Unfortunately vaccinating relatively poorer countries is not entirely in the control of the richest countries…there are many roadblocks beyond $ (and they can vary by country) to getting more of the world vaccinated. Getting the world vaccinated is the top (and only) priority of Covax (WHO’s covid vaccination arm, along with CEPI and GAVI).
It’s not yet clear if the non-US WHO approved vaccines even work on Omicron, so some proportion of the people who received some of the 9 billion doses might be unprotected now.
With that said, of course there is always more that can be done, but tough to do when the richest countries are experiencing their highest covid numbers of the pandemic right now. It will be years before a significant enough portion of the world is vaccinated, maybe decades.
I heard today and can’t recall where, is concerns about the Winter Olympics in China. Not sure how effective the Chinese Covid vaccine is against omicron. The Chinese government is not forthcoming. Athletes that test positive (and journalists) what will be the process of isolating and getting out of the country.
Some of the reasons the NHL pulled out, besides the fact the economically they need to worry about their own league and getting back into their season.
There should not be Olympics. But there is so much money invested, and the tv rights are so important that nothing will stop it. Unfortunately
SII/COVISHIELD or AstraZeneca/ADZ1222 is similar in concept (adenovirus vector) to the Janssen/Ad26.COV 2.S (J&J) vaccine, but in early trials was less effective against the Beta variant with two doses than J&J with one dose. It also seems to have a higher rate of the rate clotting undesired effects that J&J also had.
Sinopharm COVID-19 (BIBP), Sinovac-CoronaVac, and Bharat Biotech BBV152 COVAXIN are inactivated virus vaccines.
Maybe consolation was the wrong word choice. I’m not sure. I guess I align it similar to how when someone dies in a drunk driving crash, I prefer to see the drunk person as the victim rather than the person they hit. Overall, of course one wishes they had been smart enough to have never gotten behind the wheel drunk, but since one can’t force choices, at least they’ve ended their own life instead of someone else’s - and perhaps those they left behind will learn from their mistake.
We are getting needless deaths here. It’s sad. It could have been different.
I will add, whether it’s “right” or not, I’ve totally lost sympathy for those “preaching” the anti-vax misinformation. When some of those folks die, I have no sympathy and really hope others see the truth from what actually happened. For these folks it’s similar to telling people to go ahead and drive drunk because it’s perfectly safe - safer than not. It’s appalling. Look at the real data! There’s tons of it out there now from many nations.
Yes. My experience is that when people come with disinfo talking points, because the conversation isn’t actually about the vaccine or masks or library books or what have you, any substantive pushback that takes the conversation to thought also stops it. There isn’t anything back of the talking point except a well of talking points and so if the person’s interested in persisting they have to go back for more. What they come back with is seldom connected to the first point – again, conversation about the stated topic is not the point.
It is equally disconcerting when an opposing opinion is falsely labeled as a misrepresentation.
@mtmind infers I had nefarious reasons for not quoting the article’s claim that the effectiveness against omicron increases from 35% to 75% with a booster shot. Unsaid is that this effectiveness is measured shortly after the booster, and wanes by 30% within weeks. Do we need to get boosted AND appropriately time our exposure to omicron?
Further, citing effectiveness of any booster is a slippery slope because no school-age kids are eligible, and some aren’t eligible for any vaccination. When considering the overall effect of the vaccines, and how to utilize supporting protections like masking, it is the 35% effectiveness number after two doses that is most appropriate. I expressly did not cite the 75% boosted number because doing so would be exactly what you despise—spreading misinformation.
@mtmind
“Contrary to your repeated claims, vaccination was never just about preventing infection, it was about slowing the spread and saving lives.”
I didn’t claim anything. I factually stated that the EUA was entirely dependent on preventing infection, and 50% was the threshold to meet.
I inferred nothing. Rather, I corrected your erroneous claim that “the CDC also estimates the mRNA vaccines to be 35% effective against Omicron.” The full quote indicates otherwise, and I thought others might be interested in knowing that.
Any source for this claim with regard to Omicron? How many weeks? The way you have it written might lead some to believe it is a couple of weeks. Is that right? If not a couple, then how many? We wouldn’t want to mislead anyone, right?
I wouldn’t be surprised if we needed to get another booster when effectiveness wanes, but given that this variant is only a few weeks old, I am curious as to your source on how the booster holds up over time?
As for the rest, you may want read the articles you linked. As is the case with flu vaccines, effectiveness in preventing infection was one goal, but it wasn’t the only goal.
I know a couple of people who have received their 4th shot. Both doing well, no side effects. They encouraged me to get another since my 3rd was in August, but I will try to wait until the official word comes out. And really want one to cover the new variants. I know someone on another site said they were in a trial for a vaccine that covers all the current variants, including omicron, but that availability is probably too far off for me. Maybe for my 5th!
One of the purported advantages of mRNA vaccines is that they can be quickly altered to match new variants. But it seems like neither Moderna nor BioNTech / Pfizer is in any hurry to produce a version for Delta and Omicron, even though they made the prototype vaccines very quickly after they got the ancestral virus’ sequence.
I assume you are referring to the study discussed here, which mentions ten weeks:
For people who were given three Pfizer doses, vaccine effectiveness dropped from 70 percent one week after the booster to 45 percent after 10 weeks. Pfizer recipients who received a Moderna booster, on the other hand, seemed to fare better; their vaccine regimen remained up to 75 percent effective at up to nine weeks.
For those who initially received Astra-Zeneca, the results weren’t as strong:
Among people who received two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, a booster with one of the mRNA vaccines, made by Pfizer and Moderna, was 60 percent effective at preventing symptomatic disease two to four weeks after the shot. After 10 weeks, however, the Pfizer booster was just 35 percent effective. The Moderna booster was 45 percent effective at up to nine weeks. (The AstraZeneca vaccine is not authorized in the United States, but the Johnson & Johnson shot uses a similar technology.)
On a positive note, there are several articles published recently about how the Spanish flu ended when a less virulent strain developed, similar to what we may be seeing with omicron. If you do a google search, you can find and read. I am going to bed happy. Here’s one:
Possibly with help. I think I’ve mentioned along the way that I get a lot of real live college students who can’t make it through a NYT piece without help. And sources, sources are a great mystery.
As unfriendly as I generally am to the way biotech finance works, I can’t blame them. What’re the odds that by the time they’d got it to manufacture it’d be defunct?
A piece I read a few days ago had an epidemiologist (? that can’t be right) all furrow-browed about missing a step somewhere, and I imagine he was right about that. If all large proteins’ functions depend on residue networks and a key residue mutated, opening the door to a functional protein with lots of other mutations in quite concentrated areas, then yes, they’ll have to find that point and then work forward. I mean you can see it looking at the spike cartoons in the recent Zimmer piece: something shifted and allowed progress from 10ish mutations to 50ish, otherwise that seems awfully fast, don’t you think?
Just got back to work from vacation and found out a former co-worker (and still a colleague) passed away from Covid on Christmas. His MIL passed away a couple of days later, also from covid. Seems that it blew through their household hard. He was only 53. I’m floored. I doubt they were vax’d, but still a shock.
Although the existing vaccine against the ancestral virus is becoming increasingly obsolescent. Further mutations and variants may move even further from the ancestral virus, although they may start from an existing more contagious variant like Omicron or Delta.
That’s exactly how I feel when some of the “young” folks around me have died from it.
I sure hope others are feeling the same and opting for the vaccine route when they see things up close to them. It’s the only good that can come out of it at that point.
Both groups are working on omicron-specific vaccine formulations, even though they’re unsure if they’ll need to be deployed. For example, Pfizer/BioNTech: “The companies continue to advance the development of a variant-specific vaccine for Omicron and expect to have it available by March in the event that an adaption is needed to further increase the level and duration of protection – with no change expected to the companies’ four billion dose capacity for 2022.” https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-provide-update-omicron-variant
Moderna has similarly said it expects to begin clinical trials of its omicron vaccine early in 2022.