Covid-19 vaccine boosters can begin for some US adults as CDC partially diverges from its advisers’ recommendations
I, for one, am glad whenever individuals are allowed make their own decisions in their own interests. As far as I can tell, the evidence for “harm” is in the “we worry until we have absolute, full and complete proof that something hypothetical doesn’t happen” category. Yes, we don’t have full and complete evidence. But the booster safety evidence we have appears to be that the boosters are safe and this seems especially so for people with my demographics.
So, I’m glad the CDC head Wallensky is expanding the permission to get boosters to “people whose jobs put them at risk of infection.” These evidently include medical personnel teachers and so on. Some worry this is too broad because lots of people who want boosters will argue their jobs put them at risk. Yep. Lots of people who want the boosters will so argue.
For now, the extension is only for Pfizer, but it bodes well for access to Moderna and J&J when the data are provided. I had J&J. The protection from 1 shot is less than 2 from the others. I eagerly await being able to get a booster. I got my original shot because tutor seems to fall under “teacher”; I plan to get my booster the same way.
I was not too thrilled from being “protected” against getting a booster.
Your mileage may vary. 🙂
Lucia, I would do the same, get the booster as soon as I could.
I can see a possible supply issue here, but I have to look out for myself.
A quote from WHO’s Dr Katherine O’Brien:
 “So the focus now for the supply needs to be to protect those people who are not yet protected at all by vaccines. It will reduce transmission, it will reduce the likelihood of more variants emerging, and it will give us time to see more of the evidence about whether or not booster doses will eventually be needed.â€
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/media-resources/science-in-5/episode-53—covid-19-booster-shots?
How is that CDC’s call? It is up to the FDA.
Mike M,
It is Biden’s puppet-masters’ call; it. has nothing to do with either the FDA or the CDC.
MikeM,
The FDA already gave emergency authorization for these exact shots. Once they do that, I’m pretty sure they lose alll legal control. 🙂
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They want to think of themselves as in control. But no. Oh well. Too bad. So sad. 🙁
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So, the CDC is now giving their green light. Places like Walgreens and CVS will almost certainly go along under the auspices of the CDC authorization.
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I’ll likely need to wait for specific authoriazation for J&J to get my booster without lying. But I’ll get it. Hurray! 🙂
The delta surge looks to be dropping most everywhere in the states. Could return with colder northern weather, but I am dubious of that…. too many vaccinated in most northern states. If boosters are allowed for a significant fraction of the population, that will make a later delta-surge in northern states less likely.
lucia (Comment #206194): “The FDA already gave emergency authorization for these exact shots. Once they do that, I’m pretty sure they lose alll legal control.”
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That may be so. Like off label use. But does that apply with an EUA? I would guess not but I don’t know.
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If you are right, then the CDC also has no control, they are just making a differing recommendation. Then it would be up to the doctor. If so, then getting your booster might be just a matter of finding a doc willing to prescribe it.
MikeM,
I don’t know why the emergency status would mean the CDC can’t recommend it. But it doesn’t matter for Pfizer– the one the voted on. It’s approved.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-covid-19-vaccine
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Once CDC recommends it finding a “doctor” willing to approve will likely be easy. You go to Walmart or CVS! You can probably already get a booster by lying and saying you haven’t had a shot. This will jsut mean most who want it won’t have to lie.
Mike M,
https://www.houstonmethodist.org/blog/articles/2021/jul/are-covid-booster-shots-necessary/
Says
So doctors can already do prescribe Pfizer boosters.
But I know that the pharmacies around here aren’t making boosters available (unless you lie). I know my doctor wouldn’t prescribe me a booster until there is approval. Lots won’t. So it matters even if the FDA is not specifically controlling.
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So: the third dose can be prescribed “off label”. I suspect this is more tenous for doctors vis-a-vis getting sued if something goes wrong. Doctors don’t want to be sued and they don’t want to lose.
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So the approval of boosters matters even if it’s not entirely necessary. Some people– usually wealthier ones or heavier medical consumers– will be able to find a doctor to give them a Pfizer booster whether or not the FDA and CDC approve. Others who only rely on walking into the pharmacies won’t be able to get it. Those in between…. depends.
Thanks, lucia. So it is as I suspected, except that the EUA issue only applies for Moderna and J&J.
Yes. The EUA issue applies to Modera and J&J for sure. Still, until there is “approval”, I’m sure many doctors don’t want to prescribe off lable unless they have a very strong argument for a particular patient. The pharmacies are going to avoid it.
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A patient can almost certainly get a vaccine of their choice if they lie. You might have to try at several pharmaices, but I suspect you could get it somewhere.
Lucia,
“You might have to try at several pharmaices”
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Here in the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts, I could get a Pfizer booster any day I want (no appointment delay, just sign in on-line and go)… with just one little fib about getting the second dose in Florida. The weird thing is: I would be happy to pay for the booster, but that seems impossible at this time. It is just more of the obvious “competency” of the Biden administration.
Daszak, the Darth Vader of virus research, is back in the news. A research proposal was leaked (ultimately rejected by Darpa) that very explicitly wanted to analyze bat coronaviruses, and then genetically modify them for humans.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/lab-leak-pandemic-origins-even-messier/620209/
“The pandemic-origins debate is a big, confusing mess—but it’s an important mess, so bear with us. The hottest news in the leaked proposal concerns the researcher’s plan to sift through a large trove of genomic-sequence data drawn from samples of bat blood, feces, and other fluids, in search of (among other things) new kinds of “furin cleavage sites.†When these are encoded into just the right spot on the spike protein of a coronavirus, they allow that spike to be opened up by an enzyme found in human cells. According to the proposal, “high-risk†versions of these sites, once identified, would then be introduced via genetic engineering into SARS-like coronaviruses.â€
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https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/
“We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,†referring to cells found in the lining of the human airway, the proposal states.â€
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Also an investigation into the source of covid run by Columbia has been terminated due to members on the committee’s connections to EcoHealth (run by Daszak). They didn’t want an appearance of bias.
Is it really that hard to find scientists in that field who don’t have such ties? (Real question)
I assume they want experts in the subject matter, and those with expertise in coronavirus GOF research sure would be helpful. They coincidently are those most prone to want to hide that outcome unfortunately.
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Daszak’s overexuberant dismissal of a lab leak did not age well. Fortunately for him he has the Chinese state behind him. The media’s willful blindness to GOF research is inexcusable.
Tom Scharf,
The Darth Vader of virus research should be completely defunded and (we might hope) reduced to looking for a low pay post-doc position.
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My best guess is that when all the dust settles, it will be obvious that the most likely source for covid-19 was bat virus research funded (in part) by the self-same Darth Vader of virus research. There are some who kill millions through malicious intent (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot), and some who kill millions through grotesque incompetence. We are talking about the later here. I don’t want vengeance, I just want these idiots, and indeed 99% of all virology, banned from any possibility of future public funding. It is a field with only bad outcomes, stupid in both design and intent, inherently damaging, and implicitly dangerous to humanity. Eliminate all public funding of this idiocy.
Gotta love this ‘critical thinking’ in an Atlantic article on the DARPA-let’s make furin cleavage sites- proposal
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Unlikely? Hahahahahahahahahah!
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Sorry, but being an expert in virology doesn’t make you an expert in human behavior. The idea that researchers at Wuhan (or anywhere) for that matter, wouldn’t pursue a line of investigation because it was ‘proposed’ by a collaborator is pretty much bunk. It’s not even entirely clear it’s unethical– one can always “tweak” it to be doing something “similar” but not exactly the same. Plus… since when don’t labs sometimes do “unethical” things and come up with reasons to explain their view of the ethics is different? (Never!)
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Unless? Maybe they had already isolated something.
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Those saying this doesn’t prove a lab leak are correct. But — unless the document is faked– it does prove that Daszak’s article was beyond misleading. Even at the time it was written, people were saying, “But transgenic mice!”, “Serial passage” and so on and so on. Unless the document is fake, Daszak clearly knew all the tools to do the task, and the know how and so on existed.
I mean…
Yeah…. people who thought someone might want to do this must believe in “conspiracies”!
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Observing there are people who want to do this sort of work, that the tools exist and amassed to do it is not alleging a “conspiracy”. It’s just observing the state of the art. Observing that lab leaks happen is not allgeging a “conspiracy”.
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A very, very, very tiny portion of “lab leak” theories suggested it was leaked on purpose. Heck– if there was any intention of leaking on purpose the particular leak was a ginormous screw up. Because anyone leaking “on purpose” would want to have a protection in place for the “good” people so they at least mostly only harm intended targets. So no: I don’t think anyone planned to leak it– and as far as I can tell, no one did.
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But there certainly appears to have been the means to do this. And it looks like there were people– some at WVI- who had the skills to do it and wanted to do it.
It is remarkable how the defenders of natural origin cling to the skimpiest bits of evidence. For instance:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2
Actually, it seems that just one of the three is closer than RaTG13 and that by just a little bit; 96.8% vs 96.1%. But they do have RBD’s similar to the Wuhan virus.
Uh, no. Similar RBD’s were found in pangolins.
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The new find really does not change anything. They still have no clue as to how the virus got to Wuhan. And it does nothing to really alter the genetic evidence. The lab theory proposes that scientists:
(1) Stitched together bits from 2 or 3 viruses.
(2) Inserted a furin cleavage group.
(3) Passaged the virus through either human cells in culture or humanized mice.
The new find says nothing about (2) and (3) which are the really strong bits of the argument. It just adds to the possible starting materials for (1). Even if something very close were found, it would not really change things since (1) is not really critical to the argument.
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Also, from the above link:
That only adds support to the lab leak theory.
The timing of Columbia disbanding their covid investigation and the leaked GOF proposal is a bit suspect. I suspect the leader of the panel knew nothing about this proposal and when he queried about it he got answers he didn’t like very much.
lucia,
I agree. There are other lines of reasoning that support this. The simple generalization I use is to try to avoid assuming malicious intent when incompetence is a sufficient explanation — AFAICT it usually turns out to be simple incompetence or error.
MikeM
Here’s obvious question to ask after this claim is made: “Would we know if they did?”
But yes, as you note: not finding closer relatives of SARS-CoV-2 in bats (or any animal) in or near China supports the lab leak hypothesis. If they announced they’d found something very close to SARS-CoV-2 in a Chinese bat cave, that would be consistent with:
(1) utterly natural non-research jump or
(2) researchers who went into and out of caves got it even though it never got to the lab.
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It’s not finding anything natural that is most consistent with the “unnatural” “made in a lab – Franken-virus” story line.
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It is odd to see evidence that weakens the ‘totally natural’ virus theory be claimed to support it!
Mark,
But oddly, the proponents of “lab leak theory = conspiracy theory” story line don’t want to really address the “not accidental” issue. There are definitely good reasons to believe that if it was a lab leak, the leak was accidental even if the dangerous work was on purpose.
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It’s actually hilariously funny to now read that the theory of why the Chinese wouldn’t do the work is “ethics” about doing work that a colleague Daszak proposed to do with then under his name as lead. I mean…. if the “ethics” were all that high wouldn’t Daszak and the various Chinese researchers admit they had been proposing and preparing to create furin cleavage sites in bat DNA? And wouldn’t they admit that they did have humanized mice around? And that they did propose all that they proposed to do? (That was rhetorical. So Yes… if they had really, trully high ethics, they would have admitted they proposed to do all these things.)
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But even apart from that: For all we know Daszak’s works with his colleagues on a Chinese funded program that names a Wuhan researcher as lead. I don’t think it would be remotely unusual for people interested in the same work and interested in working on it to have the American propose to the American agency while the Chinese colleague put in a parallel proposal to the Chinese agency. As long as everyone agrees with the idea it would be even slightly “unethical”!
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So there is nothing about the whole “ethics” prevents the Wuhan crowd from doing this work that sounds remotely plausible!
It appears at least Darpa understood the risk and admonishes Daszak, et. al. for ignoring them in their rejection letter:
https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/defuse-project-rejection-by-darpa.pdf
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“It is clear that the proposed DEFUSE project led by Peter Daszak could have put local communities at risk by failing to consider the following issues:
– Gain of Function
– Dual Use Research of Concern
– Vaccine epitope coverage
– Regulatory requirements
– ELSI (ethical, legal, and social issues)
– Data Usage”
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10028443/Lancets-COVID-origins-panel-disbands-ties-Peter-Daszaks-EcoHealth-Alliance.html
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The leak is not authenticated, but it appears genuine as nobody involved is denying they are real and they have had time to do so. This stuff looks really bad. The stated master plan was to inoculate bats from coronavirus using an aerosolized vaccine. Many of these people may have had good intentions but it looks really dangerous.
Lucia,
Yeah.
There is a difference between ethical and naive.
The conflation of “bioweapon released on purpose” with “we didn’t take adequate care in our dangerous research” seems intentional by many, especially the Daszak crew. I’m not a big fan of the bioweapon release theory, but the dual use research problem is real. Once you know how to design an effective bioweapon with genetic engineering you don’t forget how to do it.
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Once you have that formula it then needs to be protected at all costs and everyone who knows how to do it then becomes a potential threat. The fall of the USSR had this problem with unpaid and unemployed weapons scientists barely being able to feed their families and places like Iran and North Korea being more than happy to help out.
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It’s just better to never enter this area, but the question is complicated, you want to be able to defend against it as well.
That this document took two years to come to light shows that ethics and preventing future outbreaks is not the primary driver of the behavior of the people in the crosshairs. They amazingly look just like regular humans who are very worried about their future and have gone into a bunker mode panic.
Off topic (as my comments usually are). I have heard that video of the border patrol on horseback confronting illegal immigrants is ‘horrific’. I am looking for said horrific video. I find this starting in around 20 seconds , and this staring around 2 minutes in.
I mostly see a lot of mounted border patrol blocking people trying to run past them [trying to block them with their horses].
Can anyone link the horrific footage? I don’t believe it exists, but due diligence compels some minimal investigation. So far I’ve burned 15 minutes and come up empty. Does anybody know where I can find the elusive video of the Horsemen of the Horrific Border Apocalypse?
lucia (Comment #206211): “If they announced they’d found something very close to SARS-CoV-2 in a Chinese bat cave, that would be consistent with:
(1) utterly natural non-research jump or
(2) researchers who went into and out of caves got it even though it never got to the lab.”
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There would still be two big problems. One is the furin cleavage site, not found in nature but using the codons expected for lab insertion. The other is that the Wuhan virus did not evolve rapidly after appearing in humans, indicating that it was already adapted to human cells.
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Finding something very close would just imply that the Chinese scientists started with that rather than stitching something together. But they still would have had to insert the furin cleavage site and passage the virus through human cells.
mark bofill (Comment #206217): “Can anyone link the horrific footage?”
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You found it. The guy who shot it says he did not see the agents whip anyone or do anything else inappropriate.
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Q: How can you tell Psaki is lying?
A: Her lips are moving.
Thanks Mike.
Politifact says this:
and this:
One wonders what the border patrol is actually supposed to do when people try to cross the border who aren’t legally allowed to.
Not that this is particularly important, but it’s a little odd. If you were trying to enter the U.S. that way with people you wanted not to be separated from, wouldn’t you make a special point of crossing the border with that group of people? I tend to think I would. This leads me to believe I don’t understand what’s actually going on there. Or that not wanting to be separated from people who have already crossed wasn’t the real issue.
mark bofill (Comment #206221): “One wonders what the border patrol is actually supposed to do when people try to cross the border who aren’t legally allowed to.”
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Warn them that if they don’t turn back, they will be shot. Then follow through.
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I am not entirely serious. But not entirely kidding either.
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Addition: It occurs to me that if you did the above, far fewer migrants would end up dead.
Mike,
I might be wrong, but yeah. I believe that at the end of the day, the government’s power comes from the barrel of a gun. It also arguably depends the support of the society behind that government.
In my view, there isn’t much else that can be done, practically speaking, if one wants border patrol to implement policy that denies entrance to at least some people. When the people in question do not comply voluntarily, then what. In the end, it’s the threat of death or actual death that resolves the situation, or else the non-compliant person/s enter. A threat is only effective when the threatened believes the threaten[e]r will follow through.
Biden’s obsession with “appearances” was once again evident as he stopped border agents from using horses immediately without an investigation. Now what? They walk? Use ATV’s? Open the borders?
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I’ll vote for anyone who states they won’t pay attention to Twitter at this point.
mark bofill (Comment #206224): “I might be wrong, but yeah. I believe that at the end of the day, the government’s power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
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You are not wrong, but of course there can be intermediate steps. Physically restrain, arrest, throw in prison, put them on a plane all the way back to wherever they started from. But they ability to do any of that fundamentally depends on the ultimate threat.
I think it is clear that the Biden administration will not enforce the border. It will hurt Democrats in some border states, but I suspect they see many millions of future always-democrat voters as worth the short term loss of state and local officeholders.
It’s covington all over again. A picture is used to tell a thousand false words and a dog pile ensues all the way up to the “president”. All of whom insist they watched the footage and are sickened by what the narrative claims it shows *sigh*. Apparently, it’s the little boy who saw no clothes who’s living in a cult.
The insanity continues:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/since-covid-19-hit-research-on-viruses-has-exploded-is-it-safe-11632496218?st=xvi6ix73hzl6x9h&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
I’d quote from the article, but I really couldn’t stand to read it.
The usual suspects are still defending gain of function experiments. And now everybody and his dog are getting into it.
All the pictures of the serious scientists in their effing sparkling white lab coats. No, I don’t trust them to do this type of research safely and I don’t think they take the risks seriously enough and I don’t believe this research will prevent a future pandemic. That is a bunch of arm waving. Publishing the genetic code of lab modified organisms that can infect humans is beyond insanity.
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This reminds me of the way Windows and the Internet was before hackers took over and exploited the wide open security. Microsoft applications were horrendous because they and everyone else just didn’t understand that bad actors would exploit these weaknesses. Looking back it was foolhardy, but there was a trust that everyone would do the right thing. Ironically they refer to a lot of these exploits as computer “viruses”. This stuff is dangerous.
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There is a difference between believing in science and putting it up on an altar and worshiping it. These people are not priests and they can do wrong through indifference, incompetence, and inadequate systems of self governance. There is too little critical thinking going on here.
Tom Scharf,
Wrt Windows and GOF research, most viruses that anti-virus software is created to protect against never existed in the wild, IIRC. They were created in-house. But in that case, the vaccine is released immediately. The other example is the NSA failing to report all the exploitable OS weaknesses so they could have them available. That might not have been so bad, but then they managed to release the tools to exploit those weaknesses to the wild in a convenient package form.
OSHA and Department of Labor have not started the process of issuing a regulation for Biden’s vaccine mandate for big companies.
It was just a statement made to give cover for CEOs to threaten their employees with firing.
MikeN,
Could be that the announced mandates were just a way to apply pressure for vaccinations without the legal/constitutional problems of a Federal mandate. By the time all the legal issues with a mandate are resolved, the pandemic will be effectively over. Not to mention the very real possibility the SC will block the mandate and it never happens at all. At a minimum, the SC is likely to view the lack of accommodation for previous infection (probably far more effective than a vaccination!) as arbitrary and capricious.
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But I suspect the biggest motivation for Biden’s announcement was to placate his totalitarian lefty base, who want to dictate everyone’s personal choices…. healthcare and everything else.
We shall see what happens, mass firings won’t look good. Are they really going to fire 1% to 10% of the federal workforce? Of healthcare workers?
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If I was anti-vax then I would certainly make them fire me loudly and proudly. I’m guessing there will be plenty of lawsuits because the legalities won’t be worked out anytime soon. If it turns out the mandate was not legal then backpay and other compensation will be in order. It’s going to be messy.
Biden: “My ($3.5T) Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars.”
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I cannot believe the left leaning media and their army of benevolent fact checkers are letting this one go. Several media sources actually defend it. I think we have a winner for lie of the year.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-new-spending-whopper-11632780042
Tom Scharf (Comment #206235): “We shall see what happens, mass firings won’t look good. Are they really going to fire 1% to 10% of the federal workforce? Of healthcare workers?”
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New York is definitely willing to fire large numbers of health care workers. Many hospitals there are already experiencing staffing problems. It looks like they are going to call up National Guard medics to provide civilian health care. They are making it easier for personal to return to work and for out of state people to get licensed in New York (yeah, that’ll work). And they are talking about importing nurses from the Philippines.
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Madness.
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The more the Dems make the vaccines political, the more they turn the reluctant into outright resistors. Way to go, Joe!
Joe built the Taliban back better and it cost the Taliban nothing. So I guess he figures he can do the same here.
I stand corrected, but only 2 Pinocchios!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/28/bidens-claim-that-his-spending-plan-costs-zero-dollars/
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Politicians talking about spending is so disingenuous, it would be easily ignored if only it didn’t matter. The entire line of thinking that the middle class will not pay if they are not directly taxed is ludicrous of course. If Amazon and their competitors cost of business goes up 10% then they pass that increase along to their customers. Shockingly those customers are not just rich people.
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Now the counterargument is that taking the money from Amazon and “investing” it in infrastructure and so forth will pay bigger dividends or spread the wealth more fairly. Let’s just say I trust Bezos to invest the money more wisely than Congress.
Joe Biden will send Haitians from Del Rio to New York to replace the fired unvaccinated workers.
Mike M.,
Do they think that National Guard medics are just sitting around doing nothing or not already working in civilian health care? This is simply beyond stupid.
No unemployment for those fired, this seems a bit harsh and vindictive.
Tom Scharf (Comment #206242): “No unemployment for those fired, this seems a bit harsh and vindictive.”
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The entire point is to be harsh and vindictive.
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Vaccine mandates are not about public health. They are not about the government knowing what is good for you. They are about SUBMISSION. Nothing else.
In terms of irony increasing, it will be interesting to see if some of the National Guard medics called up are also some of the health care workers being fired for not being vaccinated.
“It’s covington all over again. A picture is used to tell a thousand false words and a dog pile ensues all the way up to the “presidentâ€. All of whom insist they watched the footage and are sickened by what the narrative claims it shows *sigh*. Apparently, it’s the little boy who saw no clothes who’s living in a cult.”
It’s 8 years of Clinton, 8 years of Obama and the relentless slander of Trump and conservatives ever since. Slander is what they do. They slander cops. They slandered Steve Mc. The list goes on and on. They slander everyone and anyone who disagrees with them.
Othering — it’s page one of the Dem playbook. Page two is stealing elections. And page three is relying on a dishonest news media as frontline propagandists. No other pages needed. It’s all evil they need.
A fairly long read on the alleged gain of function ban in 2015:
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Should Work on the Coronavirus in Wuhan Be Considered ‘Gain-of-Function’ Research?
https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/should-work-on-the-coronavirus-in-wuhan-be-considered-gain-of-function-research/
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There is a lot of hand waving on what exactly should be called gain of function. What is interesting is that the ban is on modifications that make a virus more transmissive or virulent to humans. An important point is that they simply don’t know what modifications will do this so the ban was actually to stop the experiments * after * it was discovered a virus had gained those functions. That is exactly what happened:
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“Three chimeras produced 10,000 times more virus in the mice’s lung tissue than unmodified WIV1, and one caused the mice to lose significant weight.
According to the grant’s stipulations, the researchers at that point should have ceased the experiments. But The Intercept reported that the NIH concluded the restrictions on GOF research did not apply in this case, and there is no evidence that the research was stopped. Whether the chimeras would also be more pathogenic in people is unclear.â€
“Perlman says that just because the virus and its engineered chimeras infect isolated human cells in a petri dish does not mean they can infect cells in an actual person, where viruses are subject to immune defenses and other challenges.
“We don’t know what it will take†to infect humans, Perlman says. “That’s where the murkiness lies.â€
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This is all pretty ugly. Fauci’s dissembling on GOF is dishonest IMO. These virologists are a bunch of children playing with hand grenades.
Tom Scharf,
“Fauci’s dissembling on GOF is dishonest IMO.”
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I am beginning to wonder if “fauci” may be Italian slang for liar.
WSJ: Americans Are Getting Covid-19 Boosters—No Questions Asked
People say they are securing third vaccines by attesting that they meet the latest requirements
https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-are-getting-covid-19-boostersno-questions-asked-11632916800
“Also eligible are those with a job or living situation that poses a higher risk of contracting Covid-19.”
“CVS spokesman Michael DeAngelis said the chain is administering third Moderna doses only to eligible immunocompromised people but said it is following CDC guidance to allow patients to self-attest to their eligibility without requiring documents of proof.
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice said Monday that all adult residents of the state who have been vaccinated for at least six months should seek a booster. “If you’re 18 or above, you will qualify in some way,†Gov. Justice said. “I would really highly encourage you to run to the fire again and get that booster shot.â€
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I think this is realistically by design, and my guess is the WH told the CDC to make it so.
It’s getting psychotic on Capital Hill.
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“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Wednesday echoed President Biden while speaking to reporters, claiming the $3.5 trillion dollar spending bill would cost nothing.
“It’s not about a dollar amount. The dollar amount, as the President said, is zero. This bill will be paid for. It’s about what are the values that we share, and how we prioritize them,” Pelosi said.”
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Maybe this is just a desperate attempt to change the discussion that looks like a capital L loser. A few months ago it was a a competition to see who could name the biggest budget increase. I really don’t know what is worse for the left right now, passing this monster, or not passing it.
Tom Scharf
If so, it’s one of the few things the current administration has done I approve of.
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We are no-where close to a vaccine shortage. Letting people with possibly waning or incomplete protection improve it is a no-brainer relative to trying to force those who don’t want protection to get it.
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Even aside from the whole “it’s Δ” or “protection might or might not wane” issue, I got J&J which gave good, but lower protection in the first place. I’m just waiting for the data on mixing vaccines or 2nd j&J to be public. Then I’ll get it as soon as I can.
Johnson & Johnson Announces Data to Support Boosting its Single-Shot COVID-19 Vaccine
https://www.jnj.com/johnson-johnson-announces-data-to-support-boosting-its-single-shot-covid-19-vaccine
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Mix-and-match COVID vaccines: Can you get a Pfizer booster if you got Moderna or J&J?
https://www.cnet.com/health/can-you-mix-and-match-covid-vaccines-or-boosters-what-scientists-and-doctors-say/
“Data on mixing different COVID-19 vaccines in the US has been sparse, which has held public officials back from making any sort of recommendation based on safety and effectiveness information. At a briefing Tuesday by the White House COVID-19 Response Team, however, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that while COVID-19 vaccine-mixing studies are “ongoing,” data on Moderna as a booster shot for all COVID-19 vaccines is available now, data on Johnson & Johnson as a booster for the three different vaccines will be available “literally in a week” and data on Pfizer as a booster for other COVID-19 vaccines will be available in the first week or so of October. ”
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I think the outcome here is very predictable (it’s OK). If they were finding problems on mixing it would be big news already and there would be warnings. What will be interesting is whether certain combinations are superior.
Tom Scharf,
But where’s the data on which vaccine is best for boosting infection acquired immunity? (Real question, although I know the answer is that nobody is looking at that). Israeli data is limited to Pfizer.
Our local health care monopoly, Ballad, is saying that COVID will be with us forever if everybody doesn’t get vaccinated. *sigh* Using that logic, the ‘Spanish’ flu of 1917-19 should still be with us because there never was a vaccine for it. Apparently the concept of infection acquired herd immunity is beyond them. Active cases in TN have dropped by nearly 50%. That isn’t due to a huge increase in vaccinated people in TN.
Tom,
I also predict the data will say mixing is fine and for the reason you state.
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Also, why wouldn’t mixing be fine? I haven’t read anyone suggest a mechanism for why it might be a problem. The issue of not mixing seemed no different from the issue of just getting repeat injections, which also seem to turn out fine as far as wee can tell.
I did read a mechanism why J&J might not work as a booster after you had J&J. Your body might react to the adnovirus and so not make antibodies to the spike. But it turns out a second shot of J&J seems to make antibodies to the spike.
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DeWitt,
I think I read a headline that says Moderna is “best”. But honestly, it was a headline. Also, two shots seem to be better than one. 🙂
Feeling almost bulletproof: my visiting granddaughter (3) gave everyone in the house a cold, save for grandpa (AKA me), who remains perfectly OK. Bring on the boosters.
Upon my return to FL in three weeks, I will get the Pfizer booster shot. Maybe not really needed, but cheap insurance for a 70+ YO.
SteveF,
I think I’m going to get my flu shot tomorrow to get that out of the way. I hope I get to read the info on boosters by next week. I’m planning to get it as soon as I can. 🙂
FL case rate down an amazing ~70% in the last month, well below the national average now. Nothing with covid is predictable.
SteveF (Comment #206256)
“Upon my return to FL in three weeks, I will get the Pfizer booster shot. Maybe not really needed, but cheap insurance for a 70+ YO.”
Suggest getting a different vaccine, not a booster exactly but likely to give way more protection.
A common misconception is that because antibody levels fall [conventional vaccines] immunity lessens. This cannot be further from the truth. All antibody levels drop when not needed but the response to any new infection is incredibly fast.
The benefit of a different vaccine, if your doctor agrees/allows is that you get a second different set of antibodies developing in the immune cells so a quicker and wider and stronger response.
I am completely mystified by the reported cases of infection in previously vaccinated people [Israel etc] and wonder if it is due to a slightly different path of activity with these vaccines.
Ie they may need the person to be infected first and then help the immune response to develop more quickly than in a natural infection.
This would explain a large number of vaccinated people still getting the infection but not getting it as severely.
angech,
Thanks for the advice. I’ll take a look at the available data in a few weeks. There is the issue of simplicity as well: I can go to a local pharmacy a mile from my house and get the Pfizer shot…. no hassle and no cost.
angech (Comment #206259): “A common misconception is that because antibody levels fall [conventional vaccines] immunity lessens. This cannot be further from the truth. All antibody levels drop when not needed but the response to any new infection is incredibly fast.”
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Indeed. The experts presumably know that, but they act like they don’t. And they are talking about annual boosters. They have not explained themselves. Either they are incompetent or they are lying to us. No wonder people don’t trust them.
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angech: “The benefit of a different vaccine, if your doctor agrees/allows is that you get a second different set of antibodies”.
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You can’t be sure that will happen. If your immune system thinks it is seeing the same antigen as before, it might just make the antibodies to the old antigen rather than developing new ones. If a booster does expand the antibody response, that would be a reason to get one.
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angech: “I am completely mystified by the reported cases of infection in previously vaccinated people [Israel etc] and wonder if it is due to a slightly different path of activity with these vaccines.
Ie they may need the person to be infected first and then help the immune response to develop more quickly than in a natural infection.”
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The immune system is compartmentalized. The vaccine induces a response in the circulatory system but not in the mucosa. The virus initially infects the mucosa. So it seem there is a delay before the mucosa can recruit antibodies etc. from the circulatory system.
“I am completely mystified by the reported cases of infection in previously vaccinated people [Israel etc] and wonder if it is due to a slightly different path of activity with these vaccines.”
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A portion, probably a highly significant one, is likely to be hyper observation, from contact tracing etc. Another, which is probably relevant in Australia right now with something like 90% of their hospitalized cases in one area reported to be vaccinated, is age.
MikeM,
Who are “they”? Real question because everything is being talked about by someone. Right now, the CDC, FDA and drug companies are talking about a booster, now. The argument isn’t merely that antibody levels fall. It’s that some people are getting break through infections but did not get them earlier on. This alone suggest some people will benefit from a “boost” to their immunity.
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It doesn’t make sense to paint “them” as incompetent or complain “they” haven’t explained themselves when you are just putting some claim into the mouths of anonymous people. It’s not clear that any significant number of experts claim not to know that anti-bodies dropping doesn’t necessarily mean loss of immunity. I can’t think of experts who day that.
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Also: mere talk of a booster doesn’t mean people are calling for annual boosters. Polio had a booster. It wasn’t annual. One reason for the booster was to get both mucosal and humeral immunity. We might end up with special boosters for that.
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We may eventually need annual shots. Some people are saying this. But the main argument why we might need them isn’t merely because antibodies drop over time. It’s more related to mutation. If the virus mutates to escape vaccines quickly, it’s likely we will want annual shots as many of us already get for flu. We usually don’t call these “boosters” since they aim for a different variant.
lucia (Comment #206263): “Who are “theyâ€?”
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Fair question. The Pfizer and Moderna CEO’s, among others.
Hard to find specifics, since I have no idea how to search for “annual booster”.
From a PR POV, talking about “breakthrough infections” is indicative that your product just doesn’t work properly, so indicating that “declining antibodies” is to blame is a far better story because it also contains the solution.
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It’s also quite possible that the slower response to infection caused by declining antibody levels is responsible for a large proportion of “breakthrough infections”, and that a lot of these “breakthrough infections” wouldn’t even be noticeable if people weren’t looking for them.
DaveJR (Comment #206265): “It’s also quite possible that the slower response to infection caused by declining antibody levels is responsible for a large proportion of “breakthrough infectionsâ€, and that a lot of these “breakthrough infections†wouldn’t even be noticeable if people weren’t looking for them.”
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That is my theory. I will think about getting a booster when and if it is shown to make a difference with regard to severe illness.
Both the UK and Israel are sustaining moderately high breakouts with high infection + vaccination levels in the adult population. The vaccines cannot prevent delta from spreading. Even though Israel was first with a large scale booster program their infection rates didn’t fall until two weeks ago putting into question whether the booster was responsible. Florida’s infection rates cratered without boosters, as usual it is difficult to sort this stuff out.
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Speculation is that it is breakthroughs combined with spread by the unvaccinated younger population (not even allowed to be vaccinated) and more testing. I don’t think anyone really knows but what is evident is that delta will continue to spread at some level indefinitely under the current conditions.
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My speculation is that there is no herd immunity level that is going to suppress delta infections to near zero, but there may be a herd immunity to keep the death counts low after nearly everyone is vaccinated or infected, perhaps bringing them in line with flu deaths eventually. That is what is being shown in the UK, but not really Israel yet (although death rates are lower there) and not in the US (Florida had high death rates).
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Open questions frustratingly remain about the reinfection rates between vaccinated and infected, death rates of the reinfected, and death rates versus regional immunity levels. This is data that should be known.
The primary benefit of the booster appears to be a prevention of mild to moderate illness and it follows that it will also slow down retransmission (but this is yet to be confirmed).
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There is also an unknown of how far efficacy of the vaccines will fall in the 1 year to 2 year time frame. It’s possible they may get much worse at preventing severe illness as time moves on which would just move out how long one should wait for the booster. There doesn’t appear to be much risk here although my anecdotal evidence of one person shows that reactions to the 3rd shot can be even worse than the second.
“From a PR POV, talking about “breakthrough infections†is indicative that your product just doesn’t work properly”
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It depends on how you define “work”. Certainly the early hope we would get to covid zero is now history, and that might have happened with the original strain. Reducing the risk of severe illness and death by ~10X is definitely a working product in most people’s view.
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As an example Maine is currently having a pretty big breakout even though they have one of the highest vaccination rates. The media doesn’t like to highlight this kind of stuff because it undermines vaccine mandates, or else they go into a lot of arm waving explanations of why this is happening without supporting data.
It is clear is the existing vaccines are much more effective than flu vaccines. The question of whether or not routine boosters will be needed won’t be known for some time, and I suspect will depend more on how rapidly the virus can evolve to get around existing immunity than on falling antibody levels. I don’t think there is any evidence the covid virus changes as quickly as flu viruses.
Tom Scharf,
“Open questions frustratingly remain about the reinfection rates between vaccinated and infected, death rates of the reinfected, and death rates versus regional immunity levels. This is data that should be known.”
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Yup, it is the craziest thing about the whole pandemic. The most important data to guide sensible public and individual actions isn’t even being gathered. It isn’t difficult to ask someone being admitted to the hospital if they were already vaccinated or had an earlier confirmed case, yet that data is generally not available in any form that would be more convincing than an arm-wave statement that it is important to get vaccinated. Absolutely crazy.
DaveJR (Comment #206265): “From a PR POV, talking about “breakthrough infections†is indicative that your product just doesn’t work properly”.
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Tom Scharf (Comment #206269): “It depends on how you define “workâ€.”
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Indeed. We were led to believe that the vaccine would end the epidemic and get us to covid zero or something close. So the vaccine has not worked as claimed; that is big PR problem for the vaccine promoters.
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Yes, the vaccine was oversold. Many people realized that it might not work as hyped. But many did not. A number of intelligent, well-informed commenters here were absolutely certain that, thanks to the vaccine, the early spring wave would be the last. Once again the public health authorities have undermined their own credibility by not telling the truth. Instead, they told people that which would advance their agenda. However well intentioned that agenda may have been, it was counterproductive in terms of public health.
MikeM
Moderna is working on a combined Covid/flu shot. They are also working on vaccines for other spikes– which also might be needed. Of course the talk about what they are working on. They are drug companies. They develop things that might be needed.
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They aren’t telling us all that we will need boosters. The need for the vaccines for other spikes isn’t a “booster”. And the need for vaccines for other spikes has nothing to do with “waning antibodies”.
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I don’t know why you think their working on things that might be needed could suggest incompetence nor does it suggest they are pretending this has to do with waning antibodies.
Lucia,
Moderna (like all pharma companies) makes substantial up-front investment in the hope of a gigantic winner. In this specific case, seems to me their risk that it won’t ever happen is pretty high. They are betting 1) an annual covid vaccination will be needed, 2) the two will in no way interfere with each other, and 3) that the same m_RNA technology will work well for influenza virus. It may work out for them, but I would not bet on it. A simple booster for covid seems to me far more likely. Of course, they may have non-public information that makes them think success is more likely, but at the same time they will for sure face competition from the incumbent flu vaccine producers and other covid vaccines; Moderna is not likely going to be able to charge much more for the flu portion of their dual vaccine than the current producers charge.
In other exciting news, the Panamanian foreign minister warns that 60,000 migrants, most of them Haitians, have recently passed through Panama on their way to the USA from South American countries. https://news.yahoo.com/panama-warns-even-bigger-haitian-002619651.html
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Colombia is said to be holding back many thousands of people who want to try crossing the dangerous marshlands and dense forests which separate Colombia from Panama (the Darian Gap) so they can trek northward to the US Mexican border.
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Ol’ Alzheimer Joe sure knows how to amp up illegal immigration via non-enforcement, winks and nods. A country with no border is destined to very soon not be a country at all. That may be the point of the Biden Administration’s policies.
SteveF,
WRT to the MOderna combined vacc: Even if the combined vax is not a winner, they may learn stuff in the process that helps with their next product. So of course they are going to work on more vaccines. The will need new products regularly, so they are going to try to develop then.
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Nothing about this decision means the don’t understand what waning antibodies do or don’t mean. Mike M is drastically over interpreting what it might mean for people to “talk” about vaccines.
Merck announces an orally dosed anti-viral that cuts hospitalization and death among at-risk covid patients by ~50%. the clinical trial was stopped early because it was deemed unethical to maintain an at-risk control group when the results were already obvious. https://www.statnews.com/2021/10/01/mercks-antiviral-pill-reduces-hospitalization-of-covid-patients-a-possible-game-changer-for-treatment/
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Maybe IV monoclonal antibody as an outpatient plus this 5-day oral antiviral would eliminate most risk of serious illness. It will be interesting to see if this same anti-viral might be effective *before* becoming ill (perhaps at a much lower dose).
Upon further reading: the Merck antiviral works by taking advantage of the virus’s poor RNA replication accuracy….. it makes so many errors in the RNA that functioning virons can’t be produced. So it is a bit of a Faustian bargain; you don’t want the virus generating variants that are more dangerous via RNA mutations, but if there are lots and lots of errors, the virus can’t replicate successfully at all. Low dose treatments would appear out of the question.
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There appear to be few if any side effects from the drug.
Cause a “problem”. Blame someone else for trying to fix it.
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There’s a good reason why a lot of protestors against authoritarian regimes wave American flags. Freedom is inconvenient to those who want control, and America, more than anywhere else, shows what can happen when people fight for it. I can’t help but feel attempts are being made to rectify the issue like never before. Flooding a country with “diversity” while also shaming and denouncing the glue which holds it together? Dividing people up into gender and racial groups and have them fight for oppression supremacy? It’s pretty clear where this is going.
lucia,
I’ve seen at least one paper whose premise was that one could predict how long immunity from vaccination or infection would last by how fast serum antibody titers decreased. I don’t have the link, but I’m pretty sure the paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Pfizer did challenge testing on vaccinated monkeys (so much for the claims I’ve seen that there was no animal testing). The result was that there was no viral replication in either the lungs or nasal passages for recently vaccinated monkeys. My suspicion is that there would be replication after six months to a year from vaccination.
In the absence of a nasal spray vaccine, it seems likely to me that without booster shots to maintain high antibody titer, nearly everyone will end up having been infected. But the majority of those infections will not result in serious disease in otherwise healthy vaccinated people.
lucia (Comment #206263): “It’s not clear that any significant number of experts claim not to know that anti-bodies dropping doesn’t necessarily mean loss of immunity. I can’t think of experts who day that.”
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I never said that. I complained that many experts *seem* to ignore that and do not explain why. So they *seem* to be concealing their reasons with misleading statements.
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lucia (Comment #206273): “They aren’t telling us all that we will need boosters.”
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At least the Pfizer CEO has been saying that he expects that we will need boosters.
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All along the attitude of most experts has been “trust us” while giving us no reason to trust them and good reasons not to.
It’s unclear what affect if any vaccination status has on the Merck anti-viral. One would assume it helps the unvaccinated more but that may not be the case.
MikeM,
Yes. I wasn’t precise. You had previously complained “they” were telling us we would need annual boosters. That was here:
That encapsulates what I object to in what you are saying. I know “they” (Pfizer) are telling use we need one booster now. That’s not the same as saying we need annual boosters. Pfizer is also not saying we need them merely based on evidence of measuring antibodies in blood. They are saying it based on breakthrough infections. Whatever your theory about how the immune system works might be, the infection rate first dropping then rising is a sign of either reduced immunity overall, or a need for greater immunity due to the new mutation.
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There is nothing in Pfizer’s advice that we need a booster that suggest all you claim in the bit I quoted.
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So I still don’t know which particular “they” is remotely guilty of what you claim “they” are saying.
MikeM
Well then, seem is to be doing a lot of heavy lifting here. That they “seem” is your interpretation of…. something…. They don’t seem to be doing that to me. Obviously, there is no need for them to explain why they are doing something they are not doing. And there is no reason to believe they are concealing their reasons for doing it because they aren’t doing it. I also don’t see misleading where, it seems you do see misleading.
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If you find someplace where “they” are suggesting it is very likely we will all need annual vaccines based on drops in blood anti-body levels (and no other evidence), bring it along. Otherwise, I have no idea why you think it “seems” “they” are doing that or how “they” are “misleading” people.
DeWitt,
I agree that people monitor antibodies and think they (a) at least might result in lower immunity and that (b) they could at least reduce sterilizing immunity.
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The thing I’m objecting to in Mike’s assembly is that he seems to be suggesting that “they” are going so far as to tell us we will need annual boosters because blood antibody levels drop. And that more over, they are somehow ‘misleading’ us into thinking that with low antibody levels we little or no remaining immunity — and so need boosters to keep antibody levels up.
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It don’t think ‘experts’ are telling anyone that loss of antibodies means you are left with zero immunity. (That is: none are forgetting or even pretending to forget that we also have B and T cells left.)
The Merck anti-covid drug is a re-purposed anti-influenza drug which showed promising results in animals and cell cultures against influenza viruses. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6848974/
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The Merck study apparently included three different dose levels: 200 mg, 400 mg, and 800 mg twice per day orally. It will be interesting to see the actual study results when they are reported.
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Merck has a guaranteed contract with the US government for $1.2 billion (1.5 million 5-day treatment courses, contingent on FDA approval), working out to ~$700 per treatment….. Merck stock price is up 10% on the news. Compared to hospitalization it is cheap.
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If the FDA approves the drug, then I suspect there will be plenty of off-label use against influenza, which kills lots of people, especially the very young and the very old.
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At least one researcher involved in the development of the drug quit because he thought the drug introduced too much risk of mutagenisis. None of the Merck trial participants were pregnant, and all participants (male and female) had to agree to carefully avoid pregnancy to reduce the risk of neonatal damage.
When women soccer players sued over equal pay, a lot of the men expressed support against this sexism.
USSF has put them on the spot now by offering identical contracts to both. They will take the World Cup bonuses for the men and women and put that in a single pot that will be split equally.
This is a substantial drop for the men if they make the World Cup.
They are responding now with ‘no comment’.
The women also don’t like the deal because they lose their per game salaries, and possibly lose money compared to current if the men don’t make the World Cup, and are now talking about fair pay rather than equal pay.
MikeN,
I can’t get too excited about salaries for professional athletes in a sport few in the USA care about enough to buy access (tickets, subscriptions, etc). I am sure they are all very talented, but really, who cares? Among the men, the very talented can make a king’s ransom playing for European teams; I suspect they are not nearly good enough.
SteveF,
I too can’t get very excited about the athlete’s salaries. It’s an entertainment industry and value in entertainment has to do with draw and revenue.
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I didn’t look at some document a while back and the one thing that was clear was that the document discussing revenues etc. were opaque. The women’s pay may be unfair, or it might be fair. I just don’t know.
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You are right that the men, if good enough, likely would make more by leaving US soccer and playing for European teams. Perhaps that avenue isn’t available to the women. Still: the main issue about fair pay has to do with revenue. (And I’m sure that “management” does their best to pay both men and women as little as possible- just as sport management has always done in all sports everywhere! Just as colleges have done with student athletes! )
Lucia,
Then there is the ‘get a real job’ argument if they are unhappy about their salaries. It is much ado about nothing IMHO.
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I enjoy playing golf, just as I am sure you enjoy competitive dance. I can probably go out and beat 98% of the over 70 crowd. But really, who cares? Nobody is going to pay me to better most 70 year olds. And that is a bit like US soccer….. nobody cares…. or at least not enough to pay giant salaries.
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About a year ago I played a round of golf with a very talented young man, 24 YO. In spite of never having seen the golf course before, he played the course at maximum length (called ‘from the tips’) and shot 1 under par. This means he is better than 99.9+% of all golfers, and he was easily the most talented player I ever played with. When I asked if he had considered professional play, he said that he played some of the professional ‘mini-tours’ for a year, but he was *far* from competitive…. and never made any money. Only the best 0.01% or 0.001% are good enough to make it professionally. He drives a UPS truck for a living. BTW, his no-fee coach was Hank Haney, formerly Tiger Woods’ personal coach.
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The bitching soccer players might want to consider a different career path.
I think the point of MikeN’s post was be careful what you ask for. The women demanded equal pay but because the men are less likely to get to the World Cup than the women then the women might end up getting paid less overall. That they may balk at this after they examine the math indicates this is just another spat over more pay.
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Most of the money in professional athletics is derived from TV contract rights. I’m sure the men’s World Cup is huge amounts of money, but only once every 4 years and likely the broadcast rights are lower for the US market. The Europeans get paid a lot because a lot of people follow soccer in the EU. Those EU games are more popular in the US than the US league which is definitely a lower class of play.
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The US women are definitely world class though, unlike the men. Unfortunately women’s soccer is just not very popular. Their case was not helped by their failure to win gold at the Olympics. An argument can be made that they were sidetracked by their own politics.
MikeN
Of course, this structure was made knowing the men tend to not make it to cups and the women do tend to make it.
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“Equal” could also have been that they get identical contracts with the team that plays wins cups getting the cup winning. That’s also “identical” but players on a winning team would make more money. Playing is “working” in sports. So in this case, the ones who play the cup do more work, but split the revenue. That’s not actually “equal”.
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There are all sorts of things that could be characterized as “equal” based on reading. Or put another way, “identical” can be written to be “unequal” if you know how “the same” provision pans out in the wild.
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Still… I can’t get hugely excited about it. As SteveF says: they could all get other jobs. I suspect “management” wants to give the players as little as they possibly can. That’s not unusual for management in general, but seems especially so in sports.
If women want “equal†pay for making a World Cup then they need to put a product on the field people want to watch. TV markets aren’t going to pay for a product that doesn’t reach a lot of viewers. The women can complain about not having their product marketed equally to attract viewers, but that is about it.
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Is their sexism in sports? I would say so, many more men watch men’s sports and women typically don’t watch sports as much. This is likely cultural.
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This is similar to the typical academic complaining about football coaches being paid way more than their efforts. If they can get 100,000 people to show up and watch them do their jobs and sell a TV contract for the same then they will be paid more. As it is they need to produce an intellectual product that will get licensed patents to really produce revenue. Otherwise they will be paid what the market will bear for their services. It’s already a rigged market in their favor with state subsidies and a job market that requires a college degree in most cases for higher pay.
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The argument that their product is somehow more morally worthy is not compelling, the market will decide and if they don’t like that then too bad.
I do enjoy the media spin that Biden is “telling†the Democrats to wait for a deal. Reality is the two sides couldn’t agree and it was a disaster and an embarrassment for Pelosi. Another instance of where I’d love to see an alternate reality where the media interpreted that event happening on the right. The messaging of “we don’t care what’s in the bill but we are going to spend huge sums of money†isn’t so wisely thought out.
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House progressives are misreading Manchin IMO and they are painting him into a corner. If Manchin is * perceived * to be caving to the political left on a gigantic spending bill he will not get re-elected in 2024. Holding the infrastructure bill hostage is just bad tactics. This probably won’t end well for the left is my guess. If Manchin is going to switch parties, then it will happen sooner than later. The party and their media lapdogs have been heaping scorn on him for months.
Tom–
I agree on the viewers==pay in sports. As I said before: it’s in the “entertainment” category. The soccer federation (or whatever it’s called) had rather opaque document that made it hard to tell the amount of money brought in by women’s soccer. So it was hard to figure out if the women were underpaid given revenue based on those documents. I’m sure a world cup brings in money compared to no world cup though. So I personally tend to think the team that gets into and wins a word cup should get most of the money from that. Splitting it might look “equal” on paper, but of course it’s not if one team consistently makes the world cup and the other one doesn’t and the group drafting the offer knew that when drafting.
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Absolutely.
But there is a case to be made that something is odd about an institution that is supposedly about higher learning having such a huge revenue side associated with what amounts to commercial sports.
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It’s not wrong for those in the commercial sports arm of the school to be paid more. But it’s weird for that to have become such a huge thing at so many schools. Still, it is what it is.
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Professions bitching about their pay being unfair is commonplace though. School teachers bitch about pay. Everyone comes up with a “way” to make the comparison to say they are underpaid. I’ve seen a recent on on school teachers being paid less hourly than others with “similar” degrees. I read the “newspaper” article version– not something with nuts and bolts. But it does seem that “similar” is just “a bs is a bs is a bs”, which is BS. And also, it’s clear the analysis doesn’t consider things like job security. Teachers do change jobs, move, leave. But they very rarely face layoffs — which is a big unpredictable thing that is extremely costly. Or their “company” being bought out by another company in a way that means a division moves and maybe even if you aren’t laide off, you are no longer a good fit and vulnerable. And teachers are generally not “at will” employees after a few years.
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There are lots of advantages to the job of “teacher” which have economic benefits that aren’t “weekly pay”. I don’t know how to value these things, but they aren’t valuless. So one might expect weekly pay to be a little lower. How much? dunno.
Tom Scharf,
“If Manchin is going to switch parties, then it will happen sooner than later.”
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I will be utterly shocked if that happens, since he has had ample opportunity and hasn’t done it. Besides, he really does support most the things the progressive caucus supports…. increased legal protections for unions, limiting/eliminating voter verification rules, a roll-back of most of the 2017 tax cuts, and big increases in corporate and personal taxes. He diverges with the Democrats on eliminating fossil fuels and forcing only renewables on the country, and is reluctant to spend trillions that we don’t have. Manchin doesn’t fit in comfortably with the most extreme left of the Democrats, but probably even less so with Republicans. On balance I think he is a classic ‘liberal’ Democrat (eg like Bill Clinton).
My question is why do the progressives think that insulting someone is the best way to get them to get with the program? Normally you could count on Manchin rolling over in the end. But it looks like they’ve managed to back him so far into a corner that if he folds now, he looks like a coward and a fool.
OTOH, maybe the Democrat powers that be want to teach the Bernie wing of the party a lesson. Nah. I don’t believe that either.
Tom Scharf, that is part of it, but I was looking at the men’s side, all those guys virtue signaling for equal pay for the women.
The payout is something like the mens team gets more for making the world cup than the women do for winning the world cup. If they make the playoffs they get another payout, then more for later rounds which are unlikely for the US. Making the world cup is pretty likely; missed in 2018 but made seven straight before that. Playoffs is about 50-50.
So now the men have a 15 million payout while the women have 5 million, and USSF is now saying 10 million for each. These men who virtue signaled are now having to give up 5 million and give it to the women.
Many of the men’s national team do play for European teams. There is even additional payout from FIFA to the clubs for using their players.
MikeN,
I suspect none ever thought of the possibility the money would come out of the men’s pool of money. There’s a tendency for “workers” thin think “the pot” is infinite. Since the books are opaque, it’s actually possible that “management’s” only viable economic option for paying women more is to pay men less. Or, it may just be that management doesn’t want to pay out more to athletes in general. The latter would hardly be unprecedented.
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DeWitt Payne (Comment #206300): “My question is why do the progressives think that insulting someone is the best way to get them to get with the program?”
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My explanation is that their positions are based on ideology, emotion, and virtue signaling. All of that is amplified in an echo chamber. They reject logic and the idea of absolute moral principles. Since they have no sound ethical basis for their positions, the positions themselves get elevated to ethical absolutes.
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As a result, they have no way to argue except via insults. They can not build arguments on shared common ground since they reject the very idea of an absolute morallity. They can not use reason to persuade, since they have no way to arrive at their positions by means of reason. But they are certain that they are right and that opposition must not only be wrong but evil. All that is left is to try and bully people.
A group of parents in two Florida counties (Gainesville area and Jacksonvile area), both defying the governor’s parental opt-out for mask mandates, have filed lawsuits to compel the school boards to follow the executive order and health department orders. Should the court issue a writ of mandamus, the school board members would be subject to arrest and prosecution for contempt. It is not clear to me that the Florida Court of appeals will grant them standing, but if the case proceeds, things could get interesting.
The timing of the Merck drug is rather unfortunate in the grand scheme. A lesson learned is you can’t take two years getting a drug to market for a novel virus global pandemic of this nature. Yet another example of where challenge testing could have potentially saved 1000’s of lives.
Anecdotal data from my area’s vaccine mandate. This is more reasonable than some other places I have heard of.
https://www.fox13news.com/news/about-70-of-tampa-city-workers-meet-covid-19-vaccine-deadline-officials-say
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“Tampa city workers had until Thursday to follow the mayor’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate after the requirement was announced August 25, and so far city officials said at least 70% of workers are vaccinated.”
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“It’s turning out that a lot of them, and this is anecdotal, a lot more people have antibodies than we thought or than they knew. So we’ve got the antibody serving as a vaccine substitute,” said Tampa Police Benevolent Association spokesperson Danny Alvarez.
It’s unclear how long antibodies last from natural infection, so the city will require those workers to get tested four times a year, Alvarez said.”
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“If we did find somebody who was not complying with the policy as it goes on, we would just look to what we always do is progressive discipline. But that’s not the goal of the plan,” said Bennett.”
It continues to look like every state has had (or is now having) a ‘delta surge’ in cases and deaths. How severe the surge (and especially in deaths) seems to be directly related to vaccination rate for that state. Looking at a dozen or so, ranging from the ‘most evil anti-science-low-vaccination’ to the ‘most saintly-high-vaccination’, it looks like the death rate per confirmed case varies between about 0.5% and 2%.
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It will be interesting to see if the delta surge for the whole country continues to fall as northern states have ever colder weather that keeps people indoors.
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It will be even *more* interesting to see if Biden’s vaccine mandates become basically irrelevant due to falling case rates. After all, the most draconian of the covid rules and regulations have always been justified based on a “public health emergency”; those rules and regulations would seem inappropriate if the emergency has passed. When cases and deaths fall to a couple of % of their peaks, it may be difficult to argue that the same “emergency” conditions apply.
Tom Scharf (Comment #206305): “Yet another example of where challenge testing could have potentially saved 1000’s of lives.”
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I don’t think so. The purpose (or at least the main advantage) of the drug is to prevent severe illness. So you would need to do the challenge testing on people at risk of severe illness, half of whom would be deliberately infected but not treated.
Tom Scharf (Comment #206306): “This is more reasonable than some other places I have heard of.”
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A little less unreasonable. They are not really accepting prior infection as a substitute for the vaccine, they are only accepting it as a reason to delay getting the vaccine. Still an anti-science position.
“They are not really accepting prior infection as a substitute for the vaccine”
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They are allowing previous infection instead of a vaccine:
“So we’ve got the antibody serving as a vaccine substitute … the city will require those workers to get tested four times a year”.
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This is way more reasonable than no prior infection allowed, and since natural infection immunity is likely more variable than a vaccine response this is not an unreasonable condition, but to be fair they should also put requirements on vaccinated individual’s antibody levels which could be group tested instead of on an individual level. At least they are acknowledging prior infection which is a big step from sticking fingers in the ears and yelling la la la.
One thing for sure is the media’s coverage of Florida has fallen off a cliff once the case rate fell 75% in a month, it’s now #42 out of 50 states in case rate. Why such a speedy collapse is an interesting story, but due to the political bias of previous coverage it just can’t be covered that way as a science interest story. Alaska is having a huge peak, WTF? It’s like War Games, the only way to win the covid prediction game is to not play the game.
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The breakouts are regional and do tend to have a latitude correlation over a year. I still think there is an unknown factor X but you would have thought it would have been found by now, perhaps luck (a few super spreaders triggers a huge wave) and weather play a role. I sure hope this is the last big wave but this seems a bit optimistic given the past. Remember 3 weeks of lock down and we are done? We were all so innocent then, ha ha.
The CDC has recently published two papers on masking in K-12 schools, both explicitly designed to support masking mandates in schools. One study defines ‘covid breakout’ as two cases in a school; the study is therefore both nutty and irrelevant. The other study is far more serious and relevant, and shows that there is in fact almost certainly a mask effect: Schools with mask mandates for students and teachers had less than half the number of covid cases of schools with no mask mandates.
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of course, the results are still rubbish: 1) the absolute numbers of infections is low (eg absolute. maximum of ~60 cases per 100,000 student-days without masks versus ~25 cases per 100,000 student-days with everyone wearing masks), 2) the case rates were falling rapidly over several weeks after school started, masks or not, and 3) most importantly, there is zero description of consequences…. were any children hospitalized? Did any die, or suffered long term consequences? Of course not.
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The studies are just propaganda: they present data in the most favorable possible light, while ignoring the counter argument that masks are inherently detrimental to normal communication and learning. 10 MPH speed limits would eliminate virtually all traffic deaths… but there would be considerable cost, just as with K-12 school mask mandates. We rationally reject 10 MPH speed limits, just as we should reject masking of kids who are at near zero risk.
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You can safely say that masks in schools are irrelevant to childhood health and development, except to the extent they interfere with learning.
Tom Scharf,
*sigh*
I would like someone to show me a disease where vaccination is more effective and lasts longer than infection acquired resistance, assuming that there is a vaccine in the first place. We know that reinfections were rare for the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 when there was no vaccine, i.e. that the effectiveness of acquired immunity was high regardless of antibody levels. I’m not holding my breath.
DeWitt,
“I would like someone to show me a disease where vaccination is more effective and lasts longer than infection acquired resistance..”
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Of course there are none. At least none ever documented. At this point nothing about covid public policy is related to actual health outcomes…. it is long since 100% political, with the unhinged left trying their best to force everyone to submit to their will.
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The moment that previous infection becomes considered at least as good as a vaccination by the crazy left, we will know a bit of sanity has intruded into an otherwise nutty political discussion. Don’t hold your breath waiting….. I predict they will NEVER accept a rational evaluation of previous infection….. or anything else for that matter.
Tom Scharf (Comment #206311): “This is way more reasonable than no prior infection allowed”.
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No, it is not. They are still telling the recovered they have to get vaccinated. Just like all the other tyrants. Just because you no longer have antibodies does not mean you are no longer immune.
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All they are doing is spreading out the firings over 6 months to a year, so as not to create a short term staffing crisis.
They can say these things about infection acquired immunity because the CDC is failing in its core fundamental job of providing this information. They have billions in funding and 1000’s of employees, this doesn’t even include the special covid funding.
Tom Scharf,
“They can say these things about infection acquired immunity because the CDC is failing in its core fundamental job of providing this information.”
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Do you think the CDC staff believes that is their fundamental job? I suspect not. The CDC and the FDA are heavily biased to support the policies that politicians on the left support. The self-same politicians that vow endless financial and legal support for increasing control of bureaucrats in the the CDC and the FDA.
Tom
But they need some proof that you really were infected in the first place. Otherwise, people who didn’t want the vaccine would just claim they had covid.
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To rely on tests antibodies dropping at group level. But then someone has to do it, collect the data and write up the results of the study. As long as it hasn’t been done, the only thing you can do is test individuals.
Infection vs vaccination is a classic example of the fallacy of the argument from ignorance. The statement: ‘we don’t know how long infection acquired immunity lasts compared to vaccination immunity’ can easily be recast to: ‘we don’t know how long vaccination immunity lasts compared to infection acquired immunity’. So saying we don’t know something does not prove that it isn’t true. Once upon a time, rhetoric and logic were taught in the public schools.
I thought I saw an analysis out of Israel that natural immunity was 11 times more protective as vaccination. But most of the vaccinated were seeing their immunity wane. I think the same study showed 75% effectiveness of vaccination.
The problem here is that we really lack definitive data. Israel and Britain have the best data and I think both sets show that there are a lot of vaccinated people getting sick and being hospitalized.
I don’t have a lot of evidence for it, but the evolutionary pressure of our leaky vaccines is to me a danger. A surge in vaccinated people as we are seeing would tend to favor strains that had some resistance to vaccination generated antibodies.
Dr. Vinay Prasad on the video blog Follow the Science presents the strongest arguments against the Pfizer boosters. He says there should be a randomized study of healthy people with and without the booster to test whether it is effective, which hasn’t been done. Also, the so-called effectiveness study by Pfizer only tests whether the booster leads to results that are not inferior to dose 2, not whether it improves the effectiveness of dose 2. Additionally, the end point of the testing falls on level of antibodies and not the actual effectiveness of the Pfizer booster. See 32:00 of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe9boK1jKCM&t=2226s
The basic point is that the testing has been unnecessarily very skimpy. Much other good stuff in the video.
David,
Evolutionary pressure exists with or without vaccines.
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I too think the assumption that people who recovered are not immune is not only “argument from ignorance”, but extends it to “we don’t know something unless there is a double blind study”. If double blind studies show vaccines give immunity to a particular disease, we should accept that infection does with very little evidence for the latter.
lucia (Comment #206323): “Evolutionary pressure exists with or without vaccines.”
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David Young (Comment #206321) is absolutely right. Evolutionary pressure is far greater with the vaccine. The vaccine allows a large amount of viral replication in the presence of the vaccine induced antibodies. That creates an enormously enhanced chance of mutations being selected to avoid the antibodies. And the vaccine allows transmission of the selected virus.
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The evidence on natural immunity seems to be that it is much better at preventing mild infection and transmission. That makes the naturally immune a dead end for viral evolution.
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Viral evolution requires extensive replication in the presence of the antagonistic agent. Both the replication and the antagonist must be in the SAME individual. That happens with vaccinated people, but probably does not happen with the naturally immune.
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Also, the vaccine produces a very narrow range of highly targeted antibodies that will pretty be much the same for everyone. Natural immunity produces antibodies with a range of targets that vary from person to person. That makes it enormously easier for the virus to evolve to evade the vaccine.
MikeM
I know you keep insisting evolutionary pressure is greater with the vaccine. But your case is very weak.
What is more important is there is much less with vaccine.
So no. It there is very little reason to conclude it create enormously enhanced chance of mutations. In fact, since the number mutation is proportional to the number of mutations, on should expect a lower number of mutations per time with vaccination.
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Of it is true that those that escape the vaccine would tend to be the ones transmitted.
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I know you like to speculate that it might do these things, and then insist your speculation is fact, but it is an unlikely argument.
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It’s worth noting the argument that it is simply lack of nasal immunity that makes people get sick actually means the exact same viruses escape from the multiplication in the nose in vaccinated and unvaccinated. Those multiplied because the lack of immunity is location specific. In which case, there is no reason at all to think vaccination causes any more selection of toward variants being the ones to escape. Meanwhile, those vaccinated have virus multiplying for less time.
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So the balance of the argument is that vaccines will reduce the rate at which variants emerge.
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After it’s conferred. That only occurs after the infected person acted as a ginormaous virus generator with it concommittent potential to generate a mutation. In the meantime a vaccinated person who does get infected (generally only in the nose) does not create or transmit as much virus should they get infected. And there is little reason to suspect there is much more “selection” toward vaccine resistant in the nose in the vaccinated vs unvaccinated because we think the nasal immunity isn’t conferred by vaccines.
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It’s silly that your argument somehow doesn’t include the that those with natural immunity only cease to be virus reproducing factories after they already were. And also that those who get the nasal infections also cease to be virus repordusing factories after their breakthrough infection. And the latter produce less over all virus with every reason to think there is no particular evolutinary selection for “vaccine” escape in their noses!
MikeM
This is wrong.
A mutation that escapes a vaccine can occur in an unvaccinated individual by the exact same process as in a vaccinated one. That’s just the way mutations are.
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Any mutation— whether it does or does not escape vaccine (or medical treatment)– can replicate as long as the person’s body doesn’t attack it. If it’s vaccine resistant, that will happen equally in a vaccinated and unvaccinated person.
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Those viruses that replicate and can be transmitted will. Those that would escape our vaccines are generated at the same rate in the unvaccinated.
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Of course, if one that is not vaccine resistent is created in an unvaccinated person, they will only transmit to unvaccinated people. So it will transmit more slowly in the population. So the only ones that will transmit to both vaccinated and unvaccinated are the vaccine resistant ones. But these aren’t circulating any faster than they would have if the vaccine didn’t exist. They would have anyway– at a rate that is dictated by other factors that dictate transmissibility.
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And, of course, we can only notice a vaccine resistant virus evolved when the vaccine exists. But that doesn’t mean that specific virus doesn’t come into existence absent the virus. It only means we don’t “tag” it as having any special quality.
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But none of this means the presence of vaccines result in faster evolution of vaccine resistant ones. Those same viruses that would have been resistant to the vaccine (which was never created) still evolve. We just don’t notice.
Francis Collins (NIH) offers a glowing report of a modeling study that suggests vaccine generated antibodies are more effective against a range of variants…. which he then uses to suggest vaccination is better than naturally acquired immunity…. and supportive of the need to force everyone to get vaccinated, even if they had previous covid illness. He is being simply dishonest, and I suspect trying to please the Biden administration. Collins says nothing about clear and overwhelming evidence (most recently the large Israeli study of breakthrough infections) that immunity acquired by infection is much more effective at reducing future infection than the Pfizer vaccine.
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My opinion of Collins as a scientist has dropped an order of magnitude. He is a political hack, like most of those in Washington.
Mike M.,
If vaccines cause more viral evolution compared to unvaccinated, then where are they? Δ came from India. γ came from Brazil. β came from South Africa. α was first identified in the UK. None of these countries had a significant number of vaccinated people at the time. IIRC, Α, Î’ and Γ originated before vaccines were even available.
DeWitt,
The emprical evidence that the variants arrived before vaccine and in places where there wasn’t any hasn’t convinced MikeM before! He prefers his speculative argument that decrees does things “do” happen merely because they are not utterly impossible!
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Other than there is no such thing as a “vaccine resistant” virus absent a vaccine, there is no argument that the presense of the vaccine cases more, worse or even “vaccine resistant” viruses to emerge.
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Of course the presence of a vaccine means those that are foiled by the vaccine vanish meaning the fraction that are not foiled become the dominant fraction. But that doesn’t mean the vaccine “caused” them to be, nor does that mean that fraction grew faster than it would have absent the vaccine.
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It will grow just as fast in the presence or absence of the vaccine. But since the vaccine kills off the other ones, it will be the only one left. The same thing happens with natural immunity which viruses can escape.
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And for this virus, the thought is it doesn’t give nasal immunity. Well, that means the process of “no vaccine” is happening in noses which is unfortunate. But it doesn’t mean that vaccine escape happens faster that if all those people got full blow cases, were infectious for longer, had bodies with many more replications and so on!
lucia,
You seem to have no understanding of how evolution works. In particular, you don’t seem to understand the difference between mutation and evolution. I don’t have time to explain it more than I already have.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #206328): “If vaccines cause more viral evolution compared to unvaccinated,”
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I never said that. I said that the vaccines encourage evolution to evade the vaccine.
“Do you think the CDC staff believes that is their fundamental job?”
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I really don’t know what they think their job is lately. They do some things well while seemingly abandoning obvious responsibilities. My guess is that the bureaucratic inertia is rather heavy at that organization and that quickly bring a lot of resources to bear on a fast moving pandemic was just not their thing. Determining the relative immunity of vaccines versus infection doesn’t really change the course of the pandemic so maybe they just see this as low priority. I’ve also heard people remark that they didn’t want to give people the idea that getting the infection is “better” than a vaccine which is an idiotic line of thinking.
“Evolutionary pressure is far greater with the vaccine. The vaccine allows a large amount of viral replication in the presence of the vaccine induced antibodies.â€
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You can say this over and over but the apparent conclusion (?) that vaccines are dangerous or a bad idea doesn’t follow. Clearly delta is transmissive enough that the bulk of humanity will get this infection in the absence of a vaccine. Sterilizing immunity would be better of course but an infection doesn’t provide that either. Previously infected do get covid again at some rate, I think I read maybe 1% or so of new infections, but that data is very old, and those infections tended to be milder.
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The real question is whether the ultimate body count is higher with or without the vaccine? It is conjecture that vaccines are pushing evolution to a point that the ultimate body count would be higher somehow. One can dream up that scenario but that has not been the case historically and not been the case so far on covid. Mutations of other dangerous viruses tended to make them less lethal and even benign sometimes.
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“That makes the naturally immune a dead end for viral evolution.â€
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This is not the case with covid. Natural immunity is not providing sterilizing immunity. But it does seem possible based on limited data that the naturally immune are less transmissive than the vaccinated. I wish we had better data on this, see previous rants on the CDC. Perhaps India would be a guide here as the bulk of their cases were infections.
That last of the zero covid holdouts has given up under pressure from delta.
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New Zealand to End ‘Zero Covid-19’ Strategy
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says the government is aiming to ‘actively control the virus’ as it prepares to ease restrictions
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-zealand-to-end-zero-covid-19-strategy-11633331640
“New Zealand is ending its effort to keep Covid-19 out of the remote South Pacific country as the economic costs mount and after its latest lockdown failed to halt the spread of the virus.
Pandemic restrictions in the country’s largest city, Auckland—in place after a Covid-19 outbreak in mid-August—will be eased in stages starting this week, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Monday.”
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They never completely suppressed the last outbreak, although it was kept at very low levels. They still represent the biggest success story for covid.
Delta is now >99% of US cases and that’s near the case everywhere on the globe. This is because delta reproduces faster in humans than the original strains and its aerosol transmission is more effective. It’s 2.5X multiplier of R over the original strain. It’s an alteration in the spike protein.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02275-2
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What is unknowable (at least to me) is whether the vaccines that target this spike leave any room for delta to evolve past the vaccine and retain their enhanced transmission. What seems possible (more likely?) is that delta will evolve the spike protein in such a way as to make it more transmissible among the vaccinated and natural immune but * less transmissible * among the naïve. Unless we get some rather gory detail from actual experts we just can’t know this answer. We could do a lot of GOF experiments to find out though! Ha ha.
Tom Scharf (Comment #206333): “the apparent conclusion (?) that vaccines are dangerous or a bad idea doesn’t follow.”
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I do not claim that vaccines are dangerous, only that there is a risk that is not well understood. So there is a lot to be said for using the vaccine to protect those at significant risk while holding off on vaccinating everyone.
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Tom Scharf: “Natural immunity is not providing sterilizing immunity.”
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What do you mean by sterilizing immunity, why does it matter, and what evidence do you have for your claim?
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Tom Scharf: “But it does seem possible based on limited data that the naturally immune are less transmissive than the vaccinated.”
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It seems to me that the important thing is to reduce transmission to the level where it can not be sustained. The vaccines clearly do not do that. It appears that naturally acquired immunity does achieve that.
For the purposes of this conversation lets call sterilizing immunity the ability of the body to stop the virus quickly before it becomes symptomatic and fast enough to prevent the retransmission of the virus. It’s important to understand that when an infectious person coughs in your face you are going to get some virus that will start replicating and might be detectable. Immunity is not an astronaut suit. If you get a huge dose you will probably be symptomatic, especially the longer you are from the initial infection.
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The naturally immune get reinfected. This shows up in both Kentucky studies (more often than the vaccinated) and the Israeli study (less often than the vaccinated). Some of them are symptomatic, thus very likely transmissive. Breakthrough infections are shorter than naïve infections so the retransmission period is shorter.
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There is certainly some people who are naturally immune who have weaker reactions to a reinfection (older, immunocompromised, just unlucky in their body’s initial defense, etc.). What is the relative retransmission rate between the naturally immune and the vaccinated? Who knows. How far is R reduced for the two groups? Unknown.
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“The vaccines clearly do not do that. It appears that naturally acquired immunity does achieve that.â€
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I can certainly believe herd immunity level may be lower for the naturally immune than the vaccinated, but as usual no data. This is all speculation. Declaring the other side is speculation does not prove one’s own speculation correct. Weight of evidence is probably that natural immunity is better for preventing retransmission but it is very weak as far as I can tell.
MIkeM
They don’t. The vaccine prevents those that don’t evade the vaccine from surviving. But the don’t “encourage” the other ones. The other ones plod along just as they would have without the vaccine.
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You are confusing “survival bias” for “encouraging”. They aren’t “encouraged”. They would exist and propagate as long as there is no negative selection bias against them. The non-resistant virus doesn’t “discourage” the resistant ones. They don’t hunt them down to eat them. This isn’t like ants where one ant colony will attack another one. They don’t “fill” the “petri dish”. If there is no vaccine, both strains should be able to happly replicate in the same infected body with the “vaccine resistant” one either not affected or barely affected by the absence or presence of the non-resistant one. The fact that the body can quickly kill the non-resistant one doesn’t increate the replication rate of the resistant one. It doesn’t make it’s life cycle “faster”. It doesn’t do anything to “help” it along.
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The strains that could evade the vaccine would evolve regardless. (We wouldn’t call them vaccine resistant if there was no vaccine. But they would still exist and propagate provided they can replicate and transmit.)
MikeM
On the contrary, you are saying things that are flat out wrong about evolution.
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It happens even absent the vaccine. You don’t seem to get this. You also don’t seem to get that the resistant strain doesn’t get any “help” from the non-resistant one being gone. It doesn’t open up some sort of wider “niche” for it.
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I perfectly understand you don’t notice the ginormous holes in your argument. But they are present.
Lucia,
“It doesn’t open up some sort of wider “niche†for it.”
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Exactly right. The ~100% “displacement” of other strains by the Delta strain in the USA does not mean that the delta strain “out-competes” other strains. It just means that absent the delta strain the pandemic would have been effectively over long ago. The near-universal “delta surge” seen in the USA (and most other countries) even after cases had fallen to *near zero* in many places, is just telling us that the delta strain is able to infect a lot of people the other strains had difficulty infecting.
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Which means (I hope) the clear current decline in the delta-surge will bring the pandemic to an effective close, absent the emergence of some other strain that can evade/overcome existing resistance in the population. While the pandemic will likely come to a close, I have much less hope the the pandemic madness will end…. to many people have been terrified by mis-information (much willfully reported) for the madness to end any time soon.
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Case in point, one of the large Florida Counties fighting against DeSantis and the parent opt out rules reports weekly covid cases per 1000 student-weeks; their data show the case rates rose sharply in the first weeks after school started (in August in Florida), in spite of everyone wearing masks, but have now dropped to much lower levels…. under 10% of the peak rates, and are falling rapidly. But the county has not even considered revising their mask mandate. BTW, many FL counties with no mask requirement at all have infection rates in schools LOWER than some counties with strict mask mandates.
MikeM
I think one problem with your claims may be that you may not be using words in the same way people normally interpret them.
When you say vaccines “encourage” vaccine resistant strains, are you claiming something more like:
(a) In the presence of a vaccine the probable number of ‘vaccine resistant’ strain existing and propagating in the population will be greater after defined set of time (for example a year or decade) that it would be in the absence of a vaccine?
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(b) Or do you mean the vaccine resistant strains will be a larger proportion of what is circulating? And that you call this “encouraging” the resistant strains even if the total number of resistant strains is lower than in case A?
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Because “encourage”, ordinarily, “encourage” means a happens. B, with it’s over all reduction in the number of resistant strains circulating is not normally called “encouraging” (Though B is what should happen with a partially protective but not fully protective vaccine. The total number of resistant strains created per year or decade will be lower because fewer viral replications happen and there for fewer mutations occur. And a mutation that escapes the vaccine still replicates and transmits whether or not the vaccine is present. So it will circulate provided lots of people get infected as they certainly do when they are not vaccinated at all. )
STeveF
That’s just it. Delta may or may not evade the vaccine. Whether it does or not, this was not “created” by the vaccine because it broke out before the vaccine. It just spread like wildfire.
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But the main issue seems to be that those who get delta create much more virus, and it’s spreading fast. People sometimes don’t understand that with something capable of exponential spread, and increase in from 2 for A to 6 for D means the ratio D/A will grow exponentially with a growth factor of (6-2)! And of course going from 2 to 12 means the ratio grows with a factor of 12-2. Pretty soon it looks like “almost all D”. It doesn’t mean A was gone or wiped out or whatever. Unless immunity to D gives you immunity to both, A will still exist.
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Meanwhile, the vaccine for A doesn’t “encourage” D in any meaningful sense. It worst it fails to discourge it. But the reason D is circulating is that D is just dang transmissible. Given it’s infectiousness, we have enough unvaccinated people for it to circulate. Lack of a vaccine for A wouldn’t have slowed it!
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And of course, if you eventually got a vaccine for D but not A, then D would get wiped out. A would remain. But that doesn’t mean it was “encouraged” by the vaccine for D. It was always there, transmitting– but less successfully. And when D is gone you are back to the epidemic you had before vaccine for D came along. (Unless, of course, D give you immunity to A. )
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Of course, if the vaccine gives 90% protection to both– so no actual “evasion”, you still get a ton of both vaccinated and unvaccinated people sick with D. Those who want more protection will want to get it because the absolute probability of getting sick is now higher.
lucia (Comment #206341),
Both A and B.
Mike M:
(A) Nothing in any argument you made suggests A is remotely likely. Nothing about evolution of viruses makes it likely in the present circumstances.
(B) Doesn’t fit the term “encouraging” vaccine resistant strains. OR if it does, since there is less of it around “encouraging” would be consistent with benefitting public health.
If delta was the original strain then our death counts would have likely been double. We probably would have reached herd immunity before the vaccine. The original strain was pretty bad still, almost like it was … ahem … already adapted for efficient human transmission. Statistically it’s possible we just got very unlucky and an early natural mutation made it this way. We just need to track those very early lineages, but wait …
Tom,
Absolutely. If delta had come first, death counts would be at least double. But yes: we’d be at herd immunity because infection seems to give immunity. Old folks homes would be significantly depopulated too.
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On the grim side: Perhaps that would protect Social Security. Those paying out pensions would have benefited. Not the way you really want those things to happen though.
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Oddly, once they did have the too-late vaccine, lots of people might take it “just in case”!
For a Florida booster at the county site where I received my original shots:
1. You must be 6 months out from the second shot
2. You must answer this question correctly: “Do you have increased risk for COVID-19 exposure and transmission because of occupational or institutional setting?”
Tom Scharf,
Being over 65 doesn’t allow you to get the booster?
Yes, over 65, immunocompromised (no apparent proof required), and that final loophole you can drive a truck through which is for anyone over 18.
Large Pfizer USA study released today:
“The Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine is 90 percent effective at preventing hospitalization for up to six months, with no signs of waning during that time period”
“In a subset of people who had samples of their virus sequenced, the vaccine was 93 percent effective against hospitalization from Delta, compared with 95 percent against hospitalization from other variants.”
“The vaccine’s effectiveness against infection did decline over time, however, falling from 88 percent during the first month after vaccination to 47 percent after five months.”
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https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02183-8/fulltext
Tom, yes sadly looks like NZ will not get to zero. In last couple of weeks, active subclusters have multiplied from 3 to 12 today. The largest no. of cases are in Pacifika (especially Samoan) in the poor South Auckland area. Lots of them involved in essential services, overstayers scared of immigration status being discovered, a suspicion of vaccines after 2 babies died from criminally negligent MMR vaccination in 2018, large families and cramped housing – all contributing – plus the infectiousness of Delta. Also appears to have spread into criminal gangs, not known for compliance with laws and community pressures.
The only good news is that vaccination has been able to take place at pace. 80+% of Auckland has had at least one jab. 92% of all NZ 65-over with one jab, and 82% with 2. Hopefully that will keep death rate down. Still, modellers are predicting 1000 cases with 6 deaths a week for a fully open NZ and 90% vaccinated. Not something our hospitals can easily manage at moment though frantically gearing up.
The battle is how to get the hold-outs vaccinated. Former prime minister Key (conservative) arguing for taking away rights – vaccination passports to fly, to enter licensed premises, sports games, music events. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/452377/take-away-some-of-their-rights-sir-john-key-on-incentivising-vaccinations.
A bit different from conservatives in USA I think. But we do have an ever-stronger liberatarian party (ACT) advocating for QALY approach to balancing risk versus cost which I go for.
I think though the biggest success story for handling covid goes to China (once they did react) and Taiwan.
I don’t trust China’s numbers to the point I don’t even look at them. Maybe they are right but they are mega-politically motivated to under report these numbers. I put them on par with the old USSR (what nuclear radiation floating into your country could you possibly be speaking of???? we know not which you speak, ignore that roof blown off our reactor, it’s routine maintenance!). They can do large scale misinformation that you just can’t do in the west. I don’t wish them an outbreak but delta is equal opportunity.
Parents of disabled children in FL have filed notice of appeal of a Federal judge’s rejection of their Federal lawsuit claiming the DeSantis parental opt-out order for masks in schools violates federal law (people with disabilities act). This is probably the beginning of the final act in the dramatic school-masquerade theater in Florida. My guess: the 11th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals will simply refuse to hear the case, or the delay in hearing the case will be so long that defiant Florida school districts begin to drop mask mandates when student case rates drop to very low levels (something already well underway), and the 11th will dismiss the case as moot.
Tom
I also don’t trust China’s numbers. Though who knows, maybe in this case it’s true.
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Lucia,
I agree that there will be a drop in Federal expenditures for Social Security and Medicare due to the pandemic. But my guess is the drop in future payments is unlikely to be more than $300 billion, while added expenditures (Federal and State) have already topped ten times that. I believe the final accounting will show the pandemic to be very costly in both economic and human terms.
Tom Scharf,
Speaking of the USSR and coverups, there was the anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk in 1979 which wasn’t investigated until 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
That sounds familiar. Unfortunately we’re unlikely to ever get that sort of information from China.
DeWitt,
The first causality under a totalitarian regime is factual truth; of course China lies about almost everything. You can see exactly the same thing on a miniature scale at most US colleges and universities, where leftist political dogma trumps everything else… including the truth.
Garland: Partnership among federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement to address threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.
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Harrass a senator in the toilets. All part of the process. Berate a school board and you’re a domestic terrorist.
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The process is the punishment.
IMO harassing and shaming your opponents publicly is more about in-group signaling how virtuous you are to others as well as competitive peer social ladder climbing. Clearly this isn’t about persuasion, which is why it is being broadcast by Fox 24/7. Trump berating CNN’s Acosta publicly didn’t exactly bring him around to Trump’s side. I suppose there is something to be said for team building on your own side at the expense of increasing divisiveness, but I find the whole thing socially destructive and the only redeeming quality is momentary entertainment. Let he without sin cast the first stone.
Countries having done really well with covid so far is a bit of a liability in reality at this point. You can certainly avoid a lot of deaths by vaccinating before a breakout but it seems inevitable that delta or a future variant will sweep through your area. The UK and Israel show that even large prior breakouts and high vaccination rates won’t stop delta.
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Taiwan is a bit bizarre. A single smallish outbreak, only 14% vaccinated, and basically zero covid. That seems like a drought laden forest ready for a a match. Maybe China/Taiwan have built-in immunity from previous SARS like cousins or some other factor X, but all else being equal they are going to be hit just like everywhere else. Fortress Taiwan can’t stay that way forever.
Speaking of Taiwan, PRC has been probing their defenses with an increasing number of warplane incursions. It might be China doesn’t wait after all. I give Taiwan 18 months. China swallows it whole, Biden does something utterly ineffectual, three weeks later that’s the end of that.
[link]
[Edit: I can’t quite articulate why I think 18 months. I think China has more work to do for some reason, but I can’t put my finger on why I think that.]
Tom Scharf,
The only thing that appears to stop delta is a huge delta surge (see Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil). When most everyone who is susceptible has had it, the pandemic does appear to die out.
China needs at least another decade of military expansion before it can take a chance like that. The repercussions are larger than a military battle, they would likely get ostracized from world trade with the west. It’s just not worth it. The Ruskies buzz our ships with regularity, probing a potential opponent is standard military practice to see how they react. A large fleet of Chinese ships constantly circling Florida wouldn’t make the US too happy.
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In the larger picture anybody who believes the US/Allies won WWII because of their industrial capacity should take a look at the scale of China’s factories. We won’t beat China by having better war factories.
markbofill,
I hope you are mistaken, and that China doesn’t attack Taiwan in 18 months. The Taiwanese have enough military capability to make that extremely costly to China, but I am not convinced the politicians in Taiwan are willing to go all-out in a war they know they will lose in the end…. they may just fold and flee to Western countries rather than fight.
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Another important factor is TSMC; China could cause hugely costly global economic disruption by destroying the (giant) TSMC manufacturing facilities with a few air or missile strikes. These produce critical microprocessor (and other) chips for thousands of applications worldwide.
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The moral hazard with any totalitarian communist regime, which is electorally illegitimate and knows it, is that it values political domination more than anything else: kill many millions or civilians to gain political control? Disrupt the world economy? Sure, no problem! Just another of the many profound, inherent evils of the left.
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China’s utter hostility to ‘life liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, which is rampant in Taiwan, is what makes China’s attack of Taiwan more likely. That we have a confused, Alzheimer’s addled president only increases the risk of an attack.
mark bofill (Comment #206365): “I can’t quite articulate why I think 18 months. I think China has more work to do for some reason, but I can’t put my finger on why I think that.”
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Invading islands is really hard. Taiwan has strong coastal defenses. China has very few landing craft and not many paratroopers. In the short run, Taiwan could probably deny China control of the air since Taiwan’s air force is almost entirely devoted to air defense. If Taiwan had to go it completely alone, China could surely wear them down, but it would take time and be very costly. To prevent that, it might be enough for the U.S to supply Taiwan with fighter jets and other equipment. If the U.S. were to provide air support, China would probably have little chance of a successful invasion.
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A failed invasion attempt would be catastrophic to the Chinese government. No way do they attempt it until they can be certain of a relatively quick victory. They have a lot of work to do to get to that point.
All,
Thanks for your thoughts and feedback. I hope Taiwan is a tougher nut than I think it is, and that all of the reasoning offered as to why China won’t go for it is correct.
Tom Scharf,
“If the U.S. were to provide air support, China would probably have little chance of a successful invasion.”
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China, faced with an unsuccessful invasion, could use nuclear weapons to completely destroy the island. I do not put that outside the realm of possibility. Human lives mean nothing to the CCP; permanent political control is everything.
My above comment was wrongly directed to Tom Scharf. It should have been Mike M. Sorry.
All China has to do is blockade or quarantine Taiwan, and with some substantial cost, it would defeat Taiwan.
JDOhio,
Donno. Yes, Taiwan can’t survive without ocean freight, but anything that long term would invite global pressure on China, with refusal to accept Chinese exports in many places. If every one of China’s trade partners refused Chinese business, it would be much more than just costly.
Taiwan imports most of its food, but it seems they have large stockpiles, including an 18 month supply of rice.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4203406
So a blockade could bring them to their knees, but it would take a considerable time. I think that SteveF is right that the result would be great economic pressure on China.
I don’t believe the US would permit a blockade of Taiwan. On the other hand, I do worry that Biden’s puppeteers would dither indecisively for a few critical days if China threw everything and the kitchen sink in an effort to take Taiwan by force. If after a few days it seemed China won, the world would make peace with China. Who wants war and/or economic upheaval for a lost cause.
I might be wrong in thinking that China could largely prevail in a few days. I’m not sure they could, but I’m not sure they couldn’t either.
China hasn’t really demonstrated any competence in a foreign military engagement so they may or may not be able to competently attack Taiwan. It’s just as likely to be a complete clusterf*** from their side once live firing starts. I just don’t think this is a likely scenario in the near future. Even if they managed to succeed it will result in the heavy militarization of South Korea and Japan. There just isn’t a lot of upside here and China has yet to show any expansionist tendencies.
Well, maybe. Because I take the side of the US, I assume for purposes of worrying that adversaries are competent in absence of specific evidence one way or the other. It’d be great if PRC forces couldn’t find their asses with both hands, I just don’t like assuming that.
Regarding expansionism, I don’t really agree. I don’t think they view Taiwan as expansion, they view that as reunification AFAICT. Their regional behavior seems to lean towards expansionism in general to me. They aren’t building airstrip islands in the South China sea because they want vacation real estate.
No, no vacationing is likely on tiny islands built up as military airstrips, which are claimed as Chinese territory. China simply wants to intimidate Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia, and claim virtually all natural gas (and possibly oil) in the South China sea. It is simple theft of natural resources from small neighbors. They have only the most flimsy claims to the few tiny natural islands (already rejected by World Court and other organizations), so they are going to take the natural resources by force.
This model discusses the dynamics of emergance of vaccine resistant strains:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95025-3
The rate of emergence of vaccine resistant strains is lowest when the population gets vaccinated quickly (relative to transmission rate.)
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Full vaccination of the population does not enhance the emergence of vaccination resistant strains. (Partial might. Which means it is the presence of unvaccinated among the vaccinated that permits (not ‘encourages’) the resistant strains to take over.
mark bofill,
I think that you are looking at China mostly the right way. They do have expansionist ambitions and even if they do not, they regard Taiwan as a rebellious province, not a foreign country. They had no qualms about subjugating Hong Kong.
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But they won’t try for Taiwan unless they think they can do it quickly. That way they present the world with a fait accompli rather than a small nation valiantly resisting conquest by a superpower. We can not count on their military being incompetent. But they can not count on Taiwan folding or being abandoned by allies. So I don’t think that they can move until they have overwhelming force. They do not have that now, not for an invasion of a island, but no doubt they have the resources needed to develop that capacity.
lucia (Comment #206380),
The model looks like rubbish. They make all the usual questionable or wrong modelling assumptions. In addition, they do not seem to have anything remotely resembling a realistic model of viral evolution. They do not consider viral population dynamics in individuals, which is where a resistant strain would evolve. They seem to assume that people have either sterilizing immunity or no immunity. They do not consider that leaky vaccination impacts viral evolution. Totally unrealistic.
MikeM,
You can call it rubbish all you like. But this is at least a base. Do you not like the fact they included positive selection pressure in the vaccinated? That would be odd because you include it in your argument. Do you not like the fact that they include the existence of natural immunity? That would be odd because you do too. Do you not like the fact that they include genetic drift? Well, you don’t like that. After all, you seem to not like it when I say “mutation happens with our without vaccine”. It seems to trigger you tellin me I’m mistaking mutation for evolution. But mutation is an essential element that underpins evolution and it’s real. Genetic drift is real.
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If you think something specific in their assumptoins is “nonsense”, say which thing you think is ‘nonesense’.
It accounts for mutation, genetic drift, selection pressure, effects of the existance of different sorts of infected and susceptible groups. I would certainly tweak or extend based on more specific properties of vaccines– but this is model the base. And it has at least been carried out stochastically. So it could be extended or it’s assumptions tweaked.
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The problem with your theory of what happens is YOU post questionable, inconsistent and wrong assumptions, which if you bothered to do math would be called out and made explicit. It would be easy to point out what is wrong with your assumption because it would be stated explicitly. And in addition, you don’t even do the math to see what happens. You just leave the result to your imagination which, I suspect, has a preconceived idea of the outcome.
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And for what it’s worth: in your “mathless” argument, you never address statements about your wrong assumptions. For example: you don’t even engage points like the fact that, while the vaccine isn’t 100% effective, the vaccinated foster substantially less growth of virus and are less transmissible. You don’t even engage that the likely reason they get nasal infections but not humoral is that their mucus membranes lack immunity. So there is no selection pressure in their noses. The selection pressure would only exist in bodies (where there is damped opportunity for the non-resistant virus to multiply– and so there would be lowered rates of mutation relative to the unvaccinated.)
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All these could be tweaks to a model– but to include them you first have to admit these are features of the vaccines and viruses. And you have to assign them values so you can determine the selection pressure
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It’s fine to call other people’s assumptoins nonsense once you see how it plays out in the math. But you just post your (fairly implausible) “modeling” assumptions as “facts”, and then don’t even do the math under your assumptions.
Crazy headline:
“Alachua County School Board allows mask opt-outs for high school students, masks still required for K-8th”
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Alachua (dominated by progressive voters from the university of Florida at Gainesville) is one of the counties resisting the DeSantis parental opt our order on mask mandates. Here is the crazy part: kids 14 and under continue to be required to wear masks, but have far lower risk of serious illness than those 15 and over…. who are allowed to opt out of masks! The claimed rational: older kids can get the vaccine if their parents want. Bizarre. It reminds me of William Buckley’s quip about preferring government run by people selected from the Boston telephone directory than by people selected from Harvard’s faculty.
SteveF,
I don’t think that’s a bizarre rational for allowing opt-out. After all: the reason for the masks is at least supposedly to protect those who are not vaccinated. But in high school, the lack of vaccination is voluntary. So it’s a choice.
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What you don’t have in above 14 years old is parents who say they are scared for their unprotected kids who see no option other than masks. If they are scared, they can get their kids vaccinated.
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The possible “bizarre” is the argument for forcing masks for younger kids.
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I agree this reasoning doesn’t consider the fact that the younger kids aren’t very susceptible to serious illness with or without vaccination. But it is responding to the pressure of parents who are afraid for their unvaccinated kids and can’t get them vaccinated. They are afraid whether or not they should be– but that’s the rational for requiring masks.
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Those parents want the lowest possible risk for their kids and can’t get them vaccinated. So: masks.
Local county here has softened their mandate to no longer require medical form for opt-out. It seems that the problem is going away with low case rates and time for the Twitter mobs to go find something else to scream about.
The most likely time for a vaccine evading variant to evolve is when there are still lots of active delta cases side by side with lots of vaccinated people. That would be right about now in the USA and other regions will have different timing. Delta is already vaccine evading to a certain extent, it’s leaky enough to allow survival.
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What remains unknowable, and likely the most important question, is how likely that variant is to evolve genetically. If it was a simple minor genetic change it would already probably have happened given the huge numbers of the delta virus. If evading the vaccine spike protection is a complex major genetic change then it may be quite unlikely to ever happen. I have very little insight into this.
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One assumes this is the foundation of why GOF testing is desirable to those who think it can be done safely. If GOF testing showed there was only one likely genetic path to robust vaccine evasion then a vaccine could be pre-designed for it and distributed. For example if delta was predicted by GOF then we might have been able to cut it off. This all looks good on paper but as I have stated before this seems too dangerous to do given the sloppiness of humans in science.
Lucia,
Yes, lots of parents have fear which is disconnected from reality. The most recent Florida data shows total covid deaths starting March 2020 among those under 12 (some 2.2 million kids) is 24…. nearly all of whom had other serious health issues (like cancer). There is simply no appreciable risk to kids under 12; the CDC has not approved vaccines for that age group because the potential risk for the vaccines is greater than the risk of the disease. Either the school board is uninformed or they are willing to let uninformed parents dictate policy.
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And on top of it all, confirmed cases in schools (with and without mask requirements) are falling all over Florida, just as the delta surge case rates are falling for all age groups in Florida. The risks of (mild) infections in schools fall every day; somehow I doubt the school boards are goung to pay much attention to that reality.
SteveF
The latter. 🙂
Tom Scharf,
Yes, a couple of counties have backed away from their original no-opt-out mask mandates, but most continue to insist on masks. Maybe if infection rates fall low enough they will relent, but I see no indication of that… AFAIK none of the defiant boards has stated conditions under which they will end mandates, I guess because they have no intention of ever ending them. (You may have noted many editorials/opinion columns by the usual suspects claiming “We’re never going back to normal.”) The madness will only end when enough pressure is applied to the boards to make it end.
Tom,
I think you are correct.
It’s worth noting there are also lots of reasons vaccine evading is a lesser concern than treatment-evading. Treatments are given to already ill individual. So the body is already chock-full of bacteria or virus. It’s generally hosting so much the individual has symptoms. The treatment might kill the virus or bacterial or it might just allow the body to survive while the bodies antibody system is given time to work.
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The famous penicillin invading gonorhea has mechanisms that cause it to evade the bodies antibodies entirely. There is no natural immunity because gonorhea is basically an “evading machine” that has mechanisms to evade “things” already present. So it hardly needs to wait for mutation; it’s nearly all selective pressure.
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If a bacterium does evade penicillin (or other antibacterial) it will then proceed to not be killed by the body. There is no sweeping up by the body. So if the treatment is too little to wipe out all bacteria, the selective pressure for the population to become all penicillin evading is huge for pathogens our immune system can’t thwart at all.
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In contrast, if we can protect against infection with a vaccine, that means the body’s immune system can fight the infection and confer immunity. That’s the way vaccines work.
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So even if the vaccination is not 100% effective, if it is even partially effective, it at least reduces the amount of “first generation” virus and so reduces the rate of mutation. This reduction is one of the factors in the Nature paper whose assumptions Mike does not like.
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Unless the virus resistant variant predates the vaccine, this mutation is the first step in the evolution of a virus resistant vaccine. So reducing this mutation rate matters to the speed of evolution. It is a mechanisms where by vaccines slow the rate of emergence of vaccine evading variants by reducing the “rate of creation” in the process.
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And of course, with viruses that generate natural immunity, when infected with a virus that is not 100% evading will replicate more slowly in the body because the immune system does get some of it. And then after replicating more slowly, the bodies immune system does wipe it out. All this with lower viral loads at all time. After all: if the virus is only “partially evading” the ratio for survival of virus evading to non-evading viruses is not necessarily a large value. In fact: it could be very close to 1.
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All this said: of course an evading virus could arise. But the base modeling suggests the probability is highest when the population is partially vaccinated. And of course, it looks like the danger of leaky vaccines would be reduced by having the vaccinated get boosters so their body gets a running start on both the partial virus evading and not-virus evading virus.
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The solution to the imperfections is not “don’t get vaccinated” nor is it “don’t get boosters”!
Tom Scharf,
I was mistaken; some of the defiant boards have declared the conditions under which they will allow parental opt-out. A few were reasonable (like Sarasota county), but others set conditions that are unlikely to happen for a very long time (if ever!)…. eg under 49 covid cases per week per 100,000 population in the county for a specified number of weeks.
“So if the treatment is too little to wipe out all bacteria, the selective pressure for the population to become all penicillin evading is huge for pathogens our immune system can’t thwart at all.â€
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Sounds like cancer and chemo.
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There is random genetic alteration (drift) and recombination (shift) with other viruses. The latter can create large changes all at once. If a vaccine evading mutation occurs in a bat (or lab) through recombination then the levels of active virus and vaccines in humans is mostly irrelevant. It’s unclear how big a factor all this is, they mostly focus on recombination of covid variants with each other here, but there is a theory that the original covid strain was a recombination event in a bat (or lab) with another coronavirus type. Lots of uncertainty.
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/plenty-of-evidence-for-recombination-in-sars-cov-2-69156
School boards can always change their mind and update requirements. They are almost always going to favor student and staff safety in highly public meetings. It’s taxpayer money after all. There should be some useful data between those counties with and without mandates. The usual suspects have already deemed this answer found (in the expected direction) so I’m not sure we will get a fair shake on the science anytime soon. Mask science has as much political pressure as climate science, hard to trust and requires a lot of time and effort to sort it out. The problems of observational studies of masking and their associated models are a great example of why the FDA requires double blind studies.
Tom Scharf,
“There should be some useful data between those counties with and without mandates.”
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There is. If you compare counties that have mandated masks for the entire school year to counties that have no mask mandate, the pattern looks clear: cases in the no-mandate counties peaked a few weeks after school started and reached somewhere around 60-65 confirmed cases per 10,000 student-days, then declined rapidly, to about 25% of the peak (last week of September). Counties that required masks peaked at about 35 cases per 10,000 student-days, then declined rapidly to about 25% of their peak. The pattern almost exactly matches the delta surge in cases in Florida; no surprise there.
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But before we say “Aha! Masks are saving lives among school kids!” we should note a few things: 1) There may be a very strong correlation between overall case rates in each Florida county and case rates in those county’s schools; kids spend a lot more of their hours outside school than in school, and there is no way to know where an exposure leading to a case took place, 2) counties where it is politically impossible to mandate masks may be (probably are?) counties with lower overall vaccination rates, and 3) nobody is claiming these “school cases” represented anything beyond a “cold”; there are no claims of hospitalizations or deaths. Indeed, many confirmed cases are from required routine covid screening tests, with no symptoms at all.
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Finally, the experience in European countries where in-person teaching never stopped was that the classroom was NOT responsible for many cases of transmission, just the opposite: most cases were acquired outside school.
Covid-19 Vaccines-Association of American Physicians and Surgeons Published October 4, 2021:
https://rumble.com/vnbv86-winning-the-war-against-therapeutic-nihilism-and-trusted-treatments-vs-unte.html
I think it’s too early to determine differences in masking. One would also want to see what happens when a mandate is lifted or changed.
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Trying to tease out what is likely a few percentage points of difference in Florida during a huge outbreak and decline through observation and modeling is going to be tough. You would of course need to normalize to the background case rate and try to find a difference in timing when the mandates took effect. Different regions have different timing, different immunity levels, etc. I just question whether even the best modelers with the best intentions can really get this done with the available data. We really don’t have the best intentions with academia heavily pressured to speak with the “right†authority.
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Another example is vaccines, you don’t need to model the difference, you don’t need to squint really hard to see a difference, it is just obvious. Masks are just not that way, probably a little helpful but if they had an effect as large as some people like to pretend we wouldn’t need models and prescription eyewear to see the difference.
Sam,
That’s an hour long video. I rarely get much of anything from video. It’s so slow and it’s hard to scan back to hear an actual argument. Is there a transcript or companion paper by any chance?
Two Minute read, and worth it:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-coronavirus-lab-leak-virology-origins-pandemic-11633462827?mod=djemalertNEWS
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Yes, almost certainly covid-19 escaped from a laboratory. Humanity places itself at grave risk if it won’t stop this dangerous (crazy!) gain-of-function research on pathogens.
On masks, what I would like to see is analysis from detailed contact tracing. For infections acquired outside the home, what percentage were acquired while masked. What percentage were acquired from someone who was masked. The contact tracing interviews are gold mine of data but so far I havent seen analysis, only anecdotes.
Of course, even if masks were highly effective, mask mandates would only work if there was also high compliance.
SteveF,
Yep. Read that at breakfast this morning.
Phil,
“…mask mandates would only work if there was also high compliance.”
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Have you known many 15 YO’s? Enough said.
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Fortunately, in this unique instance, their feelings of utter invulnerability are actually correct, so they will be OK, regardless of compliance with mask mandates.
I read that as well. Richard Muller did the BEST temperature record which did convince me somewhat the instrumental record was accurate enough for its purpose.
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“…more than 9,000 hospital samples—is available of people exhibiting flulike (thus Covid-like) symptoms in China’s Hubei and Shaanxi provinces before the epidemic started.
Based on SARS-1 and MERS, the natural zoonotic theory predicts 100 to 400 Covid infections would be found in those samples. The lab-leak hypothesis, of course, predicts zero. If the novel coronavirus were engineered by scientists pursuing gain-of-function research, there would be no instances of community infection until it escaped from the laboratory. The World Health Organization investigation analyzed those stored samples and found zero pre-pandemic infections. This is powerful evidence favoring the lab-leak theory.”
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“But a team of American scientists mutated the stem of the coronavirus genome in nearly 4,000 different ways and tested each variation. In the process they actually stumbled on the Delta variant. In the end, they determined that the original SARS-CoV-2 pathogen was 99.5% optimized for human infection—strong confirmation of the lab-leak hypothesis.”
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Double meh on that second one. Not sure that means anything we don’t already know.
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Mostly more of the same that circumstantial evidence points towards a lab leak. Daszak’s undisclosed proposal for adding a furin cleavage site gets much less attention than it should. He should be hauled before Congress (and I have little doubt he would in a Republican led one, ha ha).
Strong compliance with effective(?) masking would reduce effective R. What is an interesting question is whether that would have to be maintained indefinitely or whether it would just be used as a delaying tactic to get to vaccination. Absent a vaccine then it is just slowing down the path to herd immunity. You won’t get to covid zero because masks are leaky. Worth something as a stopgap.
Tom Scharf,
“He should be hauled before Congress”.
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Better if he were keel hauled, with a clear promise to do the same for any virologist who does gain-of-function research on potential human pathogens. That would be far more effective than any Congressional questioning. There is not a lot beyond a keel haul that you can do to get the attention of the human embodiment of Snidely Whiplash, or any of his minions.
lucia (Comment #206398)
I haven’t found one. They link to the slides but they didn’t tell me much.
I agree about videos, I don’t usually watch them. Transcripts are faster to read, for me anyway, and, like you say, easier to understand.
Podcasts are even worse, though.
Sam,
Podcasts are, indeed, worse than video.
WSJ: “Top U.S. military officials testified earlier this year that Beijing is likely to try to use force in its designs on Taiwan within the next six years. Other officials have said China’s timeline could be sooner than that.
Taiwan’s defense minister, Chiu Kuo-cheng, warned Wednesday that China would be able to launch a full-scale attack on Taiwan with minimal losses by 2025.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-troops-have-been-deployed-in-taiwan-for-at-least-a-year-11633614043
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Should be taken with a grain of salt. US military routinely screamed about the “missile gap” with the Soviets for years to get bigger budgets. I doubt Taiwan’s defense will hold up very long if that happens, but China has to worry about the US’s response. Kuwait was taken over in hours and that didn’t end well.
Florida now #47 out of 50 states in covid case rates. I’d like to join the media in congratulating Ron DeSantis for the “Florida miracle”. I’m certain they will be writing endless articles on the wise political moves made to suppress the unforgiving disease on his helpless people. Or something.
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In other news Florida has also joined the top 10 in death rates per state. One would surmise those two events are not coincidental.
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Florida did let delta rip through the state (not sure they had much of a choice here) and this would be the predicted outcome. Whether it has any staying power (the last big surge???) is something I’m not sure I would place a lot of money on, but hopeful. Anyway it’s a better place to be once it is over, not so great going through it.
Tom,
China might not risk it. I think that if Xi is inclined to risk it, the incompetence of the Biden administration is a feature he might want to take advantage of, all other unknown things assumed equal. [Edit: Biden’s administration is a feature with an expiration date.]
Shrug. But they might not risk it.
Tom Scharf: “Florida now #47 out of 50 states in covid case rates… Florida has also joined the top 10 in death rates per state. One would surmise those two events are not coincidental.”
Yes, I agree that the two facts are related, and expect the Covid incidence in FL to be pretty low by the time we return for the winter. It’s a fortunate effect (for us) of an unfortunate situation.
In other news
Garland’s Anti-Parent School Board Order Protects Son-In-Law’s Profits
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https://headlineusa.com/garland-order-protect-son-in-law/
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“ Garland’s daughter, Rebecca Garland, is married to Xan Tanner, who co-founded a company that provides public schools with curricular materials promoting Critical Race Theory and other left-wing propaganda, the Conservative Tree House reported.â€
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“Tanner’s company, Panorama Education, profits from materials that push Social Emotional Learning, Equity and Inclusion—academic jargon used to disguise Marxist indoctrination focused on class, race, sex and sexual orientation, as well as feelings and personal experience.“
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“ The company reported in early September that it raised $60 million from numerous investors,â€
The thing people need to remember about Florida is that it has about 1.15 to 1.35 times as many residents over 65 as the states it is compared to (NY. MA, NJ, CA, TX). These are the people likely to die from covid. The truth is that with age profile taken into consideration, Florida is relatively low in covid deaths.
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Now that FL is past the delta-surge, the fight over mask mandates in schools is where the MSM will focus. That cases have dropped by 80% in schools over the past 3 weeks, and that there are virtually no kids hospitalized (and none dead) due to exposure in schools, won’t change the MSM narrative *at all*. The left never quits and never compromises on policy; it demands submission. It is what makes the left so dangerous to personal liberty. I think DeSantis understands this. Ultimately, the defiant school boards will be forced to abandon their nutty mask rules, but kicking and screaming the whole way.
I am cautiously optimistic that several of the defiant school board members will be voted out of office, bringing a marginally more sane control of public schools in FL. These school boards have injured children for no good reason and remain defiant in their insistence that the injuring of children should continue. Best that they be gone…. and I am sure many soon will be gone. Idiots.
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It is possible the Biden administration will force the FDA to approve covid vaccinations for those under 12, which may give idiot school boards a fig leaf to end masking requirements ‘with grace’. But it is only a fig leaf. They are fools who have injured children for no good reason.
Another miracle of covid modeling:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00620-4/fulltext
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This study attempts to show how increased vaccination would have saved lives. This may be true but their attempt to estimate how the death rate was going to progress in the model is woefully wrong, missing by about 3X. It shows FL deaths peaking at around 900 deaths/day.
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A bit more embarrassing and humorously they don’t even get the * already reported * death data correct. They show already reported death rates of 800 deaths/day. It seems they didn’t process the zero report days correctly.
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Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Not even a cursory check against reality before publication. 8 authors, ha ha.
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At least with covid models we get to analyze their skill in a reasonable timeframe (not very impressed), climate models not so much.
SteveF:
“Case in point, one of the large Florida Counties fighting against DeSantis and the parent opt out rules reports weekly covid cases per 1000 student-weeks; their data show the case rates rose sharply in the first weeks after school started (in August in Florida), in spite of everyone wearing masks, but have now dropped to much lower levels…. under 10% of the peak rates, and are falling rapidly. But the county has not even considered revising their mask mandate. BTW, many FL counties with no mask requirement at all have infection rates in schools LOWER than some counties with strict mask mandates.”
My granddaughter who lives in Florida contracted COVID in her first week at school (1st grade), that resulted in 4 other cases to my knowledge. That’s why there was such a large spike.
Phil,
“My granddaughter who lives in Florida contracted COVID in her first week at school (1st grade)”
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I trust your granddaughter has recovered. Some cases of covid-19 are more significant than others. Cases among the 6-7 YO set are almost always insignificant. Did she spread it to other kids, or were other kids just quarantined because they had contact with her?
My son’s school decided to reimplement masks when school restarted. As usually happens when kids get back to school, he contracted a cold. In his second week he contracted another, both of which he passed onto me. This totally convinced me masks are worth a damn.
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We received an email telling us that if he gets any one of a list of symptoms, which include all those associated with the common cold, ie sore throat, he should stay away from school and go visit the doctor. I’m sure the GPs would be overjoyed to be swamped with kids with common colds. Obviously, I ignored the email. He’s wearing a mask, isn’t he?!
SteveF
“I trust your granddaughter has recovered. Some cases of covid-19 are more significant than others. Cases among the 6-7 YO set are almost always insignificant. Did she spread it to other kids, or were other kids just quarantined because they had contact with her?”
Yes it was a mild case and she has recovered. Thanks.
She spread it to family members, all cases were confirmed.
Phil,
Unlike the original strain, the delta strain does appear more transmissible from children to adults.
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The good news it those who have recovered will be very resistant to re-infection for at least 8 months (and likely longer). The best data I have seen (Israeli study of 2.5 million people) suggest those who have recovered are at least three times more resistant to re-infection than people who have been vaccinated but never were infected.
Case rates in Singapore have been doubling roughly every 10 days and are now about twice the U.S. and Israel; about the same as the UK. A little higher than the U.S. summer peak, but only about half the peak in Israel. Singapore is at 81% fully vaxxed, which must be near 100% of adults. UK 67%, Israel 62%, U.S. 56%.
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It seems obvious that the vaccine does little to prevent spread. Maybe it helps for a while, but most vaccines in Singapore have been administered since July 1.
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Official cumulative cases in Singapore are 2.3% of population, compared to 12% for the UK, 13% for the US, and 14% for Israel.