Spaceman spiff
Noble
Also Covid can cause all sorts of long term effects, some which might be permanent and crippling to some unlucky people. Flu doesn't.
Also Covid can cause all sorts of long term effects, some which might be permanent and crippling to some unlucky people. Flu doesn't.
After reading all this my thoughts are that people should be taught how virus' spread and how to keep your immune system strong in junior high, with remedial lessons on washing hands properly (Properly) in grade school. I know two nurses who insist that you don't need soap to wash your hands. One of them, took that to mean you just dampen your hands and wipe with a paper towel to mean "wash your hands", even in nursing school she missed the lesson. When she worked in the hospital she got some horrible bacterial infection that was because she did not wash her hands between patients. The other brags about being an ER nurse. My friend who is a biologist said you don't need soap if you have time and enough water to rub your hands under running water for 3 or 4 minutes. Using soap properly (wet hands, rub soap thoroughly into your hands and under fingernails, then rinse thoroughly). It is something everyone in my family does because my maternal grandfather died of a viral meningitus and my paternal grandmother lost someone to a bacterial infection. My grandmothers were two women who would have been rich if they had bought stock in the Clorox company that they supported by cloroxing everything.
I have never had a flu shot. I got the Hong Kong flu when I was 11, in 1968. The whole family had it. Flu shots were available in 1971 (I think). That flu took a lot of people down and it was two winters (1968 & 1969). My brother, Mom and I were in bed for 2 weeks. After that my mom got the flu shot the first year it was out and it was worse. The doctor told her to never get another flu shot. Since then I don't think I have had the flu even once, but someone mentioned on this forum that the flu only lasts a couple of days, that is wrong. How long it lasts depends on a lot of things, and people who have low functioning immune systems can die from pneumonia due to influenza. The other thing is that there are a plethora of respiratory virus' out there that people think are the flu but are not. That's why they have tests for them now, since they do create a health risk for a population that is not minor.
Too much misinformation and lack of information is what causes a pandemic like the one we are experiencing now. This virus has had it's grip on the world for 2 years and may be another 2 years before it gets under control because it is Not like the flu, 1. because it is not seasonal, like hot weather as well as cold, people are crowded even more than in the 60's (for a lot of reasons, lots of small towns are ghost towns now....)
Did either bother to read the paper concerned? I did.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.12.21261951v1.full.pdf
I don't think their interpretations are correct. This is the table
View attachment 14700
Note that all four categories (natural infection, mRNA vaccine (BNT/BNT), adenovirus-vector vaccine (ChAd/ChAd), and mixed adenovirus vector and mRNA (ChAd/BNT)) have the same "1.00" value against the wild-type strain, and a "(reference)" remark is put against the wild-type strain in the confidence interval ("CI") column. This means that the figures that appear below against Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta for each of the three vaccination regimens and natural infection are in comparison only against that regimen's performance against the wild-type strain. They are not for comparison between different regimens.
If it was the case that the 1.03 figure against Delta for the natural infection with the wild-type strain was comparable against the 0.82 and 0.85 for ChAd/ChAd and BNT/BNT vaccination, and indicating a better response than those, then it would mean that the all four regimens have exactly the same neutralizing response against the wild-type strain, which is implausible, as there are at least small differences in effectiveness between the vaccines.
Furthermore, something else that the twits on Twitter do not bother to mention is that the confidence intervals for all four regimens' neutralizing response against Delta relative to the wild-type strain all show significant overlap, especially for natural infection, BNT/BNT, and ChAd/ChAd. There is therefore insufficient information in this table to conclude that there is any difference between these regimens in their neutralizing effect against Delta.
What the study does show are some more figures here:
View attachment 14701
Which show that the quantities of neutralizing anti-bodies twelve months post-infection are much lower than those they measured in vaccinated individuals (the scale is logarithmic, 10^0 = 1, 10^1 = 10, 10^2 = 100).
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.12.21261951v1.full.pdf
Still further, the paper is not a real-world study of immunity, as in it did not assess the actual relative likelihood of people within the different regimens coming down with Covid-19 from any circulating strain.
The conclusion of the twitterers is not a conclusion of the study authors, and they are clearly skimming medical pre-prints looking for factoids to share with their uninformed followers on Twitter, rather than attempting to confer an understanding of studies in their full context.
Even if their analysis were somehow correct, what exactly is their point? There is no more wild-type SARS-CoV-2 circulating any more, so where are you going to get it as a substitute for vaccination? Getting infected with any type of SARS-CoV-2 puts you and those around you in significant danger of serious illness and can lead to a sustained chain of onward infection that can jeopardize the health of many people. The point of the vaccines is that they prime your immune system with an ability to fight SARS-CoV-2 prior to infection, and in a way that greatly reduces your risk of serious illness and death, and they are good at doing that. So what if they were a few percentage points less effective than natural infection? You get to avoid the risk of natural infection with an initially naive immune system.
Wild type is just what the study authors have gone for as a label for the strain that appeared in Wuhan in 2019.Excellent, I think you said it well, I read through the study this morning with coffee and agree with you, the twitter comments are incorrect...Sometimes I'll post stuff that I haven't read through but intend on reading later when I have more time so that others here can read it too and draw their own conclusions...The term 'wild-type' is kind of an odd choice of words to me but perhaps because I don't think any humans were infected with a wild variety of SARS-CoV-2, instead it was an engineered variety from the beginning that escaped or was released from a lab...
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Wild type is just what the study authors have gone for as a label for the strain that appeared in Wuhan in 2019.
They have probably tried to be politically correct, and to avoid controversy. They may also be firm believers that it did originate in nature and crossed over to humans, rather than being agnostic on the issue.Yeah, it just sounds a little off to me, maybe a bit PC too with the implication in the wording of that label?...But then again I didn't like them changing the labeling of the strains either...History will still tell the origin of viruses and variants even if they scrub it from the labeling...
More vaccine deaths in 2020 - 2021 than all 30 years before. Any one still consider the covid shots safe?
Covid Statistics Death