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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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This is only puzzling if you think the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are highly effective.

And that the Chinese communist party has the welfare of their people as their top priority.

Or that

Personally think you’d have to believe CCP level propaganda to think Pfizer and Moderna are not highly effective for high risk groups to protect against the most serve outcomes/death.

That is quite the change in positioning relative to their initial billing. It might even be true, but it doesn't do much at all if the goal is something akin to zero COVID, particularly if the pricing would be anything like what Western nations paid.

Both unfortunately and fortunately, this is almost certainly wrong. That may be the mainstream media narrative, but it's the result of a little bit of bad science and a whole lot of bad science reporting. The science is tricky because a lot of different things are happening at once: vaccine rollout, vaccines waning, variants changing, population getting infected, etc. But despite really promising initial apparent effectiveness against infection, we have every reason to believe herd immunity against coronaviruses is impossible because the human immune system's immune protection from infection (i.e. mostly antibody based) wanes too quickly (as opposed to protection from severe disease which appears to be more driven by long-lived T cells). The original studies were misleading because they didn't have the time to look at long enough after vaccination.

The fortunately part is that it doesn't appear the virus has changed enough to noticeably evade the vaccines (by which I mean 3 doses of one of the mRNA vaccines) at all. The reduced effectiveness against Omicron appears to be due to the virus being better at evading the immune system not due to a mismatch between the vaccine and the virus. Although that's difficult to tell because it's hard to find an entirely immune naive individual to expose to Omicron (either the actual virus or a vaccine). From that perspective, China would actually be an interesting place to do some reason and get some more solid data... but that doesn't seem likely to happen.

Source: listening to a lot of TWiV. Apologies, writing in a rush, so not tracking down good specific episodes.

The reduced effectiveness against Omicron appears to be due to the virus being better at evading the immune system not due to a mismatch between the vaccine and the virus. Although that's difficult to tell because it's hard to find an entirely immune naive individual to expose to Omicron (either the actual virus or a vaccine).

One approach: why not engineer a new virus that the vaccine doesn't protect against and that mimics Omicron's ability to evade the immune system? It could give us deep insights into future pandemics.

One approach: why not engineer a new virus that the vaccine doesn't protect against and that mimics Omicron's ability to evade the immune system? It could give us deep insights into future pandemics.

"Hey we've made cancer airborne and contagious, you're welcome! We're science - we're all about coulda, not shoulda."

From that perspective, China would actually be an interesting place to do some reason and get some more solid data... but that doesn't seem likely to happen.

I feel that China has already done more than enough research on novel corona viruses.

This is a cheap shot at China. It's of course possible to research corona viruses without doing gain of function research.

The initial billing was in respect to a virus that is now extinct. The vaccines were super effective against the original strain of COVID. If we had managed to roll them out globally in March of 2021, COVID would likely have been eradicated.

No, there's no way. Far, far too many animal reservoirs, and even when the vaccines were effective the longevity of the immunity was too short. Then there's the question of whether there would have been a similar number of cases but a much higher proportion of asymptomatic ones (i.e. the debate over whether the vaccine actually provided sterilizing immunity or just decreasing symptoms below the threshold of detectability).

Maybe if we had remarkably broad monitoring procedures (not feeling great? Swab in your bathroom, stick it in this tube and get same-day next gen sequencing!) that sounded the alarm much sooner after a new pathogen emerges we could prevent it. The experience from this pandemic killed that idea for a generation or two, though.

Mystery solved then, right? The CCP doesn't need to drop $50 billion on Western vaccines that are marketed on the basis that they are "highly effective for high-risk groups to protect against the most severe outcomes and death", particularly when doing so would be a declaration that they're unable to produce their own equivalent. This isn't a confusing policy decision.

particularly when doing so would be a declaration that they're unable to produce their own equivalent

I think that this is an important addition to your initial explanation.

The CCP might be willing to lose face if Western vaccines could e.g. reduce transmission to a minimum, but not to save a relatively marginal number of lives whose deaths won't be officially attributed to covid anyway.

My assumption is that the ccp either believes their own propaganda with respect to the quality of their vaccines OR they are simply refusing to import western vaccines out of some kind of misguided national pride. I’d love to know if the leadership and other important Chinese officials have used moderna or phizer vaccines (not that we are ever likely to find this out but it would be a great example of revealed preferences)

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