COVID-19: Vaccine/antidote and testing procedures Megathread [Mod Warning - Post #1]

Call me Al

patnor1011 wrote: »

The article in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, reporting the results of the Sputnik V vaccine, demonstrated that 100 percent of participants in the clinical trials attained a stable humoral and cellular immune response.

I do not know but disregarding the Russian vaccine despite clearly positive results so far is strange, to say the least. The most obvious reason is that there is a lot of money at stake.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31866-3/fulltext#articleInformation

I think most who question the Russian vaccine are doing so because the rollout they are currently undertaking is essentially the phase III trial of the testing process.
Most reasonable people won't discriminate and will be ok taking it once full and thorough testing is complete.

dominatinMC

Atlantic Dawn wrote: »

Mask use and social distancing will reduce the spread of the flu.

Whatever about mask use, social distancing cannot be considered as a long-term solution to this. Notwithstanding the effects of social distancing on the economy, we are a social species and people do not want to be locked-up indoors watching a virtual concert or some other bull**** like that.

hmmm

This seems to be an interesting paper:
https://www.lji.org/news-events/news/post/t-cells-take-the-lead-in-controlling-sars-cov-2-and-reducing-covid-19-disease-severity/

"If a vaccination is successful, vaccine-induced antibodies are ready to intercept the virus when it shows up at the doorstep. In contrast, in a normal infection the virus gets a head start because the immune system has never seen anything like it. By the time the adaptive immune system is ready to go during a primary infection, the virus has already replicated inside cells and antibodies can’t get to it.

“Thus, these findings indicate it is plausible T cells are more important in natural SARS-CoV-2 infection, and antibodies more important in a COVID-19 vaccine,” says Crotty, “although it is also plausible that T cell responses against this virus are important in both cases.”"

drunkmonkey

Atlantic Dawn wrote: »

Mask use and social distancing will reduce the spread of the flu.

You don't need both, masks aren't any use if you practice social distancing. Let people decide for themselves which one to use.

Sconsey

drunkmonkey wrote: »

You don't need both, masks aren't any use if you practice social distancing. Let people decide for themselves which one to use.

Let drunkmonkey tell me what the best course of action is or listen to the cohorts of qualified, experienced experts throughout the world?

drunkmonkey = just decide what you want to do (masks are bad)
Qualified, experienced experts = wash hands, distance, wear mask

Yeah I'm going to listen to the experts, not the anti-mask evangelist.

is_that_so

Article about just how hard it is to read papers, even for scientists. This beauty is one example.

Take this sentence from a 2002 paper studying the bone strength of young athletes, for example: "RUN had significantly (p < 0.05) greater size-adjusted CSMI and BSI than C, SWIM, and CYC; and higher size, age, and YST-adjusted CSMI and BSI than SWIM and CYC."

https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/science-research-papers-getting-harder-to-read-acronyms-jargon

Cordell

drunkmonkey wrote: »

You don't need both, masks aren't any use if you practice social distancing. Let people decide for themselves which one to use.

You need every single reasonable measure you can take: mask, distancing, washing and sanitizing, refraining from attending gatherings and visits and so on. Not a single measure is 100% efficient, but having more of them combined is what brings us to safety.

MerlinSouthDub

This seems like very positive news - Acterma trial: "Hospital patients taking the drug were 44 per cent less likely to need ventilators or die"

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/roche-says-its-drugs-reduce-ventilator-need-for-covid-patients-1.4358313

Hmmzis

mcsean2163 wrote: »

The only other annual vaccine in the world for over 65s is influenza

https://www.consumerreports.org/vaccines/vaccines-for-seniors/

The genome of the influenza A virus approximately 13.5 kilobases (kb)
The genome size of the SARS-CoV-2 varies from 29.8 kb to 29.9 kb.

Which virus vaccine would you prefer to rate against.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/GenomesGroup.cgi?taxid=10239

There's never been a coronavirus vaccine despite years of effort but now we will have one as good or better than the influenza vaccine? Or do you think it will be worse?


I'm certainly not trying to be misleading and would appreciate if you could share your wisdom on what you think a potential outcome would be.

I think this article explains the state of vaccination knowledge better than anyone on this forum could:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/how-long-do-vaccines-last-surprising-answers-may-help-protect-people-longer

There are a good few issues with the flu shots, the biggest one being antigen drift of the pathogens themselves (there a lots of strains and each strain keeps mutating at a rapid pace). Our immune systems can only keep up with the conserved proteins inside the virus via CD8+ cytotoxic T cells, the nAb response becomes of limited use after a year or two. The current trivalent inactivated flu shots don't induce much of a cellular response and due to lack of adjuvenation in them, the antibody response is limited and not lasting. If you like I can link to an article or two that go into much deeper details about it, but they're not light reads. Influenza doesn't do much in terms of direct immune evasion/suppression either, you're immune for life for each particular mutation you clear.

If you look at SARS-cov-2, it's a very different picture we have at the moment and since the time it emerged. It's just the one strain, antigenic drift appears to be minimal if not outright non-existent. It's ways of immune evasion and suppression are quite numerous though. A very floppy/flimsy spike protein that's difficult for the immune system to splice into antigenic peptides and the various proteins it encodes for innate immune suppression in addition to the ORF8 protein that ties up the MHC-I proteins therefore hindering CD8+ T cells from becoming specific to it.

If you look at the current vaccine candidates, the only flu jab like ones are the Chinese ones that use the inactivated virus platform. All others are very different from the usual flu jab and from each other as well. That is a good thing, since if one of the platforms doesn't give the required result, hopefully some of the other platforms will.
Contrary to popular belief, there really hasn't been all that much R&D into flu vaccines in the last 10-20 years. If you search Google Scholar or PubMed, there is surprisingly little there.

mcsean2163

is_that_so wrote: »

If you want to spend six months of every year for the rest of your life doing this have at it. It's not living and a flu' jab is an eminently more sensible option.

You do understand you can still get hospitalised with influenza even if you've had the flu jab?

mcsean2163

Hmmzis wrote: »

I think this article explains the state of vaccination knowledge better than anyone on this forum could:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/how-long-do-vaccines-last-surprising-answers-may-help-protect-people-longer

There are a good few issues with the flu shots, the biggest one being antigen drift of the pathogens themselves (there a lots of strains and each strain keeps mutating at a rapid pace). Our immune systems can only keep up with the conserved proteins inside the virus via CD8+ cytotoxic T cells, the nAb response becomes of limited use after a year or two. The current trivalent inactivated flu shots don't induce much of a cellular response and due to lack of adjuvenation in them, the antibody response is limited and not lasting. If you like I can link to an article or two that go into much deeper details about it, but they're not light reads. Influenza doesn't do much in terms of direct immune evasion/suppression either, you're immune for life for each particular mutation you clear.

If you look at SARS-cov-2, it's a very different picture we have at the moment and since the time it emerged. It's just the one strain, antigenic drift appears to be minimal if not outright non-existent. It's ways of immune evasion and suppression are quite numerous though. A very floppy/flimsy spike protein that's difficult for the immune system to splice into antigenic peptides and the various proteins it encodes for innate immune suppression in addition to the ORF8 protein that ties up the MHC-I proteins therefore hindering CD8+ T cells from becoming specific to it.

If you look at the current vaccine candidates, the only flu jab like ones are the Chinese ones that use the inactivated virus platform. All others are very different from the usual flu jab and from each other as well. That is a good thing, since if one of the platforms doesn't give the required result, hopefully some of the other platforms will.
Contrary to popular belief, there really hasn't been all that much R&D into flu vaccines in the last 10-20 years. If you search Google Scholar or PubMed, there is surprisingly little there.

Great response and more links would be really welcome?

Are you saying that the floppy structure is easily identifiable across all strains of Sars cov2 of which there are currently 6?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200803105246.htm

If so, fingers crossed, that sounds very promising.

is_that_so

mcsean2163 wrote: »

You do understand you can still get hospitalised with influenza even if you've had the flu jab?

Some can anyway but is that really a justification for people to mask up and social distance into perpetuity? You'd really be alarmingly concerned about someone's mental health if that's how they choose to live their lives. The jab protects a lot of people and that's its aim.

Sconsey

Sconsey wrote: »

Let drunkmonkey tell me what the best course of action is or listen to the cohorts of qualified, experienced experts throughout the world?

drunkmonkey = just decide what you want to do (masks are bad)
Qualified, experienced experts = wash hands, distance, wear mask

Yeah I'm going to listen to the experts, not the anti-mask evangelist.

you know what the EXPERTS Called edward Jenner???

Sconsey

rusty cole wrote: »

you know what the EXPERTS Called edward Jenner???

'The Father of Immunology'. What's that got to do with the bogus advice coming from some posters? Are you saying you don't trust EXPERTS in their fields and would rather take advice from randomers on an internet forum?

Gael23

EU have signed a contract for Sanofi vaccine

is_that_so

Not vaccine news but interesting all the same!

Researchers from the School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences at the university are training sniffer dogs, including English springer spaniel Floki, to identify Covid-19 in people.

https://www.rte.ie/news/newslens/2020/0918/1165994-dogs-detect-covid-19/

Chris_5339762

That would really help airport screening for this, and its as out-of-the-way as modern drug dog screening is.

Dogs are great.

FutureTeashock

is_that_so wrote: »

Not vaccine news but interesting all the same!




https://www.rte.ie/news/newslens/2020/0918/1165994-dogs-detect-covid-19/

This is laughable and diabolical in equal measure.

Micky 32

FutureTeashock wrote: »

This is laughable and diabolical in equal measure.

You seem to think any potential armoury against this virus is laughable. Dogs have been trained to detect certain cancers.

Is there any particular reason you don’t want to see the virus eradicated? Just curious....

FutureTeashock

Micky 32 wrote: »

You seem to think any potential armoury against this virus is laughable. Dogs have been trained to detect certain cancers.

Is there any particular reason you don’t want to see the virus eradicated? Just curious....

Picture this scenario. I'm at the airport waiting for my flight. A dog suspects me of having Covid, then what? Am I force tested against my will with a notoriously dodgy test that throws up false positives and negatives frequently?

I will NEVER consent to be tested for this crap. Ever!

Micky 32

FutureTeashock wrote: »

I will NEVER consent to be tested for this crap. Ever!

Well any decent respectable person might have a different view. If a dog was alerted to me i’d be glad to have a test to help prevent the spread of the virus.

hmmm

Unless they train dogs to detect the smell of ****e, you'll be fine

FutureTeashock

hmmm wrote: »

Unless they train dogs to detect the smell of ****e, you'll be fine

I know for a fact karma is real, because you'll be taking the rushed, experimental vaccine.

ACitizenErased

FutureTeashock wrote: »

I know for a fact karma is real, because you'll be taking the rushed, experimental vaccine.

Yeah all the horror stories of the trial participants with brain damage and being terminally ill are harrowing to be fair

Oh wait

FutureTeashock

ACitizenErased wrote: »

Yeah all the horror stories of the trial participants with brain damage and being terminally ill are harrowing to be fair

Oh wait

Internal document reveals Covid-19 vaccine trial participant's serious symptoms

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/09/17/covid-19-vaccine-trial-astrazeneca-participant-symptoms-cohen-dnt-ebof-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/coronavirus/

hmmm

And an independent safety board reviewed the details of the case, whether it was related to the vaccine or not, and approved the trial to continue.

That's thankfully how we do science in the West.

FutureTeashock

hmmm wrote: »

And an independent safety board reviewed the details of the case, whether it was related to the vaccine or not, and approved the trial to continue.

That's thankfully how we do science in the West.

It worked so well for the Swine Flue vaccine!:rolleyes:

ACitizenErased

FutureTeashock wrote: »

Internal document reveals Covid-19 vaccine trial participant's serious symptoms

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/09/17/covid-19-vaccine-trial-astrazeneca-participant-symptoms-cohen-dnt-ebof-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/coronavirus/

“Participant’s”
One person.
That was not actually vaccine related.
If you clutch any harder you’ll hurt yourself.

Micky 32

FutureTeashock wrote: »

It worked so well for the Swine Flue vaccine!:rolleyes:

Yep that’s why you hardly hear of any cases these days.

mcsean2163

is_that_so wrote: »

Some can anyway but is that really a justification for people to mask up and social distance into perpetuity? You'd really be alarmingly concerned about someone's mental health if that's how they choose to live their lives. The jab protects a lot of people and that's its aim.

I'm inclined to wonder if we shouldn't be following Sweden but with better protection for care homes and vulnerable.