8420PR

I think to be fact based, it's worth pointing out that there will NOTbe long term side effects of the type that people drop dead in 5 years time because they took the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine today. There may be side effects that are visible short term, but the serious ones are one in a million chances and in the case of the recently discovered myocarditis in young men all have so far recovered - so no long term side effects (source: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/2021...issue-in-youth).

outgoing

My nuance ends where I have hard data and the hard data are, to my knowledge, that vaccine is safe and effective in population 12+. It is also fact that masks prevent the spread of the virus indoors but they are less effective/needed outdoors unless in crowded places.

Fair points but I think you selectively picked my point (a) and omitted points (b) and (c). This is fine. To my understanding the rates of muscle heart inflammation are extremely rare. What was it 7 cases out of millions of doses? This is the Pediatrics paper that describes this in the US: https://pediatrics.aappublications.o...ds.2021-052478. I think this is all besides the point though b/c the vaccine is not mandatory, however, I trust regulators in the US, EU, Israel etc that the vaccine is safe. In that, I could argue that it is monstrous to expose other people - e.g., with immune suppression - to these unvaccinated kids especially given that mortality is higher among older ages and people with co-morbidities. I don't think we want to get into a discussion on value of life of different groups and ethics of such valuation. Thus, if we want to fully open we can either (a) separate kids from these people or (b) vaccinate both groups or (c) continue with restrictions until we know the long-run consequences of these vaccines (but how long is long-run? a year, a decade?).

Speaking of nuance - also note my point (c) that you skipped - there is more and more evidence of long-covid in children (and actually pretty severe) thus I'd argue that we should look at their health beyond just the initial infection. I don't have time to dig out stats (I' m not sure these even exist but maybe someone could help here) but I'm willing to bet that rate of covid complications in children is higher than rate of vaccination complications.

Loren Pechtel

Kids still transmit it to adults even if it's not that bad in kids. And the current issue is colleges and employers mandating it, not grade schools.

Vaccine side effects show up soon, not long down the road.

Covid is a serious risk to anyone that is highly exposed.

I didn't say it was the highest, I said it was just about the highest. Finding a few events above it isn't a rebuttal.

Yeah, it's obvious they're following the goodlife that wants to see as many people dead as possible.

Delta is already here, just not that widespread yet.

How many of them are even insured in the first place. The freedumb crowd doesn't think they'll need it.

Exactly. Anything risky enough to make the vaccine a worse choice than not taking it would have shown up in the trials.

FlitBen

For the mass of older vacinees, not much. Only young males due for an mRNA-based shot might need to distinguish between the evolving sets of symptoms, which should be nil for most of them. ID experts may have a different take of these concerns.

nk15

Delta 10% of new cases currently in the US, versus 90% in the UK, it will make a big difference if/when becomes dominant in the US.

Delta, now a 'variant of concern,' accounts for 10 percent of new U.S. cases, CDC says (nbcnews.com)

corporate-wage-slave

I've always struggled with some of these figures since while in general they are correct, when you get down to an individual level, and ask questions like age, weight, height, other illnesses, household composition you then one can expect get different numbers.

So for Delta, what distinguishes it from other variants and Pre-Alpha (base lineage) Covid is that it works on the Spike protein in a slightly different way, so that it gets through the body's immune system slightly more effectively. The actual problem is that this means a weaker level of exposure is enough to catch Covid in a serious way. Hence a younger unvaccinated, or undervaccinated, person living in a large household or in student shared accommodation is more likely to get Delta than Alpha, and a lot more than Pre-Alpha Covid. An older couple living alone, and both vaccinated are in a better space here, thankfully. This is how variants work - they seek better transmission in their evolution, and if you're really unlucky they do this via a better attack tactics on the immune system. Alpha didn't do the latter so much. Which then explains why one dose of a vaccine isn't so effective as it was up to and including Alpha. You need the second dose to overcome the immunity advance made by Delta.

But the good news is that despite the fact that all Western endorsed vaccines were developed to purely deal with Pre-Alpha Covid, so far they have also overcome all 4 of the Variants of Concern, 8 Variants of Interest and probably the 25 or so Variants under Investigation. And probably the hundreds of other variants and mutations out there. It seems likely that at some point a variant will put up a tougher fight against the vaccines, but there again all the main vaccine developers are working on second generation vaccines, and the mRNA vaccines have an obvious head start in this department.

Anyway to go back to how we measure this, R0 means if you don't go mad on public health measures, how many people will 1 person typically infect? For Pre-Alpha it's 2.5 people. For Alpha (currently dominant in the US) it is 4.5. For Delta it is about 6 people but we are still collecting data on this one, it may be slightly lower. Compared to 18 for measles (thanks to school settings for the likely victims). I am pretty sure Delta iin the USA will do exactly what it did in the UK: kill off Alpha due to its evolutionary advantage. It's therefore critical that the USA gets people under 30 double vaccinated as quickly as possible. It has a couple of weeks advantage here, which should not be squandered. This is on the basis that nearly everyone over 50 has had both vaccines, since they remain the most at risk from an avoidable death.

outgoing

If this is correct we should see relatively quickly large spatial differences in cases due to very different vaccination rates across state or even counties. MO, AR, UT, and LA already reversed the declining trend in cases.

FlitBen

Children spread lots of risky things to adults. Adults try to not spread risky things to children, at least not the responsible adults. This generational advantage of our species is what wiser members rely on for collective survival and prosperity.


Since you seem so certain, you might explain the long-term clinical surveillance.
Adverse effects are rare among everyone infected, i.e. not reported for just anyone. I can see how good convention might be dismissed by persuading others that anyone so exposed is seriously at risk.


Not just anyone.

As I posted before.
You still have some persuading to do.


It was not meant to be in the wider sense, for there are far bigger killers of man that I do not ever recall you dwelling on. Such as malaria, which is estimated to have caused more than a tenth of all mortality across millennia.

“Killer event” conflation is not that interesting outside of teleology.


Conversely, anything not risky enough that makes not taking the vaccine the better choice would have shown in the trials as well.

FlitBen

The one thing obvious in your disdain is that judgmental “goodlife” allusion.


And that is a general fact-based claim, because?

Loren Pechtel

Goodlife--as in the Saberhagen Berzerker novels.

nk15

CureVac’s Covid-19 Vaccine Disappoints in Clinical Trial (msn.com)

outgoing

Now what I would want to know (and we should know asap) is what's the "real-life" efficacy of Pfizer & Moderna against this Lambda variant? It seems that Pfizer is emergency approved and hence most likely used in Peru. Any data on this? I think it is also important to understand what did they do different from Pfizer and Moderna. The article is vague about that.

bambinomartino

I didn't address points (b) and (c) because (a) was so beyond the pale from my perspective. But okay:

The virus will mutate most likely in countries who won't have widespread vaccination for another couple of years. In other words, it will not develop in the tiny child (who are not very good at transmitting it to boot) unvaccinated population in the West, but among adults in the Third World. So this is irrelevant at best.
There aren't enough good studies, but some have come up with single digit percentage of long covid in children (and I believe less so for the wee ones), that's hardly "prevalent".

There are actually 700 or so (you are off by a factor of 100) cases of myocarditis in the US alone.

A USC study from a few months comes to mind. They asked people what they thought their risk of dying of Covid was. Age groups like 30s and 40s said something like 20%. Which is off by a factor of many many THOUSANDS. This is a serious disease, yes, but the public has been scared witless, and public policy in too many places, including and especially Canada, where I live, is based on pandering to that irrational but large part of the electorate.

There is nothing dumb about freedom, this is coming form someone who spent a large portion of his life behind the Iron Curtain. You obviously fancy yourself one of the smart ones who should dictate how others live their lives.
I gave the obvious example of Measles. But the same holds for smallpox, polio (thankfully largely eradicated), as well as tetanus, chickenpox, hepatitis B, etc. Some of those may be on par with covid with respect to severity, but are hugely more infectious. Give me a list of "many childhood diseases used to be--diseases for which schools mandate vaccination" that covid is "a lot more dangerous". Include infection rates for comparison too, if you can.

Piece of cake for someone smart like you.

TTT

Some additional details via the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06...urevac-vaccine
Perhaps something to do with it's enhanced stability?

GadgetFreak

Goggle is your friend. The CureVac vaccine is an mRNA vaccine like Moderna and Pfizer but the one from CureVac uses unmodified mRNA while the other two use modified nucleotides in their RNA. Stepping away from Google, I think it is likely that the modifications stabilize the mRNA in Pfizer and Moderna so they work better. Stabilizing mRNAs has been a long term problem with trying to develop mRNA vaccines.