Coronavirus 14: Boosted Waves or Merely a Ripple?

Is it over?

  • YES

    Votes: 9 17.3%
  • NO

    Votes: 14 26.9%
  • It will never be over

    Votes: 13 25.0%
  • I'm over it

    Votes: 14 26.9%
  • I'm more worried about Monkey Pox

    Votes: 2 3.8%

  • Total voters
    52
i recall catching a lot of flak for pointing out that a new drug with a highly unusual process for approval laden with incentives other than solely "general well being of people taking it" might not be as understood as people think. being against mandating it as a matter of basic process was apparently equivalent killing people or something.

maybe the processes we had prior to 2020 existed for a reason after all. maybe continued "emergency use authorization" long after it was apparent there was no emergency remaining had some extra incentives, like familiar-looking $$$ ones, especially as it gets advocated/pushed onto age groups who barely have any risk at all. mandating emergency-use approval stuff was ridiculous, which we're starting to see in court outcomes, despite the court's initial bias over the panic.
 
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Given that people not being vaccinated directly correlates in general with a worse outcome, there might be a reason people interpreted your posts in the way they did.

Of course, we all know what your posts were. We were here. The revisionism on bogus logic is unnecessary.
 
Another point of confusion here. The spike protein doesn't stay in the cells once expressed. Another section of the mRNA - a sequence termed the S glycoprotein signal peptide in the 5' UTR - serves as an instruction for what to do with the protein as it's produced. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines contain the instruction to export the spike protein out of the cell, so the immune system can see it. If the protein stayed inside the cells, the immune system would not be able to target it. Nor is the immune system going to target the cells just for expressing the spike protein. Unless the cells begin malfunctioning to the point that it's detectable via the various intercellular signaling methods.
Well, if something misfolds or gets degraded due to other reasons, then a part might get exposed via MHC I, and the cell will get killed by cytotoxic T-cells. But that's a lot less impact than the actually replicating virus.
i recall catching a lot of flak for pointing out that a new drug with a highly unusual process for approval laden with incentives other than solely "general well being of people taking it" might not be as understood as people think. being against mandating it as a matter of basic process was apparently equivalent killing people or something.

maybe the processes we had prior to 2020 existed for a reason after all. maybe continued "emergency use authorization" long after it was apparent there was no emergency remaining had some extra incentives, like familiar-looking $$$ ones, especially as it gets advocated/pushed onto age groups who barely have any risk at all. mandating emergency-use approval stuff was ridiculous, which we're starting to see in court outcomes, despite the court's initial bias over the panic.
It's probably best to re-visit the whole thing right now. It might be necessary to have some more checkpoints.
 
i think the big improvements would be to transparency of data (which we did not get) + not mandating when rolling stuff out quickly. also make the liability shield very temporary. the combination of a liability shield + mandate invites problems where there were none previously, even if the design of a drug itself is perfect.

if the scenario were like "hey, this disease is pretty bad and is killing people, especially so in some age groups. here's a drug we pushed to market asap that is seems likely improve your odds of survival qutie a bit if you get the disease and are at risk. also, here is our best estimate of the tradeoffs of taking it vs just getting the disease based on population, your choice", i'd not have had these complaints. that's a far cry from a pseudo-religious push to give the drug even to age groups where people dying to the disease is ~case report levels of frequency though.

i think the approach would have to fundamentally change if the mortality rate were something like 30% rather than 3% too. the covid levels of panic would be legit for something like that, but we knew pretty early on we weren't dealing with something that kills ~1/4 to 1/3 that get it. i think we already had data long those lines when lockdowns started in 2020, with already physicians i know questioning whether a lockdown was merited given the negative consequences of that vs threat of disease. then covid got politicized and it became harder to have any type of discussion like that at all w/o gnashing of teeth/taking sides. i'd love to say we could adjust by not being political next time, but unlike the above i don't think it can happen.
 
Man, we're three years into this and people are still fixating on deaths (regardless of the fact of how high the death rate is compared to, say, influenza) instead of what happens to a lot of people who got it and lived (especially unvaccinated). Something we're getting an increasing wealth of data about. "not getting it" was the early aim. Avoiding deaths can't have been, because we didn't have the vaccines. This is why "not getting it" was the only realistic initial goal in terms of handling spread. The only people who dispute that were, conveniently, the same people who insisted it wasn't deadly at the time (though now accept and admit it freely).

Meanwhile, I'm still coughing up my lungs three years on, every morning. Good times. Good to know "not being political" means "ignoring any threat modelling I personally disagree with" :D

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EDIT - unrelatedly (I'm just avoiding the sin of double posting), they're still doing Ivermectin trials, contrary to the claims by people who think Ivermectin is getting an unfair rap and people are avoiding it because they Just Want To Promote The Vaccines.
It's still not any good.
 
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WHO abandons plans for crucial second phase of COVID-origins investigation
Sensitive studies in China were intended to pinpoint the source of the pandemic virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China, Nature has learned.

Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn’t going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Their hands are really tied.”

In January 2021, an international team of experts convened by the WHO travelled to Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes COVID-19 was first detected. Together with Chinese researchers, the team reviewed evidence on when and how the virus might have emerged, as part of phase one. The team released a report in March that year outlining four possible scenarios, the most likely being that SARS-CoV-2 spread from bats to people, possibly through an intermediate species. Phase one was designed to lay the groundwork for a second phase of in-depth studies to pin down exactly what happened in China and elsewhere.

But two years since that high-profile trip, the WHO has abandoned its phase-two plans. “There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. The WHO planned for work to be done in phases, she said, but “that plan has changed”. “The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins,” she said.

Researchers are undertaking some work to pin down a timeline of the virus’s initial spread. This includes efforts to trap bats in regions bordering China in search of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2; experimental studies to help narrow down which animals are susceptible to the virus and could be hosts; and testing of archived wastewater and blood samples collected around the world in late 2019 and early 2020. But researchers say that too much time has passed to gather some of the data needed to pinpoint where the virus originated.
 
Going back, I think that our immune system should kill the cells that receive the RNA. Doesn't the protein have a component that directs it to and anchors it to the outside of the cell membrane? And it also is supposed to act as its own adjuvant.

The big surprise was the spike protein in the plasma, because all of the spike protein was supposed to remain affixed to the cells that were producing them. No?
 
Going back, I think that our immune system should kill the cells that receive the RNA. Doesn't the protein have a component that directs it to and anchors it to the outside of the cell membrane? And it also is supposed to act as its own adjuvant.

Yeah, my bad. Expressing the viral protein in itself isn't enough to get the cell targeted, but Spike is supposed to end up anchored on the external membrane rather than fully secreted, which will make the cell a target. As for adjuvants, RNA itself is a pretty effective adjuvant even without uptake and expression.

The big surprise was the spike protein in the plasma, because all of the spike protein was supposed to remain affixed to the cells that were producing them. No?

Have we got reports of fully intact Spike free in blood plasma? Wouldn't be too surprising if the membrane anchoring isn't 100% effective. There are confirmed reports of the S1 subunit being cleaved off, and so ending up free from the cell. The issue is that rather curious furin cleavage site getting cut on exposure of the protein. How much the S1 fragment retains its resemblance to the spike protein fold once detached seems uncertain. The remaining S2 fragment left attached to the membrane it appears does not retain its structure, and so is unlikely to retain functionality.
 
Looking into it, some parties also predicated that the cells would produce exosomes that express the spike protein on the surface. Which ... makes sense and I should have thought of it ahead of time. It would boost the total signal that the immune system can see instead of just a bunch of cells in our arm being a pincushion of spike proteins.

I've stopped following the 'spike in plasma' story. I was pissed we weren't told about it sooner, because our regulator never freaking ask for simple answers of easy questions, but I don't really care all that much. It's a risk to the patient, obviously, but the virus is worse.

That said S1 is the Receptor Binding Domain. So, whatever cellular damage is happening by binding to ACE2 (and it's real, since the cell need more time to replace a dysfunctional ACE2 protein), it's the S1 that does it. Ergo, finding S1 in the plasma very much does suggest further investigation about where it's ending up.
 
I expect they’d say the same of your claims.
doubtful, since that wasn't the common argument against my claims back then, and the gist of this nonsense sideline is that we don't anticipate much change.
 
US energy dept says COVID probably leaked from Wuhan lab

COVID-19 was probably the result of a leak from a laboratory, according to a newly updated classified report from the United States Department of Energy obtained by the Wall Street Journal newspaper.

The judgement for the latest classified report arose out of new intelligence and was made with “low confidence”, the Journal reported on Sunday. The energy department oversees a network of US laboratories, including some that undertake advanced biological research.

The latest findings suggest a change in the view of the US energy department, which said previously it was undecided on how the virus emerged. The officials declined to elaborate on the intelligence that had prompted the department to change its position. It now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in saying the virus probably spread after a mishap at a laboratory, a conclusion the FBI reached in 2021 with “moderate confidence”.

Four US intelligence agencies believe with “low confidence” that COVID-19 took place through natural transmission, while two others remain undecided, the Journal added.

Despite the agencies’ differing analyses, the update reaffirmed an existing consensus that COVID-19 was not the result of a Chinese biological weapons programme, the people who had read the classified report told the newspaper.
 
Doesn't matter where it came from.... it's here. I think SARS CoV 2, and many variants to come, remain for all of us to deal with. It don't think it can be eradicated. We all have to deal with it, IMHO.
 
This is not how protein expression works. When a cell starts making a protein from an mRNA sequence, it doesn't just keep doing it forever. There are tens of thousands of proteins being produced in the body from their corresponding mRNAs, and this requires a strict and complex system to get the relative amounts of each protein required at any given time.

A critical part of that control mechanism is that cells don't just keep expressing an indefinite number of copies from a single mRNA. A lot of this comes down to a section of the mRNA we call the 3' untranslated poly A tail. As the cell runs off copies of the protein, this poly A tail shortens. As it shortens, the mRNA becomes less stable, and a cascade of processes in the cell mark mRNAs with shortened poly A tails as essentially "finished", triggering their rapid breakdown into short fragments, and a halt to expression of the protein they encode.

In simple terms, an mRNA molecule is an instruction to the cell saying "make me a batch of this protein." The poly A tail and related mechanisms serve as an instruction for how many copies of the protein are in that batch. Once complete, production of that particular protein halts, and the mRNA is broken down - a finished instruction. mRNAs are not instructions to just make a protein forever - such an instruction would be by its very nature cytotoxic, if you could come up with a way to bypass all the mRNA regulation systems to create such an instruction.

Just to avoid any confusion, the fragments detectable up to 28 days post vaccine above are not usable instructions for the cell. The mRNA needs to be complete and unbroken from its 5' UTR to at least part of the 3' poly A tail to get any intact spike protein produced. They resemble the fragments you get after an mRNA instruction is "finished" and degraded. Since these fragments are detected free in the blood plasma, it's actually questionable if the mRNA molecules they are from were ever taken up by a cell and expressed at all. It's more likely we're seeing the remains of the fraction of the mRNAs that didn't make it into cells in the first place. The surprise is that the bits are big enough to still be identifiable, rather than degraded all the way down to their individual bases.

Another point of confusion here. The spike protein doesn't stay in the cells once expressed. Another section of the mRNA - a sequence termed the S glycoprotein signal peptide in the 5' UTR - serves as an instruction for what to do with the protein as it's produced. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines contain the instruction to export the spike protein out of the cell, so the immune system can see it. If the protein stayed inside the cells, the immune system would not be able to target it. Nor is the immune system going to target the cells just for expressing the spike protein. Unless the cells begin malfunctioning to the point that it's detectable via the various intercellular signaling methods.

Clearly you have not read the Moderna and Pfizer papers.

The cells that take in the mrna do produce protein and as a consequence are attacked by the immune system and destroyed. If they are not then the vaccine is malfunctioning even worse than we already saw. The selling point of the modified spike protein encoded in the mrna used was that it would be 'anchored' to the cell membrane but exposed. This inevitably drawing an attack and ending with apoptosis. One possible problem is that this does not necessarily avoid the protein at that stage getting loose and wrecking some more havoc before being destroyed.

To be clear: I'm accusing you of deliberate misdirection. You use a lot of terms to pretend you're being technical but you are attempting to distract from what really goes on. And I do not thing you ever argued here about the covid and pharma iindustry issues in good faith. I know when I see certain types of attempted manipulation. It's not accidental.

Some basic questions, are you willing to answer succinctly and in plain language?

What exactly happens to the produced protein? To be specific, where exactly does it move into after being produced?
Do you agree or do you deny that it is supposed to moves into the cell membrane and gets exposed to the outside of the sell, but anchored to the cell that produced it?
What is supposed to happen to that cell when the immune system reacts to the protein?

And I'm worried that at least the people who liked your comment willfully choong ignorance rather than researching things because checking things out might reveal to them uncomfortable knowledge. The embracing of ignorance in contemporary culture, for the same of some tribal sense of belonging to a side of any ongoing "polemic", worries me more than the covid! Facts are there to check and people refuse to check, refuse to see, and keep playing according to the "narrative" of the tribe they think they ought to belong to. There's some serious psychological/social breakdown going on...

Edited: I may be getting to harsh here. People are human, and subject to unconscious bias, professional bias, social influence, whatever.
But I am very, very frustrated at the attempts to not see the problems of this whole covid disaster, of what was done wrong.
 
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