Discussion thread VI - COVID-19 (new coronavirus)

[sharon sanders]

I agree that the very group that should be protecting us is our media. And we have been grossly let down for years - excepting a few reporters.

Listen - the COVID-19 vaccines were NEVER a guarantee. We have stated that on this site many times. We carry vaccine information but we do not "push" it. Our COVID-19 vaccine section in our Scientific Library is here.

We have said here many times that vaccines are ONLY ONE tool.

I have been following the UK situation link to see what might happen in the US. No one knows how bad the situation became in India because the number of deaths is probably grossly undercounted. link In the UK it looks like a trend may be developing of less cases in the past few days. Maybe the Delta attack lasts about 8 weeks? In any event, in a highly vaccinated population it appears the Delta COVID-19 deaths are at a lower rate than in a mostly unvaccinated population (at that time) like India.

So you have to ask yourself. Among all the c**p out there what do you see? Painted with a broad brush - what can you generally ascertain?

What is your personal risk if you get COVID-19? What have you generally seen among your contacts? Any hospitalizations? Any deaths?

I know one death and several illnesses that all recovered at home under a doctor's remote care. The death was male, age 82, pre-vaccine, & with "regular" COVID-19. What will happen with the Delta variant? I have no clue.

I urge everyone, again - contact your health practitioner for insight and advice. Do not take medical advice from the internet.

I am fully vaccinated, very restrictive in my activities, and I carry a mask.

I urge the current administration NOT to encourage large scale lockdowns. Society will not stand for it. Bad. Really bad.

The doctor above is wrong about one thing. There have been plenty of vaccine failures and/or misses. Some flu vaccines have completely missed their target. Some are less effective than anticipated. So it happens. This is why I never gave up on masks or said wtf I am going to return to my old life 100%. Too much is still unknown. Also, most pandemics take several years to work through the world's populations.

Always use at least two sources for your news.

Use your common sense.

Only you can take care of you.

 

[Emily]

Something is up, Sharon. The media and some 'experts', haven't just been reporting bad data, they have been demonizing the unvaccinated. That is what led to me researching Third Reich era propaganda done by doctors and public health officials. This all culminated with Biden himself making a statement that anyone not vaccinated by now is not very smart.

There are a couple of reasons for the government going into fascist mode about mass vaccination. One is that they fear an ADE disaster in the vaccinated so they want to eliminate the unvaccinated control group. The other is that the Marek's disease signature has been observed and the unvaccinated (and without immunity from natural infection), even the young and healthy, are in great danger.

I posted Read's 2015 Marek's paper last summer, but all of a sudden this March 2021 people started saving it in the Archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https:...l.pbio.1002198
That may mean legal interest.

Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens

Abstract

Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. Here we show experimentally that immunization of chickens against Marek's disease virus enhances the fitness of more virulent strains, making it possible for hyperpathogenic strains to transmit. Immunity elicited by direct vaccination or by maternal vaccination prolongs host survival but does not prevent infection, viral replication or transmission, thus extending the infectious periods of strains otherwise too lethal to persist. Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.

Author Summary

There is a theoretical expectation that some types of vaccines could prompt the evolution of more virulent (“hotter”) pathogens. This idea follows from the notion that natural selection removes pathogen strains that are so “hot” that they kill their hosts and, therefore, themselves. Vaccines that let the hosts survive but do not prevent the spread of the pathogen relax this selection, allowing the evolution of hotter pathogens to occur. This type of vaccine is often called a leaky vaccine. When vaccines prevent transmission, as is the case for nearly all vaccines used in humans, this type of evolution towards increased virulence is blocked. But when vaccines leak, allowing at least some pathogen transmission, they could create the ecological conditions that would allow hot strains to emerge and persist. This theory proved highly controversial when it was first proposed over a decade ago, but here we report experiments with Marek’s disease virus in poultry that show that modern commercial leaky vaccines can have precisely this effect: they allow the onward transmission of strains otherwise too lethal to persist. Thus, the use of leaky vaccines can facilitate the evolution of pathogen strains that put unvaccinated hosts at greater risk of severe disease. The future challenge is to identify whether there are other types of vaccines used in animals and humans that might also generate these evolutionary risks.


Citation: Read AF, Baigent SJ, Powers C, Kgosana LB, Blackwell L, Smith LP, et al. (2015) Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens. PLoS Biol 13(7): e1002198. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198
Academic Editor: Christophe Fraser, Imperial College London, UNITED KINGDOM
Received: January 15, 2015; Accepted: June 11, 2015; Published: July 27, 2015
Copyright: © 2015 Read et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Data Availability: All data files are deposited in Dryad, doi:10.5061/dryad.4tn48.

 

[tetano]

This situation refers to hyperpathogenic strains, like Ebola, with CFR of 30% or higher. Sars-Cov-2 is not a hyperpathogenic strain.

 

[Emily]

The original Wuhan strain was not hyperpathogenic. That is why they considered doing challenge experiments with healthy young volunteers in England. But hot strains could emerge or already have and the study proved that hosts vaccinated with an imperfect vaccine like the current COVID vaccines could keep those strains circulating.
Ebola was mentioned since they are using an imperfect vaccine for that, too, and there could be unintended consequences.

 

[tetano]

Sars-Cov-2 cannot evolve in a hyperpathogenic virus, unless a recombination event with other animal species virus happens

 

[Emily]

I don't know how a biologist could predict that already. See https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00113 Can SARS-CoV-2 Accumulate Mutations in the S-Protein to Increase Pathogenicity?

They don't understand how the hot Marek's strains evolved. They don't understand how FIPS evolves from feline coronavirus. Biology will throw some curveballs. (This is why GOF work is so dangerous.)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26085161/
Mutation of a Single Envelope N-Linked Glycosylation Site Enhances the Pathogenicity of Bovine Leukemia Virus
...Instead, a particular mutation at SU codon 230 increases replication and accelerates pathogenesis. This unexpected observation has important consequences in terms of disease control and managing.

 

[JJackson]

SARS-CoV-2 could pick up mutations and become more pathogenic but is just as likely to pick up mutations that make it less pathogenic. To date none of the SNPs or recombinations which have supplanted earlier wildtypes seem to have done either to any great extent. Changes in the Spike protein are probably not where we should be looking for changes in pathogenicity as it is primarily involved in cell entry which this virus does not seem to have a problem with. Spike changes will give the virus a fitness advantage in a mixed naive/partially immune population which is what we are seeing with D614G, Alpha and Delta all showing a fitness advantage as our immunity profile evolved.
There is some evidence that Delta has reduced the serial interval from 6 to 4 days with a more rapid reduction of CT scores imply 3 log more RNA. If the PFU ratio is maintained this equates to a lot more virus earlier which challenges contact tracing and increases the need for frequent rapid antigen testing, and lower test costs even at the cost of sensitivity.

The herd immunity question is a red herring in the discussions as it relies on us achieving a high and sustained level of immunity to infection to the point of not transmitting the virus. Excellent as the vaccines are in reducing disease severity they may be halving transmission in the short term but if we lower our guard and double the number of contacts we have, over our caution a year ago, this advantage evaporates, added to which protection will wain with time since your last viral challenge.

This virus is going to be with us for the long term we have to hope that we, and it, find a less damaging balance as we did with the 1918 pandemic as it morphed into seasonal H1N1 flu but that is likely to be a gradual process taking years or possibly decades.

 

[sharon sanders]

A few comments:

1) It is wrong to demonize any group of people. This can lead to some very unfortunate consequences.

2) When vaccines work, they are miracle drugs.

3) Vaccines do not always work as anticipated and we should always be ready for this.

4) Vaccines, like other public health tools, are not 100% effective by themselves. You need to layer your protections in a pandemic.

5) Do not take medical advice from the internet. Do your research. Contact your medical practitioner about medical questions.

6) Governments need to realize that they can not control what people think. The only communication plan that works is the truth.

7) Further lockdowns in Western societies will lead to mayhem.

 

[tetano]

In any case, the article of Read refers to hyperpathogenic agents that currently circulate, not that they can (with very little probability) in the future. For this reason there is currently no possibility that occurs what is described

 

[Emily]

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/statu...032943621?s=20
Eric Feigl-Ding
@DrEricDing

Replying to@DrEricDing

3) CDC internal report also reveals the results of an “CANARY IN A COAL MINE* unpublished Massachusetts contact tracing study revealing an outbreak of vaccinated to vaccinated transmission that was genomic sequencing confirmed. why the hell is this not published yet?!?!?!

11:04 PM · Jul 29, 2021·Twitter for iPhone

 

[Emily]

Report released next day.

https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum...s-—-barnstable-county-massachusetts-july-2021

 

[Emily]

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/statu...30290080108544



Eric Feigl-Ding

@DrEricDing

Replying to@DrEricDing

5) the Singapore Delta outbreak proves that vaccinated still transmitted. In this #DeltaVariant cluster alone, among 29 vaccinated who got infected, 21 transmissions events were between vaccinated-to-vaccinated or vaccinated-to-unvaccinated. That’s a lot! http://covid.viz.sg




12:18 AM · Jul 2, 2021·Twitter for iPhone


https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/statu...30854386073602


Eric Feigl-Ding

@DrEricDing
Jul 2

Replying to@DrEricDing

6) Also notice (4 o’clock position) that many of the unvaccinated-to-unvaccinated first initially started from a vaccinated-to-unvaccinated transmission chain!!! This demonstrates why vaccinated people still need to mask up damnit! (This is a subtweet at a public health agency)

 

[Emily]

So most of the uptick in hospitalizations and deaths in the US are from CDC's carrot/stick game. (Advising vaccinated they could unmask.) They should have known better, so should science journalists. But the horror sells vaccines and controversy is great for news.

I guess the FDA's latest guidance on antibody testing is part of the same game.

 

[JJackson]

This is a CDC investigation and would be reported in a MMWR report. I assume he is referring to this report https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm?s_cid=mm7031e2_w

As I pointed out in the comments to the previous post the vaccine is very effective at reducing severe disease and deaths, which is what the primary endpoint of the trials was assessing, but only reduces infection by about half. Reading the report what occurred is no surprise as human behaviour is the primary driver.

During July 2021, 469 cases of COVID-19 associated with multiple summer events and large public gatherings in a town in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, were identified among Massachusetts residents; vaccination coverage among eligible Massachusetts residents was 69%. Approximately three quarters (346; 74%) of cases occurred in fully vaccinated persons (those who had completed a 2-dose course of mRNA vaccine [Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna] or had received a single dose of Janssen [Johnson & Johnson] vaccine ≥14 days before exposure). Genomic sequencing of specimens from 133 patients identified the B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in 119 (89%) and the Delta AY.3 sublineage in one (1%). Overall, 274 (79%) vaccinated patients with breakthrough infection were symptomatic. Among five COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized, four were fully vaccinated; no deaths were reported.

 

[Emily]

Thanks for your comments, tetano and JJackson. Will hope a Marek's disease scenario does not occur.

 

[Emily]

Apparently CDC won't release data until it is outed on Twitter. I hope your PH agency is more forthcoming. I'm wondering if the AZ vaccine is doing better as far as vaccinated transmission? I don't know what they are using in Singapore. (See below)
Here it is mostly mRNA, though I have not read the MMWR report so not sure what was used there.

 

[tetano]

"As more and more people are vaccinated in Singapore, we will see more infections happening among vaccinated people," Teo Yik Ying, dean of the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

"It is important to always compare it against the proportion of people who remain unvaccinated...Suppose Singapore achieves a rate of 100% fully vaccinated...then all infections will stem from the vaccinated people and none from the unvaccinated."

Singapore has already inoculated nearly 75% of its 5.7 million people, the world's second highest after the United Arab Emirates, a Reuters tracker shows, and half its population is fully vaccinated. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-...ee-quarters-recent-covid-19-cases-2021-07-23/

 

[tetano]

While seven cases of serious illness required oxygen, and another was in critical condition in intensive care, none of the eight had been fully vaccinated, the health ministry said.

"There is continuing evidence that vaccination helps to prevent serious disease when one gets infected," the ministry said, adding that all the fully vaccinated and infected people had shown no symptoms, or only mild ones.

 

[Emily]

To be clear, Dr. Ding seems positive about disease protection for the vaccinated, he just also seems to care just as much about the unvaccinated. So does the country of Singapore since they are doing the right studies and being transparent.

 

[Emily]

This (Massachusetts public health study) does not look good.

https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum...s-—-barnstable-county-massachusetts-july-2021
"By July 26, a total of 469 COVID-19 cases were identified among Massachusetts residents; dates of positive specimen collection ranged from July 6 through July 25 (Figure 1). Most cases occurred in males (85%); median age was 40 years (range = <1–76 years). Nearly one half (199; 42%) reported residence in the town in Barnstable County. Overall, 346 (74%) persons with COVID-19 reported symptoms consistent with COVID-19.** Five were hospitalized; as of July 27, no deaths were reported. One hospitalized patient (age range = 50–59 years) was not vaccinated and had multiple underlying medical conditions.†† Four additional, fully vaccinated patients§§ aged 20–70 years were also hospitalized, two of whom had underlying medical conditions. Initial genomic sequencing of specimens from 133 patients identified the Delta variant in 119 (89%) cases and the Delta AY.3 sublineage in one (1%) case; genomic sequencing was not successful for 13 (10%) specimens."