Tjf1967
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2020
I did. People have rights. One of them is not too endanger others. If you choose not to get vaccinated then keep your distance. Wear a mask. It's not too much to ask
Last edited:
The New Normal
- Thread starter Harvey
- Start date
- Status
Campgottagopee
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2020
You certainly make a very valid point. Heck, VT did it and their numbers are some of the best.
Marz, While at UNC did ya ever cross paths with Ralph Baric who is a world expert on the the coronaviruses?
He’s worked a lot on those little things.
MarzNC
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2020
Nope. Looks like Baric came to UNC-Chapel Hill just about the time I finished grad school in 1987. We are about the same age. He was in California for a few years before joining UNC-CH School of Public Health, now known as the Gillings School of Global Public Health. Dennis Gillings was the CEO and co-founder of Quintiles, where I worked.
That's pretty cool that Baric has been working on research related to SARS-CoV-2 for most of his career. He got interested in coronaviruses a few years before SARS. The following interview is from March 2020, soon after the first clusters were identified in the U.S. His comment about "contemporary human coronaviruses" caught my eye. He was talking about coronaviruses that case common cold symptoms. I just found a good article from 2016 about those, but had heard about them over a year ago.
March 2020
" . . .
“There’s lots of viruses that jump between species — flu is the best example — which is a disease of birds and mammals” that then spills over into humans. “But there had not been any major human pandemic virus that was in our recent memory. It turns out the contemporary human coronaviruses — of which there are four that you’ve been infected with and I’ve been infected with — they emerged 100 to about 800 years ago. And there’s no recorded information about what disease they caused or whether they caused any disease. And even if they caused disease, it probably would have been written off as flu.
. . ."
MarzNC
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2020
There are lots of UNC-CH alumni actively involved in COVID-19 research. It's a major research university with a huge medical research complex, along with the Gillings School of Public Health. A key scientist in the development of Moderna is Kizzmekia Corbett. She's actually from the county that UNC-CH is in and got her Ph.D. from UNC in microbiology and immunology. She and Dr. Fauci were the UNC-CH commencement speakers in May 2021.
x10003q
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2020
Didn't Desantis close the international borders of Florida? Despite his border closing actions, Covid is exploding in Florida. It can be so confusing.
Harvey
Administrator
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2020
Vermont has at least 2 advantages. Limited urban areas. And VT is easier to "cut off" vs NY. NY Metro isn't easy to unravel.
Sbob
Well-known member
- Joined
- Apr 20, 2021
Confusing yes . The news seems to be all about the Delta variant but since there is no test other than genome testing which isn’t being done , So are numbers just an estimate? There was a disagreement between the CDC and Florida state reporting of the stats.
Also Pfizer seems to be only 60% effective. So how does the vaccine brand distribution by state come into play?
Since I had the Pfizer shot I’m thinking about getting a Moderna shot too ? Bad idea?
Also Pfizer seems to be only 60% effective. So how does the vaccine brand distribution by state come into play?
Since I had the Pfizer shot I’m thinking about getting a Moderna shot too ? Bad idea?
MarzNC
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2020
Genomic testing is being done in many states. Also in many countries. Where Delta moved in more than a couple months ago, it's coming up as well over 95% of the samples tested. In the U.S. it's true that not all test samples are checked for which variant it is but my impression is that it's being done for a lot of the samples from patients in a hospital. Keep in mind that not all states report all of their data to the CDC. For instance, Texas won't share county-level data with the CDC. Florida hasn't been wanting to share data publicly for quite a while. That's one reason I don't bother to check stats for Florida that often. I have no confidence that the stats are meaningful.
January 18, 2021
Fired Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones turns herself in to jail and tests positive for Covid-19 | CNN
The former Florida data analyst who has accused state officials of covering up the extent of the pandemic has turned herself in, days after a warrant was issued for her arrest, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) said.
www.cnn.com
If you are referring to the one study that was reported recently, that's the first report comparing Pfizer and Moderna in the period after May 2020 when Delta was starting to spread fast in most regions of the U.S. Did you read the actual pre-print or a news report?
I wouldn't start second guessing FDA and CDC recommendations. While there are studies in the UK being done for "mix and match" those are because of concerns with Astra Zeneca. While a third shot is probably useful for a small percentage of high risk people, there is no basis for thinking that mixing two different mRNA vaccines offers more protection. Add an mRNA vaccine to another vaccine based on a different approach to vaccine development may be useful, but there isn't enough known yet.
Here's the pre-print I mentioned. The study was a case-control study done in several states. As with any statistical analysis, it pays to understand the population involved and what questions were of primary interest. For instance, when I researched knee injuries after I messed up a knee in 2012 (not skiing) I didn't pay much attention to studies done with adults ages 20-40.
August 6, 2021, pre-print of Mayo Clinic study (copy&paste may have missed some text)
Comparison of two highly-effective mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 during periods of Alpha and Delta variant prevalence
" . . .
Discussion
The occurrence of breakthrough infections and reports of diminished neutralization of emergent variants by vaccine-elicited sera mandate the continual monitoring of the comparative effectiveness and durability of COVID-19 vaccines.8,9 Overall, we find that
in our study population from Minnesota, both vaccines strongly reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe
COVID-19, but individuals vaccinated with mRNA-1273 were about half as likely to experience
breakthrough infections as individuals vaccinated with BNT162b2. This relative risk reduction
conferred by mRNA-1273 was also observed in other states, including in Florida during a recent
COVID-19 outbreak. The effectiveness of both vaccines, particularly BNT162b2, was lower in July
compared to prior months. Finally, the rates of complications experienced by patients with
breakthrough infections were similar between those vaccinated with mRNA-1273 or BNT162b2.
mRNA-1273 and BNT162b2 were originally designed, tested, and proven to reduce the
burden of symptomatic disease, hospitalization, and death related to SARS-CoV-2 infection. This
study further supports the effectiveness of both vaccines in doing so, even despite the evolution
of more transmissible viral variants. It is important to realize that most vaccines are not 100%
effective, particularly against asymptomatic infections. For example, the estimated effectiveness
of seasonal influenza vaccines has ranged from 19-60% over the past decade.16 While COVID-
19 mRNA vaccines have been shown to be drastically more effective than this, the occurrence of
breakthrough infections is indeed still expected. We observed a pronounced reduction in the
effectiveness of BNT162b2 coinciding with the surging prevalence of the Delta variant in the
United States, but this temporal association does not imply causality, and there are likely
several factors contributing to changes in vaccine effectiveness over time. Consistent with
our findings, a previous test-negative case-control study found that full vaccination with
BNT162b2 was less effective in preventing symptomatic infection with the Delta variant
(88.0%, 95% CI: 85-90.1%) than with the Alpha variant (93.7%, 95% CI: 91.6-95.3%),
although it was highly effective against both.17
Several factors could contribute to the observed differences in effectiveness of mRNA- 1273 and BNT162b2. Although both are nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccines encoding the prefusion stabilized SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein, there are differences in the vaccination regimen and formulation.18,19 BNT162b2 is administered as 30μg/0.3mL (100 μg/mL) doses 21 days apart20 and the Moderna vaccine is administered as 100μg/0.5mL (200 μg/mL) doses 28 days apart.21 Assuming similar sized constructs, this means that each mRNA-1273 dose provides three times more mRNA copies of the Spike protein than BNT162b2, which could result in more effective priming of the immune response. There has not been a head-to-head comparison of the neutralizing antibody titers elicited by BNT162b2 versus mRNA-1273, but such a study could provide important context for our results. Certain adverse effects, such as myalgia and arthralgia, were observed more frequently after vaccination with mRNA-1273 than BNT162b2 in their respective clinical trials, and it can be speculated that this increased reactogenicity is paralleled by increased immunogenicity.3,4 Furthermore, there are differences in the lipid composition of the nanoparticles used for packaging the mRNA content of There are some limitations of this study. First, these cohorts are not demographically representative of the American population (Table 1, Table S1), which may limit the generalizability of our findings. Similar real world clinical studies on larger and more diverse populations from various health systems are needed to more robustly compare the effectiveness of mRNA-1273 and BNT162b2. Second, although this study accounts for geographic variability by matching individuals from the same state, these conclusions should continue to be tested longitudinally throughout the United States and globally. Third, it is
(DSPC), and cholesterol whereas the lipid nanoparticle of mRNA-1273 is composed of SM-102,
PEG-DMG, DSPC, and cholesterol.22 The structures of the cationic lipids (ALC-0315 and SM-
mRNA-1273 and BNT162b2. BNT162b2 has a lipid nanoparticle composed of ALC-0315, ALC-0159, distearolyphosphatidycholine
102) in each formulation are shown in Figure S5.
There are some limitations of this study. First, these cohorts are not demographically representative of the American population (Table 1, Table S1), which may limit the generalizability of our findings. Similar real world clinical studies on larger and more diverse populations from various health systems are needed to more robustly compare the effectiveness of mRNA-1273 and BNT162b2. Second, although this study accounts for geographic variability by matching individuals from the same state, these conclusions should continue to be tested longitudinally throughout the United States and globally.
Third, it is possible that our vaccine effectiveness estimates are impacted by unknown exposure risk variables which were missed in the matching procedure, although the similar risks for infection, hospitalization, ICU admission,
and death in the week following the first dose suggest that all of the compared cohorts had similar
baseline risks for the defined outcomes at the time of study enrollment. Finally, while we did
observe a recent reduction in vaccine effectiveness in July, we did not analyze the risk of infection
relative to the date of vaccination. The reduced effectiveness could be due to waning immunity
over time, the dynamic landscape of SARS-CoV-2 variants, or other factors that were not
considered here.
Our observational study suggests that while both mRNA COVID-19 vaccines strongly protect against infection and severe disease, there are differences in their real-world effectiveness relative to each other and relative to prior months of the pandemic. Larger studies with more diverse populations are warranted to guide critical pending public and global health decisions, such as the optimal timing for booster doses and which vaccines should be administered to individuals who have not yet received one dose. As we continue to vigilantly monitor longitudinal and comparative vaccine effectiveness in the coming months, this study emphasizes the importance of vaccination to reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and its associated complications."
. . ."
- Status
