Previous Vaccines and Masks Could Reduce Covid-19 Severity, Some Researchers Say (cnn.com) 76
Applehu Akbar shared CNN's article about why some people experience Covid-19 differently:
"When we looked in the setting of Covid disease, we found that people who had prior vaccinations with a variety of vaccines — for pneumococcus, influenza, hepatitis and others — appeared to have a lower risk of getting Covid disease," Dr. Andrew Badley, an infectious disease specialist at Mayo Clinic, told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Monday night... There's been no definitive evidence of any other vaccines boosting immunity against Covid-19. But some researchers have suggested it's possible.... Last month, researchers found that countries where many people have been given the tuberculosis vaccine Bacillus Calmette-Guerin had less mortality from coronavirus, a finding that fits with other research suggesting the vaccine can boost people's immunity in general.
But once you're infected, how much of the virus made it into your body could also have an impact on what your experience is, another expert told CNN on Monday. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at University of California, San Francisco, has been working with a team of researchers to understand how more people could go through their infections with minimal or no symptoms. About 40% of people infected with the virus don't have symptoms, according to an estimate last month by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gandhi's team found masks make a difference.
"What the mask does is really reduce the amount of virus that you get in, if you do get infected," she said. "And by reducing that... you have a lower dose, you're able to manage it, you're able to have a calm response and you have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all."
But once you're infected, how much of the virus made it into your body could also have an impact on what your experience is, another expert told CNN on Monday. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at University of California, San Francisco, has been working with a team of researchers to understand how more people could go through their infections with minimal or no symptoms. About 40% of people infected with the virus don't have symptoms, according to an estimate last month by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gandhi's team found masks make a difference.
"What the mask does is really reduce the amount of virus that you get in, if you do get infected," she said. "And by reducing that... you have a lower dose, you're able to manage it, you're able to have a calm response and you have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all."
How do they propose it works? (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as I knew, vaccines worked by teaching your immune system to recognize the genetics in question. Do these viruses have similar genetics to corona, similar proteins, or is there some unspecified other mysterious way this is supposed to work?
Or, could there be funny business going on?
Re:How do they propose it works? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is some evidence pointing towards common vaccines improving immunity against unrelated diseases. For example
https://www.npr.org/sections/h... [npr.org]
"More vaccinations meant less Alzheimer's"
However some lady on facebook yesterday was telling me quite adamantly that there are MiCroChiPs in vaccines so maybe it is the microchips.
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Re:How do they propose it works? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not so much worried about the microchips, since I haven't seen anything to indicate that. I was more thinking that someone wants to sell a medicine for something it doesn't treat, which there is a long tradition of. There is an extremely high pressure for a corona vaccine, and also to be the first with a vaccine. The testing procedures are getting rushed. In this case, there is a legitimate reason for that, but it still creates an opportunity for funny business.
With all the vaccine crazies in recent years, it makes smart people disinclined to be skeptical about anything related to a vaccine. But any potential corona vaccine is not going to have the decades of data behind it that say, measles vaccine does. Without knowing more of the details, I don't think we can declare this one is safe or that one isn't. Time to bulk up your knowledge.
Also a bit off-topic, but, I get the feeling the telcos may actually enjoy the "5G causes corona" conspiracy theories. Now, when discussing opposition to 5G, they can paint them all with that brush. A year or two ago, when completely legitimate criticisms of 5G were being discussed, they didn't have that option.
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But any potential corona vaccine is not going to have the decades of data behind it that say, measles vaccine does. Without knowing more of the details, I don't think we can declare this one is safe or that one isn't. Time to bulk up your knowledge.
That's precisely the problem with all vaccines. The pharma co's act like just because one vaccine is safe that means all vaccines are safe. They also frequently pull a switcheroo. They might e.g. mention that "measles vaccines have decades of data behind it", when releasing a completely new measles vaccine with entirely different production methods and principal of operation.
With all the vaccine crazies in recent years, it makes smart people disinclined to be skeptical about anything related to a vaccine.
it...creates an opportunity for funny business.
the telcos may actually enjoy the "5G causes corona" conspiracy theories. Now, when discussing opposition to 5G, they can paint them all with that brush.
The pharma co's enjoy the vaccine conspiracy theories. Now when discussing opposition to a particular vaccine, they can paint them al
Re: How do they propose it works? (Score:2)
Re:How do they propose it works? (Score:4, Insightful)
But any potential corona vaccine is not going to have the decades of data behind it that say, measles vaccine does
FDA trial conventions are a gold standard, to be used when developing the next vaccine for something like mumps. This disease is serious enough that rushing the vaccine test process through trials is justified when you compare it to the risk of getting Covid-19. The first people to get it will be those who know the elevated risk and are willing to roll those dice. I hope to be one of them.
At the same time, the whole medical world is learning how to speed up its hallowed procedures in time of need. This will benefit us in developing other medications.
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Something like 92% of vaccines end up too dangerous to use. With a 9 in 10 failure rate for new vaccines, it might be worth being careful.
Re:How do they propose it works? (Score:4, Informative)
Something like 92% of vaccines end up too dangerous to use.
Not even close. [mit.edu]
Over a two-decade span from January 2000 to January 2020, private-sector vaccine-development efforts succeeded in bringing a drug to market 39.6 percent of the time, the researchers found.
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Likely depends on which phase we're talking about with your source counting vaccines that have made it to clinical trials and mine including earlier failures. Or perhaps my source is wrong, it came from a radio show, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costo... [www.cbc.ca]
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Well, the portion I quoted says "bringing a drug to market", so I assume that means it's past testing/approval and is being administered to patients. Probably a bad assumption.
But your radio show does indeed say a 94% failure rate and links to a paper which has this paper [nih.gov] footnoted, and it does in fact report a 94% failure rate. So your source looks totally legit to me.
Kinda hard to reconcile these two studies, given the magnitude of the differences they report. But your theory on why certainly makes
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Yea, I couldn't quite remember whether 92% or 94% so I went with the lower number. Your source only talks about private sector, so may ignore university research. The radio program used SARS as one failure, which was a purely economic failure, once SARS went away, it didn't make sense to pursue the vaccine, so it is counted as a failure even though it may have been a success if the money was put in. The show is focused on the economics so perhaps it is tilted to not economically successful.
Your source does
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A year or two ago, when completely legitimate criticisms of 5G were being discussed
No there weren't. Just a different kind of ignorant psychobabble. On the up side no one burnt down 5G towers because they didn't understand it a year ago.
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The potential problem with 5G is it allowing more surveillance. Cameras everywhere kind of thing, which seems to be its main benefit.
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I for one am pleased everyone is coming down with Covid. All those 5G vaccine chemtrail microchips have been causing my mobile broadband to sit on a solid 4 bars of signal strength.
A fine example of.... (Score:1)
All dick, no balls.
Re: How do they propose it works? (Score:2)
They could. It would not surprise me either to learn the body has some common tools for fighting all viruses, which gets stronger with use like anything else in the body. It also makes me wonder if some of the things we do to ward off colds - vitamin C mega dosing, zinc, garlic etc. -might not have some protective use with Covid19... I mean if body defenses against one virus help against another, why not nitrients?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: How do they propose it works? (Score:4, Informative)
The tuberculosis vaccine is for Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, a bacteria. It also seems quite variable in the amount of protection it gives, working better the further from the equator and seems to depend on genetics as well. It does seem to protect against stomach ulcers (related bacteria) and some types of cancer. Care has to be taken in use, including doing a tuberculin skin test.
The Wiki article is interesting, it is definitely not a straight forward simple vaccine like smallpox for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
BCG (Score:2)
Re: How do they propose it works? (Score:3, Interesting)
Typically not genetics - usually surface proteins (Score:4, Interesting)
As I understand it, the genetic material in a virus is typically packaged in a protein shell, and it's the shell that antibodies are able to attach to. The genetic material is hidden inside, making it mostly inaccessible to antibodies. (Sometimes B cells evolve their antibodies to match fragments of broken pathogens, which would potentially allow them to match viral genetic material exposed by broken viral shells, but IIRC that's more common with bacterial and fungal pathogens.)
Proteins are directly translated from genetic material, of course, but because of the complex folding that happens when a protein is made, it can be difficult to predict whether a genetic change will lead to virtually no change in the protein's structure or a complete transformation of the protein's shape. Even when the MHC presents fragments on the cell surface to show the immune system that it hasn't been invaded and shouldn't be destroyed, the fragments it's presenting are protein fragments rather than genetic material.
I'm no immunologist, though, and immunology can get incredibly complex, so I could well be wrong about some of this.
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I'm not sure that a tuberculosis vaccine would be appropriate, why do you think it is?
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The Covid19 disease is mainly a problem in South Western Europe and the Americas.
The whole of Europe has ~3.2 million total cases; the whole of Asia has ~5.6 million cases. How is this "not a problem" outside of Europe and America?
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Funny
The rest of the world is Eastern Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa.
Initial viral load (Score:4, Interesting)
The (hero) Chinese doctor who was the first to suspect something was wrong died and he was only in his 30's. His initial viral load was probably high and maybe even multiple exposures so it seems entirely reasonable that reducing the initial expose results in milder symptoms giving the body time to react. However here in the USofA no amount of evidence will convince the science-denying freedumb lovers that masks are a good thing.
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"Viruses are too small for masks" from scientists (Score:2)
I was hearing from people in medical research the "viruses are way smaller than holes in masks so masks don't help" thing a few years ago. It was one of those cases where scientists came to a reasonable conclusion based on the facts they had (small viruses, big holes), but didn't actually test those conclusions or read up on whether other scientists had tested them, so they ended up missing a bunch of extra factors that come into play in the real world.
It's a pretty common mistake that smart people make,
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I don't understand the "Viruses are too small for masks" argument when the issue is the droplet carrying the virus is what you want to filter out and they are not too small.
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Science affirming (Score:1, Interesting)
So I can set straight the freedumbers, what is the nature of the scientific evidence on masks?
I heard a talk by one of the guys doing the studies of common cold transmission, where the conclusion is that at least for the common cold, the primary route of transmission is touching your face. They draw this conclusion in the best tradition of Koch and his Postulates.
They put volunteers in rooms, where they test people catching the cold from someone else, for example, with barriers between them but where
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The conclusion that you don't catch someone's cold from their coughing, but you do catch it from touching a surface they coughed or sneezed on and then rubbing your eyes or picking your nose.............So a mask really doesn't do much to protect from a cold apart, perhaps, from putting people in a frame of mind that they don't pick their nose.
Experts have been saying all along that wearing non medical masks is not to protect you, it is to protect others from you. If someone with a mask is not coughing or sneezing on as many surfaces, or is leaving shed virus in a smaller radius because of the mask, nose picking becomes slightly less risky for others.
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I don't have the link or the cite for this, but back in March when everyone was in a panic, an NYC ER doctor dude suggested that one should not fear going to the grocery store, and that a mask was not necessary. He recommended that you wash your hands really well after going there. I based this on his "observations of COVID cases", so I don't know how experimentally controlled science this was, but he didn't seem like one of those flyover Deplorables. Have such tests been done with the SARS-Cov2 virus are is this largely statistical inference? Do they control for variables such as the type of mask, whether the person knows how to wear it or if they have their nose or even nose and mouth exposed, and how often they wash or replace their mask?
Science learns and we adjust based on new evidence. We've learned since April and early March; at that point there was already strong evidence for masks. At this point, the evidence that masks work is overwhelming. For example, areas of Germany which had mask mandates saw less COVID growth http://ftp.iza.org/dp13319.pdf [iza.org]. The same thing has happened at a US state level, and even locally. Look for example at COVID levels broken down in individual counties in South Carolina, where mask requiring areas saw COVI
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Science learns and we adjust based on new evidence. We've learned since April and early March; at that point there was already strong evidence for masks. At this point, the evidence that masks work is overwhelming.
It was overwhelming in March, too.
Re:Science affirming (Score:4, Interesting)
So I can set straight the freedumbers, what is the nature of the scientific evidence on masks?
Not that this should be news by now, but...
With COVID-19, at least, they're finding that (non-medical) masks are significantly more effective at preventing you from infecting others than they are at preventing you from being infected by others. This is important because people are contagious with COVID-19 prior to the onset of symptoms.
There are several video demonstrations of this, actually - although I can't locate the one I really want (involving a singer who inhaled mist then sang, wearing different face coverings), this one's not bad... albeit a bit drawn-out:
https://www.livescience.com/fa... [livescience.com]
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and "Millions of people trust CNN, that makes it trusted" is just spooky to think about.
Re:CNN's article (Score:5, Insightful)
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It’s actually exhausting to try and piece facts together these days which really is the problem, not everyone has the time or will to try to verify everything.
It's much worse than that. The 30% of the population who have much higher than average intelligence don't have time or will to put all the facts together (mostly due to economic servitude). The other 70% simply do not possess the mental faculties required to overcome the lies, deceit and misdirection.
Even smart people who spend their entire careers on it have trouble keeping up, and they're the ones causing it (for their respective team)
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CNN such a trusted source of information.
This story was reported in a few places, but I intentionally cited a left-wing source so the story wouldn't be immediately modded Spam.
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Indeed they are. Now maybe you can point to a Fox News article discrediting what CNN published?
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Re: "Some" researchers say... (Score:1)
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We're leapfrogging 'idiocracy', but I guess I'm not supposed to reveal that
Good luck
Seriously? (Score:3)
How do they explain France then? They have a shitload of coronavirus deaths, but compulsory vaccinations and they have been vaccinating BCG until a few years ago.
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Study excludes UK and France (Score:3, Informative)
The study excludes the UK because children were vaccinated between 12 and 13 years of age and not as infants. Similarly, France is excluded because children were vaccinated on entry to school.
This seems a bit sketchy and a rather weak reason to exclude two large countries with high COVID-19 mortality.
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It's a common anti-vaxxer theme, "the mercury in the vaccine gave my baby autism!" Never mind that Thimerosal hasn't been in vaccines in the US for almost two decades, the leaders of that movement are no more honest than the anti-nuclear power fanatics.
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Thimerosal was taken out of childhood vaccines in the United States in 2001.
Measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines do not and never did contain thimerosal. Varicella (chickenpox), inactivated polio (IPV), and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines have also never contained thimerosal.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesaf... [cdc.gov]
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Before getting my recent lens implants I wore contact lenses for fifty years. The preservative in the cleaning solution all that time was...wait for it...thimerosal!
Correlation vs casuation (Score:1)
"Last month, researchers found that countries where many people have been given the tuberculosis vaccine Bacillus Calmette-Guerin had less mortality from coronavirus".
I also saw some data showing that men in those countries have significantly smaller penis size.
Foxdie is real (Score:2)
Glad to hear (Score:4, Funny)
"Previous Vaccines and Masks Could Reduce Covid-19 Severity"
I knew that I shouldn't throw away my previous masks, thank god, I still have them all.
Playing My Tune (Score:1)
I've taken about every vaccine I can get. Maybe that'll offset somewhat my 73 years, high blood pressure, and type A blood if I'm ever exposed to it. Going to pains to avoid getting exposed to it. See what happens. Vaccine for this damned virus can't get here fast enough.
Ahahahahahaha (Score:1)
Willing to follow medical advice (Score:4, Insightful)
The people who took the recommended vaccines are the same people who are social distancing, wearing a mask, washing their hands.
Vaccinated people know more (Score:3)
And are more careful as a result. The anti-vaxxers are among the most abysmally stupid people the planet has to offer. You would think that does contribute to their exposure risk.
The disease is the cure (Score:2)