Courmisch

The point is that the government won't be liable for bodily injury and negligent manslaughter if somebody dies from Covid after refusing to take the vaccine - as opposed to if somebody dies from Covid before getting a vaccine while the government wouldn't have taken any preventative restrictions.

Case in point: in my home country (and probably a few other European ones), PM and health ministers are under criminal investigation for not taking measures in January/Februrary.

Not to say that the healthcare system could ignore you altogether.

cockpitvisit

Are there? Would you care to post some pointers to those indications? Thanks!

r2d2

Here: https://www.is.fi/taloussanomat/art-2000007657738.html (sorry, it's in Finnish)

cockpitvisit

Thanks. Sadly, that article does not point to any specific research proving that existing vaccines produce no sterilizing immunity, it just mentions it in one sentence (if the google translator got it right).

It seems no one researched whether new Covid-19 vaccines produce sterilizing immunity, so there are no "indications" at all - it is simply not known. Same for the proposed Finnish vaccine the article talks about - by their own admission, they lack money for a proper phase 3 study, so their claims of sterilizing immunity look a little dubious.

Courmisch

Interesting point - we don't know if (or which) vaccines prevent spreading the virus. We also don't know how immunity (sterilizing or not) will last. That's something scientists will have to figure out at some point next year, when it comes the time to worry how often to redo the vaccination, if at all.

But in the short term, so what? Should it affect someone's will to be vaccinated? I guess if you know you have caught the virus, then it's questionable whether vaccination makes any sense. but otherwise I'd be concerned about side effects, not sterilising immunity or lack thereof.

DrSickle

I don’t believe there is a feasible way to prove what kind of immunity is given by a vaccine this early. After all, there is no reliable way to show infectiveness at the moment (PCR positive does not mean someone is infective), nor is there any way to prove immunity (negative antibodies does not show that someone is not immune).

Most things we know about vaccines is learnt after the fact. For instance, the the number of times a vaccination has to be renewed in order to keep immunity has in many cases been learnt retrospectively.

On the other hand, virus replication causes tissue damage, which causes symptoms. If a vaccine protects from the disease, it is rather unlikely that these people would just keep having the same level of virus replication without magically developing any symptoms (even the vaccine-mediated immune response would also result in tissue damage and symptoms if the disease was severe enough). So it is likely that infectiveness is at least to some extent decreased by the vaccine, although the extent of this decrease remains unknown. Still, it annoys me greatly that the newspapers managed to turn this into “vaccinated people will enjoy life without getting a disease but will endanger everyone else by spreading it”.

ffay005

Could you elaborate on this? I took an antibody test this week and was hoping for a positive result, but it came out negative. As much as I have been travelling, and to several major covid hotspots, too, I was expecting that if anyone, I would have had a very mild version of covid19 at some point and that this would show up as a positive result in the antibody test.

DrSickle

Antibody levels do not stay elevated forever, even if the immunological memory still exists. Thus, it is natural for antibodies to decrease after some time after an infection. How this works is pathogen-dependent, different pathogens trigger the immune system differently.

Hepatitis B virus is an example of this. When vaccinating against HBV, some (less than 5%) people fail to develop immunity. If one wants to verify immunity, The HBV s-antigen antibodies must be measured at 6-8 weeks from the final dose, at which time the antibody levels should exceed a certain threshold in order for the immunization to be considered successful. If this is not done, the way to
show a successful immunisation involves taking the entire vaccination series again.

How does this work with our current SARS-CoV-2 virus? I don’t believe we fully know yet. And that is my main point - we know rather little about how immunity works with this virus.

Also apologies for going somewhat off topic here, just thought this subject important for aviation in general at the moment, which I believe justifies the discussion (for a few posts at least).

SPBanker

As far as I am concerned, this is not off-topic at all. Thanks for sharing this level-headed analysis.

zxcv1

According to this, should be okay a year from now.

intuition

Not sure I follow your reasonning. The map seems to indicate that there is nowhere in the world that will be a "near-zero-spread" zone until 2022?

SPBanker

Yep, dates seem to quite late... With several vaccines approved both in the US and EU very soon, I’d say Europe and North America will be more than 70% vaccinated before the autumn 2021. Same goes for Japan, China, most of ASEAN countries...

fransknorge

You are dreaming. Based on current order and stocks, France for example, estimates that 15 million people will be vaccinated by end of summer. That is less than 25% of the population.
https://www.franceinter.fr/coup-d-en...long-processus

There are serious production issues to vaccinate this much in such a short time. I think that in autumn 2021 we should be happy if we reach 40%.

Ed Size

In Germany we are hoping that we got 5 million people vaccinated by end of March. Just the first priority group, the people older than 80 years old and people working in the medical business are more than 8 million, even the people older than 65 are close to 20 million. If Germany gets more than 30 million people vaccinated by autmúm 21 this only will work if normal doctors can give you the treatment. If it stays so special any number higher than 20 million by Oct. 21 will be a great success.

SPBanker

One needs AstraZeneca and other similar vaccines for really large numbers, i.e. vaccines that don’t require -70C for storage etc.