[HN Gopher] Moderna vaccine appears to work against variants
___________________________________________________________________
Moderna vaccine appears to work against variants
Author : pseudolus
Score : 191 points
Date : 2021-01-25 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| r00fus wrote:
| I don't see any identification of the variants successfully
| defeated in this article.
|
| For example the E484K variant identified in Brazil that is
| supposed to be antibody resistant is quite terrifying.
| slumdev wrote:
| No reason to be afraid of new strains. Coronaviruses become
| less deadly as they evolve to become better at spreading.
| brianbreslin wrote:
| That's a mixed bag, as on one hand sure the number of dead
| goes down per 100, but then the number of folks infected goes
| up, thereby meaning the same number of dead possibly, or more
| people infected in hospitals.
| slumdev wrote:
| SARS-CoV-2, by best estimates (0.3% mortality), is roughly
| 3x as deadly as the seasonal flu.
|
| The common cold is a coronavirus. It is significantly less
| deadly than the seasonal flu. We have every reason to
| believe that a more contagious but less deadly version will
| resemble the common cold.
| alicorn wrote:
| Common cold is caused by a variety of viruses, only a
| small subset of which is coronaviruses. Look it up.
| thehappypm wrote:
| The mortality rate is higher than .3%.
|
| .3% of New York City has already died.
|
| Unless the vast majority of New Yorkers have already
| contracted the virus, the mortality rate has to be
| substantially higher than .3%.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| SARS1 was also a coronavirus, and it had more than 50%
| mortality for those infected. The virus strain tells you
| nothing about its mortality.
|
| SARS-CoV-2 is also only ~3x as deadly as the flu WITH
| UNPRECEDENTED MEASURES TO CONTAIN IT. In areas where it
| wasn't contain, such as the initial outbreak in Italy
| that overwhelmed hospitals, it was 10x or more as deadly
| as the flu.
| paganel wrote:
| At some point the virus will run out of people to infect.
| lazide wrote:
| Influenza certainly hasn't. It will mutate past defenses,
| and survive, just as seasonal coronaviruses have - unless
| a concerted effort occurs to completely eradicate it, and
| that effort is successful.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It actually will just continue to mutate and start
| reinfecting people as immunity wanes.
| wittyreference wrote:
| Viruses are believed to become less deadly over time when
| being less deadly offers an evolutionary advantage in ability
| to _spread_. If being more deadly and more spreadable have
| the same mechanism (e.g., avoiding spike protein-inhibiting
| antibodies), you can expect that old adage not to hold true
| over the short-term.
| foobiekr wrote:
| I think this is kind of not representing the reality.
| _Some_ viruses _have become_ less deadly over time. Not all
| viruses go through this process and the selection pressure
| that promotes this kind of evolution is _death._
|
| So we have no reason to believe this will occur with
| covid19.
| waterhouse wrote:
| > the selection pressure that promotes this kind of
| evolution is _death._
|
| Not necessarily. Assume that people try to self-
| quarantine as soon as they notice symptoms. (They don't
| need to be 100% effective at this.) Consider "mutations
| that affect how quickly it spreads within your body".
| Those that increase said efficiency would presumably
| increase the likelihood of death; but they would also
| probably shorten the "asymptomatic spreading" period,
| which means they'd get selected against; this selection
| happens even among those that aren't dying.
|
| (Author background disclaimer: No biology beyond 9th
| grade.)
| slumdev wrote:
| If anything, this is an argument against lockdowns and
| masking. Letting asymptomatic and barely-symptomatic people
| spread more-contagious but less-deadly strains would evolve
| the virus into a minor nuisance in short order.
| lazide wrote:
| No it won't - it increases the chances for mutations and
| variants to form, randomly, increasing the odds that one
| of them will be more deadly AND more infectious.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That is wildly wrong. As long as the virus is spreading,
| there are no evolutionary pressures on it to become less
| deadly.
| CyanLite2 wrote:
| UK's Pandemic Team says the new strain appears to be more
| deadly. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210125/uk-variant-
| may-be-m...
| lazide wrote:
| That is a dangerous misunderstanding of evolutionary pressure
| in viruses.
|
| LONG TERM, less deadly viruses will tend to spread better
| because the more deadly a virus is, the more it raises stakes
| for the host population to remove it or prevent it , and the
| more it can make it apparent who has been infected. Ebola for
| instance justifies pretty almost any action you can imagine
| to contain it's spread, where we are still arguing if
| lockdowns or travel restrictions are the cost appropriate
| measure with COVID.
|
| If the time of fatality is sufficiently delayed, or the time
| to implement other countermeasures or recognize the situation
| has changed is too long, it doesn't help anyone in the short,
| medium, or potentially even long term - you can have massive
| fatalities and huge spread.
|
| The 1918 pandemic had multiple waves, with the second in
| particular having a much higher fatality rate than the first
| - 10x a typical flu season, which is what we're seeing now.
| This was almost certainly caused by variants, though lack of
| data makes it impossible to prove.
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu]
|
| A particularly nasty example [https://www.adn.com/alaska-
| news/science/2020/03/22/how-an-al...]
|
| The more infections, the more likely we'll get more variants,
| and the more likely we'll get some that cause terrible,
| terrible problems - and may still be quite infectious.
|
| Long term, will the most terrible ones die out? Very likely.
| However, smallpox was a scourage on humanity since likely 300
| BCE and up until eradication by a massive global effort in
| 1975, it still had fatality rates around 25-35%. So don't
| just assume COVID will 'evolve to harmlessness', or if it
| does that it would happen on a timeframe convenient for
| society [https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html]
| slumdev wrote:
| Trench warfare is responsible for evolving a deadly 1918
| Spanish Flu virus.
|
| Soldiers with minor symptoms remained where they were, not
| coming in contact with many other people.
|
| The very sickest soldiers were transported by train, where
| the infected many other people, to hospitals, where they
| continued infecting many other people. It was our own
| attempts to care for the soldiers that caused the deadliest
| strains to spread and continue evolving.
| lazide wrote:
| Those conditions allowed more infections to happen, and
| eventually one of them was more deadly. ANY situation
| that results in more infections will result in more
| mutations (as it is a property of the viral replication
| mechanism), and increase the odds that one of them will
| be more successful in infecting and spreading - with the
| possible side effect of host death.
|
| What some folks are proposing in this thread
| (uncontrolled community spread so it will 'mellow out')
| is an even more massive expansion of that due to the
| quite visible ability for COVID to be infectious in
| patients with no symptoms for long periods of time, which
| Influenza has not been able to pull off.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| A virus _may_ become less deadly. There is no guarantee. It
| depends on what evolutionary options are available and what
| pressures are selecting mutations.
|
| Pre-symptomatic infectiousness has about the same selection
| pressure as low mortality rate IMO. Low risk viruses
| circulate well because people don't care about transmission
| very much. High risk infections cause people to take
| precaution and thus eliminates those stains. SARS-COV-1 and
| MERS were that way.
|
| But pre-symptomatic infectiousness (SARS-COV-2) makes this
| calculus immaterial for most people; they transmit it without
| knowledge. This reduces the pressure on high mortality /
| morbidity strains / variants.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| A strain that spreads more while not being significantly less
| deadly is much scarier than a more deadly strain that spreads
| less. Do the math if you don't believe me.
| adventured wrote:
| The headline is slightly misleading if only because it's so
| vague, which is why this is out today:
|
| "Moderna says it's working on Covid booster shot for variant in
| South Africa, says current vaccine provides some protection"
|
| "The company's researchers said its current coronavirus vaccine
| appears to work against the two highly transmissible strains
| found in the U.K. and South Africa, although it looks like it
| may be less effective against the latter."
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/25/covid-vaccine-moderna-workin...
| foolmeonce wrote:
| B.1.1.7(UK) and B.1.351(SA) the article links to the source.
| They say "variants including", but I doubt they would leave out
| the Brazilian one if it was tested.
| contravariant wrote:
| The linked study names the 501.V2 / B.1.351 / South African
| (vulg.) variant. This variant also has the E484K found in the
| B.1.1.248 / Brazil (vulg.) variant.
|
| That said based on the title you might assume the vaccine to be
| _as_ effective, but that 's not quite what the study says. In
| short it states:
|
| >A six-fold reduction in neutralizing titers was observed with
| the B.1.351 variant relative to prior variants. Despite this
| reduction, neutralizing titer levels with B.1.351 remain above
| levels that are expected to be protective.
| ryan_j_naughton wrote:
| Six fold reduction is extremely concerning!
|
| As the vaccine becomes more widespread, it will be tested
| more widely by exposure to the virus and this will trigger
| faster evolutionary cycles by the virus to defeat the
| vaccine.
|
| My forecast is we will have to get much faster at releasing
| updated vaccines and distributing them in order to stay ahead
| of this virus -- and that everyone will need to be vaccinated
| every 6 months until we hit sufficient heard immunity of the
| circulating strains such that is stops circulating so rapidly
| and the speed of mutation consequently reduces.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| I believe the same thing. We need a fast vaccine update
| cycle. We also need much faster production. It looks like
| the mRNA vaccines have the fastest turnover cycle. IMO the
| government should employ emergency measures to force Pfizer
| and Moderna to upgrade their production facilities to 10x
| what they are now. Get other companies involved. Pour as
| much money as necessary.
|
| Fortunately, it seems there is openness from the FDA to
| have a faster approval cycle for vaccine tweaks. Moderna is
| already working on a "booster shot" to try and increase
| immunity to the South-African variant.
|
| I wish that we also had other therapeutic tools to combat
| COVID. I wonder if we couldn't save people who are getting
| hospitalized by employing drugs that block the receptor the
| virus uses to enter cells. Similarly to the way HIV is kept
| under control. That could save lives and it would be more
| mutation-proof.
| temp667 wrote:
| I hate suggestion like this - most of the government
| involvement so far has been negative - don't wear masks,
| do wear masks and cloth masks are fine (they probably are
| not). We're going to cancel doctors license who go out of
| order in vaccine distribution (so now when the 65 year
| old drives their 75 year old partner in they can't both
| be vaccinated).
|
| If anyone actually cared about this there is an EXISTING
| mechanism to get business to produce pretty much any
| quantity of anything you want. You pay them money.
| Instead the government is constantly canceling contracts,
| seizing products, stopping the sale of products for more
| than 10% more than historic prices etc.
|
| ALL these steps REDUCE confidence in making a big / high
| risk investment.
|
| My guess - if we looked at even existing use of the DPA -
| probably most stuff got made by folks not expert in
| making it and sat in a warehouse. I'm serious - I want to
| know how many ventilators made under DPA by rando
| companies are actually in use?
|
| I've worked in govt contracting - the govt does not get
| "the best" producers to produce, in situations like this
| the hands reach out from the experts playing the govt
| contracting game. Not end of world normally, but with
| lives on the line some more standard approaches would be
| refreshing.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| This is an emergency situation. I don't know if we can
| count on individual companies to just do the right thing.
| They might be risk-averse, afraid of financial losses,
| but we need them to go full-steam ahead. Pfizer and
| Moderna should definitely be financially compensated for
| everything they produce. We could pay them above cost and
| basically guarantee their financial success in this
| operation.
|
| It's possible that the current generation of vaccines
| could end up being outdated, and there could be some
| amount of waste, but the important thing is the
| production rate. When an updated vaccine becomes
| available, we want to be able to produce it and
| distribute it as fast as possible.
|
| On another note, there's also research into oral
| vaccines. IMO that would be amazing if it could pan out.
| Imagine if we could just mail people capsules containing
| booster doses updated for the latest strain every month.
| We'd crush any pandemic in no time.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The really wild vaccines use a self replicating viral
| vector. One of Merck's discontinued candidates used a
| live, replicating virus.
|
| I guess if you really nail the science, you can make it
| infectious and vaccinate by breathing on people.
| inpdx wrote:
| Disagree completely.
|
| This is war. Governments fight wars. It's one of the
| primary roles of government. In WW2 all sorts of
| prioritization and direction came from government. This
| should be the same.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I wonder what would be the implications for being able to
| develop and deliver RNA vaccines on this shorter, more
| regular timeline? Specifically, does the infrastructure
| required to accomplish this goal also bring other vaccines
| or treatments in the realm of feasibility?
| neuronic wrote:
| Of course, mRNA vaccines on their own open up a new
| category of vaccination. E.g. Biontech is working on a
| mRNA multiple sclerosis vaccine and cancer vaccines.
| djrogers wrote:
| That scenario only plays out if vaccinated people can be
| carriers. If not, virus that is exposed to the vaccine will
| not have a chance to evolve more quickly.
| corin_ wrote:
| Even if they cant, for the period when there are lots of
| people vaccinated and also lots of people infected,
| that's lots of mutations happening in infected people and
| then trying to jump into vaccinated people, giving it
| more chances that one of those mutations would then
| spread from vaccinations people even if current mutations
| don't (which isn't known yet). If it spreads from
| vaccinated people already then that would be even worse.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Aren't most antibodies at this point a result of infection?
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| EK484K is a particular mutation, not a variant. It is common to
| a Brazilian variant and the SA variant referenced in the
| article.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'm not surprised. These new variants started taking over months
| ago before many people were vaccinated, so there was no pressure
| to adapt to the vaccines.
|
| My theory is that what they _are_ adapting to is all the other
| mitigation measures that we 've been doing for a while--think
| masks and social distancing.
| jerf wrote:
| Viruses can't really "adapt" to "not being spread". It's not
| _quite_ zero, I suppose we could hypothesize some superior
| ability to survive on a surface for some period of time or
| something, but there 's not _much_ they can do about it.
|
| Bacteria would have more options, since they're so much more
| complex. Viruses just don't have much they can do.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| > Viruses can't really "adapt" to "not being spread".
|
| Of course they can. We have this pandemic because a
| coronavirus became highly transmissible.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It most likely jumped the species barrier.
| lazide wrote:
| They mutate, and mutations more successful in causing
| infections cause more infections and become dominant.
|
| There are many ways for this to happen, some of which covered
| in this thread - changes in the surface presented to the
| host, more viral load produced and expelled by an infected
| host earlier being some obvious ones.
|
| Some potential methods that have occurred with other diseases
| in the past include additional methods of infecting hosts
| (from prior versions), such as viral envelopes that can
| insert against additional types of cells, or changes to the
| way the virus hijacks cell replication machinery to produce
| products that are better at hiding what is going on to the
| immune system.
| amelius wrote:
| Is the efficacy still in the 94% range?
| niea_11 wrote:
| From the abstract of the paper linked in the article: No change
| for the UK variant, but lower efficacy for the South African
| variant (if my understanding of the abstract is correct):
|
| _No significant impact on neutralization against the B.1.1.7
| variant was detected in either case, however reduced
| neutralization was measured against the mutations present in
| B.1.351._
|
| Paper :
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.25.427948v1
| bdonlan wrote:
| This study was done in a laboratory based on blood samples and
| does not directly equate to a percentage effectiveness.
| Collecting data on actual effectiveness in the wild, as it
| were, will require a sufficient number of vaccinated people to
| come into contact with the variant strains in question, and
| will therefore take a few months, most likely.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| They believe so ("neutralizing titer levels with B.1.351 remain
| above levels that are expected to be protective"), but this was
| a blood sample study that can't definitively demonstrate
| population efficacy.
| 02020202 wrote:
| "vaccine"
| Exmoor wrote:
| Here's a link to the actual study:
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.25.427948v1
|
| I believe most of the vaccines approved or pending approval
| (Johnson and Johnson) target the spike protein, so I would expect
| their results to likely (hopefully) be similar.
| andred14 wrote:
| Here let me fix it:
|
| "Moderna vaccine kills Hank Aaron one week after he receives it"
| jeofken wrote:
| If we fail to totally eradicate these strains of coronavirus from
| earth, like we have never ever in history managed, is lockdown
| forever right - the end of free life? Or was it just something
| required in 2020 for some reason?
| maxerickson wrote:
| A big change is that there is vaccine production capacity now,
| and the new vaccines can go through an approval process like is
| used for annual flu shots, meaning a new vaccine can start mass
| production in a few months vs the (very quick) year that it
| took this time.
|
| A year ago there wasn't much more than experimental capacity to
| make mRNA vaccines. Now we are at tens of millions of doses a
| month and scaling up.
| mlindner wrote:
| Actually much faster than months. MRNA-based vaccines can be
| brewed up in days to weeks.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The approval of the update adds some time. I guess you can
| be manufacturing at the start of that.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Updates are likely to be fairly streamlined, though; we
| already do this for the annual flu shot.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > like we have never ever in history managed
|
| Smallpox would like a word.
|
| Polio, too, for the most part.
| mlindner wrote:
| SARS and MERS as well, which is notably more relevant. These
| don't exist anymore.
| nradov wrote:
| MERS hasn't been eradicated. There are animal hosts, mainly
| camels, and people occasionally still get infected.
| lostapathy wrote:
| COVID is different in that it appears to have numerous
| animals it can live in. It's one thing to lock down people,
| but another entirely to lockdown animals.
| paganel wrote:
| Those two took decades to eradicate, we won't be able to keep
| the Earth's population on lockdown/no-lockdown cycles for
| that long.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's a goalpost move, and a matter of logistics, not
| outright impossibility.
| organsnyder wrote:
| We didn't keep the Earth's population on lockdown for the
| centuries/millenia before those diseases were brought under
| control.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Lockdown is required when there is a risk of more paitents from
| an infectious disease than there are beds. Lockdown isn't the
| purpose, the purpose is to stop the number of new paitents
| requiring hospital from outnumbering the number of paitents
| leaving hospital (either walking or in a bodybag)
|
| When was the last last time we had a disease that spread this
| quickly and caused this many hospitalisations, on a global
| scale?
| chasd00 wrote:
| even CA is lifting their stay at home order. I think the
| political costs of these hobby authoritarian regimes are
| finally getting too expensive.
| jerf wrote:
| Coronavirus will naturally evolve into the attraction basin for
| viruses of its type, which is the common cold:
| https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article248455480.htm...
|
| It's already well on its way, from what I can gather.
|
| One frustrating aspect of the reporting for me is people
| talking about "more infectious" variants without describing
| whether or not they are more or less _dangerous_. In general,
| the virus putting more work into being infectious is _good
| news_ ; it generally comes at the cost of being less dangerous
| in other ways as it hyper-optimizes into replication rather
| than anything else. We should expect and want to hear about
| "more infectious" variants, which double as natural vaccines to
| some extent against other less infectious, more dangerous
| strains still using the same external protiens.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| There's a substantial lag, though, between finding out how
| infectious a variant is and how deadly it is (AIUI the rough
| averages are 2 weeks from infection to hospitalization and
| another 2 weeks from hospitalization to deaths, but that
| might have changed). That means that the data on how
| infectious a variant is becomes available ~1month ahead of
| information about how dangerous it is. Have we even had
| confirmed spread of these variants for a month?
| watt wrote:
| There is some talk that it also _is_ deadly.
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/22/new-uk-
| covid-v...
| slumdev wrote:
| "30% more deadly" means that only 99.6% of people survive
| it rather than 99.7%. Still not ebolapocalypse.
| jerf wrote:
| It may be, but that article is also hedging quite a bit.
|
| People have a hard time with this intuitively, because we
| probably live under the weakest selection pressure in the
| history of planet Earth, but it's vicious down there.
| Viruses are to a large extent playing a zero-sum game. If
| they get better at one thing, it almost _has_ to come at
| the cost of something else, because they 've already got
| all the knobs cranked up as high as they will go just to
| survive and they don't have a spare energy budget just
| lying around to put into other things without taking away
| from something else.
|
| It's not _impossible_ that some mutation was made that made
| it more infectious _and_ more deadly... but it 's a long
| enough shot that I'd consider the likelihood of incomplete
| early information and incentives that some parties have to
| amp up the danger in the presence of such uncertainty
| higher. Viruses do not routinely become more infectious
| _and_ more deadly. If they did, we 'd all be long dead. The
| evolution gradient tilts _strongly_ away from that.
| sjg007 wrote:
| The virus exists in multiple species. It may be perfectly
| fine in bats and reproduce without killing the bat. In
| humans, however, it kills.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Very true, especially when you consider that a more
| deadly variant is highly likely to be associated with
| things like higher viral load, worse symptoms, and faster
| symptom onset. A virus that kills twice as many people
| will likely be harmful for twice as many people -- giving
| the virus fewer asymptomatic hosts that go around
| spreading without even knowing it.
|
| It's more likely to go the other way; some derpy mutation
| that reduces viral load, slows incubation, reduces
| symptoms, makes more super-spreaders.
| NLips wrote:
| BBC's _More or Less_ did a bit on this. 70% more deadly (per
| person) would actually be better than 70% more infectious.
| Deaths increase linearly with deadliness of virus, but they
| increase exponentially with infectiousness.
|
| Say the current mortality rate is 2% and each infected person
| passes on the disease to one other after a week, then stops
| being infectious. If 100 people have the virus in week 0,
| after 10 weeks 1000 people will have had the virus and 20
| will have died.
|
| Increase the death rate by 70% and you'd have 34 deaths
| instead. Increase the transmission rate by 70%, and you'd
| have 170 people newly infected in week 1, then 289 in week 2,
| totalling 285,000 infected people, of which 2% die. That's
| now 570 deaths.
|
| Obviously the numbers can all be changed somewhat depending
| on treatment, or whether you expect everyone to be infected
| at some point anyway, but the takeaway is that more deadly is
| not necessarily worse than more infectious.
| hehehaha wrote:
| The question should be can you get re-infected via SA variant.
| And what's the mortality rate on re-infection? At this point, you
| have to assume vaccine rollout is too slow to catch up with the
| spread.
| traveler01 wrote:
| Since there are probably specialists out there, can you answer me
| a question?
|
| Since these vaccines are targeting spike proteins, shouldn't they
| work with every variant? Is there (big) risk of a mutation
| actually changing the spike protein?
| raphlinus wrote:
| I'm not a specialist, but I can link you to the answer: [1]
|
| Key quote: "B.1.1.7 is defined by 23 mutations from the
| original Wuhan strain, 8 of which are in the spike protein. The
| 3 mutations hypothesized to have the largest potential
| biological effect are N501Y, spike deletion 69-70del and
| P681H."
|
| The B.1.351 (South Africa) variant has N501Y but not the 69-70
| deletion. We're still learning, but virologists I follow are
| concerned that N501Y may be a driver of higher transmission.
| But it's likely that multiple mutations contribute.
|
| [1]: https://asm.org/Articles/2021/January/B-1-1-7-What-We-
| Know-A...
| thehappypm wrote:
| When the immune system creates antibodies, they basically hug
| the spike protein and build antibodies on every nook and cranny
| they can find a way to bind an antibody. These regions are
| called epitopes, and the immune system creates many antibodies
| for each invader.
|
| If the spike protein mutates, it means that the structure of
| the spike is different. Obviously the spike can't change too
| much, because it needs to still be able to latch onto cells,
| and many changes would be irrelevant. Even if one antibody
| suddenly stops working because of a slight shift in the
| protein, there are other antibodies targeting different parts
| of the protein that would still be effective.
|
| Only if the spike changes so dramatically that literally none
| of the antibodies you had before are relevant anymore. That's
| why it's not super expected that we'll get a version of the
| virus that these vaccines won't at least produce some
| antibodies against.
| CyanLite2 wrote:
| ELI5: The spike protein itself is changing on the virus.
| officialchicken wrote:
| Unpublished, non-peer reviewed, and sample size of 8... is there
| a well known name for opposite of FUD?
| outlace wrote:
| Hubris
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, in your analysis, what's the minimum sample size and why?
| schoolornot wrote:
| The more guessing and conjecture I hear about the effectiveness
| of current vaccines on mutations, the angrier I get. Are there
| any clinical trials going on right now to determine how well
| various strains respond to the current vaccines? Until Pfizer
| or Moderna puts out a press release saying their products cover
| the top 4 major strains, I'm not believing anything.
| bdonlan wrote:
| There are two ways to do clinical trials on vaccine
| effectiveness. One is to vaccinate someone and then
| deliberately infect them; this gives you good data quickly,
| but due to the deadliness of COVID-19, this is generally
| regarded to not be an option. Another is to vaccinate a very
| large number of people and wait to see if they get sick with
| the virus from natural exposure. This is ongoing right now on
| a very large scale; millions of people have been vaccinated,
| and sooner or later people will come in contact with these
| new variants. However, it takes time to collect enough data
| with this approach to provide useful results, and in this
| case it can be confounded by the lack of a control group (you
| don't know how many exposure events happened that did not
| lead to infections).
|
| Regardless, the current vaccination campaign is highly
| effective against the original - still very widespread and
| deadly - virus, so it's worth getting it, and as people get
| vaccinated with it, it will eventually be apparent whether it
| works against various variants as well. If it doesn't, it's
| likely that a booster vaccination can be developed for these
| variants (and indeed, Moderna has begun work, as an insurance
| policy, on a booster for the south african variant).
| krona wrote:
| Actually the UK is performing a challenge trial with young
| adults. Sign up here to get infected:
| https://ukcovidchallenge.com/covid-19-volunteer-trials/
| kaycebasques wrote:
| > is there a well known name for opposite of FUD?
|
| False hope
| bpodgursky wrote:
| "Peer review" is not a suicide pact. In the middle of a
| pandemic, where days matter, you publish information as you get
| it, and act with that understanding.
| Nightshaxx wrote:
| I disagree. In a pandemic it's important to get solid and
| clear information to the population. If you start saying
| things that don't go through the proper channels to be
| verified as reasonably true, then you create massive
| confusion when you potentially have to go back on that
| information. Scientists can and do make mistakes. A lay
| person might not understand what "preprint" or "not peer
| reviewed" mean yet this article is on the BBC which the
| average lay person does trust as a source for reasonably true
| information.
| sgt101 wrote:
| I think that if "the other side" sticks to the rules and
| doesn't publish things like
| :https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/20/covid-
| vaccin... using small sample sizes and various assertions
| about how the immune system works then you are right!
|
| On the other hand, if you are in a situation where no holds
| bared screaming to get attention is the norm then it may be
| good to share information quickly and transparently.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Last week the media in the uk ran headlines saying that
| covid was spreading like wildfire, despite the evidence
| from the number of cases showing the opposite (halving
| every 2 weeks)
|
| The day later they ran headlines sayign that covid wasn't
| spreading like wildfire.
|
| The source of the first scaremongering inaccurate dangerous
| headline was a study which said: During the
| period 6 January to 15 January, SARS-CoV-2 virus was
| circulating with a higher prevalence than between 25
| November to 3 December with 158 in 10,000 infected. There
| was no strong evidence for either growth or decay in
| prevalence averaged across the period 6 January to 15
| January.
|
| Which led to headlines like
|
| "Covid-19 cases have increased more quickly since lockdown
| started in England, study finds"
|
| (Lockdown started on Jan 5th - when about 60,000 cases were
| being identified each day. The headline was Jan 21st, when
| about 30,000 cases were identified)
|
| https://inews.co.uk/news/covid-19-cases-england-increase-
| sin...
|
| The 7 day cases identified from Jan 6th to 15th dropped
| from 55,885/day to 40,242/day
|
| That either means the number of unidentified cases
| balooned, or the REACT study was too small to identify
| changes over the course of a week (it's not designed to).
| In the former case we'd expect fewer tests were being done,
| but tests throughout January have remained averaging about
| 550,000 a day.
|
| The media will print whatever they can, so it's important
| to give headlines which make it clear the data is
| inconclusive. "appears" is a weasel-word that is well used
| in this case, and far better than misreporting a scientific
| paper
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| This seems like an unreasonable assessment. The preprint is
| available
| (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.25.427948v1),
| submitted for peer review, and the article is pretty clear from
| the start that this is a preliminary finding.
| sambe wrote:
| Where was it submitted? I couldn't see that anywhere.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| I'm not sure; the Moderna release mentions submission but
| doesn't specify.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Sample size of 8 is not really a huge issue for this kind of
| analysis.
|
| The hypothesis is that the Moderna vaccine produces antibodies
| against the new variant.
|
| 8/8 people sampled produced antibodies.
|
| Can we confidently say that 100% of people will produce
| antibodies? No, not with a sample size of 8.
|
| Can we say confidently that 50% of people will produce
| antibodies? That the vaccine gives you a coin toss's odds? If
| it's just a coin toss, this result would be the same
| probability as 8 "heads" in a row, or 1 in 256.
|
| So, the result is hardly FUD or meaningless. They've also
| submitted to journals for the world to inspect the results.
| mcc1ane wrote:
| hype
| ogre_codes wrote:
| This result is the absence of bad news. No more, no less.
|
| Regardless of what this early result is, the only thing most of
| us can do is try to keep social distancing, use masks, and get
| vaccinated to protect ourselves as best as possible.
|
| If the vaccine doesn't actually protect us against the newer
| strains, we should _still take it_ because we need protection
| from the more widely strain regardless. The only difference is
| whether we 'll need to take a second vaccine in another year.
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