareholders will benefit and we will pay higher premiums assuming insurance covers the cost.

I don't know what kind of prices insurance pays for flu vaccines, whether they're comparable to these proposed prices.

Covid is way more infectious and has demonstrated a much higher mortality rate, so covid vaccines probably would command higher prices than flu vaccines in the market.

The only benefit I could see is that there's enough profits to be had from higher prices to encourage more entrants to market. Not just other drug companies developing "better" covid vaccines but even academia investing in vaccine R&D, such as the Yale group working on nasal vaccines.

 

[DavidGraham]

I find doctors/medical science, at least in the West, are very quick to dismiss anything they can't explain as 'psychosomatic'

Most doctors are not trained or even educated to discover Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, otherwise known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, which is one of the most common "Long COVID" problems. Several viral and bacterial infections already cause Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, and COVID 19 is now discovered to be a major one among them. In the end, the condition will go undiagnosed, or misdiagnosed as another unrelated condition, unless the patient is persistent enough, and seeks a medical care of the highest experience and specificity.

The whole Long Covid outcome needs proper investigation at an immunology level, to understand how and why it's different

Investigations are underway, the problem is it takes a long time, because researchers are simply scattered across too many fronts, COVID causes a systemic "disturbance" in the immune system, which may cause it to attack it's own host "autoimmune", or may cause it to malfunction, or may cause the reactivation of other dormant viruses, or may affect the hormonal balance of the body, may cause elevation of signaling proteins in the body, affecting the function of nerves and brain. COVID also causes endothelial dysfunction (the lining of blood vessels), which causes a cascade effect of tiny clots clogging up in small capillaries in any organ, causing virtually any symptom, most commonly of course are heart and brain Strokes, it can cause continuous reduced cerebral blood flow, affecting cognition. COVID can affect a great many other systems in the body, I simply can't recall all of them from memory. So it's going to take a gigantic effort to come up with a comprehensive body of knowledge about the whole thing.

 

[WhiningKhan]

COVID also causes endothelial dysfunction (the lining of blood vessels), which causes a cascade effect of tiny clots clogging up in small capillaries in any organ, causing virtually any symptom

Indeed - this reminds me of how a couple of years ago, most people considered "covid made man's penis shrink" a funny meme. While in fact that is a real thing.

Peyronie's Disease & Covid-19 | News From The PD Clinic

Some men are suffering from Peyronie's Disease after having Covid-19. You should be asked about any history of COVID-19 infections when being diagnosed.

www.peyroniesdisease.co.uk

 

[wco81]

Huge pattern of missed work in the last 3 years.

work absences from illness are at an all-time annual high in the US and show few signs of relenting. And it’s not just acute illness and caregiving duties keeping workers away.

About 1.5 million Americans missed work because of sickness in December. Each month, more than a million people have called out sick for the past three years. About 7% of Americans currently have long Covid, which can affect productivity and ability to work, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)....

Last year, the trend accelerated rather than returning to normal. In 2022, workers had the most sickness-related absences of the pandemic, and the highest number since record-keeping began in 1976.

In 2022, the average was 1.58 million per month, for a total of 19 million absences for the year. The largest spike was in January 2022, when 3.6 million people were absent due to illness, about triple the pre-pandemic number for that month....

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/29/covid-absence-workforce-health-long-covid

 

[Mariner]

Regarding my comments about John Campbell's misinformation in his Youtube videos mentioned a few posts back, it turns out he has more than a million reasons to be pushing these nudge nudge, wink wink doubts about vaccination:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1620201300469383168

 

[Mariner]

In general Covid news, my 7 year old cheerfully told me yesterday that his girlfriend's Mum has Coronavirus at the moment. Which means that her daughter will catch it soon. And, as the daughter is still going to school as per the regulations, my son will probably have it soon thereafter. Followed by his younger sister and probably myself and my wife. Can't really tell a 7 year old to try and keep away from his friends, can you?

In the UK, the seasonal booster offer (currently a bi-valent Wuhan+BA.1 vaccine) is being withdrawn for the over-50s on 12th February. Which just happens to be just a few days before I actually turn 50! I've managed to book a jab tomorrow, citing the fact that I work with my brother in law who is immunocompromised due to previous illness (he still has monthly blood tests to keep an eye out for further problems). If my son catches Covid at school, the booster wouldn't have any effect in stopping me catching it, but I figured it's worth getting the jab to reduce the risk of getting Long Covid symptoms at a future date, even if the risks are only reduced by a small amount.

 

[wco81]

There's been some good data coming out recently about the US bivalent, which targets the BA.5 (and maybe BA.4) variant rather than BA.1 targeted by bivalent boosters in Europe.

Good protection against the latest variants such as BB-1.5.

 

[entity279]

Regarding my comments about John Campbell's misinformation in his Youtube videos mentioned a few posts back, it turns out he has more than a million reasons to be pushing these nudge nudge, wink wink doubts about vaccination:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1620201300469383168

Yeap, good ol attack the person because then you don't ever need to discuss the substance of what they are actually saying

And yet you seem to give the benefit of a doubt gladly, from what i've been understading from your posts, to the `official science`. Which is many times funded by capital/interests orders of magnitude higher by the manufacturers themselves. You can't have it both ways here