First we have the various grades of covidiots: anti-maskers, deniers etc; then flip-flopping and inconsistent policies; and now, in Quebec (where I live) and other jurisdictions, decisions to fuck around with vaccination frequencies and timings.
FFS, everything is being done half-assed. At least do this one thing (vaccinations) properly. So basically we can either vaccinate X people properly or 2X people sort-of.
Regardless, we will probably be masking and distancing until end-2021 or early 2022 if we do the vaccines properly (this is just based on my gut feel BTW) so why screw this up.
“They” claim that the single dose will have 90% efficacy but, in a CBC interview with a doctor, she informally polled a bunch of her epidemiologist colleagues who told her that the 90% figure was more or less cherry-picked and that the real efficacy level was closer to 50%. In a Montreal Gazette article (Quebec confirms it will delay second vaccine dose for CHSLD residents and staff | Montreal Gazette) experts have indicated that there is no known about changing the frequencies.
My coworker said his epidemiologist friend says it will take until 2024 to end. If that’s the case, a lot of people are going to die from other causes while still isolating.
IMO, when employers start demanding people get vaccinations or stop working there, people will reluctantly get vaccinations. Not getting a vaccination is a (stupid) luxury, and not everyone can afford that.
In any event, I have little sympathy for idiots who don’t get vaccinated. I’m just saddened because I know three immune-suppressed people, who could die over something that is not their fault.
It will depend on the employers, and might only happen for frontline employment. Where I work, presumably we could all just wear masks, but I won’t do that for life.
Of course it will end. Pandemics end with or without human intervention, which is why we don’t worry much about the Spanish flu or Russian flu any more, even though the viruses that caused them are still out there. Vaccination is a good thing because it makes it possible to get to the end with fewer deaths than would happen if it ended the natural way, but it’s not like we’d be stuck in a permanent state of ever-rising cases without it.
For those of us who don’t have COVID and hopefully won’t get it, the worst aspect is that medical facilities are effectively crippled, so any medical issue could be a real challenge. A good friend of mine was lucky to get emergency surgery just as the first wave was ending and before the second one hit and started overwhelming hospitals again. Ontario has gone into a harder lock-down as of last Thursday.
Although there are certainly a number of people (including, ironically enough, medical personnel) who are refusing vaccination, the bigger problem is the inadequate production, planning, infrastructure, and training for distributing the vaccine and getting it “into arms”. I would get vaccinated today if I could (although I’d prefer an adenovirus vaccine to the mRNA vaccines just on the basis that it is a better understood technology with more confidence in the longevity and durability of immune response) but as it looks right now it will probably be after summer before I’ll even quality to be in a tier eligible to receive the vaccine.
And there appear to be a lot of people who assume that once they have been vaccinated that they are ‘immune’ from contracting the virus, which is the result of a lack of public health education. Even if you’ve been vaccinated, you can still be infected and potentially even produce and shed enough virion particles to infect others, which means that until we have enough vaccination to achieve a demonstrated level of herd immunity, everybody still needs to maintain physical distance, aver from close contact with people outside their household, and otherwise wear protective face coverings.
As for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it appears to be mutating faster than most virologists anticipated, and able to be hosted in a wide array of mammal species from which it can backspill, which is worrisome for the potential that it could undergo gene transfer and antigenetic shift the way influenza does. How much or often that results in enough mutation to produce a new strain is still unknown (I see scientists opining that the currently identified variants ‘probably’ don’t effect the immunogenicity of the current vaccines even though they are just guessing from gene sequencing and have no actual data to base speculation upon), but I suspect we’ll be coping with this pathogen for the foreseeable future and will see further rounds of vaccine development targeting more than just the spike glycoprotein to get a broader immunogenic effectiveness.
People need to be thinking less about “returning to normal” and more about modifying existing infrastructure and social behavior, as well as infectious surveillance systems, to minimize the threat of viral and bacterial pandemics because even if we get the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen under control there are other pandemics that will be coming, and eventually we’ll get to something that has a mortality rate in the double digits instead of the comparative love tap of this virus.
Stranger, could you talk to my governor? Pete-the-Dick Ricketts (Nebraska). He’s an ever loving fool and willing to kill off a lot of us to stay on the red gravy train.
My concern is that, for some reason, some policy makers are screwing around with Vax schedules. If we follow schedules that do not conform to the data-driven, prescribed schedules, there are no guarantees that we will vaccinate enough people to achieve herd-immunity.
Right now, if I understand things correctly, test data associated with vaccine prescribed administration is probably the best known aspect of this pandemic, and following said administrations is probably the best way of beating or mitigating this thing, yet some governments are willing to compromise on this.
I assume you are referring plans to vaccinate as many people as possible using the vaccines that were to be held in reserve as the second injection, with the intent that somehow ramping up production and distribution will still allow for second vaccinations on some kind of schedule. I understand the desire by officials to try to get a handle on this wave by getting as many people vaccinated as possible–even if with less effectiveness–to reduce the impact of severe morbidity on hospitals and hopefully reduce mortality. However, I would agree that this compromises the overall effectiveness of vaccination to a degree that we cannot estimate, and potentially increases the population that could become reinfected, thus extending the pandemic and presenting more opportunities for the virus to mutate into a more virulent or infectious variant or an immune-resistant novel strain. The assumption that there is no way to control the spread of the pathogen other than vaccination is self-defeating, but in the current climate of denialism, exceptionalism, and general selfish and self-serving behavior it is probably not unrealistic.
Well, the Spanish Flu of 1918 actually lasted for 3 years, from 1918 until 1920. And this pandemic seems to be about as infectious as that was. So probably until 2023 or 2024 (assuming no drastic mutations to make it last longer).
But at least we now have better ways to react (masks, social distancing, isolation, lockdowns, and even vaccines). Even if some fools aren’t willing to take those precautions.
What I have heard or read were in the last couple of weeks (an interview with a doctor and a couple of articles with quotes from doctors) is that there really isn’t definitive data associated with playing with the timings though there may be a reduced efficacy of 50% with only one dose. I don’t recall the intervals that are being discussed here in Quebec (I think in the order of 40-some days). All that will be guaranteed is that twice the population will have unknown levels of protection (or lack thereof).
So my provincial government will have essentially wasted vaccines just so that they can say that they have vaccinated twice as many people in a given time period.
A 50% efficacy is nothing to sneeze at. I’ve actually heard higher numbers tossed around for a single dose.
There are risks associated with a slower rollout. It is possible that having half the population with 50% immunity is more useful than a quarter having 95% immunity in the short term. Fauci is of course correct that the data we have doesn’t support this decision. But the data on the vaccines is unrelated to how this disease is going to swing in the next few months.
The effect of delaying the vaccine is that it will reduce the efficacy and persistence of protective immunity in those vaccinated while essentially doubling the vaccinated population, in hopes of both constraining spread of the contagion and reducing the number of people who require hospital care. The long term effect of not following the established vaccine protocols is that effectiveness of the vaccine will reduce by some uncertain factor, and it may ultimately compromise durable immunity in those vaccinated, requiring another full round of vaccination and/or allowing more opportunities for a novel variant to develop and spread which may prove to be resistant to the immunogenicity of the existing vaccines.
It should be noted that the mRNA vaccines (both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech) have a two shot protocol, while the presumably soon-to-be-approved Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires only one shot and the Oxford-AstraZenica has a two shot protocol but has already shown good immunity after an initial half-dose shot (discovered by accident), suggesting that both dosing protocols could be cut in half to increase the amount of doses available. Both J&J and O-AZvaccines use an adenovirus vector for their spike protein expression, which is a well-developed technology that is known to develop robust response of both the innate and adaptive immune system even when they are imperfectly applied. mRNA vaccines, by contrast, are a pretty new technology, and while it is very easy to tailor them to changes in the gene sequence of a virus as it undergoes mutation, the cold-chain distribution problems and unknowns regarding long duration immunogenicity should give pause to playing around the currently defined protocols. Hopefully someone is doing robust tracking on the efficacy of these vaccines though I am less than sanguine about anyone doing a good job at tracking and collecting data at this point.
The problem with “some fools [who] aren’t willing to take those precautions,” is that they compromise safety for everyone else, not only because they can spread the disease but because they can also create enough harbors to increase the potential for a new variant that could actually develop into an independent strain. The fact that we know that the SARC-CoV-2 virus can pass into numerous domestic animals and then spillback increases the potential that antigenic shift–the recombination of genomes of two separate viruses which is what makes Influenza A a cyclic threat that many epidemiologists and virologists consider it the most likely pathogen to become the next worldwide threat capable of double digit percentage mortality–could occur in this virus as well. If you think a pathogen with an infection fatality rate of ~0.3% is bad, imagine one that kills one person in ten and what the economic, social, political, and security ramifications would be.
That is not in any way a sure thing. I doubt you could even peg a likelyhood on it.
The best thing, of course, would be to get everyone their two shots in the tested time frame. We can be pretty sure that would be a very successful vaccination program. But holding back on a partial immunization plan, letting perfect be the enemy of good, could also lead to a spread of a variant resistant to the existing vaccines. It’s also perfectly likely that a later booster will give just as good long term immunity as 3 weeks.
If one shot has ~60-70% effectiveness, that’s actually a good vaccine booster or not.
Could you expound on this, as without more it sounds to the ear of someone adhering to social distancing but becoming weary as “six feet apart and/or masks in the presence of most other human beings from now on” or “no more bars, no more concerts, no more dance floors, no more wedding banquets…” Which isn’t the fault of the speaker but the listener.
“~60-70% effectiveness” is a mediocre vaccine. That is an efficacy we accept in influenza because there are multiple strains floating and constantly undergoing around and figuring out which ones will dominate is an imprecise science, and the limited duration in which to produce seasonal vaccines means that there isn’t time to select for optimal immunogenicity.
It is not “perfectly likely that a later booster will give just as good long term immunity as 3 weeks”; the point of a booster is to provoke a second, more robust memory B cell response that will provide long term sterilizing immunity (that will stop infection and spread) instead of protective immunity that will fade in a few months, allowing reinfection and the potential for sustaining contagion in the population. We know from other vaccines that require boosters that delaying the booster shot significantly results in dramatically lowered long term immunogenicity; essentially, if the ‘virus’ (in the case of a vaccine, the antigen surrogate epitope) doesn’t hang around very long, the immune system ‘assumes’ that it wasn’t a real threat and doesn’t develop long term response in order to prevent allergic response to what could just be a harmless protein.
This isn’t an issue of “letting perfect be the enemy of good”; it is following data-driven medical science and using a verified protocol versus guessing at what might work, when the consequences of a bad guess may be that the entire population lacks resistance and can harbor contagion indefinitely. If this were just a fairly innocuous respiratory disease you might take that risk, but given the bizarre and worrisome pathology of this virus–much of which is still unknown but the fact that it can enter the central nervous system should be highly concerning–the focus should be on ensuring the most effective immune response possible.
There is the assumption that the only way to control this virus is via vaccination and nothing else, which is precisely “letting perfect be the enemy of good”. In fact, there are effective methods of preventing transmission of the virus in the form of physical distancing, effective contact tracing and testing, wearing clinical-grade masks properly, avoiding large gatherings, et cetera, and as a society we need to figure this out because this will not be the last or most virulent pathogen to break out into a global pandemic. Using these methods, countries like Australia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and New Zealand have brought spread of contagion down to manageable levels even without a vaccine and without the excessive and damaging broad business and educational shutdowns.
I’ll first point out that most of our booster shot windows, which varies considerably by disease and vaccine, are the product of many years of use. Unlike the fast job on the current covid vaccines.
