My concern is that the virus is damaging along a number of fronts. But I balance this with the vaccine being increasingly the wrong tool as variants drift
Coronavirus. The n(in)th sequel.
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Not getting infected is supposed to beat getting infected. At every turn.
Also I was answering to Berzerker's curious attitude of getting himself vaccinated while peddling anti-vaxxer crap.
Yes. But getting infected is also inevitable, which means taking an extended view of the immunity will make sense too.
There are no perfect solutions, just dilemmas. I don't want only the vaccine protecting me when a variant pops up that beats the vaccine.
I don't know the answer. It's a question I keep in my head when looking at fhe problem
Verbose
Deity
You do not want to get infected without having the vaccine to start with. The vaccine alerts and arms your immune system against it regardless.
But also if your get infected even with the vaccine, your immune system will stil get a proper look at the actual virus, and update its schematics for anti-bodies to fight it off better next time. (Since vaccines only selects for certain features of the virus that it can instruct the immune system to target, while if the immune system actually meets the virus it can get a much more broad-spectrum view of the enemy – which is why immunity from an actual infection is better than from vaccines.)
In the end what we want is some top-notch vigilance about what the virus is doing, catching crucial mutations as and when the occur, and then updated vaccines and booster-shots.
If everyone gets it, but with the added protection of vaccines, and we don't drop our guard, this should all be manageable.
Berzerker
Deity
when did I peddle anti-vaxxer crap?
I wouldn't want to chance natural immunity in that context, either. You're not looking at the same problem as others are discussing. The specific position here is "get Covid or get vaccinated", because that's the unfortunate position some people are hitching their wagons to, in The Discourse™. People are undermining the necessity of the vaccine by invoking protection from natural immunity. It's not about "what happens when people inevitably get a variant". It's all about people (who are more than happy to get vaccinated themselves) peddling a stance that harms people with misinformation in the now (rather than in the future).
A variant which escapes the vaccines might escape the immune system of a Covid-surviovor as well. A booster can have an updated version of the virus proteins, but you cannot update your immune system.
How the coronavirus infects cells
I am not going to try and summarise the text, but will show the pictures:
Fused cell structures (syncytia) seen in cells expressing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (green). Nuclei are in blue and the cell skeleton is in red.
I am not going to try and summarise the text, but will show the pictures:
Fused cell structures (syncytia) seen in cells expressing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (green). Nuclei are in blue and the cell skeleton is in red.
Verbose
Deity
In a way the immune system is part of the problem – a lot of the Covid 19 care is directed towards making sure the immune system doesn't go hay-wire. And immuno-compromised people don't do perceptibly all that much worse than those not so afflicted. Curious virus, all round.
The bit I was responding to was about catching Delta after being immunized.
Triggering an immune system response against the whole virus is a mixed bag of risks. Honestly, I don't like them. Not just risking the disease itself, but also the longer term immune response.
I think what would help the debate is evidence that a novel booster triggers a large (and sufficient) response against the booster's target rather than a substandard response also containing antibodies against the original vaccine.
There's currently a lot of faith surrounding the concept of updated boosters. I'm not doubting they can work, but I know we don't have evidence that they'll function as expected
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I get the feeling both of these places may be around the million mark when you start looking at excess mortality
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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If we're on the same page about not getting infected, then the only sane policy to deal with the pandemic is extinguishing the virus. So why is this obstinately kept off the agenda?
People should have noticed that vaccines were deployed not as part of a strategy to extinguish it but as part of a strategy to convince people to "live (die) with it". This is the fundamental contradiction of the whole process as it developed throughout 2021. If the goal were to extinguish the virus this process didn't require leaky vaccines, it required vaccines that could really prevent infection. But promising research along those lines received no state support opnce the excuses to reopening, the original vaccines approved in early 2021, were available. This shows very clearly what was the real priority.
Business interests, basically keeping capitalism going as it was, overrode sane public health policy and planning. During 2020 lockdowns in most of the "wealthy countries" were kept below efficacy level not because of any cultural resistance to lockdowns (some "western" countries did them successfully) but because businesses interests refused even temporary universal public support for workers, debt cancellations and reorganization of production (going on "war footing" for the time it took, and it didn't need be much).
So now it's "endemic". Until it evolves into a worse variant and people spontaneously lock down regardless of business interests and captured governments.
People should have noticed that vaccines were deployed not as part of a strategy to extinguish it but as part of a strategy to convince people to "live (die) with it". This is the fundamental contradiction of the whole process as it developed throughout 2021. If the goal were to extinguish the virus this process didn't require leaky vaccines, it required vaccines that could really prevent infection. But promising research along those lines received no state support opnce the excuses to reopening, the original vaccines approved in early 2021, were available. This shows very clearly what was the real priority.
Business interests, basically keeping capitalism going as it was, overrode sane public health policy and planning. During 2020 lockdowns in most of the "wealthy countries" were kept below efficacy level not because of any cultural resistance to lockdowns (some "western" countries did them successfully) but because businesses interests refused even temporary universal public support for workers, debt cancellations and reorganization of production (going on "war footing" for the time it took, and it didn't need be much).
So now it's "endemic". Until it evolves into a worse variant and people spontaneously lock down regardless of business interests and captured governments.
Snowygerry
Deity
Put the entire world on "war footing" - indefinitely ?
Would it not be much simpler to isolate yourself then ?
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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Of course it's not indefinitely. Contrary to what is happening now, an eradication strategy would have ended the pandemic. When a large country or even whole continent eliminates the virus successfully people there can be back to entirely normal life apart from controls at the border. Proof? China. Or for a long time Australia and New Zealand before their governments betrayed their own people there.
There are valid reasons to worry that elimination won't be quick in some areas of the world. But there is no doubt it could be done, if there was political will, in all of Europe and North America - including Mexico I dare say. It wasn't done because governments refused to do it, because it required a economic and social reorganization on behalf of that part of the population usually most exploited there. And it would be possible over the entire world, even if it had to be done in states. It can be done in stages, country by country, splitting the problem into pieces and then putting them together. The recipe is known since early 2020.
There is no real political will in wealthy counties' governments (apart from China) to do the effort necessary to end this pandemic. There is propaganda but no coherent strategy
Consider vaccines. We know they cannot end the pandemic, not the ones currently in use anyway. Worse, they were promised to poor countries but that promise is shamelessly broken. Promises keep being announced, hundreds of millions of doses, billions of doses, announced in the mainstream media. But its failure to deliver is not announced. And no technology transfer was done, is done because that would not be to the benefit of big business interests. The promises of vaccines to end the pandemic were just an excuse to profit from the vaccines without a challenge to the monopolies from competition by production in poorer countries leading to eventual development of pharma industries there. Business interests overrode public health priorities any effort to end the pandemic even with the defective strategy of vaccines. Research and financing of vaccines that would be easier to distribute or produce was also curtailed from lack of funding and no hope of regulatory approval once the current fig leafs in use were approved.
Thus is pure cynicism at play by governments, servile public health officers and journalists. The proclaimed orthodoxy makes no sense: there are no vaccines to end the pandemic around the world, there is no investment in better vaccines, technology transfer or copying is forbidden under threat of economic retaliations, there are outright propaganda offensives against research about antivirals, and there is a proclamation from above, from the people who ere tasked with ending epidemics, that this epidemic is now endemic and everyone must "live (die) with it". The virus is simultaneously proclaimed to be so dangerous that vaccination was made mandatory in a number of situations, but not dangerous enough to eradicate. Covid infections are proclaimed to be exceedingly dangerous because of long-term effects, but we are ordered to be unfazed about catching it again and again throughout our lives as live (die) with it.
The current proclaimed orthodoxies about the pandemic make no sense. But woe befall whomever questions it, it will be censored from any mainstream media.
Berzerker
Deity
Covid is an update to our immune systems and the delta variant has escaped the Pfizer vaccine more easily than the immune systems of covid survivors. Simulated updates are better than nothing but I believe the data show covid survivors are doing better against variants. The immune response to the real thing is more thorough than the vaccine.
Why is it misinformation to say covid survivors are better protected than everyone else and dont need a vaccine? People wouldn't be invoking natural immunity if they weren't being told to get a vaccine they dont need, the vaccine isn't necessary for them. And the reason I got vaccinated is because I didn't get covid. If I had already gotten covid I wouldn't have bothered with the vaccine.
'I dont have a firm answer on that' - Anthony Fauci
The guy in charge cant tell us why covid survivors need the vaccine when confronted with studies from Israel showing they're better protected than vaccinated people.
There's video of Biden getting a booster recently, they didn't check to see if they hit a vein, just jab and plunge. I dont know the odds of hitting the blood stream with the injection but with billions of jabs I wouldn't be surprised if a few thousand had complications.
Because it's something you need to prove. Emphatically. Beyond the improvements we've seen from the vaccines themselves.
So go on. Prove it.
Prove it!
Otherwise this is more fearmongering from someone who's already gotten the vaccine. What? Didn't seem to stop you, eh?
(edit: this is a hilarious x-post)
Just read your own posts, man.
So every time a new variant emerges, you want to contract Covid again to boost your immune response? With an enhanced risk to yourself and others around you? Thanks, but no thanks.
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