Deadly Wuhan Coronavirus

Captain Tinkle

Honorable
Could my American friends please explain how the vaccine is being distributed in the US?

In the UK they are priotising the eldest, those with health conditions and frontline workers, eventually filtering down to the rest of the population.

Someone who I met in the US has already had her jab but she is a housewife, late 30s however they are very, very well off. Must mention she is also ex airforce if that makes a difference?
 

nivek

As Above So Below
Could my American friends please explain how the vaccine is being distributed in the US?

In the UK they are priotising the eldest, those with health conditions and frontline workers, eventually filtering down to the rest of the population.

Someone who I met in the US has already had her jab but she is a housewife, late 30s however they are very, very well off. Must mention she is also ex airforce if that makes a difference?

Its being distributed the same way, prioritized for the elderly and front line workers, health care, law enforcement, etc. first and some states are not wasting the vaccine if they have extra after vaccinations...Meaning for example, this past Friday they were administering the vaccine in the small town I live nearby for those 65 and older and front line workers and the window of time they set up was from 10am until 2pm...If they took care of everyone who showed up and still have extra vaccines then its first come first serve for anyone else that shows up, this way the vaccines that have been taken out of deep freeze are not wasted and tossed away...

I'm 56yo and I'm not expecting the vaccine to be available to me until around May or June...Also the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be released in my country around April, its a one shot deal, not a two shot deal like the others, this is the one I'm wanting to get myself...I've read about the various technologies used to create these vaccines and personally I trust the Johnson & Johnson one more than the others because its uses technology that has been tested and used for the Ebola virus whilst the technologies used for Pfizer and Moderna are very new and have not been used before...

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Captain Tinkle

Honorable
Its being distributed the same way, prioritized for the elderly and front line workers, health care, law enforcement, etc. first and some states are not wasting the vaccine if they have extra after vaccinations...Meaning for example, this past Friday they were administering the vaccine in the small town I live nearby for those 65 and older and front line workers and the window of time they set up was from 10am until 2pm...If they took care of everyone who showed up and still have extra vaccines then its first come first serve for anyone else that shows up, this way the vaccines that have been taken out of deep freeze are not wasted and tossed away...

I'm 56yo and I'm not expecting the vaccine to be available to me until around May or June...Also the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be released in my country around April, its a one shot deal, not a two shot deal like the others, this is the one I'm wanting to get myself...I've read about the various technologies used to create these vaccines and personally I trust the Johnson & Johnson one more than the others because its uses technology that has been tested and used for the Ebola virus whilst the technologies used for Pfizer and Moderna are very new and have not been used before...

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I wonder how she managed to get hold of it then?

Are you able to pay to jump the queue?
 

nivek

As Above So Below
I wonder how she managed to get hold of it then?

Are you able to pay to jump the queue?

No one can pay to move up and get the vaccine earlier than others as far as I know...Its likely she got a the shot the way I mentioned at the end of the first paragraph of my post above, hard to say...

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nivek

As Above So Below
Speaking of vaccines, here's an interesting read...Seems we were somewhat prepared...

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Fact check: The vaccine for COVID-19 has been nearly 20 years in the making

The claim: The COVID-19 vaccine was developed in less than a year, but there are no vaccines against viruses and diseases that have existed for far longer

It is approaching a year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and on Dec. 8, Britain was the first Western country to begin vaccination against the virus. The rollout was followed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's emergency authorization of Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine on Dec. 11 and Moderna's on Dec. 18.

Given the quick scientific response to the newly emerging virus, one Instagram post is calling foul, questioning why vaccines for equally debilitating diseases, predating the pandemic, have not yet been developed.

The Nov. 30 Instagram post from author Boyce Watkins shares a screenshot of a Facebook comment alleging countless years of research effort have yielded no vaccine.

"40 years worth of research...no vaccine for HIV (sic) At least 100 years research...no vaccine for cancer (sic) Ongoing research...no vaccine for the common cold (sic) Less than a year for a covid (sic) vaccine? Thanks but a hard pass on that shot..." claims "Lee Morin" in the comment.

"This does make you wonder: How did you come up with this so fast, but you can't vaccinate against viruses that have been harming people for centuries?" asks Watkins. The post has received over 13,800 likes and comments agreeing with Watkins' charge.

"Come on. You have 7 BILLION customers. No other virus/cancer/ailment has that many customer. Follow the money," writes Instagram user borzirtc.

Other social media users have posted the same or a similar claim, as recently as Jan. 13. USA TODAY has reached out to those who posted the claim for further comment.

It began with chickens

Operation Warp Speed, the private-public partnership initiated by the White House during the pandemic, may give the impression the COVID-19 vaccine developed overnight, but in actuality, it depends on research dating back nearly 100 years.

Coronaviruses were first encountered in April 1930, when a strange respiratory disease ravaged poultry farms across North Dakota and Minnesota, killing tens of thousands of baby birds, The Scientist reports. Unsure of what exactly this illness was, veterinarians Arthur Schalk and Merle Hawn of North Dakota Agricultural College, now North Dakota State University, called it "infectious bronchitis of baby chicks," the viral agent later named infectious bronchitis virus.

Further scientific research into IBV and recognition that it was not like influenza A, a flu virus known to cause bronchitis, would transpire over the next 30 years. In November 1968, a group of scientists wrote to the journal Nature asking for IBV, and viruses resembling it like mouse hepatitis virus discovered in 1947, to be classified as coronaviruses, a name derived from its appearance — the spike proteins casting a halo around the surface, much like the sun's corona — on electron microscope imaging.

SARS was the first attempt at a human coronavirus vaccine

While coronaviruses could cause a variety of fatal diseases in animals, the two known to infect humans were not a grave concern, as they only caused the common cold. This belief was challenged in November 2002 with the emergence of a new respiratory illness in Guandong Province, China, that would infect over 8,000 people worldwide and claim 774 lives.

In less than a month, researchers decoded the enormous genome of the new virus, which caused a disease called severe acute respiratory syndrome. Researchers concluded it was a coronavirus, likely to have jumped from animals to humans because it was only somewhat related to other known coronaviruses. (It took over 15 years of search to identify bats as the potential animal source.) By July 2003, thanks to isolating and quarantining patients, the World Health Organization declared SARS officially contained.

Nevertheless, fears of future seasonal SARS outbreaks called for a vaccine. SARS-CoV's spike protein was an obvious choice for a target. Prior research found the spike protein was critical in determining which species a coronavirus infected, where it preferred to hunker down — called organ or cell tropism — and disease severity. The spike protein had even been proposed as a vaccine target for canine coronavirus in 1991.

A number of vaccines targeting the spike protein were designed, tested in animal models and found to be quite promising against SARS and other coronavirus illnesses like Middle East respiratory syndrome, which appeared in 2012. But further testing reached an impasse when funding declined steadily in the years following the 2003 outbreak, said Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, whose team collaborated with Galveston National Laboratory to create a SARS vaccine in 2016.

"We manufactured a really great SARS 1 vaccine in the lab. We actually had a manufacturer at Walter Reed, but then we couldn't raise the money to do all the clinical testing," he told USA TODAY.

Funding was not the only issue. Testing whether a vaccine can prevent disease requires the disease to still be around. Since there have been no major outbreaks of SARS since 2003, testing vaccine efficacy was difficult. But more instrumental is interest: Few SARS or MERS cases meant pharmaceutical companies were less inclined to invest in a likely rarely used vaccine.

Laying the groundwork

Typically, the road to creating new vaccines is long, with many steps: Finding and developing a vaccine target (exploratory), testing it in tissue- or cell-cultures and animal models (preclinical) followed by three phases of clinical trials with human volunteers.

If a vaccine proves its mettle, its developers have to seek and gain approval from the FDA before manufacturing. Lastly, in phase four, quality control monitors for any possible vaccine side effects.

For vaccines to be effective, a specific target is needed. This vaccine target, also called an antigen, is typically a fragment of the disease-causing agent that instructs the immune system on how to recognize and destroy it upon contact. Searching for a suitable antigen can be an arduous process but prior coronavirus research made it all the more easier.

"When the Chinese put up the COVID-19 sequence on bioRxiv in January, our community of scientists looked at it and said, 'Yeah, we got this because we know how to do it.' It was all about plug and play based on all that experience," said Hotez.

Having a running start does not mean the testing process was accelerated, however. Hotez, whose recombinant protein subunit COVID-19 vaccine is undergoing clinical trials in India, stated the vaccine still underwent testing among a large group of human volunteers, even more than a typical trial with over 30,000 to 60,000 people.

What accelerated the vaccine process was manufacturing.

"The two accelerants are doing the manufacturing of risk (scaling up manufacturing based on the assumption the vaccine will work, also called at-risk manufacturing) and manufacturing the vaccine in parallel with clinical trials. That's new because we usually wait for the phase three results," he said.

So why is there no vaccine for HIV, cancer or the common cold?

Human immunodeficiency virus, the culprit behind acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, commonly known as AIDS, is a tricky virus. Much like the novel coronavirus, HIV binds to a protein on the surface of T cells, a type of white blood cell, to enter. Once inside, HIV integrates its genetic material with its host cell's DNA, using the host's DNA replication machinery to create new viruses, which blast off to infect and kill other T cells.

Finding a specific and effective vaccine target is therefore difficult, especially since HIV mutates frequently in order to mask itself from the immune system. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, common vaccine approaches using inactivated or live HIV forms have either not been "effective in eliciting immune responses in clinical trials" or are too dangerous to use.

The same goes for the common cold, which is caused by a smorgasbord of viruses including over 150 different types of rhinovirus, a common troublemaker.

"It's hard to create a vaccine when you have so many different viruses causing similar symptoms. To make a universal vaccine against all of them is probably pretty daunting, it might be doable, but it's daunting," explained Hotez.

Cancer, an abnormal growth of the body's own cells due to unchecked genetic mutations, is no virus, but the struggle in finding a suitable vaccine target is not any easier.

"The challenge is getting antigen targets and also access, because a lot of the antigens, or cancer proteins, are first inside the cell. They may not be presented to the immune system so these are much more complicated targets," said Hotez.

Advances in messenger RNA-based vaccine technology in recent years may help fast-track some cancer vaccines, he acknowledged. The platform, which provides the body the equivalent of a genetic assembly instruction booklet for manufacturing target-specific antibodies, has been used for rabies, influenza and Zika and is considered an attractive approach for its low cost, speed of manufacturing, potency and versatility, Nature reported.

Many cancer vaccines using mRNA are in the works, like Moderna's personalized cancer vaccine, mRNA-4157, which is being tested in patients with metastatic common epithelial cancer. The Boston-based pharmaceutical company also announced on Jan. 11 it was working on a mRNA HIV vaccine with phase I clinical trials expected sometime in 2021.

Our ruling: Missing context

We rate this claim MISSING CONTEXT because without additional context it might be misleading. Vaccines require specific targets against which they train the immune system. COVID-19's spike protein was identified nearly 20 years ago as a potential vaccine target during the development of the SARS vaccine, following the 2003 SARS outbreak. This has helped expedite the vaccine process, given that vaccine platform technologies have advanced in recent years, as well. Another accelerant was the commercial-scale production of COVID-19 vaccine doses prior to FDA clearance, called at-risk manufacturing, when early results appeared promising. Finding suitable vaccine targets for HIV, cancer and the common cold has been more difficult in comparison as these diseases have either elusive or highly variable targets.

(Sources on the link)

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pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
doing a little couch based research last night and went surfing.

CNN removed their coronavirus death counter now that Biden is in. I guess plague over, problem solved.

The new counter will only show how many times he has his favorite ice cream
 

nivek

As Above So Below
doing a little couch based research last night and went surfing.

CNN removed their coronavirus death counter now that Biden is in. I guess plague over, problem solved.

The new counter will only show how many times he has his favorite ice cream

Biden said on November 3rd he had a plan ready to roll out to eradicate the virus from America, then on January 23rd Biden says there's nothing 'they' can do to stop the worsening trajectory of this pandemic...

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Biden under fire after suddenly claiming 'there's nothing we can do' to combat COVID over 'next several months'

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nivek

As Above So Below
So it seems to be true that the South African strain has more resistance to the vaccination efforts, leading Moderna to create a new version of their vaccine to counter the SA strain...

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Moderna is designing a new version of its COVID-19 shot to fight the variant first found in South Africa

Moderna's coronavirus vaccine is probably still protective against a virus strain first found in South Africa, but the Massachusetts biotech on Monday said it planned to soon start testing a booster shot tailored to protect people against that variant.

Moderna's two-dose COVID-19 vaccine won US authorization in December and has since been rolled out to millions of people. A large-scale study last year found the shot was overwhelmingly protective against COVID-19, being about 94% effective at preventing symptomatic disease.

But infectious-disease experts have grown increasingly concerned with the recent rise of several variants, in particular one, known as B.1.351, that was first identified in South Africa. That version of the virus has 10 mutations in the spike protein, which is the target of the leading COVID-19 vaccines, including Moderna's.

New lab research from Moderna and its partner scientists at the US National Institutes of Health found the shot generated less of an immune response against that strain. That research hasn't been published yet in a medical journal, but Moderna said it believed the shot was still protective, at least in the short term.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious-disease expert, said Monday on NBC News' "Today" show that the current coronavirus vaccines were considered effective against existing strains. "However, we really need to make sure that we begin, and we already have, to prepare, if it's necessary, to upgrade the vaccines," Fauci added.

Moderna's shot showed a sixfold reduction in neutralizing antibodies - the viral-killing proteins that play a critical role in the immune system - against the B.1.351 variant compared with other variants, the company said. "These lower titers may suggest a potential risk of earlier waning of immunity to the new B.1.351 strains," Moderna said in a Monday press release.

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pepe

Celestial
Wasn't the Spanish Flu pandemic the emergence of H1N1 influenza? H1N1 is still endemic to the world and is one of the seasonal influenzas. The swine flu pandemic in 2009 was a strain of H1N1.

I had swine fever, I rang the help line but all I got was crackling. Thing with that one is how quickly it comes on. By the time I'd finished my dinner every bone in me ached, all of fifteen minutes and I was on the phone to the doctor. I wasn't advised to isolate or make any differences to my life style, just tamiflu and carry on. I had no sense of contagion being a worry. Had a good chat with the GP as if it was nothing to worry about. It went quickly, within a few days.
 

pepe

Celestial
I do wonder if good or bad immunity comes with pedegree. It's as if we don't have any handle what so ever on how strong we really are in this department individually. It has a randomness that I think has reason and I cant think of anything else that would influence this. In some cases a pedegree can suffer more than a mongrel as the mix gives coverage and I wouldn't be suprised if this is at work here in one fasion or the other.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
This is actually a good idea, since the appearance of these new contagious variants, I've begun using my P100 respirator more so now if I have to go into any store, although I do still sometimes use a four layer cloth mask that has a filter insert...I still have a couple boxes of N95 masks I could use with my cloth mask for this two mask method...

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Two Masks Are the New Masks

We should all be thinking about the quality of our masks right now. New variants of the coronavirus continue to emerge, and one in particular is cause for pressing concern in the United States because it’s so contagious and spreading fast. I wrote about the steps you can take to better protect yourself.

The bottom line is that you should keep taking the same pandemic precautions you always have, but do a little better. The new variant spreading in the United States appears to latch onto our cells more efficiently. The mutation in the virus may mean it could take less virus and less time in the same room with an infected person for someone to become ill. People infected with the variant may also shed larger quantities of virus, which increases the risk to people around them.

That’s why the quality of your mask is more important than ever. You can read about the latest research urging a well-fitted two- or three-layer mask. Or you can keep the masks you’ve been using and just double-mask when you go to the store or find yourself spending time with people from outside your household.

One big advantage of double-masking that I’ve found is that it creates a better fit and closes the gaps around the edge of your mask. I like layering my masks. When I walk the dog or exercise outdoors, I wear a regular mask to comply with area mask rules. When I want more protection for short errands, I wear a better mask. When I’m in a taxi or on a train, I double-mask.

I’ve just bought a new set of masks called KF94s that I really like. They fit well, have added flaps to close gaps around the face and include a moldable band to tighten the fit around the bridge of the nose. Now I wear a KF94, a type of mask made in South Korea that can be purchased easily online, covered by a cloth mask. I recently learned about the KF94 from Dr. Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. Jha notes that the gold-standard N95 masks are still hard to find, and we should save them for health workers. The KF94 mask resembles an N95, with some differences. It’s made of a similar nonwoven material that blocks 94% of the hardest-to-trap viral particles. But the KF94 has ear loops, instead of elastic head bands, so it won’t fit as snugly as an N95 — although double-masking can help close any gaps.

The KF94 is also disposable — you can buy a pack of 20 for about $40 on Amazon. While you can let a KF94 mask air dry and reuse it several times, it can’t be laundered and won’t last as long as a cloth mask. One solution is to save your KF94 mask for higher-risk situations — like riding a subway, spending time in a store or going to a doctor’s appointment.

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August

Metanoia
China is spreading conspiracy theories that the coronavirus was created in an American lab and that a US-created vaccine is killing the elderly

BB1d4da8.img
 

AD1184

Celestial
This is actually a good idea, since the appearance of these new contagious variants, I've begun using my P100 respirator more so now if I have to go into any store, although I do still sometimes use a four layer cloth mask that has a filter insert...I still have a couple boxes of N95 masks I could use with my cloth mask for this two mask method...
Does your P100 respirator filter exhaled air? Or is it a type that has a simple one-way valve to allow exhaled air out?
 

nivek

As Above So Below
Does your P100 respirator filter exhaled air? Or is it a type that has a simple one-way valve to allow exhaled air out?

It has a one-way valve for exhaled air, however back in March I added a filter on the inside to the exhausted air valve, simply a small flat filter taped on the inside that I can change periodically...

I think I'm going to purchase a good full face respirator for use when I go back to work fulltime again in an industrial workspace for protection...I've been looking at the available options for those types and giving it some consideration...

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