Can you explain for my idiot friend again.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
Can you explain for my idiot friend again.
To be expected built for the original/old variant of the Virus (same as the vaccines) now some of them don't work very well if it at all.
As good as an official confirmation right? 
Yes, because you have to queue to see a doctor before you get the jab and you go through a health questionnaire with him/her. I asked for Pfizer initially rather than AZ because of my bad history with "traditional" vaccines, and the doctor agreed with that. At the time I was in the age group for AZ.
For the booster, the doc asked me if I wanted a third Pfizer and I said yes please, as I've been OK with two doses of Pfizer.
Obviously, some people won't know or won't have an opinion, and then the doctor decides (based on what you've stated as your medical history).
Regarding antibodies and not T cells i.e. they've little neutralising effect against Omicron but should protect against serious disease. Bad for health services and society at large but less so for vaccinated individuals.
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Yeh exactly, but does cast a little doubt on the 75% claim of boosters stopping infection.
Man he’s so dumb. You’re very kind for being so patient with him.
Basically it’s possible to manufacture artificial antibodies against covid. They’re useful for people whose own immune system isn’t functioning properly, either because it never worked properly or they got so sick so quickly it couldn’t catch up. They’re called monoclonal antibodies, are administered via injection and are usually very expensive (so not something a GP would prescribe)
Turns out most of the currently developed antibodies and antibodies in development don’t work against omicron. Not a massive surprise but a pain in the hoop nonetheless.
I knew all that I just wanted to make sure I got a 2nd opinion for the idiot, cause he's really untrusting.
That sucks
Incredibly alarming figures coming out from Russia, Ukraine and Poland now.
The tweet above is about man made, monoclonal antibodies. All of them exactly the same. The antibodies you generate in response to a vaccine are polyclonal. There’s a bunch of different types. So hopefully give broader protection. Monoclonal antibodies are needed when you either can’t generate your own antibodies or they need some help.
T-cells are a different issue. They can’t be manufactured in a lab. They’re only produced by your own immune system.
Thought they were all the rage as potential cancer hunter killers.
Yeah, CAR-T cell immunotherapy. They take your own ones out, tweak them to target your cancer and inject them back into you. Very cool technology.
Just roast it with a lot of garlic and you'll be fine. You can also put some grated cheese on top.
I think that’s wishful thinking at best.
That's sick. Can they do the same for covid in theory? I found this article, but it seems to be written in Martian. https://www.immunology.ox.ac.uk/cov...-specific-t-cells-for-adoptive-t-cell-therapy
not nice for anyone
Back in ireland, Meanwhile covid seems rife in my kids school and I know several parents who are now withholding their kids from school until Christmas is done. Just close the bloody things on Friday as some are calling for. They are only missing 2 1/2 days in which they will do very little apart from cough and sneeze on each other
Would you quit bashing the schools for feck sake.
In what sense? Number of infections or hospitalisations? I'm cautiously optimistic that Omicron is milder due to vaccination and previous exposure throughout a population. Time will tell though!
I’m bashing the department of education, schools are doing the best they can in the circumstances. But the last few weeks at ours, loads of kids off sick, after school clubs cancelled, teachers out and parents holding their kids at home just in case. I don’t see the point in not letting them break up on Friday. They won’t be doing much at school but there’s lots of risk on the mouth of Christmas
Pretty much on all fronts
Russia had 28,000 new cases and 1,133 deaths
Poland had 22,000 new cases and 592 deaths
Ukraine had 9,590 new cases and 355 deaths
Of course Russia's population is huge, but as a percentage their deaths are well out of whack. The Government tried to introduce a new lockdown but a public backlash made them back down
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Oh in case it wasn't clear I was only messing. I constantly bash the schools and the handling of them and it irks certain people. I don't get why they're not letting them off early either, seems like an easy win, surely. I feel bad for the teachers who are probably concerned about getting covid now in advance of Xmas.
Are their stats any good? Those deaths to cases look remarkably high?
You mean invade Ukraine
Their stats are hugely unreliable. Their excess deaths are about 4 x what they are officially reporting for covid deaths.
I have no idea, they are the the countries own statistics as far as I know, I use COVID Live Update: 272,640,660 Cases and 5,348,891 Deaths from the Coronavirus - Worldometer (worldometers.info), and have been from the start of this. I have no reason to doubt it.
They're not going to invade
Ukraine is just coming out of their wave. They're doing fine. For now.
Been bad in Russia for a while that’s delta figures rather then what we are facing.
Every person infected with the Omicron COVID variant is believed to be passing it on to between three and five others on average, a senior government scientist has said.
Dr Susan Hopkins, the UK Health Security Agency's chief medical adviser, told MPs on the Commons health committee that for Omicron, the R value in the UK is between 3 and 5.
So we had to lockdown when R rate was 0.7-1 and we were having vaccines deployed.
Now it's likely around 5 and no Lockdown
This government is just a shambles.
Boris has totally lost it, by keep saying no more lockdown - so it will either get worse or Boris will Lockdown and lie to us yet again.
This is now the period, where Boris is simply out to save his own leadership and be dammed with what is right and best for everyone IMO.
Dr Susan Hopkins, the UK Health Security Agency's chief medical adviser, told MPs on the Commons health committee that for Omicron, the R value in the UK is between 3 and 5.
So we had to lockdown when R rate was 0.7-1 and we were having vaccines deployed.
Now it's likely around 5 and no Lockdown
This government is just a shambles.
Boris has totally lost it, by keep saying no more lockdown - so it will either get worse or Boris will Lockdown and lie to us yet again.
This is now the period, where Boris is simply out to save his own leadership and be dammed with what is right and best for everyone IMO.
I'm pretty sure than once Christmas and Boxing Day are over there will be a lockdown.
Russia's death rates have been up there for a couple of months now - and probably for much longer. According to their excess deaths stats there's almost certainly been massive under-reporting of covid deaths from them during the pandemic.
Cases per death will be partly due to under-testing, they're probably only testing people who need professional medical care. Combine that with low vaccination rates and they've got a fight on. Similar for Ukraine.
Incidentally these are assumed to be more or less entirely delta cases. With no serious historic case data it's anybody's guess what that will mean for omicron.
It’s pure faith in the vaccines when its already proven to escape the vaccines to a degree. He’s letting it rip through the population hoping that most people will get mild symptoms and benefit from the increased immunity it will give them.
The danger is if it evades vaccines to the point where our death toll is back above what it was at the previous peak with nearly 2K deaths in a day. Boris is said to see 50k deaths per year from covid as an “acceptable” range. If this goes tits up it could do it in a month.
Why has the political will for a pan-sarbecovirus vaccine vanished, if the current ones are and will continue to struggle? Is it a US led decision?
Care to elaborate instead of being incredibly condescending?
Vaccines are all about training the body to recognise a threat and deal with it, that's no different in principle to what the early experimenters were trying to achieve. For some diseases one or two rounds of training seem to be enough.
For things like the common cold we start training as babies, and still keep catching it, but mostly we ignore it. Even so, a lot of people this year think they've had the "worst cold ever." Assuming they didn't actually catch covid, chances are they felt worse because they were out of training because we hadn't been meeting people so much. It actually also meant that a lot of young children and babies caught things that are normally (winter) seasonal viruses as the country reopened in summer.
Covid in the future? Good chance that kids who grow up with it circulating will always think it's just another cold. Some of us will be safer if we get that kind of protection routinely in a controlled way via vaccines, even if that doesn't stop us getting exposed to the virus or occasionally catching it ourselves.
I don't think the research has been shut down, it's just not seen as something we can get in the next few months.
Incidentally there are trials underway of vaccines delivered by patches, nasal spray and even in tablet form. They're struggling to do clinical trials though. Not surprising really as they're looking for people who have not been previously infected who are willing to get infected.
Big day tomorrow.
Imagine next Tuesday.