First, theres a few things. Theres the idea that people got it twice already. Thats debated and not any kind of proven fact, no matter how many times people report those rare instances. That could all just be false tests.
Second, yes people could very well only be imune for a relatively short period. Like the common cold. You can catch that 2-3 times a year.
We don’t yet know how long immunity would list for covid19.
I suspect the vaccine is being developed with the assumption that it will last a while. At least long enough to be effective. SARS antibodies last many years so thats probably the closest.
I"m no expert on this but…
You can develop varying levels of antibodies if infected naturally. Thats probably due to how the virus impacts you, how severe the infection is and how your body is able to fight it off.
Presumably the artificial immunity from a vaccine is going to give a high level of antibodies safely by design.
I thought that all antibodies only last a few months (why keep producing them when there’s no purpose for them?), but what happens is your body still remembers how to produce them. So with a future exposure/infection, the defensive reaction is immediate since your body already knows how to respond, and the virus is unable to take hold. The virus may change slightly, so when those changes are compounded over decades it eventually renders the old solution ineffective. But it’s not that the immunity wears off, it’s that it becomes obsolete.
The reason there is an annual flu shot is because the virus mutates, and what worked last season will be ineffective against what you’ll catch this season.
Of course, that’s just my understanding. I could be wrong.
That is a good response, glitch99. I didn’t think of it.
But for sure you are right about the body “remembering”. I have seen that before. It is something Dr. Berx has asserted. And that “remembering” thing would be how a vaccination might last longer than I was thinking. I just didn’t put two and two together . . . until your post.
So, yeah, maybe there is a chance for a vaccine after all. Hope so.
If you read the scare media carefully, you’ll see they talk about antibody levels falling to some much lower level after several months. This is not uncommon and largely expected. For many vaccines, the point is not that you generate antibodies that last forever; rather that your adaptive immune system will generate antibodies now and your immune memory cells will remember how to make them again if needed. Then those can produce the needed antibodies very quickly if the same viral protein shows up again in the future and this will help your body fight it off very quickly, possibly so fast you never know you’re sick. Yes, memory cells don’t live forever so maybe you need a 10 year booster like you to do tetnus.
In short, a working long-lasting vaccine is not at all incompatible with seeing antibody levels falling in the near term.
Here’s an early use, outpatient retrospective study on HCQ/Azith/Zinc given relatively early to high risk patients (old, or shortness of breath, or various known bad comorbidities) in the NY area.
Objective: To describe outcomes of patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID- 19) in the outpatient setting after early treatment with zinc, low dose hydroxychloroquine, and azithromycin (the triple therapy) dependent on risk stratification.
Results: … 4 of 141 treated patients (2.8%) were hospitalized, which was significantly less (p<0.001) compared with 58 of 377 untreated patients (15.4%) (odds ratio 0.16, 95% CI 0.06-0.5). Therefore, the odds of hospitalization of treated patients were 84% less than in the untreated group. One patient (0.7%) died in the treatment group versus 13 patients (3.5%) in the untreated group (odds ratio 0.2, 95% CI 0.03-1.5; p=0.16). There were no cardiac side effects.
Conclusions: Risk stratification-based treatment of COVID-19 outpatients as early as possible after symptom onset with the used triple therapy, including the combination of zinc with low dose hydroxychloroquine, was associated with significantly less hospitalizations and 5 times less all-cause deaths.
In short, they found a large and highly statistically significant reduction in need for hospitalization of these high risk outpatients compared to those not treated with this combo. Deaths fortunately didn’t happen often enough to be statistically significant in this sample, but less than 1% vs 4% sure sounds good to me. It wasn’t the best study design, but the results for hospitalization were very strong.
This is in contrast to other studies that have shown or suggested that 1) HCQ and/or AZ don’t help serious or critical covid patients, and 2) HCQ given somewhat early to relatively healthy patients didn’t show a statistically significant improvement (although it did seem to be somewhat better, just not enough).
Top executives at companies including aluminum giant United Co. Rusal, as well as billionaire tycoons and government officials began getting shots developed by the state-run Gamaleya Institute in Moscow as early as April, the people said.
The Gamaleya vaccine, financed by the state-run Russian Direct Investment Fund and backed by the military, last week completed a phase 1 trial involving Russian military personnel. The institute hasn’t published results for the study, which involved about 40 people, but has begun the next stage of trials with a larger group.
Russia has reported more than 750,000 cases of Covid-19, the fourth-largest total in the world, and Gamaleya’s program is on a faster track than many rivals in the West. RDIF chief Kirill Dmitriev said last week phase 3 trials will start Aug. 3 and include thousands of people in Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with the vaccine distributed nationally as early as September. Western researchers typically run phase 3 trials for months to better understand safety and effectiveness.
Gamaleya’s candidate is a so-called viral vector vaccine based on human adenovirus — a common cold virus — fused with the spike protein of SARS CoV-2 to stimulate an immune response. It is similar to a vaccine being developed by China’s CanSino Biologics which is already in phase 2 trials with plans for more in Canada.
I’m sure they’re only that far along because they hacked it
If you thought our response to the virus was bad in the US, be glad your not in S. Africa.
Some of the healthcare staff are on strike and the govt is so corrupt that even the NGOs trying to help out with covid won’t give them money. Corruption wrecks everything.
Well, there were some childhood vaccines with a mercury-based preservative until 2001, and some vaccines still have it (source).
I have a relative who was absolutely certain that her child changed drastically (from typical towards the autism spectrum) after a poor reaction to a vaccine. She tried many things and settled on a gluten-free diet (also organic, because why not), which made the child much more manageable. Thankfully the child outgrew (overcame?) those behaviors after a few years and doesn’t have any dietary restrictions now.
An experience like this makes you question things. We did a lot of reading and soul searching before vaccinating our child. Some parents opt to spread the vaccines (one of the visits has 6 shots!). The problem with this is having to go to the doctor and upsetting the baby multiple times instead of just once. The science on this is that the human body is capable of fighting off something like 100K infections simultaneously, so fighting off 6 or 10 should be easy. But I was very nervous every time, and you have to watch them for 3 days for any signs of adverse reaction. Mine developed malaise and a low grade fever only once (don’t remember which shot, unfortunately). I stayed up almost all night to keep an eye. High fever can do all kinds of long-lasting damage to a baby regardless of what caused it.
With all the talk of what the second round of stimulus might look like, I thought this opinion article was hard to find much fault with: COVID stimulus-induced deficit effect
The critique certainly sounds pretty accurate to me. But beside that, it made it sounds like there were things they could add to the stimulus bill to bring some accountability for all that deficit spending. So it made me wonder how they’d practically do that and if there were examples of this in previous bills (and of course what they’d look like).
Here’s an article that goes thru more of the details of what i said before, about how falling antibody levels is expected and doesn’t mean the rest of your immune system isnt going to be ready to stop the virus if it shows up again.
This article summarizes various school related transmission risks. Younger kids seem to be much less of a transmission risk, while teenagers are moreso. This could argue for opening preK/daycare/elementary schools but not middle or high schools (at least those not without more serious protections / redesign).
growing number of experts say plans for school reopening should account for growing evidence that older students—largely teens—appear to have a greater risk of both getting and developing symptoms from Covid-19 and transmitting the virus.
“We need to make sure to differentiate between young and older children,” says Alyssa Bilinski, a doctoral student in health policy at Harvard’s graduate school of arts and sciences, who is working on a study modeling Covid-19 outbreaks in schools. “By the time you reach high school the risk of infection is pretty indistinguishable from young adults.”
The study found that in the high school, 38% of students had positive antibody tests, while 43% of teachers and 59% of staff did. Meanwhile among six elementary schools only three children caught the virus at the time of the outbreak—likely from family members—and though they attended school they don’t appear to have passed it on to anyone there. Later, by the end of the first wave of cases, only 9% of elementary school students had antibodies.
I should also mention that antibody positive tests are not a foolproof measure for degree of infection/exposure, especially when it comes to children. Kids have a stronger primary immune response, which can often fight off infections without / before generating antibodies, in which case they may well have been exposed and survived without symptoms but not test positives for antibodies.
On the school note, I saw a proposal that using fast cheap testing (ie Abbott spit on a strip test) could work for schools by testing every kid every day and keep them home for two weeks if they test positive. These take 10min to work and cost $1-2, compared to the more accurate PCR tests that cost 100x that and take days to get the results.
In particular, the 50% accuracy cited for that is a function of the viral concentration. Very low concentrations are missed by these fast tests, but very low concentrations are not thought to be associated with an infectious state. Just like people test PCR positive for weeks after being released from the hospital and apparently recovering, these are thought to be detecting the viral fragments left over from the infection and these people have not been found to infect others when it’s been investigated (not 100% sure but it looks this way).
In short, a very sensitive expensive test appears to be overkill for policy / planning, while a fast and widespread test could do a lot of good. I mean, even if you miss someone who’s sick and not yet infectious for a day and they go to school and infect some people before you notice and keep them home the next day, you’re still way ahead of where you’d be if you didn’t test asymptomatic people at all.
That would still be a significant expense around $100M per day in tests alone, not counting labor to administer the tests. School funding was already decreased from many State budgets due to COVID-19 unemployment and tax revenues lost, so it’s hard to see how this would happen without federal support for the States. That said, it’d probably pay for itself in parents feeling safer to let kids return to school and allow them to get back to work.
It sounds like a lot maybe, but given we already spend $10-20k/student/year on public school education, it’s hard think that paying an extra $250-500/student/year at $1-2/day would be a big change.
Alternatively, if we stay remote for this coming year, the teachers unions will find out pretty quickly who’s actually needed and who’s not. They don’t have much leverage if all the kids are staying home anyway…
For “higher education”, they might finally have to face customers balking at the unreasonable tuition rises over the last several decades. And end up shutting down a lot of universities with more remote learning.
Some colleges may definitely go under over this, or at least merge with other nearby colleges with better finances. Two colleges in my State have had massive restructuring this summer already. Rising functioning costs due to COVID, loss of revenue from lower enrollment with more students taking gap years before rejoining in 2021 or going with remote learning at online universities, loss of revenues from sports programs (empty stadiums, cancelled/shortened seasons), and finally loss of State funding for many.
Yet the outcome of all this I don’t think will be lower tuition. More pass the buck to student to make up for lost revenues by decreasing scholarship and raising other things than tuition, especially room and board.
