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Thanks Loki, that info on virus replication and mutation is helpful for understanding what’s going on.
I still have some issues with the conclusion that unvaccinated populations are definitively the source of the mutants.
If mutations can occur in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, and vaccinated can spread the virus but are more likely to be asymptomatic, couldn’t we also make an assumption that their behavior would lead them to be less cautious than a unvaccinated individual who is symptomatic, and hence be more likely to spread it despite being contagious for a smaller window of time?
Additionally, it appears that Omicron was circulating in European countries with high vaccination rates before the discovery of this variant in South Africa.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/12/01/world/coronavirus-newsletter-intl-01-12-21/index.html
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Dutch health officials said Tuesday that Omicron was present in the Netherlands a week before two flights arrived from South Africa carrying the virus.
Nine cases of Omicron were linked to a private event on November 20 in Scotland, days before South Africa announced the existence of the variant. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon told Scottish Parliament Tuesday that none of the individuals had a recent travel history or known links to others who had traveled from southern Africa.
My other big question would be about antibody dependent enhancement.
Fauci talked about this last year (3:05-3:48 in the clip).
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Something that I want to make sure the American public understand. It's not only safety when you inject somebody and they get maybe an idiosyncratic reaction, or an allergic reaction, or pain. There's safety associated; does the vaccine make you worse? And there are diseases in which you vaccinate someone, they get infected with what you're trying to protect them with and you actually enhance the infection. You can get a good feel for that in animal models. So that's going to be interspersed at the same time that we're testing. We're going to try to make sure we don't have enhancement. It's the worst possible thing you could do, is vaccinate somebody to prevent infection and actually make them worse.
This also seems to be addressed on the nih website
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33113270/
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Patient comprehension is a critical part of meeting medical ethics standards of informed consent in study designs. The aim of the study was to determine if sufficient literature exists to require clinicians to disclose the specific risk that COVID-19 vaccines could worsen disease upon exposure to challenge or circulating virus.
Results of the study
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COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralising antibodies may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated. Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern: that vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralising antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials.
Conclusions drawn from the study and clinical implications
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The specific and significant COVID-19 risk of ADE should have been and should be prominently and independently disclosed to research subjects currently in vaccine trials, as well as those being recruited for the trials and future patients after vaccine approval, in order to meet the medical ethics standard of patient comprehension for informed consent.
To my layperson understanding, the fact that so many states and countries with very high vaccination rates are also experiencing some of the highest case numbers would line up with antibody dependent enhancement. Anecdotally, I have a number of friends who got covid immediately following their vaccination.
[edit to fix YouTube embed issue, apparently it requires a full “http://www” in the url]
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These virologist talk about it and why the messaging from the beginning was wrong and which case people like Jeremey tend to think that way. Staring from about 7:45.
They would also tell you that we aren't 100% sure vaccinated people can transmit.
I just tried watching a bit of these two, and I know we’re not supposed to judge a book by it’s cover, but wow are they unhealthy low energy looking weirdos. Sorry Decreed, if you’re getting good info from them then more power to you, but I found their energy/presentation very difficult to get past.
The virologist’s appearance/delivery plus the opinion that vaccinated can’t spread the virus makes me pretty wary of their info. I was under the impression that the issue of vaccinated individuals being able to spread the virus has become accepted knowledge at this point.
Speaking of sources of info, Loki, I’d like to address this point.
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As for the media pushing the vaccine hard, it's because if we don't vaccinate then the virus will mutate and more people will die. That's how Delta and Omicron came about like I mentioned in PMs. Vaccines have been pushed hard in the past, like inoculations for smallpox and the polio vaccine. It's actually a pretty standard response for vaccines to be pushed hard during an epidemic/pandemic because they're the only way to truly deal with the illness. This is just the first pandemic of this scale to exist in a society where media is so prevalent.
I appreciate your interpretation that these media outlets are doing this solely for altruistic reasons, but I can’t help but notice that pharmaceutical companies have a MASSIVE financial incentive for profit off of this whole thing. I don’t believe they pay money to all of these tv shows for no reason. It’s like how corporations donate money to politicians. I assume they expect something in return.
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It's actually a pretty standard response for vaccines to be pushed hard during an epidemic/pandemic because they're the only way to truly deal with the illness.
Are they the only way? Fauci was talking about treatments in that video from last year, and my understanding is that there was a decent amount of literature available that ivermectin (a ton of studies available here https://ivmmeta.com/) and hydroxychloroquine along with azithromycin was proving effective in the treatment of covid from very early on.
T-Funke, I’ll try answering this with headings rather than quoting it all out because it will hopefully be easier to follow.
MutationsMutations are small, if they happen at all. This is why we can’t really observe evolution in anything other than viruses and single celled organisms, because the timeline for noticeable evolution is too long.
Take chickens for example. The classic question, “which came first, the chicken or the egg” actually kind of has an answer. The egg did, as long as you specify that this specific DNA sequence defines a chicken, then nothing before that would truly be a chicken.
But it’s not that simple actually. There is no real delineation between when the animal stopped being a Red Jungle Fowl and started being a Chicken. It’s more of a spectrum over a very long period of time, and the animal that produced the animal with the DNA sequence you would define as “Chicken” would be virtually identical to the Chicken in every way, and you would have to look at the DNA to tell them apart.
The reason I bring this up is important. Variants don’t appear after a single person is infected. Let’s put an arbitrary number on it. Let’s say it takes 1000 infections for Covid to accumulate enough mutations to become the Omicron variant. That means there needs to be a chain of 1000 people infecting each other in a line for the variant to appear. This is how variants appear and is well documented and understood, and it’s known that it’s not possible for a variant to appear after just a few replications.
As I
have previously
illustrated, vaccinated
people are
far less likely to contract the virus, which means that the rate of transmission is already greatly decreased because there are few people to spread it, but that even if they do contract it, they are contagious for a far shorter period of time, and they are less contagious than unvaccinated people. This means it will take a lot longer to reach those 1000 people, if it even does reach 1000 people, and thus will take longer and be much less likely to produce a variant, or may not even produce a variant at all if that lineage is successfully broken.
This doesn't show that the Omicron variant definitively came from unvaccinated people, but it does show the odds are astronomically against the variant having come from a vaccinated population.
Also, just for posterity, I will state again that the 1000 people I chose was just to illustrate the point. I don't know how many different people it would actually take other than it being at least hundreds and could be as high as tens of thousands. I was just seeking to make the concept less abstract and thus easier to understand.
Risk TakingIt's hard to say that vaccinated people will inherently take more risks than unvaccinated people. I am vaccinated and I still wear a mask and limit my interactions, and most other people I know personally who are vaccinated are the same.
Conversely, I know a lot of unvaccinated people who aren't as careful and don't take as many precautions. I have also seen the inverse of both of these.
Now what we can do is take two people and look at the probability of spreading the virus. I'll refer to them as A and B again, and assume the other people near them are not wearing masks.
Person A is fully vaccinated and decides they don't need to wear a mask and that they can be around a decent number of people without issue. They decide to socialize in a group with 10 other people. Given this situation, their risk factor is 3.6.
Person B on the other hand decides to wear a mask and meet with fewer people, say 3 people that aren't wearing masks. Their risk factor is 6.5, which is still 81% higher than the vaccinated risk.
Even if vaccinated people do take more risks, they are still less likely to spread the virus.
Omicron found in EuropeThe first four people found with Omicron, like I said before, are not necessarily the first 4 to have contracted it. Like I had stated before, there's not a clear delineation where the original Covid stops and Omicron begins. Omicron, as we discovered it, in all likelihood probably existed for around a month, and it's very possible for it to spread to Europe from other people, who would then infect other people, etc.
The likeliest origin of Omicron is the location with the greatest density of cases, which is
South Africa; of note is that the UK is the next most dense, and there is a lot of travel that happens between these two countries as SA used to be a British colony. South Africa also has a vaccination rate of
24%, much like how India, which was the origin of the Delta variant, had only about
12% fully vaccinated at the time Delta was found.
This is like trying to say that because AIDS was discovered in LA, that it must have originated from LA, or at least the US, when all signs point to that not being the case.
Antibody-Dependent EnhancementThat video of Fauci is, as you said, from last year. He was explaining how and why we needed to go through the clinical trials. Antibody-Dependent Enhancement is extremely, extremely rare, and
Phase III trials are specifically designed to uncover this issue, and if it is found, it is removed from use. Also, there's no way that this is the case with the Covid vaccines as all of the studies show you are better protected and extremely unlikely to spread the virus. If the vaccine caused ADE, vaccinated people would have worse symptoms and higher death rates.
There is no evidence to support any claim that Covid vaccines cause ADE.
Your UnderstandingYour understanding is wrong, and based on false data. Countries with high vaccination rates are not experiencing higher instances of infection. Some of the countries have higher overall numbers, but they are also more populous.
DeCreed Bratton's VideoThe virologist spoke in absolutes which wasn't wise, but is pretty common when speaking to laymen.
Literally every single vaccine in history has never been 100% effective. There has always been a chance to transmit the disease if you are vaccinated. However,
that chance is severely reduced and has been shown time and again; just look at Polio. There was still a slight chance you could transmit Polio to someone unvaccinated, but the likelihood was astronomically low. If you compare that to no vaccine, where you are almost certainly going to spread it, the benefit should be clear.
Big PharmaI will admit that pharmaceutical companies profiting off of this pandemic is disgusting. However, your argument that they're only pushing to have everyone vaccinated so that they can maximize their profits falls apart when you look at countries that can't afford to buy their vaccines at the market price, so they have provided them at cost or have donated them. The main reason they are being pushed as hard as they are is so that we can prevent the spread, and thus variants, and return to a sense of normalcy so fewer people die.
Is this the only way?No. We could let the virus run its course and cull the population until there aren't enough people to transmit it and have it mutate effectively, thus stopping its propagation. That's what happened with the black death. Most people find this to be a rather poor solution though.
The only way to stop a disease is severely limit its transmission. The only way to limit its transmission is to vaccinate. That's why literally every epidemic/pandemic we've had has either wiped out vast swaths of people, or have only been stopped when around 80% or more of people have been vaccinated.
SummaryIt looks like you're looking for reasons to support vaccine hesitancy and ignoring the vast amount of data showing that the vaccines work and are safe. The fact that you went back to statements Fauci made before any vaccine was even approved makes me think that you're trying to support your conclusion that they aren't safe/necessary rather than letting the data inform your conclusion.
Topic: Covid vaccine (Read 74196 times)