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Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2022 11:02 pm
by raven
Herainestold wrote:
Sat Jan 29, 2022 11:42 pm
We have engineered a virus that infects children, when the original strain did not affects them as much. Good work.
It always infected children. It just didn't make them that sick.

Not sure that Omircon is making them sicker now (is there data on that?), or whether vaccines are protecting the rest of us enough that it just seems like it is.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:23 am
by Herainestold
Bharat Biotech in India is developing a nasal covid vaccine.
Nasal vaccines may be the best way to prevent infections long term, because they provide protection exactly where it is needed to fend off the virus: the mucosal linings of the airways, where the coronavirus first lands.

Bharat Biotech is among the world’s leading vaccine manufacturers. Its best known product, Covaxin, is authorized to prevent Covid in India and many other countries. But its experimental nasal vaccine may prove to be the real game changer.
So-called mucosal vaccines ideally would coat the mucosal surfaces of the nose, mouth and throat with long-lasting antibodies, and would be much better at preventing infection and spread of the virus. It is the difference between planting sentries at the gates to bar intruders and trying to oust them after they had already stormed the castle.

Nasal vaccines are “the only way to really circumvent person-to-person transmission,” said Jennifer Gommerman, an immunologist at the University of Toronto. “We can’t live forever sheltering vulnerable people and boosting them so that their antibody levels stay artificially high.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/heal ... nasal.html

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 8:57 pm
by jdc
raven wrote:
Wed Feb 02, 2022 11:02 pm
Herainestold wrote:
Sat Jan 29, 2022 11:42 pm
We have engineered a virus that infects children, when the original strain did not affects them as much. Good work.
It always infected children. It just didn't make them that sick.

Not sure that Omircon is making them sicker now (is there data on that?), or whether vaccines are protecting the rest of us enough that it just seems like it is.
Infections and hospitalisations by age here https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... ons-by-age but they've helpfully grouped them by different age bands

I had a graph showing static hospitalisation rates in children as the proportion of hospitalisations that were children went up but that must have been Delta, I think. I might see if I can find an updated one.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 10:54 pm
by Herainestold
I should have said "preferentially infects children".

Luckily children are not affected as much with respect to severe effects, but a significant portion will have to deal with Long Covid.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Fri Feb 04, 2022 8:32 pm
by jdc
Herainestold wrote:
Thu Feb 03, 2022 10:54 pm
I should have said "preferentially infects children".

Luckily children are not affected as much with respect to severe effects, but a significant portion will have to deal with Long Covid.
Sounds like an ageist variant but isn't that because it preferentially infects the unvaccinated and under-vaccinated, and more children than adults are in that group?

My reading of this https://www.england.nhs.uk/2022/01/nhs- ... year-olds/ is that 2.4m 12-17 year olds have had 1 dose, 1m have had 2 doses, and 5-11 year olds are unvaccinated.

And the vaccine does protect against symptomatic infection with variants: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/f ... le/2788485
3 doses of mRNA vaccine, relative to being unvaccinated and to receipt of 2 doses, was associated with protection against both the Omicron and Delta variants, although the higher odds ratios for Omicron suggest less protection for Omicron than for Delta

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Fri Feb 04, 2022 9:47 pm
by Herainestold
jdc wrote:
Fri Feb 04, 2022 8:32 pm
Herainestold wrote:
Thu Feb 03, 2022 10:54 pm
I should have said "preferentially infects children".

Luckily children are not affected as much with respect to severe effects, but a significant portion will have to deal with Long Covid.
Sounds like an ageist variant but isn't that because it preferentially infects the unvaccinated and under-vaccinated, and more children than adults are in that group?

My reading of this https://www.england.nhs.uk/2022/01/nhs- ... year-olds/ is that 2.4m 12-17 year olds have had 1 dose, 1m have had 2 doses, and 5-11 year olds are unvaccinated.

And the vaccine does protect against symptomatic infection with variants: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/f ... le/2788485
3 doses of mRNA vaccine, relative to being unvaccinated and to receipt of 2 doses, was associated with protection against both the Omicron and Delta variants, although the higher odds ratios for Omicron suggest less protection for Omicron than for Delta
The vaccines work well against infection when they are "fresh", but immunity wanes quickly. You are good for about 90 days but by six months you are basically down to zero. Protection against severe outcomes appears to be much better and does not wane to the same extent. So vaccines are still useful.

A colleague who is involved with covid response for her company's work force,and who follows the data closely, told me that the risk for children under two years was similar to that for an adult aged 40. This is surprising and frightening news, but I have been unable to confirm it. We must be very cautious to protect the most vulnerable in our society, at either end of the age spectrum.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2022 6:29 am
by bob sterman
Herainestold wrote:
Fri Feb 04, 2022 9:47 pm
A colleague who is involved with covid response for her company's work force,and who follows the data closely, told me that the risk for children under two years was similar to that for an adult aged 40. This is surprising and frightening news, but I have been unable to confirm it.
In contrast, a friend of a friend who is closely involved in his company's response to the pandemic (e.g. wiping down surfaces and putting little dots on the floor telling people how far apart to stand) and who reads the Daily Mail closely said something completely different. But I have been unable to confirm that either.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2022 7:01 am
by headshot
bob sterman wrote:
Sat Feb 05, 2022 6:29 am
Herainestold wrote:
Fri Feb 04, 2022 9:47 pm
A colleague who is involved with covid response for her company's work force,and who follows the data closely, told me that the risk for children under two years was similar to that for an adult aged 40. This is surprising and frightening news, but I have been unable to confirm it.
In contrast, a friend of a friend who is closely involved in his company's response to the pandemic (e.g. wiping down surfaces and putting little dots on the floor telling people how far apart to stand) and who reads the Daily Mail closely said something completely different. But I have been unable to confirm that either.
Which is interesting, because someone I don’t know, and have never actually met, who works in a fish and chip shop in Whitby, told me that Covid is statistically more dangerous to under fives than working in a steel mill in Turkmenistan.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2022 3:52 pm
by Herainestold
Yeah, I know. Its not evidence, its a vague story.
I was hoping somebody else could corroborate. I was unable to find anything on it.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2022 6:27 pm
by headshot
Herainestold wrote:
Sat Feb 05, 2022 3:52 pm
Yeah, I know. Its not evidence, its a vague story.
I was hoping somebody else could corroborate. I was unable to find anything on it.
I wonder why?

Have you read this book yet?

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Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2022 10:32 pm
by raven
jdc wrote:
Thu Feb 03, 2022 8:57 pm
raven wrote:
Wed Feb 02, 2022 11:02 pm
Herainestold wrote:
Sat Jan 29, 2022 11:42 pm
We have engineered a virus that infects children, when the original strain did not affects them as much. Good work.
It always infected children. It just didn't make them that sick.

Not sure that Omircon is making them sicker now (is there data on that?), or whether vaccines are protecting the rest of us enough that it just seems like it is.
Infections and hospitalisations by age here https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... ons-by-age but they've helpfully grouped them by different age bands

I had a graph showing static hospitalisation rates in children as the proportion of hospitalisations that were children went up but that must have been Delta, I think. I might see if I can find an updated one.
Cheers for that link, jdc. That makes the age profile very clear - still heavily weighted towards the elderly being most at risk. With perhaps a very slight increase in the under 4s being hospitalised compared to early variants, but that's a bit hard to tell given that cases are high in that age group right now.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2022 4:21 am
by Herainestold
raven wrote:
Sat Feb 05, 2022 10:32 pm
jdc wrote:
Thu Feb 03, 2022 8:57 pm
raven wrote:
Wed Feb 02, 2022 11:02 pm


It always infected children. It just didn't make them that sick.

Not sure that Omircon is making them sicker now (is there data on that?), or whether vaccines are protecting the rest of us enough that it just seems like it is.
Infections and hospitalisations by age here https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... ons-by-age but they've helpfully grouped them by different age bands

I had a graph showing static hospitalisation rates in children as the proportion of hospitalisations that were children went up but that must have been Delta, I think. I might see if I can find an updated one.
Cheers for that link, jdc. That makes the age profile very clear - still heavily weighted towards the elderly being most at risk. With perhaps a very slight increase in the under 4s being hospitalised compared to early variants, but that's a bit hard to tell given that cases are high in that age group right now.
That graph does show 0-4 hospitalizations roughly equivalent to 55-64 age group. Luckily deaths are not showing the same equivalency.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2022 4:36 am
by Herainestold
Covaxin vaccine a whole inactivated virion vaccine (not just spike protein) shows good efficacy in antibodies against Omicron. Suggestion that it may be a good booster against highly mutated variants.
The B.1.1.529 variant (Omicron) recently emerged in November 2021 and has spread throughout the world. The Omicron variant has more than 30 mutations within the spike protein that could impact vaccine-mediated immunity. We used a live virus neutralization assay to evaluate the neutralizing activity against the Omicron variant of sera collected from subjects who received a booster dose (6-month after primary series last dose) of Covaxin. We found that sera from Covaxin boosted individuals showed neutralizing activity against D614G (vaccine strain), Delta, and Omicron variants. One hundred percent of boosted subjects showed neutralizing activity against the Delta variant while over 90% of boosted subjects showed neutralizing activity against the Omicron variant. These findings show that a booster dose of Covaxin can generate robust neutralizing antibody responses against the Omicron variant.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 22269189v1

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2022 6:53 am
by bob sterman
Herainestold wrote:
Mon Feb 07, 2022 4:21 am
raven wrote:
Sat Feb 05, 2022 10:32 pm
jdc wrote:
Thu Feb 03, 2022 8:57 pm

Infections and hospitalisations by age here https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... ons-by-age but they've helpfully grouped them by different age bands

I had a graph showing static hospitalisation rates in children as the proportion of hospitalisations that were children went up but that must have been Delta, I think. I might see if I can find an updated one.
Cheers for that link, jdc. That makes the age profile very clear - still heavily weighted towards the elderly being most at risk. With perhaps a very slight increase in the under 4s being hospitalised compared to early variants, but that's a bit hard to tell given that cases are high in that age group right now.
That graph does show 0-4 hospitalizations roughly equivalent to 55-64 age group. Luckily deaths are not showing the same equivalency.
It does not show that the hospitalisation rate per case is equivalent for those age groups. Look at the left hand panel showing the % of the population in each age group who were infected. It doesn't use quite the same age bands but you can see the infection rate is much much higher in young children. So hospitalisations as a % of infections are much lower for that age group.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2022 4:15 pm
by shpalman
Harm to AstraZeneca jab’s reputation ‘probably killed thousands’ and according to a newspaper this is the fault of "scientists and politicians" and not the fault of a newspaper which is unable to maintain the sense of a quote when using it as a headline for example. I mean, there's two orders of magnitude between the headline here and the actual
Scientists and politicians “probably killed hundreds of thousands of people”
quote in the article.
Fears over the links to blood clots also led other countries, including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Bulgaria, Iceland and Thailand, to pause their use of the vaccine.
And then the actual proven links to blood clots is why it was completely suspended in younger people; even the UK stopped giving it to the under-30's and that can hardly be blamed on anti-UK bias. (The article says under-40's but I'm fairly sure I remember it being under-30's at the time.)
Before European regulators made their decision, Germany decided it should not be given to those over 65, and France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, called the vaccine “quasi-ineffective” in people over 65.
Italy's national regulator decided not to roll it out to the older population either, because there wasn't phase III trial data demonstrating its effectiveness in that age group.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2022 6:01 pm
by Herainestold
shpalman wrote:
Mon Feb 07, 2022 4:15 pm
Harm to AstraZeneca jab’s reputation ‘probably killed thousands’ and according to a newspaper this is the fault of "scientists and politicians" and not the fault of a newspaper which is unable to maintain the sense of a quote when using it as a headline for example. I mean, there's two orders of magnitude between the headline here and the actual
Scientists and politicians “probably killed hundreds of thousands of people”
quote in the article.
Fears over the links to blood clots also led other countries, including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Bulgaria, Iceland and Thailand, to pause their use of the vaccine.
And then the actual proven links to blood clots is why it was completely suspended in younger people; even the UK stopped giving it to the under-30's and that can hardly be blamed on anti-UK bias. (The article says under-40's but I'm fairly sure I remember it being under-30's at the time.)
Before European regulators made their decision, Germany decided it should not be given to those over 65, and France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, called the vaccine “quasi-ineffective” in people over 65.
Italy's national regulator decided not to roll it out to the older population either, because there wasn't phase III trial data demonstrating its effectiveness in that age group.
Sir John Bell is hardly a disinterested party with respect to the AZ vaccine.
It does pose a small risk, that risk was identified, and health authorities reacted. Whether the reaction was exactly right and what the consequences of
that reaction were, is another question.
In the UK and Europe AZ was replaced by mRNA vaccines, so it would be difficult to put a number on the number who died because of the interruptiopn of the vaccine program, but I doubt it was thousands.
Sir John might be referring to the lack of uptake of the AZ vax in the developing world, because of the publicity given to the blood clotting problems.
he may have a case there.
I personally was happy to get AZ and also happy to get a Pfizer booster.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2022 6:55 pm
by shpalman
Herainestold wrote:
Mon Feb 07, 2022 6:01 pm
Sir John Bell is hardly a disinterested party with respect to the AZ vaccine.
It does pose a small risk, that risk was identified, and health authorities reacted. Whether the reaction was exactly right and what the consequences of that reaction were, is another question.
In the UK and Europe AZ was replaced by mRNA vaccines, so it would be difficult to put a number on the number who died because of the interruptiopn of the vaccine program, but I doubt it was thousands.
Sir John might be referring to the lack of uptake of the AZ vax in the developing world, because of the publicity given to the blood clotting problems.
he may have a case there.
I personally was happy to get AZ and also happy to get a Pfizer booster.
I was happy to get AZ because it meant jumping the age-based queue, and I was happy to get my Pfizer booster in November.

Vaccination rollouts in the EU were generally somewhat behind the UK, but it was the strategy of various countries in the EU of giving AZ to younger people because of doubts about its efficacy in older people which led to the discovery of the clotting problem fairly quickly.

If it had been immediately included in everyone's age-based rollouts I don't know how much faster things would have gone overall, since the doses just weren't arriving. The first batch of a quarter-million AZ doses arrived in Italy almost exactly a year ago (on the 11th of February) when 3.3 million Pfizer doses had already arrived since the beginning of the year and had mainly been giving to people working in the health service and their friends and anyone else who managed to get hold of the google sheet link.

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1982&start=75#p70122

Image

At that time, the UK had already given a first dose to more than 20% of its eligible population, but Italy was only just about to start its age-based rollout.

I got my first AZ dose in mid March, by which time about half a million AZ doses had arrived (versus 9 million Pfizer doses) but Lombardy's age-based rollout was still stuck in the over-80's and basically being a f.cking pile of sh.t because the moron friends of the regional administration were in charge of it; when the Post Office took over it improved a lot. About 5 million of us had had a first dose by then. Indeed it seems like most of the EU was at about 7-8% of first-dose coverage when the UK was already at about 35% (OWID).

(Cases and deaths in the same period in the same random selection of countries.)

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2022 7:30 pm
by shpalman
I did note that the UK managed to make a 5-fold reduction in its CFR but continues to reckon that the vaccine didn't really reduce the case rate, whereas the Italian experience was a reduction in case rates without such a strong CFR reduction. Maybe the rollout here wasn't strictly age-based and the coverage in the older morons is still patchy enough even now that we just made it obligatory for the over-50's but more young people jumped at the chance for freer international travel at the beginning of the summer (Green Passes for social stuff probably helped too).

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2022 7:37 am
by shpalman
AstraZeneca vaccine: Did our stupid f.ckups over the trial protocols, the clotting side effects in young people, and the failure of manufacturing plants outside the UK spoil UK's gift to the world?

From here you can really see the pro-AZ bias that there was in the UK, so much so that you ignored the Germans when they figured out the clotting link and then months later reported that the British had found it first and blamed the Germans for being secretive about it.

Even the UK has stopped using it, so you can hardly blame that on nationalism.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2022 4:26 am
by Woodchopper

Omicron-targeted vaccines do no better than original jabs in early tests
Experiments in animals show that boosters customized for the fast-spreading COVID variant offer little advantage over standard jabs.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00003-y

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2022 4:49 pm
by Herainestold
Prime and Spike covid vaccine treatment.
The vaccine is remarkably simple, it is just the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. That’s it, no adjuvants or other ingredients. The study, which is in preprint, was in mice, in which they compared two groups. One group received only one dose of Comirnaty (the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccine). The second group received the same one dose of Comirnaty, and then 14 days later received a nasal spray of the spike protein. Both groups were then exposed to SARS-CoV-2. In the first group, without the nasal spray, 80% of the exposed mice died. In the second group, with the nasal spray, none of the exposed mice died. That’s a pretty dramatic result.

The concept of the nasal spray booster is what the researchers are calling “Prime and Spike”. The idea is that you first prime the immune system with a parenteral vaccine. Then you expose that primed immune system to the spike protein in the respiratory tract through the nasal spray. This causes the memory B cells produced by the initial vaccine dose to produce a robust antibody response to the spike protein. The researchers did not test the nasal spray by itself, but that was not the idea of the treatment in any case.

Because COVID is a respiratory illness, in most people the virus enters their system through breathing, the nose, mouth, and lungs. The mucosa of our respiratory tract, which has its own antibodies, is the first line of defense against this route of entry into the body. The nasal spray, therefore, boosts this first line of defense, so that the virus never has a chance to gain entry or establish a foothold.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/nasal- ... -175933072

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2022 2:54 am
by Millennie Al
Herainestold wrote:
Sat Feb 26, 2022 4:49 pm
Prime and Spike covid vaccine treatment.
In the first group, without the nasal spray, 80% of the exposed mice died. In the second group, with the nasal spray, none of the exposed mice died. That’s a pretty dramatic result.
Yes. So dramatic it's firmly in the category of sounding too good to be true.

Actual study at: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 4.477597v1

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2022 2:29 pm
by tom p
Herainestold wrote:
Sat Feb 26, 2022 4:49 pm
Prime and Spike covid vaccine treatment.
The vaccine is remarkably simple, it is just the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. That’s it, no adjuvants or other ingredients. The study, which is in preprint, was in mice, in which they compared two groups. One group received only one dose of Comirnaty (the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccine). The second group received the same one dose of Comirnaty, and then 14 days later received a nasal spray of the spike protein. Both groups were then exposed to SARS-CoV-2. In the first group, without the nasal spray, 80% of the exposed mice died. In the second group, with the nasal spray, none of the exposed mice died. That’s a pretty dramatic result.

The concept of the nasal spray booster is what the researchers are calling “Prime and Spike”. The idea is that you first prime the immune system with a parenteral vaccine. Then you expose that primed immune system to the spike protein in the respiratory tract through the nasal spray. This causes the memory B cells produced by the initial vaccine dose to produce a robust antibody response to the spike protein. The researchers did not test the nasal spray by itself, but that was not the idea of the treatment in any case.

Because COVID is a respiratory illness, in most people the virus enters their system through breathing, the nose, mouth, and lungs. The mucosa of our respiratory tract, which has its own antibodies, is the first line of defense against this route of entry into the body. The nasal spray, therefore, boosts this first line of defense, so that the virus never has a chance to gain entry or establish a foothold.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/nasal- ... -175933072
Why would you compare single Comirnaty to Comirnaty + spike?
Why not double? Double is the correct dosage and would be a two-vaccine vs two vaccine comparison. Why not also a double + spike arm (it's only mice, after all - they are cheap).
That sounds like an inherently biased study.

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Sat May 07, 2022 5:12 pm
by shpalman
Impact of population mixing between vaccinated and unvaccinated subpopulations on infectious disease dynamics: implications for SARS-CoV-2 transmission
Although risk associated with avoiding vaccination during a virulent pandemic accrues chiefly to people who are unvaccinated, their choices affect risk of viral infection among those who are vaccinated in a manner that is disproportionate to the portion of unvaccinated people in the population.
Responses to (predictable) criticism

Re: Developing the Covid-19 vaccine

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2022 12:03 pm
by tom p
Some good news re: COVID vaccines - Pfizer/BioNtech has submitted an application to the EMA for an amended COVID vaccine - now with added Omicron!