Fear and Loathing, a Rat Flu Odyssey

[The AD]

Not "is natural immunity superior or inferior to vaccine mediated immunity." When the average cost of a hospital stay is $50,000 vs a couple vaccine doses at $20 each, and with transmission cycles leading to wave after wave of infections without an approach to herd immunity, there really should be no argument at all.

Before there was a vaccine you could make an argument (even if it wasn't a very good one) to support just letting the virus burn through the population and--perhaps--we'd come out on the other side with a large % of the population with some measure of immunity. As soon as a safe vaccine was available that argument made exactly zero sense anymore. We now have an effective way to provide immunity without killing people and continuing the spread of the disease, and that's the goal. At least I hope everyone can agree that's the goal.

[jono]

Thanks for the very accessible write-up, Mofro.

[skaredshtles]

Windows PC, apple phone. Thanks!

Whoa whoa whoa, there, Sparky. You can't mix shit up like that!

[wooley12]

Had my vax 6 months ago. Time for a booster. Fk you Mtuhockey33, you ignorant slut.

[jono]

False narratives like the herd immunity theory or the superiority of natural infection underlies much of the at large anti-vaxx commentary.

I hate to say it, because it's totally fraught with confounders, but I think someone is going to have to come up with an approach for adjusting the "previously infected" and "naive vaccinated" cohorts to account for the unfair advantage of ignoring the worst of the infected cohort. The very worst (dead) never make it into the infected cohort and the next worst (long haulers or really bad cases) may get more immunity and usually get more cautious.

Accounting for behavior may be impossible, but if you just count up ~1% (or use the CFR) of all exposures among the vaccinated and reduce the "breakthrough" cases by that number (IOW, assume they would have died) you'd be a lot closer to apples to apples. At least the rough size of such an adjustment would be obvious, and would serve to illustrate just how bad a retrospective study is going to be at comparing the two in the first place.

[old goat]

Some of the data points in the graph of fatality vs contagiousness look off, even allowing for the log scale of the x axis.
Dangerously close to "it's just the flu" for one thing. For another, polio killed OR disabled a much smaller fraction of the population than covid--so either it was a lot less transmisable or a lot less dangerous, or both, than shown on the graph.

[jono]

I was thinking this one:

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zqWa...bescope3.0.png

[Skidog]

Maybe the natural immunity dipshits can enlighten me, doubtful I know. Are they arguing that it’s better to get Covid for the antibodies than it is to get the vaccine? Seems….a lot more risky


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No dipshit. Like if you got covid before vaccines and didnt die.

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[Skidog]

Well... he was sure sticking to his guns that natural immunity is better than a vaccination on that one! At least he's consistent...ly wrong.

Nobody and I mean nobody argued it's better...equal maybe? Maybe slightly less than vax, but.surely not zero. I guess NPR likes to push the anti vax message with there "super immunity" article.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1033677208

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[mcphee]

Seems like keeping your distance from people, limiting trips to get things, wearing a mask when you do need to go out, and getting vaccinated is a better route, but I’m just built different.


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[CarlMega]

Seems like keeping your distance from people, limiting trips to get things, wearing a mask when you do need to go out, and getting vaccinated is a better route, but I’m just built different.

Nah, assuming you are of a handul people who are super immune is more smarter. also maybe they glossed over this:

"DOUCLEFF: Hatziioannou and her colleagues published these findings in the journals Nature and Immunity. So just who is capable of mounting this so-called superhuman immune response?

PAUL BIENIASZ: Individuals who were infected early in the pandemic and then sort of between six and 12 months later, they were then vaccinated."

&&

DOUCLEFF: On the surface, this seems to suggest some bad news - that you need to catch COVID to have this super immunity. But John Wherry at the University of Pennsylvania says that's probably not the case.

JOHN WHERRY: We see some of it happening just in vaccinated individuals.

DOUCLEFF: His lab research shows that months after the vaccine - just the vaccine - a person's antibodies begin to become more powerful, more flexible.

[old goat]

I was thinking this one:

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zqWa...bescope3.0.png

The deadliness seems to be untreated., except for HIV as noted. A lot of those are bacterial diseases treatable with antibiotics and malaria treatable with an antiparasitic. And how to you measure the R0 of a disease like lyme or malaria that is not transmitted directly from human to human? I gather the x axis R0 number shouldn't necessarily be taken literally. This graph does seem more accurate than the first one.

[KQ]

No dipshit. Like if you got covid before vaccines and didnt die.

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Washington trials are being move to Zoom. Lockdowns may be coming.

[jono]

The deadliness seems to be untreated., except for HIV as noted. A lot of those are bacterial diseases treatable with antibiotics and malaria treatable with an antiparasitic. And how to you measure the R0 of a disease like lyme or malaria that is not transmitted directly from human to human? I gather the x axis R0 number shouldn't necessarily be taken literally. This graph does seem more accurate than the first one.

I screwed that up, grabbed the wrong link. I don't see it now, but I thought someone posted one like this around here somewhere (obviously pre-delta shown):

https://i.redd.it/3gc9lhqizbd41.jpg

[old goat]

I screwed that up, grabbed the wrong link. I don't see it now, but I thought someone posted one like this around here somewhere (obviously pre-delta shown):

https://i.redd.it/3gc9lhqizbd41.jpg

That one's pretty good, other than the weird y axis--log at the bottom, linear at the top. I don't get the high R0 for rabies. How many rabies patients go around biting people? (I get it they're using R0 loosely.) I assume the Hep B death rate is for the acute phase--if you look at the long term risk of cirrhosis and liver cancer it's certainly more dangerous than Hep A.
Thanks for posting. Very interesting.

[MultiVerse]

The deadliness seems to be untreated., except for HIV as noted.

In an unprotected naive population the case fatality rate for Covid can approach 15%. In Italy for example, due to an evenly age stratified distribution of cases in an older average population the CFR was 14.1% by August 2020:

Let's put some context around Covid relative to other pathogens.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/dat...tious-diseases
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7518649/
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspu...thing-you-need

Attachment 382912

[jono]

There it is. Thanks!

[MultiVerse]

Closest known relatives of virus behind COVID-19 found in Laos. Studies of bats in China and Laos show southeast Asia is a hotspot for potentially dangerous viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2.

Scientists have found three viruses in bats in Laos that are more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses. Researchers say that parts of their genetic code bolster claims that the virus behind COVID-19 has a natural origin

...

“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says.

...

The Laos study offers insight into the origins of the pandemic, but there are still missing links, say researchers. For example, the Laos viruses don’t contain the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d415...ampaign=nature

[k2skier112]

[old goat]

Closest known relatives of virus behind COVID-19 found in Laos. Studies of bats in China and Laos show southeast Asia is a hotspot for potentially dangerous viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2.

Scientists have found three viruses in bats in Laos that are more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses. Researchers say that parts of their genetic code bolster claims that the virus behind COVID-19 has a natural origin

...

“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says.

...

The Laos study offers insight into the origins of the pandemic, but there are still missing links, say researchers. For example, the Laos viruses don’t contain the so-called furin cleavage site on the spike protein that further aids the entry of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses into human cells.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d415...ampaign=nature

Thanks for posting. I think a lot of people have suspected that the Covid 19 may not have originated in China but was only identified there. However, lacking the missing link, it's too soon to stop hating China.

The study highlights the importance of ongoing monitoring of bat coronaviruses and other potential pandemic pathogens--the kind of work the Wuhan lab is criticized for.

[jono]

Thanks for posting. I think a lot of people have suspected that the Covid 19 may not have originated in China but was only identified there. However, lacking the missing link, it's too soon to stop hating China.

And given the accusation of gain of function research, the fact that this one doesn't have a furin cleavage site still leaves the lab in the sights, too, right?

And if they find actual SARS-CoV-2 in the bats, can't that just mean they caught it from some humans and we'll never know?

[Mazderati]

Nature is metal.

[riser4]

Metal as fuck.

[MultiVerse]

And given the accusation of gain of function research, the fact that this one doesn't have a furin cleavage site still leaves the lab in the sights, too, right?

And if they find actual SARS-CoV-2 in the bats, can't that just mean they caught it from some humans and we'll never know?

We can probably say with some certainty SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2 originated in a bat host.

We also know the intermediate host for SARS was the palm civet and the camel for MERS. The intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2 in which additional mutations such as a furin cleavage might have happened is still unknown. It took 14 years to nail down the origin of the SARS epidemic.

So to answer the questions 1) a lab leak is always possible even if entirely zoonotic in origin, lab engineered maybe less so now but still possible 2) finding actual SARS-CoV-2 in bats shouldn't change anything either way because the evolutionary arrow of causality would be clear if that were to happen.

[old goat]

Assuming the virus arose in nature and was collected by the Wuhan lab which scenario is more likely--the virus leaked from a level 4 biocontainment lab or was spread by one or more poor Laotian guano collectors or miners, in a remote part of Laos without the capacity to recognize a novel disease?