Tuesday, August 10, 2021

mRNA Neo-Vaccinoids Are A License To Infect And Produce Antibody Dependent Enhancements

NYMag  |   But holding all else equal, if vaccines were still doing a good job preventing severe disease but a considerably worse job preventing spread, wouldn’t that drive the gap wider between cases and hospitalizations, or cases and deaths? 
Yeah. But —

It’s a lot to hold equal.
What I’m hearing — and I’ve been helping with a bunch of patients — is that people who are breaking through are getting very sick. They’re getting Regeneron antibodies.

There may be something to this waning immunity story. It’s fuzzy, but the people who are getting hit are more apt to be people who were vaccinated very early. I had a patient in recent days, who’s in her 70s. She got vaccinated in January. And, I mean, she almost died. I mean, it’s just terrible. I think — I hope — the monoclonals are going to save her life. But she was a healthy 70-year-old lady, and just following her case was illuminating — she thought she was protected, but she also wore masks everywhere. She was on guard and still got infected and desperately ill.

Most people aren’t being that careful.
The vaccinated — who are now a very slight majority — those people just think the pandemic’s over. There’s still this sense that if you’re vaccinated, you’re good to go. I mean, I’ve even seen on television, you know, some of our leading health experts, tell people it’s perfectly okay to have indoor gatherings among vaccinated people. Well, it’s not true. So we’re getting bad advice.

This booster thing is yet another issue, because we don’t even know if they’re going to protect against a Delta. I mean, everybody’s assuming it, but there’s no data. You know, there’s some neutralizing antibodies from the Pfizer report in 23 people and there’s an Israeli pre-print, it says there’s waning immunity without any neutralizing antibodies. So we’ll see. But these are just classic spike-protein boosters. There’s nothing special about them to handle Delta. So I don’t know. I mean, I suspect they’re going to provide some protection, but I’m not sure I’m so confident it’s going to be great.

What about just the basic heterogeneity of the country? We’re so big, with so many pockets of vulnerable people, even in states that are, from a bird’s-eye view, well-protected. Could it be that what we’re seeing now is just the disease burning through those populations very efficiently and producing numbers that look large even in the national context?
I think that’s true. I think heterogeneity is definitely playing a role, but I also think the behavior is playing a substantial role. I mean, why did Florida succumb? As you know, it’s basically at the national average for vaccination, one percentage point below. But it’s been a disaster there, and they have promotion from the leadership of the state to do everything wrong. I mean, you know, they’ve mandated no masking.

But that should provide some hope, in the sense that other states will take a different course, presumably. 
I don’t know.

Personally, I put a lot of stock into the fact that, even in states where the vaccination levels weren’t so high overall, that seniors seemed pretty well-vaccinated — I think when we last spoke, a couple of weeks ago, in the worst-vaccinated state, Mississippi, 76 percent of seniors had gotten at least one shot. That’s not 99 percent but I would’ve thought it would’ve shielded a lot.
I think for Alpha it would have been beautiful. But for Delta it’s just not nearly enough.

I mean, one of the worst signals that I’ve seen is San Francisco. San Francisco is like Vermont, they’re even a little higher than Vermont for fully vaccinated — it’s 70 percent of the population of San Francisco county and it’s going through a very substantial hospitalization spike, unlike Vermont.

And that’s a bad sign because San Francisco has been kind of a rock throughout the whole pandemic.

They’ve been incredible. Even when the rest of California was doing poorly. 
Yeah. Exactly. So I look at San Francisco as a bad bellwether for what might be coming. Why are they doing so poorly right now for hospitalization? Why is it so different than Vermont? If there’s that many people getting so sick, something’s just not right. But it’s hard to explain all these things, right? I mean, why, why did the U.K. on Freedom Day —

0 comments:

When Zakharova Talks Men Of Culture Listen...,

mid.ru  |   White House spokesman John Kirby’s statement, made in Washington shortly after the attack, raised eyebrows even at home, not ...