OT Coronavirus: America in chaos, News and Updates. One million Americans dead and counting

Merck Gouges Taxpayers With 400% Markup on COVID Pill.



Our government looks the other way while we get gouged after they used taxpayer money to fund their research. Pathetic.

 

If You’ve Had Covid, Do You Need the Vaccine? (The NY Times)

When Jonathan Isaac, a prominent basketball player for the Orlando Magic, explained why he chose not to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, he tapped into a dispute that has been simmering for months: Do people who have had Covid-19, as Mr. Isaac said he has, really need the vaccine?

That question has thrust tortuous immunological concepts into a national debate on vaccine mandates, with politicians, athletes, law professors and psychiatrists weighing in on the relative strength of so-called natural immunity versus the protection afforded by vaccines.

But the answer, like nearly everything about the virus, is complicated.

While many people who have recovered from Covid-19 may emerge relatively unscathed from a second encounter with the virus, the strength and durability of their immunity depends on their age, health status and severity of initial infection.

“That’s the thing with natural infection — you can be on the very low end of that or very high end, depending on what kind of disease you developed,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University.

Those with powerful natural immunity may be protected from reinfection for up to a year. But even they should not skip the vaccine, experts said. For starters, boosting their immunity with a vaccine is likely to give them long-lasting protection against all the variants.

“If you’ve gotten the infection and then you’ve been vaccinated, you’ve got superpowers,” said Jennifer Gommerman, an immunologist at the University of Toronto.

Without that boost, antibodies from an infection will wane, leaving Covid-recovered people vulnerable to reinfection and mild illness with variants — and perhaps liable to spread the virus to others.

This is the same argument for giving boosters to people who are fully vaccinated, said Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York. “After a certain period of time, you’re either going to get boosted or you’re going to get infected,” he said.

How immunity from infection and from vaccination compare is difficult to parse. Dozens of studies have delved into the debate, and have drawn contradictory conclusions.

Some consistent patterns have emerged: Two doses of an mRNA vaccine produce more antibodies, and more reliably, than an infection with the coronavirus does. But the antibodies from prior infection are more diverse, capable of fending off a wider range of variants, than those produced by vaccines.

Studies touting the durability and strength of natural immunity are hobbled by one crucial flaw. They are, by definition, assessing the responses only of people who survived Covid-19. The road to natural immunity is perilous and uncertain, Dr. Nussenzweig said.

A 78-year-old man received a booster shot in the Bronx last month.
Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Only 85 percent to 90 percent of people who test positive for the virus and recover have detectable antibodies to begin with. The strength and durability of the response is variable.

For example, while the immunity gained from vaccines and infection is comparable among younger people, two doses of the mRNA vaccines protected adults older than 65 better than a prior infection did.

Research published by Dr. Iwasaki’s team in May showed a stepwise increase in the level of antibodies with rising severity of infection. About 43 percent of recovered people had no detectable neutralizing antibodies — the kind needed to prevent reinfection — according to one study. The antibodies drop to undetectable levels after about two months in about 30 percent of people who recover.

Other researchers may find different results depending on the severity of illness in the participants, said Fikadu Tafesse, an immunologist at Oregon Health & Science University.

“If your cohort is just only hospitalized individuals, I think the chance of having a detectable antibody is higher,” Dr. Tafesse said.

In terms of the quality of the antibodies, it makes sense that invasion by a live virus would produce a broader immune response than would injecting the single protein encoded in the vaccines, he and others said.

The virus would stimulate defenses in the nose and throat — exactly where they are needed to prevent a second infection — while the vaccines produce antibodies mainly in the blood.

“That will give you an edge in terms of resisting a subsequent infection,” Dr. Gommerman said.

Fragments of the virus may also persist in the body for weeks after infection, which gives the immune system more time to learn to fight it, while the proteins carried by the vaccine quickly exit the body.

Several studies have now shown that reinfections, at least with the earlier versions of the virus, are rare.

At the Cleveland Clinic, none of 1,359 health care workers who remained unvaccinated after having Covid-19 tested positive for the virus over many months, noted Dr. Nabin Shrestha, an infectious disease physician at the clinic.

But the findings must be interpreted with caution, he acknowledged. The clinic tested only people who were visibly ill, and may have missed reinfections that did not produce symptoms. The participants were 39 years old on average, so the results may not apply to older adults, who would be more likely to become infected again.

Most studies have also tracked people for only about a year, Dr. Shrestha noted. “The important question is, how long does it protect, because we’re not under any illusions that this will be a lifelong protection,” he said.

It’s also unclear how well immunity after infection protects against the newer variants. Most studies ended before the Delta variant became dominant, and more recent research is patchy.

The most widely cited study in favor of natural immunity’s potency against the Delta variant comes from Israel.
Breakthrough infections after vaccination were 13-fold more likely than reinfections in unvaccinated people, and symptomatic breakthrough infections 27-fold more likely than symptomatic reinfections, the study found.

But experts cautioned against inferring from the results that natural immunity is superior to the protection from vaccines. The vaccinated group included many more people with conditions that would weaken their immune response, and they would be expected to have more breakthrough infections, noted Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The study also did not account for people whose immune defenses may have been strengthened by a second exposure to the virus.

For those lucky enough to have recovered from Covid-19, vaccination is still the ideal choice, experts said. It provides a massive boost in antibody levels and a near-impenetrable immune shield — perhaps even against future variants.

“They are like rock stars on all the variants,” said Dr. Duane Wesemann, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School.

Colorful graphs from Dr. Wesemann’s recent paper have been helpful for convincing Covid-recovered patients of the stark advantage even a single dose would offer them, he said.

Regardless of the evolving understanding of natural immunity, on one point there is near-universal agreement among scientists. For people who were never infected, vaccines are much safer, and far less a gamble, than Covid-19.

Many people who argue against vaccines cite the low mortality rates from Covid-19 among young people. But even seemingly mild cases of Covid-19 can result in long-term damage to the heart, kidneys and brain, or leave people feeling exhausted and unwell for weeks to months, Dr. Iwasaki said.

“No one should try to acquire immunity through natural infection,” she said. “It’s just too dangerous.”

 

Depends on the cooking temp. Anything under 140F should allow for infection. I recommend using an instant-read thermometer.

 

From today's NYT "The Morning":

An unvaccinated child is at less risk of serious Covid illness than a vaccinated 70-year-old.


Elementary-school students in Fresno, Calif., in August.Tomas Ovalle for The New York Times
A sharp age skew
Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University who frequently writes about parenting, published an article in The Atlantic in March that made a lot of people angry. The headline was, “Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma.” The article argued that Covid-19 tended to be so mild in children that vaccinated parents could feel comfortable going out in the world with their unvaccinated children.

Critics called the article insensitive and misleading, saying it understated the risks that children could both get sick and spread the virus. Oster responded on her website with a note standing by her main argument but apologizing particularly for the headline’s lack of nuance. Her critics seemed somewhat vindicated.

Seven months later, with a lot more Covid data available, the debate over the article looks quite different.

Oster is the one who has largely been vindicated. If anything, subsequent data indicates she did not go far enough in describing the age skew of Covid. Today, an accurate version of her headline might be: “Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Much Safer Than a Vaccinated Grandma.”

I recognize that may sound hard to believe, so let’s look at some data. Here are hospitalization rates by both age and vaccination status in King County, Wash., which includes Seattle and releases some of the country’s most detailed Covid data:


Source: Washington Department of Health
As you can see, the risks for unvaccinated children look similar to the risks for vaccinated people in their 50s.

Nationwide statistics from England show an even larger age skew. Children under 12 (a group that’s combined with teenagers in this next chart) appear to be at less risk than vaccinated people in their 40s if not 30s.


Source: UK Health Security Agency
“Covid is a threat to children. But it’s not an extraordinary threat,” Dr. Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at the University of Southampton, has written. “It’s very ordinary. In general, the risks from being infected are similar to the other respiratory viruses you probably don’t think much about.”

The threat to the elderly
There is obviously some distressing news in these comparisons. For older people — especially the very old, as well as those with serious health conditions — vaccination does not reduce the risk of Covid hospitalization or death to near zero. That’s different from what the initial vaccine data suggested.

To be clear, getting vaccinated is still the best thing that an elderly person can do. In terms of risk reduction, a vaccine is more valuable for an older adult than a younger adult. Just compare the size of the bars in the above charts. Still, the Covid risks remain real for vaccinated elderly people.

David Wallace-Wells has argued in New York Magazine that despite the widespread discussion of Covid’s outsize impact on the old, most people are “hugely underestimating” how large the age skew truly is.

Different elderly people will respond to the risks in different ways, and that’s OK. Some may decide to be extremely cautious until caseloads fall to low levels. Others — especially those without major health problems — may reasonably choose to travel, see friends and live their lives. The risks are not zero, but they are quite low. And few parts of life pose zero risk.

As a point of comparison, the annual risk of death for all vaccinated people over 65 in Seattle this year appears to be around 1 in 2,700. The annual average risk that an American dies in a vehicle crash is lower — about 1 in 8,500 — but not a different order of magnitude.

From a policy perspective, Covid’s threat to older people argues for encouraging them to get Covid booster shots, even if it remains unclear how much vaccine immunity is waning. The threat also argues for more workplace vaccine mandates, to reduce the overall spread of the virus.

Vaccinate the kids?
The more encouraging half of the story is on the other end of the age spectrum.

For children without a serious medical condition, the danger of severe Covid is so low as to be difficult to quantify. For children with such a condition, the danger is higher but still lower than many people believe. The risk of long Covid among children — a source of fear among many parents — also appears to be very low.

All of which raises a thorny question: Should young children be vaccinated? I know some readers will recoil at the mention of that question, but I think it’s a mistake to treat it as unmentionable. There is not the scientific consensus about vaccinating children that there is about adults. It remains unclear how many countries will recommend the vaccine for young children. In the U.S., many vaccinated parents have decided not to vaccinate their eligible children yet.

The arguments against doing so are that there are some rare side effects and that Covid seems no more worrisome for children than some other respiratory diseases. The arguments in favor are that any troubling side effects seem very rare; that there is uncertainty about the long-term effects of Covid; and that vaccinating children can help protect everybody else, by reducing transmission.

If I had young children, I would vaccinate them without hesitation. I have heard the same from multiple scientists, including those who understand why many parents are reluctant. (Here’s a Times Q. and A. on the subject.)

It feels like a close call that leans toward vaccination for an individual child — and an easy decision for the sake of a child’s grandparents and everybody else’s grandparents. “Unvaccinated people at any age are much more likely to cause transmission relative to vaccinated people,” Dr. Aaron Richterman of the University of Pennsylvania told me.

What does Oster think about all of this? She has taken the high road on social media and in her email newsletter, rather than relitigating the earlier debate. Instead, she devoted a recent newsletter to reviewing the evidence about children and Covid vaccines.

“I hope we can be prepared to be a little bit gentle with each other,” she wrote. “Asking questions about vaccines for kids or being more cautious for kids than older adults — these are reasonable approaches.”

At the end, she explained why she would be vaccinating her children once they became eligible: “I do not want them to get Covid. I am worried about their immune-compromised grandparent. I would like to avoid quarantine and keep them in school.”

 

Well that was disturbing.

 

Underdeveloped fetuses looking similar does not disqualify them from being part of a species. A carrot sprout looking similar to a watermelon sprout isn’t a scientific mystery, things don’t just materialize into a mature form.

 

That one is kind of cool. A reminder of the time period, a time capsule like you said. My friend’s parakeet she got last year is named Corona. I do find Pfizer and vax card ornaments to be…a little odd though. The old people look like hostages. If you squint it looks like their hands are tied behind their back.

 

Our tree is filled with ornaments of places we have traveled together and different moments me and the wife have shared. She found some COVID inspired ornaments last year that we gave out as stocking stuffers that were a big hit.

 

Is killing a sperm cell murder? Sperm is a part of the same species as its parent, correct?

 

So are blood cells. Is it murder if you cut your finger? Is it murder when women menstruate? Blood and eggs.

 

And also that Earth is flat... Totally reasonable.