The Vaccine
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
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We don't know long-term effects of this coronavirus either. So it's a "pick your poison" situation at worst.
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Well, there's death; that's a pretty long-term effect. But some people think they're immune to it.
There are antibodies and there are T-cells, both of which can be primed to attack specific viruses.
What that paper is saying is that the 'flu vaccine is priming antibodies much more strongly than T-cells, which means that with consistent vaccination the individual tends not to build up as much T-cell reactivity to influenza. Specifically just influenza: it won't matter a damn to the T-cell reactivity to anything else. Other caveats are an extremely small sample size (27 non-vaccinated, 14 vaccinated) and that all the vaccinated children had cystic fibrosis, so it's not matching controls properly.
If the vaccine works, and you take it, aren't you immune to it now? Why not hang out with people that didn't take it? Could you become a carrier? Is that true of annual flu vaccines?
ITMT: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200504/--annual_covid-19-vaccine-may-be-necessary
Annual Covid vaccine may be necessary. I'm betting Bill Gates hopes so.
Just after I went to uni, I needed emergency dental work. Couldn't get back to my old dentist from my schooldays, couldn't get an NHS dentist appointment fast enough, so went to a private dentist. They put in a temporary filling, and did a check up for good measure. They recommended an additional seven fillings, a crown, and three extractions. I was horrified. I took no further action for a few weeks until the end of term, went back to my old dentist for a second opinion. He told me I needed one filling.
He bluntly suggested the denstist in my university city had decided to make as much money out of a student as possible, given that I was likely to move on and not be a long-term customer. However, he put it more as the recommended work being, shall we say, cautious to an extreme rather than wholly unjustifiable.
In the two decades since then I have needed some extra work on the initial damaged tooth that prompted the emergency, two fillings, and one replacement filling: considerably less than half what that private dentist recommended.
Why, his microchip gonna need updates? Shoddy work. You'd expect it'd update on it's own when 5G towers get installed.
Yes, you should be immune. It's a bit more complicated than that though. Effectively, any infection is a battle of how quickly the pathogen replicates against how quickly the immune system can kill the pathogen. So you might have reactivity to the virus, but if it's weak and you cop a substantial intital viral load, you may suffer symptoms. Probably less than you would if you'd had no reactivity at all, but still some. This is also why immunity can fade: over time the body produces less of the antibodies that respond to the virus.
This also means you can be a carrier even when "immune". Immunity more means that when infected, your immune system will kill it efficiently enough that you won't really suffer any symptoms. You are less likely to spread it, because the virus will not have the opportunity to replicate so much - it is after all a numbers game. Ten virus particles per unit volume is a damn sight less dangerous than 1000 virus particles per unit volume.
One of the arguments for masks is that even if it does not absolutely stop infection, simply reducing the viral load given to someone else is going to be beneficial. So if your mask catches 70-80% of the droplets from your breath, that's a notional 70-80% decrease in the amount of virus you'll give someone.
They'll be cheap. The Pfizer and Moderna ones are quite expensive, but over time the price will drop and more, cheaper alternatives will emerge. $5 per person for an annual shot is, in drug company or individual terms, worth almost nothing at all. You're paying more in nurse/doctor/etc. labour costs for the shot.
Compare that to (for instance) anticonvulsant medication, where ~1% of the population may be taking 1-3 drugs each costing $5-100 a week, every week. It's these sorts of chronic conditions where the big money is.
The thing is that an infection provokes a much more robust immune response than a vaccine, which is more beneficial for unknown viruses. I'm not saying that it's a reason not to take a vaccine, but you can argue if it's a good idea to vaccinate the entire population instead of just those at risk like with the flu vaccine. Espescially since covid19 most likely won't be the last novel respiratory virus. Other than bats and stressed chickens shitting on armadillos in cramped cages the chinese are probably throwing much more in their soup we have yet to know about.
Outside a medical setting masks really have no proven benefit. The way people treat masks is also disgusting. Only distancing is an effective method but with a mask people feel 'safe' and no longer distance. So what's the point?
edit: not to mention bad for the environment. I see discarded masks everywhere on the street.
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It's absolutely true that people like pretending that masks make them bullet proof, and it's infuriating. But wearing a mask has been proven to be better than not wearing one.
Because people are stupid; you are supposed to distance AND use a mask (where required) at the same time.
That is fucking awful on multiple levels.
Firstly, this is misleading. It's not practical to do a proper trial outside of a controlled setting, so of course there is no study precisely looking at most people's day to day use on th street. But the simple fact is that if they work in a medical setting, they'll work outside one, too. Not necessarily as well because the public will tend to be sloppier, but it's better than nothing. See for instance the video:
Visualization shows exactly how face masks stop COVID-19 transmission
Without a mask, droplets produced during coughing can travel up to 12 feet. With a mask, this distance is reduced to just a few inches.
www.livescience.com
A fair amount of expelled vapour will be caught on the mask fabric, and it will also greatly reduce the distance of spread, both of which are plusses.
Distancing has its own limitations, as anyone worried about the economy will know. Nor is it going to protect you from people breathing virus over door handles, supermarket shelves and produce, and tins (thus the recommendation for alcohol hand gel). Masks are at least likely to reduce a lot of that.
Plenty of studies show no proven benefit. They did a meta study on mask wearing during the SARS outbreak and even the medical masks had marginal effects in preventing transmission.Firstly, this is misleading. It's not practical to do a proper trial outside of a controlled setting, so of course there is no study precisely looking at most people's day to day use on th street. But the simple fact is that if they work in a medical setting, they'll work outside one, too. Not necessarily as well because the public will tend to be sloppier, but it's better than nothing. See for instance the video:
Visualization shows exactly how face masks stop COVID-19 transmission
Without a mask, droplets produced during coughing can travel up to 12 feet. With a mask, this distance is reduced to just a few inches.
A fair amount of expelled vapour will be caught on the mask fabric, and it will also greatly reduce the distance of spread, both of which are plusses.
How so? People touch dirty surfaces with their hands and then put on a mask, touch their face or even mouth? Just breathing in the bacteria. Many people are pretty gross by default. A mask isn't going to change that. Take for example the huge amount of poop bacteria found in restaurants when they take food samples. People breathing virus on objects that a mask will somehow prevent als sounds pretty far fetched.
Hand gel I understand. But covid infections from dirty surfaces are also extremely rare.
It's not that simple.
Immune responses are specific to specific pathogens. If you are infected by a closely related pathogen sufficiently similiar to the one you are immune against, it may convey some degree of protection. But it is going to give you substantially no advantage whatsoever against a different pathogen. The average coronavirus immunity is no help against a rhinovirus, and frankly won't even help much against most other coronaviruses.
I suspect in the long run vaccination will wind down - it just needs to be knocked on the head in the short term to prevent chaos. SARS-CoV-2 is already endemic, and will remain so. It'll continue to rattle around our populations at low levels forever - the plus is that it means at any one time most are likely to have some immunity. Basically, SARS-CoV-2 is effectively just going to become another sort of influenza-like illness, affecting a modest proportion of the population annually, with limited mortality. They may well continue vaccinating against it along with 'flu for vulnerable groups, but once the current mess is over, I'm highly skeptical they'll bother with the general populace.
The quantity and quality of studies point to the fact they do work, which informs scientific consensus and why top science journals publish articles saying they work.
The main reason people latch onto the opposite view is because:
a) they don't want to have to bother wearing a mask and know people won't accept that "I don't want to" as a good enough reason
b) some prominent arseholes turned it into a political issue, and the partisan peanut gallery leapt in to blindly support their great leader
c) conspiracy theory and paranoia
Isn't there indication that the response time of T cells is quicker after infection than vaccination. Obviously not pathogen specific antibodies but infection does seem to increase immune alertness in general.
Also how much have eradication of pathogens contributed to auto-immune diseases in the developed world? It seems absence of infection could also lead to the immune system turning against itself. Like an army that has nothing to do.
This meta study shows they don't have an effect.
RESULTS We included 15 randomised trials investigating the effect of masks (14 trials) in healthcare workers and the general population and of quarantine (1 trial). We found no trials testing eye protection. Compared to no masks there was no reduction of influenza-like illness (ILI) cases (Risk Ratio 0.93, 95%CI 0.83 to 1.05) or influenza (Risk Ratio 0.84, 95%CI 0.61-1.17) for masks in the general population, nor in healthcare workers (Risk Ratio 0.37, 95%CI 0.05 to 2.50). There was no difference between surgical masks and N95 respirators: for ILI (Risk Ratio 0.83, 95%CI 0.63 to 1.08), for influenza (Risk Ratio 1.02, 95%CI 0.73 to 1.43).
Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. Part 1 - Face masks, eye protection and person distancing: systematic review and meta-analysis
OBJECTIVE To examine the effectiveness of eye protection, face masks, or person distancing on interrupting or reducing the spread of respiratory viruses. DESIGN Update of a Cochrane review that included a meta-analysis of observational studies during the SARS outbreak of 2003. DATA SOURCES...
www.medrxiv.org
I see you've missed out the very next section;
CONCLUSIONS Most included trials had poor design, reporting and sparse events. There was insufficient evidence to provide a recommendation on the use of facial barriers without other measures. We found insufficient evidence for a difference between surgical masks and N95 respirators and limited evidence to support effectiveness of quarantine. Based on observational evidence from the previous SARS epidemic included in the previous version of our Cochrane review we recommend the use of masks combined with other measures.
In short, it was a meta-study of trials they recognised as flawed and poor, and their expert opinion based on the weight of evidence supports the use of masks.
Firstly, take a read of their conclusions a lot more carefully. This meta-analysis doesn't actually say what you think it does.
Secondly, what about all the other studies? We can all cherry pick supporting evidence to backup what we already believe, but that's not how science works. The trick is to read all the evidence, and then see what the evidence points to being most likely.