US Army Creates Single Vaccine Against All COVID, SARS Variants (defenseone.com) 248
Slashdot readers fahrbot-bot and Tangential share a report from Defense One: Within weeks, scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research expect to announce that they have developed a vaccine that is effective against COVID-19 and all its variants, even Omicron, as well as previous SARS-origin viruses that have killed millions of people worldwide. Walter Reed's Spike Ferritin Nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccine, or SpFN, completed animal trials earlier this year with positive results. Phase 1 of human trials, which tested the vaccine against Omicron and the other variants, wrapped up this month, again with positive results that are undergoing final review, Dr. Kayvon Modjarrad, director of Walter Reed's infectious diseases branch, said in an exclusive interview with Defense One. The new vaccine will still need to undergo phase 2 and phase 3 trials.
Unlike existing vaccines, Walter Reed's SpFN uses a soccer ball-shaped protein with 24 faces for its vaccine, which allows scientists to attach the spikes of multiple coronavirus strains on different faces of the protein. The vaccine's human trials took longer than expected, he said, because the lab needed to test the vaccine on subjects who had neither been vaccinated nor previously infected with COVID. The next step is seeing how the new pan-coronavirus vaccine interacts with people who were previously vaccinated or previously sick. The next step is seeing how the new pan-coronavirus vaccine interacts with people who were previously vaccinated or previously sick. Walter Reed is working with a yet-to-be-named industry partner for that wider rollout.
Unlike existing vaccines, Walter Reed's SpFN uses a soccer ball-shaped protein with 24 faces for its vaccine, which allows scientists to attach the spikes of multiple coronavirus strains on different faces of the protein. The vaccine's human trials took longer than expected, he said, because the lab needed to test the vaccine on subjects who had neither been vaccinated nor previously infected with COVID. The next step is seeing how the new pan-coronavirus vaccine interacts with people who were previously vaccinated or previously sick. The next step is seeing how the new pan-coronavirus vaccine interacts with people who were previously vaccinated or previously sick. Walter Reed is working with a yet-to-be-named industry partner for that wider rollout.
Hopefully, no patents (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully this was fully created by the Army and it will be free of the patent and big pharma entanglements of other vaccines. If it can be created easily and cheaply, other nations can produce the millions of doses they need.
Re: Hopefully, no patents (Score:3)
Re: Hopefully, no patents (Score:2)
Hopefully they wonâ(TM)t a mistake as monumental as not patenting it. Because if they donâ(TM)t, somebody else will and will easily and succesfully sue the original inventors.
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Because if they donâ(TM)t, somebody else will and will easily and succesfully sue the original inventors.
Only if somebody else is already working on the same thing.
Re: Hopefully, no patents (Score:4, Informative)
Once it's "in the literature" it's no longer novel and can't be patented. They could simply publish sufficient details to a periodical and make sure to send a copy to the patent office. At that point the periodical becomes prior art.
Re:Hopefully, no patents (Score:4, Informative)
lol no im not talking anything made by the army
The US Army is famous for their medical research and vaccine production facilities.
A simple google search will confirm it: https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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The US Army is famous for their medical research and vaccine production facilities.
The US Army is also [wikipedia.org] known [wikipedia.org] for a number [wikipedia.org] of other things [wikipedia.org] under the guise [wikipedia.org] of medical treatment [wikipedia.org].
But feel free to sign up. It's your funeral.
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But it does have *huge* medical and public health operations. It needs them for combat effectiveness.
Up until recently more soldiers have been killed by bad sanitation than weapons in war. In the Civil War the ratio of soldier deaths from infectious diseases like typhus and dysentery to deaths by wounds was 2:1. This experience taught the US military the importance of sanitation, and by WW1 that ratio had dropped to 1:2. Today the military continues to do research in things like pesticides. DEET, the
Re:Hopefully, no patents (Score:5, Insightful)
lol no im not talking anything made by the army
Because something made by a corporation is so much better?
It's good to be skeptical, but once it passes trials it should be ok. The reason we have trials is because we don't trust the entities.
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> naturally acquired herd immunity is underway
Where did omicron come from? From humans mutating the virus. The more people that get covid the more mutations the world will have. Your 'get everybody sick for herd immunity' approach just makes the problem worse.
Re:Too late, Omicron's already "vaccinating." (Score:5, Insightful)
"people that have received covid previously and even those vaccinated ARE susceptible to omicron,"
This is true, although the same can be said of almost all respiratory viruses (e.g. Influenza, Common Cold, etc)
"...that pretty much means herd immunity is reset to zero . . . .blah . . . kills the virus off,"
This is essentially a total misrepresentation of the way the vaccine - and natural immunity - works and is thus absolutely FALSE.
"...if we are unlucky the next variant could be both more deadly and contagious and just like omicron be poorly defended against by previous infection of vaccine."
There is *zero* evidence that Omicron is more deadly, in fact *all* the evidence suggests it is much less deadly.
Furthermore, *most* of the evidence suggests that the vaccine - and especially natural immunity - does indeed protect against Omicron. Thus this is also FALSE.
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"...if we are unlucky the next variant could be both more deadly and contagious and just like omicron be poorly defended against by previous infection of vaccine."
There is *zero* evidence that Omicron is more deadly, in fact *all* the evidence suggests it is much less deadly. Furthermore, *most* of the evidence suggests that the vaccine - and especially natural immunity - does indeed protect against Omicron. Thus this is also FALSE.
Whoa there Sparky! First, off, AC *didn't* say "that Omicron is more deadly". As far as I can see it wasn't even implied, never mind stated. Second, both vaccines and previous Covid infection offer protection against serious illness and bad outcomes - for a limited time; but they offer little or no protection against catching the Omicron variant. Omicron is well documented to have spread from one doubly-vaxxed person to another. So whether you have protection via a previous Covid infection or from any of th
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IIUC, the difference is that omnicron is well adapted to multiplying in the bronchial tubes rather than deeper in the lungs. This generally results in milder cases, but it means that antigens can't get at the primary infection, that is going to depend on TCells, which act more slowly.
OTOH, TCells preserved a durable immunity against the original SARs for over 5 years. So that's a good thing.
If this is correct, then a virus like omnicron COVID is going to be continually infectious, as rapid immunity will r
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~ "Natural immunity" doesn't appear to be relevant for covid. ~
Absolute BS.
Study, after Study shows (unsurprisingly) that COVID behaves just like most Corona viruses, and that Natural Immunity (i.e. having caught and recovered) provides the best possible immune response in patients that are re-infected. And, it lasts longer.
~ Flu, colds, etc, mutate rapidly and that is why they're a problem. ~
You mean, like COVID ?
~ You can kill covid off with vaccines, you just keep R below 1 until it no longer exists in h
Re: Too late, Omicron's already "vaccinating." (Score:2, Insightful)
Study, after Study shows (unsurprisingly) that COVID behaves just like most Corona viruses, and that Natural Immunity (i.e. having caught and recovered) provides the best possible immune response in patients that are re-infected. And, it lasts longer.
So what you are saying is, the best way to keep yourself from getting COVID is to get COVID? Wow, that's brilliant! (e_e)
Perhaps you've forgotten why people are trying to avoid COVID in the first place (and no, the answer to that isn't "the mainstream media").
Re: Too late, Omicron's already "vaccinating." (Score:4, Informative)
>"So what you are saying is, the best way to keep yourself from getting COVID is to get COVID? Wow, that's brilliant!"
As crazy as it sounds, getting infected with a far less dangerous strain that imparts some amount of immunity and protection against other strains is certainly a thing.
I would not want to be intentionally infected by an active virus for whatever protection that might impart, but for many, it is going to happen naturally, regardless (even if vaccinated). And it happening might signify the end of the crisis. Many virologists predicted this would happen- competing strains of less and less deadly forms end up imparting enough protection that C19 just fades into the background, like other endemic viruses.
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Except that's not happening with Covid. It's not becoming less deadly over time.
Re: Too late, Omicron's already "vaccinating." (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't sound crazy at all, cowpox (a non-deadly strain) was used to make the smallpox vaccine. However, do we actually know that that's what Omicron is yet? Of all these mild cases of Omicron that are being reported, how many of them were in previously uninfected and unvaccinated people?
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>"Except that's not happening with Covid. It's not becoming less deadly over time."
All the reasonably reliable info I have seen about Omicron is that it is far less deadly, living mostly in the upper respiratory and not moving to the lungs.
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MERS has an R value of 0.5, and it has been around for over 10 years (known cases).
Sure, but has near 10 cases a year at this point. This means there's an asymptomatic reservoir, but still the number of new cases is nearly zero.
Nipah virus also has a R around, or below 0.5, and has been around for at least 75 years. I could go on.
Highly misleading.
Nipah has an endemic zoonotic reservoir. Saying "Nipah Virus" is the same as saying "Coronavirus" (Not COVID/SARS/MERS)
Like influenza (and recently, coronaviruses), it likes to produce novel viruses after recombining in other animals.
Therefor, "Nipah Virus" has no R0, because every outbreak is new.
Re: Too late, Omicron's already "vaccinating." (Score:4, Insightful)
>"Natural immunity" doesn't appear to be relevant for covid."
That is nonsense on the highest order.
Of course it is relevant. COVID has been around forever. All affected species, including human, would be extinct many thousands of years ago if natural immunity didn't work. It is KNOWN to work with C19. It might not work to the level or flexibility that you expect or want, but to deny it is relevant is insanity.
>"Flu, colds, etc, mutate rapidly and that is why they're a problem."
And, yet, we survived, long before vaccinations. Of course, I much prefer a world WITH vaccinations, where there is less collateral damage with such survival.
">You can kill covid off with vaccines, you just keep R below 1 until it no longer exists in humans."
Nope. For one, such utopia of quickly vaccinating enough people across the entire earth, before it can mutate, is essentially impossible. Plus it can live in and mutate in OTHER animals. Plus, as we have already seen, vaccination does not prevent transmission or infection in later strains, so it can mutate right through vaccinations.
Vaccinations are a great thing. It is also why I am triple-vaccinated against COVID-19 and am also vaccinated against the flu every year. But if your objective is to try and completely stop C19 for all time, this cannot occur with our current technology.
Re: Too late, Omicron's already "vaccinating." (Score:4, Insightful)
Covid hasn't been around forever, it's a relatively new strain. You're thinking of coronaviruses, which is a much broader classification. And humans only survive today from coronaviruses because they interbred with Neanderthals who had evolved immunity over the prior 400,000 years.
"Natural immunity" fades for Covid in the space of 2-3 months. It's useless after that, hence the high reinfection rate.
We didn't survive flu or colds until we mingled with Neanderthals, which is why uncontacted communities in countries where this never happened can be wiped out very quickly.
It reduces transmission and infection. Christ on a pancake, do I really have to teach you conditional probability?
Let's start with a value for R0 (the number of people you'd expect to be infected). For most strains of Covid, you can use 3.5. For the latest strain, use the value of 6. We also need the average number of contacts, which seems to be about 16.
In the worst possible case, a vaccinated person has a 75% chance of not getting infected (ie: the virus actually takes hold, as opposed to getting wiped out from the start). There is a 55% chance that a vaccinated person will not pass the virus on. So, if you have vaccinated person A and vaccinated person B, you can calculate the probability of A getting infected AND THEN passing the virus on to person B, and thus calculate what the value for R would be.
You also need to calculate it for the best possible case. The best vaccines give a 92% chance of not getting infected. Assuming that the chance of passing on the virus remains the same, you can now do the same calculations and produce the value for R in this case as well.
If the value for R is less than 1, it makes bugger all difference whether the virus can live in other species. It will start to die out in humans and eventually cease to exist there.
Yes, the virus mutates. All viruses do. But the vaccines can be updated, just as they are for flu, so the value for R can be kept below 1 even if no human is being infected at the time. A mutation may also cause the virus to no longer infect humans. If it can't spread in humans, there is no particular benefit to being potentially able to infect them. We've seen this with other viruses.
There are also animal vaccines. "Many states also are vaccinating wild animals (mainly raccoons) to prevent the spread of rabies. Instead of trying to catch every animal and give it a shot, they use a special type of food vaccine that works when the animal eats it." (Source: CDC) Precisely what stops you from developing an animal vaccine for COV2? Nothing? Then it is of absolutely zero significance that the virus can live in animals. We can still destroy it in those species.
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>"Natural immunity" fades for Covid in the space of 2-3 months. It's useless after that, hence the high reinfection rate."
Natural immunity for ANY virus fades over time. It is not useless after that because of T-cell memory, which can quickly produce anti-bodies to fight the same and often mutated variants for potentially years after recovery (or vaccination). Protection is more than just or only preventing infection, it is preventing severe illness or death, and that is what happens when you have no c
Re: Too late, Omicron's already "vaccinating." (Score:4, Interesting)
Natural immunity for ANY virus fades over time.
This is quibbling, and in any case too vague a statement to be negatable. Antibodies to, say, measles gradually disappear, so you could say "natural immunity to measles fades over time", but for practical purposes it doesn't. Getting infected or vaccinated gives effective lifetime protection against both symptomatic measles infection and spreading the disease to others.
What's different about some coronaviruses, particularly SARS-COV-2, is that it is that they can evade provoking any innate immune system response, and the innate immune response is needed to tell your adaptive immune system to make more antibodies. This means you can incubate enough virus to infect others before you even have symptoms, even if you have natural immunity.
So while it's a huge overstatement to say that natural immunity counts for *nothing*, more people getting infected is not going to lead to herd immunity. Symptomatic cases and hospitalizations will probably go down, but the virus is going to continue to circulate in some strain or another for a long time. This is going to have a long term impact on immunocompromised patients and their families, and you're going to continue to see those people wearing masks for years to come.
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Of course it is relevant. COVID has been around forever. All affected species, including human, would be extinct many thousands of years ago if natural immunity didn't work. It is KNOWN to work with C19. It might not work to the level or flexibility that you expect or want, but to deny it is relevant is insanity.
There's some seriously broken logic here.
1) COVID is a novel virus. It has existed for 2 years, not all time. You must have meant "coronaviruses"
2) A virus with a 0.01% mortality rate for breeding age adults would not come anywhere close to wiping out the species, even if it never reduced in virulence.
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Corporations have captured government and all regulators. This is the definition of fascism.
It's actually the opposite of fascism, in which the government would have strong control over the corporations. The word you're looking for is corporatocracy.
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Interesting... sounds like socialism to me.
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Nothing returned to the taxpayers? Didn't we get vaccinated?
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Hopefully... if we can afford it.
Planning for failure (Score:4, Funny)
The next step is seeing how the new pan-coronavirus vaccine interacts with people who were previously vaccinated or previously sick. The next step is seeing how the new pan-coronavirus vaccine interacts with people who were previously vaccinated or previously sick.
In my opinion, they should plan to complete that step on the first attempt!
Even if there is a chance of failure, you don't usually want failure to be the plan.
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I'm not disagreeing with you, but what supports your opinion?
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The plan was so nice, they said it twice.
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>"In my opinion, they should plan to complete that step on the first attempt!"
My fear with this type of multi-target vaccine is that it could cause an auto-immune storm of some sort or maybe just a wear response across the board. It might overwhelm the immune system with what looks to be many, many invaders at the same time. Maybe this doesn't work that way, I don't know.
It is why I am not a fan of getting lots of different vaccinations AT THE SAME TIME (or too close together). I intentionally space o
can't see this going down well. (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem is that there have been issues attributed to US military vaccines in the past, like Gulf War Syndrome. I don't know enough about it to say if the claims were medically justified.
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I'm not sure how a vaccine that only one side received would have caused that.
If it was biological then, perhaps via a biological weapon that no-one knows of? Or a pathogen in the region at that time that no-one knows of?
In any case, it ought to be something that affected a number of soldiers across the belligerents, be it biological, chemical, or something else, or protective measures that were taken (which could include vaccines) against t
Re: can't see this going down well. (Score:3)
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For the better part of this year I've studied ballistic science, including terminal ballistics. I see the superficial value of using DU for exterior and terminal ballistics. But if you consider the impact on health of those naturally incendiary projectiles (DU easily ignites on such high kinetic energy impacts)
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I don't even have words for the gross disregard of human life there. If the military was aware of the effects, which it ought to have, they were deliberately, strategically fucking up that region for decades to come.
A simple A10 pilot probably was not aware. Bu I know ti since roughly 1985, and at that time I was in highschool.
So I would bluntly exaggerate and claim: "the military was/is aware".
German tanks/airborn guns use Wolfram ammunition, it is not radioactive, but honestly: I have no clue if it is sig
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The terminal ballistics science concerning how high kinetic penetrators interact with armor dates back to the 60's.
That uranium dust comes with bad health implication also isn't new.
As far as I'm concerned depleted uranium for ammunition was chosen for basically 3 reasons.
It's high density, which makes for a good material to increase the mass of a projectile while not having to increase the dimensions of
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The "Gulf War Syndrom" is most likely heavy metal poisoning from uranium ammunition.
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Yeah, it's normally the Left that's rabidly anti-government, anti-corporate, anti-big-pharma but even those normal historical issue cleave-lines have been subsumed by politics. Since Biden is president, the Left cheerfully (some might say blindly) supports huge pharma conglomerates and dosing hundreds of millions of people with vaccines that sidestepped the normal evaluation and approval process.
Who'da thunk that it would take a little thing like a crisis to make the Left toss many of their fundamental bel
Re:can't see this going down well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Making my own firewood in the forest, every 10 years I get a tetanus booster and every 5 years a TBE booster.
To me at least it seems like the most normal thing in the world that not all vaccination makes you resistant and or immune forever.
Re:can't see this going down well. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not even 4 months out from formal FDA approval and already facing the prospects of recommended 3rd and 4th boosters, even before there has been time to study when is the optimal spacing between doses, and only very, very recently whether different formulations could be combined.
Uncertainty breeds suspicion, especially when being coerced.
But calling people who have such questions idiots is certainly helping, fuckwit.
Optimised to the bone vs. proved to work (Score:5, Interesting)
even before there has been time to study when is the optimal spacing between doses,
We're in the middle of a pandemic.
We go for whatever regimen has been scientifically shown to work.
We don't have the time luxury to tweak the most perfectest timing.
Authorities are happy with "Scientist have managed to do a very large scale study on the single exact combination of dose == X ng and delay from previous dose == Y months, the results have been peer-review, shown to the evaluation comittee, and all concluded this is good"
(with X and Y simply based on a whichever combination has shown to work on the smaller scale earlier phases, where the few combination that make most sense were tested).
We don't have the luxury of "we spent 10 year studying multiple large scale studies with every possible combination of [X, Y] and further bisecting between similar results, the results of every single of these studies has been peer review, evaluated by the commitee, and several meta-analysis have been published on top of that, and we have found that we can actually reduce X by 45%, move Y exactly 8 days earlier and still have the exact same good results".
Case in point: despite being more or less the same platform Pfizer/Biontec and Moderna have vastly different doses, because each was tested simply with the dosage that showed the most promises in the early combined Phase 1/2.
Turns out the massive dose of Moderna is mostly overkill, can be reduced. And still provokes a much higher response
But back when vaccination start, the "overkill" does was scientifically proven to be good enough in multiple dozens of patients and to successfully protect against the virus.
and only very, very recently whether different formulations could be combined.
And that's the easier part because in most case is will be just permutation between the two dominant RNA platforms.
Which is happening anyway in the wild (due to availability) so you can even get some raw number from there too.
Re:Optimised to the bone vs. proved to work (Score:5, Insightful)
For what we know those have been shown to vary quite a bit from individual to individual. Measuring anti-body levels over time could help to develop a model for an approximation of a time frame where booster shots make the most sense. Though of course by definition it will be suboptimal if such a spacing is approximated by some generalized model, because optimal is determined on a case by case basis using some kind of feedback control approach.
And in any case this would mean drawing some blood for a blood test if it is to be accurate. So even more needles. I'm sure the "skeptics" will get behind that measuring method easily...
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Actually the overkill dosage was a good idea. Curevac tried to be clever and to dose their mRNA vaccine as low as possible so they could sell more doses for the same amount of production. Turned out their dosage was too low and they had to withdraw their EMA application as a result, losing money and having to destroy a shitload of produced vaccine doses in the process.
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If you do not do the science right, how could it be "scientifically proven to work"?
They did do the science right, and it was scientifically proven to work. In future clinical trials, the researchers will change some of the parameters (such as dosage and time between doses) to see if it works better.
Obligatory car analogy: you're saying that a new model of a car that gets 50 MPG proves that the previous model that got 45 MPG wasn't a working car.
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But calling people who have such questions idiots is certainly helping, fuckwit.
If you were being intellectually honest then you would recognize that all their questions have been answered but they refuse to accept them because they subscribe to anti-intellectualism. This means means they do not put the answers from scientific experts above those of TV and radio propagandists who tell lies for profit can call themselves "entertainers" when it's legally beneficial.
Nobody should coddle anti-intellectualists merely because they chose to delude themselves with professional liars that vali
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normal trials take 3-5 years because they don't have the levels of funding and they have to wait for there turn at access to test subjects etc etc. The trials themselves do not take 3-5 years, most of that is administration and paperwork.
A little more accurately stated, normal trials take 3-5 years because they don't want to do any part of phase 2 or 3 until phase 1 is fully completed and proven to pass. Due to the funding and the demand, phase 2 and 3 on these vaccines were started significantly earlier than a typical new vaccine.
Largely proven right ? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Largely proven right ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignore deaths. Go with long term impairment.
Imagine the hassle if your loved one is in the hospital. You may not be able to visit them, and your household still needs to do "normal stuff" except now you have to pick up the load. That's a huge hassle.
Or imagine your loved one suffering long COVID, where they can't do a lot of the things anymore because of various ailments. Now you have to adapt to a new way of life - either having to pick up their share of the chores, to doing new things because it's no longer possible to do activities together anymore.
Hassle of doing a funeral and such is easy by comparison. Just one and done.
The months of suffering in a hospital or at home not being able to do what they were once able to do? That enacts a far greater emotional toll on everyone.
Re:Largely proven right ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with this and can give some personal experience (albeit not COVID related). The summer before COVID hit, my mother-in-law fell and hit her head. That started a 60+ day hospital stay that included brain bleeding, strokes, sepsis, gall bladder surgery, and open heart surgery. There were many days when my wife's mother had no clue who anybody was or what was going on. Needless to say, my wife spent almost every day in the hospital with her mother trying to help out in any way possible and helping to advocate for her mother.
This meant that I needed to not only be there emotionally for my wife, but to pick up the slack and do the various things that she would do while also doing everything I do. I would pick up our boys from school, drop our oldest off at his summer job, take my boys into my office so I could do work while they waited, etc. I even had to channel my wife when my oldest son had an unsafe situation at work. I'm not usually good with confrontations. That's my wife's department, but she was unavailable so I had to step up. At one point, leaving the hospital, I got into a car accident with my boys in the car. It wasn't bad (truck didn't stop quickly enough and rammed into me at a stop light), but again I needed to deal with it alone because my wife couldn't get away from her mother and get to us quickly enough.
The whole situation was stressful for everyone for a multitude of reasons. 60+ days was bad enough. Now imagine if this was for a few years or for life (since we don't know how long Long COVID lasts). Imagine needing to do everything because your partner can't go from the bed to the couch without needing to catch their breath. Imagine your partner having to do everything because you can't seem to hold onto a thought. In fact, imagine just trying to hold down a job with these issues. I can speak from my 60+ day experience and say that stress levels would be through the roof and you'd feel emotionally drained the entire time. You do NOT want to be in that situation!
Re:Largely proven right ? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not much of a hassle at this point. Early on when the various electronic scheduling systems were in their infancy it was, but that was largely due to a combination of demand and poor coding of those systems.
Now it's available through a simple scheduling through one's pharmacy of choice, or through those somewhat more matured electronic scheduling systems, and sometimes even at first-come, first-serve pop-up clinic events. And no one is being charged out-of-pocket for it. If you have insurance they're being billed, but if not no one seems to be sweating it.
Even many employers are getting in on the act, allowing workers paid time off for the day or two after getting their shots. Some like mine aren't requiring us to even file for PTO, just take the days while still getting paid as usual. Work even arranged private vaccination events for us, both back in the day for the original rollout and for the recent followup booster, similar to the flu-shot clinics they've organized for us every year.
Re: can't see this going down well. (Score:3)
Re: can't see this going down well. (Score:4, Informative)
They didn't 'pull' J&J vaccine, They just recommend Moderna or Pfizer over it.
Re:can't see this going down well. (Score:5, Insightful)
This virus is about 2 yrs old, the vaccines were developed in record time compared to earlier ones. That didn't happen in a vacuum. The Bush Jr. administration was funding mRNA vaccine research in the early 2000s. Only now have we reached a stage where we are relatively sure the technology is safe. And we're starting to research it for other diseases.
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I really doubt the "Bush administration" had anything to do with BioNtech/Pfitzer.
Hint: BioNtech is a _GERMAN_ company and Pfitzer only helped scaling up production.
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Who said anything about BioNtech/Pfizer? Do think BioNtech/Pfizer were the only ones doing mRNA research?
Re: can't see this going down well. (Score:2)
Here's a link that does a pretty decent job explaining it, but feel free to dig around for more sources or verification if you don't like this one. https://khn.org/news/vaccine
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We have safety data going back to 2008. I found a paper from then about an mRNA cancer vaccine experiment. It was safe then. All that's new is raising the numbers to where we can see "per million" negative effects.
Testing must be getting difficult. (Score:3)
Re:Testing must be getting difficult. (Score:5, Interesting)
Your observation brings up an interesting point that people working in drug development (specifically, clinical trial design) deal with quite often, which is, how do we determine efficacy in the indicated population if there already exists a standard of care treatment? In this case, as you noted, a large portion of the US population has already received vaccines, and the ones who have not are unlikely to volunteer for a clinical trial to determine the efficacy and safety profile of a new one.
But in fact, this does not pose a significant problem: precisely because most people have been vaccinated, it is no longer of primary relevance to measure the efficacy in a vaccine-naive population. What you actually want to measure is how well this new vaccine performs compared to people who may have been previously vaccinated, but do not get this new vaccine--in other words, how much additional protection does this vaccine confer? The answer to that question is what the FDA will be looking at because if over half the US population has already gotten some kind of COVID vaccine, the way this new vaccine behaves (both in terms of efficacy and safety) in this population is just as important as how it might behave in a vaccine-naive population.
A similar principle applies in general to many drugs with existing treatments. For example, the initial management of Type 2 diabetes often involves metformin, a widely used drug with an excellent safety profile. When new antidiabetic medications are researched, the trial sponsor isn't going to exclude patients who are metformin-naive for the sake of determining efficacy in a population with no previous antidiabetic therapy, because in real-world practice, patients already commonly have it prescribed to them.
FIH (first in human) trials are a bit of a different story, because the goal is to establish that the drug is safe for the purposes of enrolling patients who have the condition the drug is supposed to treat. So these trials generally involve dose-escalation designs on a very small number of healthy subjects. For a vaccine, this would require enrollment of both vaccine-naive and vaccinated volunteers, because such a trial needs to establish that it is safe to enroll both of these groups in a larger Phase II trial.
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What you actually want to measure is how well this new vaccine performs compared to people who may have been previously vaccinated, but do not get this new vaccine--in other words, how much additional protection does this vaccine confer?
Yes, but measuring this with statistical significant results is much more expensive than the initial clinical trials for "vaccinated vs. non vaccinated": It took a group of ~30k people and ~3 months to collect sufficient evidence for the protection against symptomatic disease, where the groups turned out to differ by a factor of 20 in terms of risk for symptomatic disease. Now if you need to collect similar solid evidence for the advantage of a new vaccine that, for example, provides 90% protection versus a
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What you say is true, but it's not what the original issue was about, which was recruitment of unvaccinated people for large scale confirmatory trials. Your point, that the sample size needs to be substantially larger to measure a smaller effect size due to a population that already has some degree of immunity, may or may not be an actual problem. The reason why is because during the time the major vaccine trials were being conducted, the US was under lockdown, distancing was enforced, and there were no v
Re: Testing must be getting difficult. (Score:2)
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I did not say they did not need to enroll ANY unvaccinated people. Safety is highly unlikely to be worse in the unvaccinated population than in the previously vaccinated. And if it were, then anyone who is unvaccinated can get the old vaccines first, then get the new one--not that any of them would.
Yet another name for 800mg Motrin? (Score:2)
It's like the Army's fix-all for everything!
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I didn't serve, but my cousin and girlfriend did, so I spent a lot of time on base.
Broken bone? Motrin.
Fever? Motrin.
AIDS? Motrin.
Another zero-liability vaccine? (Score:2)
Why are emergency use authorizations still a thing?
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Imagine how much money we can save by not staffing Fire Stations 24 hours a day, or 911 call centers?
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You do know the 'zero liability' thing has nothing to do with EUAs, right?
ofcourse.. (Score:2)
Can someone link me to developments in cures? (Score:2)
Re: Can someone link me to developments in cures? (Score:2)
Robert Smith cannot carry a happy tune. Oh, sorry, that sort of cure.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/... [www.nhs.uk]
There are two.
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You aren't familiar with their catalog. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Glad to hear (Score:2)
"Phase 1 of human trials, which tested the vaccine against Omicron and the other variants, wrapped up this month,"
Yes, 100,000 soldiers were volunteered for this by their CO. :-)
Just mix them together (Score:2)
Not quite (Score:4, Insightful)
Again? Did I read wrong or bad title? (Score:2)
So why does the title make it sound like it carries the correct mix-and-match of strains? Don't get me wrong, MMR is a godsend if you ask anyone who had to go through early age vaccines . . . another one would be great.
Come on
So it's a Swiss Army knife? (Score:3)
This sounds like the equivalent of molecular Swiss Army knife. I'd be interested to see how quickly they can adapt it when a new strain comes out.
On a related note does anyone know if every new modification to the mRNA vaccine, or I suppose this Army vaccine, needs to go through the same level of trials as the first batch?
Future variants will always be a problem (Score:2)
This vaccine might be effective against a number of past variants. But none of these past variants are currently active. The evolution of the virus has moved on. The nature of virus evolution is that variants will keep popping up, and the ones that can survive will thrive. Surviving will include being able to thwart whatever new vaccine comes along, because any variant that is effectively controlled by a vaccine, by definition won't survive.
A new vaccine is a good thing, but we should be cautious in our opt
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But none of these past variants are currently active.
I beg your pardon, but Alpha and Delta are currently quite active, and merrily killing around 2,000 people per day in the US.
Soccer Ball Shaped? (Score:2)
Like, they've made balls out of lots of shapes, but the classic one has 60 faces, not 24. And there hasn't really been anything based around 24 faces. I mean, I guess a deltoidal icositetrahedron might look ball-ish if you squint at it?
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That's what they told you. In reality, Space Force took a bunch of these non-vaccinated service members off planet as reserves in case they need to re-populate the Earth after all the vaccines fail and everybody dies of myocarditis induced heart failure in a few years.
They weren't fired... They've been iced.
Nothing good at salon.com (Score:2, Informative)
I should have known before even clicking that link. "Good article" and "salon.com" pretty much never belongs in the same sentence.
Article isn't even about Fauci. It's just a long rant against conservatives and conservative ways of thinking.
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Article isn't even about Fauci. It's just a long rant against conservatives and conservative ways of thinking.
The "conservative" way of thinking is don't get vaccinated, don't wear a mask, don't social distance, ignore the science. Also, "This book might make a white kid uncomfortable so it needs to be banned." Also also, "This book has facts about history which contradicts everything I've said so it needs to be banned."
If "conservatives" have such thin skins and can't accept the truth, they deserve to be
Re: Nothing good at salon.com (Score:4, Informative)
You are just parroting the nonsense spread by the Democrat party about what Conservatives are supposedly thinking
In June, and again in recent weeks, Texas legislators passed a law shaping how teachers approach instruction touching on race and gender. And Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican with presidential ambitions, took aim at school library shelves, directing education officials to investigate “criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography.”
Apparently gimpy Abbott's own words [nytimes.com] aren't what "conservatives" are thinking.
A Texas state lawmaker is asking schools statewide to tell him whether they currently hold any of around 850 books on a list he has compiled, explaining that he is targeting materials that "might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex."
Same state, 850 books a "conservative" legislator wants banned [npr.org] because they might make kids feel uncomfortable or expose them to other ideas. Again, not what "conservatives" are thinking.
Robin Steenman pulled her daughter out of public school over a mask mandate last year.
She's now in private school and misses public school. But Steenman is keeping her out not because of masks, but because of lesson plans she says make students feel bad about their race.
Poor kid. Might have to learn about slavery and racism [cnn.com] and how their grandparents were probably shouting at black people trying to get an education.
Last year, the all-White school board unanimously banned a list of educational resources that included a children's book about Rosa Parks, Malala Yousafzai's autobiography, and CNN's Sesame Street town hall on racism.
Huh. An all white school board [cnn.com] banning a book about one of those upstart blacks who fought for the same right as everyone else, or how Big Bird is a threat to children.
Twigg said he wants to "see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff."
Book burning was a practice perpetuated in Nazi Germany in order to oppress authors and ideas that were in opposition to Nazi ideology.
Wow. Republicans acting like Nazis [npr.org]. Who would have guessed?
But please, tell me again how I'm parroting nonsense. Or are you saying all these thin skinned snowflake "conservatives" are lying?
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Conservatives are going to run out of voters at this rate. Every day I read the Herman Cain awards for a good laugh.
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Oh? And what pray tell would the Army get from unleashing some malady on the U.S. pop.? Hell, they are taking a big risk even doing this because if it goes south, they will get the blame. If the Army were really wanting to screw the pop., they'd not have even bothered.
Re: sit back I wait for a LONG test cycle on this (Score:2)
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Since you're already vaccinated, and will soon have had your booster, that's likely to be a reasonable position for you to take. Otherwise, though....
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Ah, another Reagan Republican. He's the one who turned the Beltway Bandits loose on the Fed. Gov. by defunding government and funding his buddies. If you trust a for-profit company over the government, my guess is that you will deny accepting any Social Security and Medicare when you reach your dotage.
Absolutely. The moment you stop taxing me for them. What, no option for that? So, I have to pay into your systems as normal, but when I try to extract at least some of my investment back, I'm a hypocrite?
Fuck you, no.
Re: Just no.... (Score:2)
But of course it is "fuck you got mine"... (Score:2)
Absolutely. The moment you stop taxing me for them. What, no option for that? So, I have to pay into your systems as normal, but when I try to extract at least some of my investment back, I'm a hypocrite?
Fuck you, no.
Ah, so it is NOT a matter of trust or principle but merely of your own greed and selfishness.
Don't wanna share but still want to take from the common pot everyone else has been paying into - when YOU need more than you've put in.
You really think what you paid into Social Security and Medicare would cover ANYTHING without everyone else paying THEIR share to cover YOUR greedy ass?
That's not even stealing. People mostly steal out of necessity.
You on the other hand are simply being a SCUMBAG.
Re: Government created Covidâ¦. (Score:2)
Re: No thanks (Score:2)
The problem with a d36 is that it's too easy for the DM to rig.