I’ll reserve judgement until there are some hard numbers to back up any claims. I think it’s more likely to be a pretty significant effect.
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maybe
fine, the unvaccinated are selfish scum.
Lol that’s not necessarily true.
Most humans decide their vaccine choices for selfish reasons, for or against
There’s a lot of confusion here. The vaccine did prevent people from catching covid until the first major mutations. It was absolutely true that you were vastly safer if the people around you were vaccinated.
But viruses often mutate, and covid did. It’s still true that people with prior exposure to covid (either from vaccination or from surviving covid) are less likely to catch it, and are not sick for as long, so they are less likely to spread it. But it’s not a huge difference any more, and besides, pretty much everyone who wasn’t vaccinated has caught covid by now. The only Americans who are immunologically naive are very young children.
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That doesn’t make sense that they could develop a vaccine that works for the original strain but not subsequent ones unless it is mutating faster than it was for the first year and a half
Your immune system reuses information. It’s called original antigenic sin, if you want to Google it. So if you’ve been exposed to a virus, and your immune system sees something similar, it tries to make antibodies to what it saw the first time.
Anyone who caught original strain covid, or got the vaccine to original strain covid, is less likely to produce sterilizing immunity to omicron than someone who was initially exposed to omicron. (Sterilizing immunity means you don’t catch it at all.)
The saving grace is that cellular immunity is much broader than antibody immunity. Cellular immunity isn’t fast enough to be sterilizing. You still get sick, you can still spread the disease. But when it works, your immune system kicks in after a couple of days so you don’t get very sick and you recover fairly quickly. The CDC and other public health authorities have continued to recommend the original strain vaccine because it has been found to continue to be highly effective against serious disease, even for omicron variants.
But they’ve just announced that they will be recommending “this year’s” vaccine each fall, going forward, and will stop requiring people to start with original strain vaccine. I’m hoping we don’t see a lot more major variations, and the new strategy will help give little kids sterilizing immunity, which will reduce overall spread, since kids are major viral vectors. But i guess we’ll see when we see.
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Assuming we accept that vaccinated people are equally likely to catch and spread covid, is there any validity to the suggestion that government should spend less resources on unvaccinated people who develop covid? (Something I’ve heard, maybe never from anyone in government)
And if you think there is any validity to that, what about the hypothetical suggestion (which I’ve never heard and am not suggesting it or the first would be good public policy) that government not spend resources on people who have complications from getting the covid vaccine? There is some parallelism between the two.
if you’re saying the initial dose is the overriding factor for your forever type of immunity to any covid strain, what does that mean for people who had J&J? it was supposedly sub-par.
also, then what do boosters do at all?
a lot of this doesn’t sound logical.
That time period was at most 4 months. The CDC stopped tracking breakthrough infections 5/1/21. I suspect, but do not know, that the CDC saw evidence of failure to prevent infection well before 5/1.
The thing is, back in early-mid 2020, all you heard about is how vaccines take a very long time to develop. XYZ vaccine was developed in 4 years and that was considered fast. And that RNA was a brand new technology. And that we were skipping safety steps in order to get the vaccine to market faster. If you believe vaccines take 4 years to develop, of course you’re going to be skeptical when a new vaccine is available in under a year.
What was not widely covered is that RNA is a technology that had been researched and developed for years and years. Safety steps weren’t being skipped, they were just being run concurrently. If that had been more widely reported, would there be less vaccine hesitancy? I think so.
It’s a damn shame that the pandemic has created so many new vaccine skeptics.
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Has it been definitely determined that omicron is less severe than covid classic all on it’s own or is the vaccines at play? Is there any way to even know though? yoyo is probably one person who would be an example of someone who somehow didn’t catch covid and didn’t acquire immunity from any vaccine prior to finally getting covid in summer 2022. Are there enough people like him to come to a conclusion here?
even hearing from young healthy people in 2020 who got covid, it sounded horrendous. glad i avoided that.
Well, I don’t think the fact that the vaccine doesn’t prevent infections from rapidly mutating virus was a surprise to anyone.
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The mRNA technology was indeed under development for many years, but had never been successfully deployed at a large scale.
Agreed. And I know you know this, but there are vaccines available that are based on existing technology that has already been used in existing vaccines.
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I just asked my coworker who is a former clinician and our vaccine expert. She said there’s no hard studies, but anecdotally, the Delta variant was more severe in the unvaccinated population. But the more recent Omicron variant appears to be not as severe.
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What I’ve seen is that omicron is about as severe as the original strain, but Delta was worse.
There were some studies done comparing omicron to other strains among people with similar immune history, that’s what led to the conclusion that omicron was comparable to the original.
It’s my understanding that a major reason for this is that Omicron typically does not invade the lower lungs whereas earlier varients did. Upper respiratory infection isn’t as dangerous, easier to clear.
Yup, that’s what I’ve heard as well. Viruses tend to become less severe as time goes on. Causing serious illness and death is not generally a good survival strategy for a virus.
It means nothing. J&J delivered the same spike protein as all the other US vaccines.
Also, there’s a little bit of evidence that j&j provoked better cellular immunity. I’m happy to have gotten a dose before they effectively pulled it from the market
They both refresh your supply of antibodies (which aren’t as effective as primarily-omicron-targeted antibodies would have been, but are still very helpful) and also broaden the cellular immune response.