Not saying it shouldn't be counted but it may not end up weighing the same in policy decisions. Would you take 1000000 life years from one age group and give it to an older one? Seems wrong doesn't it? Quality of life matters and it should be balanced against the obligations to our elderly not totally subjugated.
Maybe stop presuming you know more than your sister? Its fine if the spike protein circulates, its a very small amount and it has been modified so it can't bind to your cells. Its fine if it kills a small number of epithelial cells, covid would do 1000x worse. Finally, how is the mrna going to cause epigenetic changes if it can't get in the nucleus?
Increasingly nominally. Right now, the protection is about 50%. I expect it will continue to fall as the virus evolves.
50% is a lot from a public health perspective -- there's a huge difference in the exponent -- but not something you can rely on to keep yourself or your relatives safe.
So what you’re saying is: it reduces your risk of infection? :)
I agree that it’s waning, and likely boosters will help, but it is far better (and safer) than doing nothing; just doesn’t preclude the need to mask up around unvaxed folks, etc.
It doesn't preclude the need to mask up around vaxed folks either. Delta is spreading in part because vaxed folks stopped taking precautions, trusting in vaccines. That's not good for anyone. Vaxed folks won't get severe cases, but the jury is still out on long COVID. It also applies strong evolutionary pressure to vaccine-jumping mutations.
Note: Before anyone jumps on the above statement, I'm not trying to imply anything else. Vaxed folks who don't take reasonable additional precautions ARE a major source of spread COVID19. That's not meant as a comparative statement (unvaxed folks are ALSO a major source of spread).
That's not really how it works, First, vaccines prevent infection in the first place so the virus never has a chance to replicate and mutate, unlike antibiotics which are given after infection and there are a massive number of bacteria and only the most resistant survive. Second, there isn't anything about vaccine acquired immunity thats different from infection acquired immunity, so any evolutionary pressure would already be there.
> First, vaccines prevent infection in the first place so the virus never has a chance to replicate and mutate
Ideally, yes, but in practice people still tend to develop a viral load, their immune system kicks in faster, and the result is a very brief infection.
>Second, there isn't anything about vaccine acquired immunity thats different from infection acquired immunity
Not an expert, but afaik there's been quite a few studies showing that natural immunity is superior to the vaccine-induced one - I'm also fairly sure that virologists have theorized to that end even before the data became available for the following reason: the vaccine is 100% focussed on detecting the spike protein, so changes to the spike can result in evasive variants. Natural immunity OTOH is developed against more sites of the virus and thus provide a more broad and robust response to variants, present and future.
There's been some mixed signals coming out of the research, but that's in part due to how immunity is being measured. There are definitely some studies showing that particular antibody levels for vaccines can be higher or longer lasting than natural infection, but recent research is showing that those with natural infection have had a far smaller risk of reinfection than those vaccinated, even when controlling for comorbidities. There are still confounding factors, such as behavioral differences between the groups, but its a pretty stark difference. It also makes sense from a theoretical standpoint, as acquired immunity is based on more than the just spike protein, unlike the vaccines, which is a big part of the differences between variants like Delta. The thought is that natural immunity is therefore more resilient to changes between variants.
Its all early enough that its still an open question, but there's definitely early evidence that natural immunity is more resilient than vaccination only.
Right, all you're changing is the mRNA, but that can still be really dangerous. What if you code for a protein that causes cross-reactivity with a human protein and you give millions of people an auto-immune disorder?
I'm 1000% pro mRNA vaccines and pro covid vaccines, but they still need to be tested.
Then the virus variant itself would cause autoimmune disease, and we'd have a much bigger problem than deciding whether to approve a new vaccine.
For fuck's sake, I'm not saying do no testing. I would assume they do basic checks, first in humanized animals, then using bioassays to try to detect all sorts of problems including antibody cross-reactivity with a wide variety of human cells. I'm also not against a preliminary limited human trial, with bloodwork checked after a few weeks to try to see if the assays missed anything obvious.
Short of that, what do you want them to do? We can't wait years to see if people develop symptomatic auto-immune problems. If we even wait 3-6 months for each new protein, the time advantage offered by mRNA or adenovirus vaccine tech is blown, or at least reduced to the point where there's no ability to react quickly to changing dominant viral strains in a pandemic, or new outbreaks of known diseases.
>Then the virus variant itself would cause autoimmune disease
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about or why the GP comment mentioned an autoimmune disease specifically. mRNA vaccines express specific proteins whereas the virus expresses entire viral molecules. A novel protein expression could cause an autoimmune disease because the novel proteins couls cause the immune system to attack the cells producing the isolated proteins, a problem you wouldnt have with cells producing entire viral bodies.
I think you misunderstood the (G)GP comment which mentioned cross-reactivity, i.e. the immune system's antibodies cross-reacted with both the spike protein and an endogenous human protein, like what can happen with Epstein–Barr virus Nuclear Antigen-1.
The immune system doesn't generate antibodies to an entire virus. It generates antibodies to specific immunogenic proteins or parts of proteins.
If the spike protein resulting from a vaccine causes an immune response that generates antibodies to the spike protein and oops, also some endogenous human protein, that's autoimmune disease.
If you get infected by a virus with the same spike protein, your body will generate antibodies to the same spike protein and also cause autoimmune disease if the antibodies are cross-reactive.
If cells expressing exogenous immunogenic proteins triggered autoimmune disease[1], even the existing wild-type (alpha variant) vaccines would cause autoimmune disease. Presumably that's not happening. The immune system may attack those cells expressing the exogenous vaccine-coded spike proteins, but normal immune systems down-regulate it well enough that it doesn't cause major problems. It would be a sign of a broken immune system if it decided to initiate a long-term attack of human cells just because they once expressed an immunogenic protein. If it did that, any virus would cause autoimmune disease.
Please tell me you work in a field related to immunology and you have a subtler point that I'm missing, and that you didn't just create an account to criticize a point you misunderstood yourself.
[1] to an unacceptable degree. Obviously, things can go wrong with the immune system and almost anything could, if you're unlucky enough, trigger an immune reaction leading to autoimmune disease eventually.
