The Vaccine Thread

[ktgrok]

7 minutes ago, teachermom2834 said:

The irony of it above all is that the exact people that don’t want to be around me for fear of “catching” my vaccine are the very people that knowingly went out with Covid, having decided it was no big deal. Gracious.

 

How ironic would it be if they started masking and distancing to avoid catching the vaccine?

[JennyD]

20 minutes ago, teachermom2834 said:

Disclaimer- I know people are going to jump on me and say I should still not be around unmasked people and that I can still get Covid even after vaccination. I know it. I read all the reports too. But y’all- I have to live and this is where I live. I needed an eye exam and new glasses. So I am going to go about fulfilling needs even as my community is not careful. I can no longer assume responsibility for spread of Covid when the community has decided not to mask or vax or distance. I am quite sure I am not the problem here. 

I would never criticize you.  You've done the best you possibly could. 

Our area isn't nearly as bad as yours, but all indications are that vaccination rates are unlikely to get high enough to really offer any sort of meaningful community immunity anytime soon.  DH and I have been talking about how going forward we're just going to have to hope that our vaccines keep us safe and keep the kids mostly isolated until they can get vaccinated.

We are so, so lucky that not only did we get vaccines, but vaccines that turned out to be incredibly effective. 

Edited April 28, 2021 by JennyD

[Soror]

52 minutes ago, teachermom2834 said:

Thanks. I’m over it. I have been dealing with craziness this whole time and have had to take a “you do you” approach and protect my family as I saw fit. I understand that the actions of irresponsible people effect everyone but there was just nothing I could do about it and I have to survive. I can’t just only patronize businesses that are careful because there are things I need. So I am so so happy to be vaccinated and be able to more comfortably get an eye exam or a haircut or whatever I had put off because my community takes no precautions. 
 

It is annoying to run up against this stuff but now that I am vaccinated I just can’t let it bother me. The irony of it above all is that the exact people that don’t want to be around me for fear of “catching” my vaccine are the very people that knowingly went out with Covid, having decided it was no big deal. Gracious.

Disclaimer- I know people are going to jump on me and say I should still not be around unmasked people and that I can still get Covid even after vaccination. I know it. I read all the reports too. But y’all- I have to live and this is where I live. I needed an eye exam and new glasses. So I am going to go about fulfilling needs even as my community is not careful. I can no longer assume responsibility for spread of Covid when the community has decided not to mask or vax or distance. I am quite sure I am not the problem here. 

Wow! That is incredibly sad. I had not heard that, then again I don't follow people on social media and rarely talk to anyone. Now I'm curious if anyone in my circle has similar beliefs. I would not be surprised. I told my younger hs'ed kids to not talk about vaccination around other hs friends. It is not worth the hassle and debate. It hadn't occurred to me that they would be batshit crazy enough to think it would effect them in some way.

 

[Spryte]

48 minutes ago, ktgrok said:

How ironic would it be if they started masking and distancing to avoid catching the vaccine?

Oh!  Right!  We could start the misinformation circulating that masks and distancing protect from the, errr, ill effects transmitted by vaccinated people.  🤣

This is some seriously whackadoodle stuff. Makes me wonder what happened to people in school?  Where were they for any sort of science classes?

[ktgrok]

Just now, Spryte said:

Oh!  Right!  We could start the misinformation circulating that masks and distancing protect from the, errr, ill effects transmitted by vaccinated people.  🤣

This is some seriously whackadoodle stuff. Makes me wonder what happened to people in school?  Where were they for any sort of science classes?

Well, I'm betting this is another case of a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In theory, a LIVE virus vaccine could transmit to others...of course this one is NOT that, AND the dumber thing is that what would be causing th eproblem/contagious is the dang VIRUS which they claim isn't dangerous in the first place. 

I'm suddenly very very glad I ordered a "Caffeinated and Vaccinated" shirt - may have to wear it constantly when out to keep the whackadoodles away. 

[TCB]

1 hour ago, ktgrok said:

How ironic would it be if they started masking and distancing to avoid catching the vaccine?

Or maybe we can tell them we’re wearing a mask to protect them from catching the vaccine from us. No doubt mask wearing will be much better tolerated then!

[popmom]

2 hours ago, ktgrok said:

Well, I'm betting this is another case of a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In theory, a LIVE virus vaccine could transmit to others...of course this one is NOT that, AND the dumber thing is that what would be causing th eproblem/contagious is the dang VIRUS which they claim isn't dangerous in the first place. 

I'm suddenly very very glad I ordered a "Caffeinated and Vaccinated" shirt - may have to wear it constantly when out to keep the whackadoodles away. 

Where’d you get the shirt? I got a Pfizer t off Etsy. I LOVE it. 

[Syllieann]

The mosquitoes they're releasing in Florida are actually engineered to inoculate people against their will.  That way tptb can ensure that the microchips get distributed to enough people that they can enact their master plan.

OK, maybe not, but the thing about people coming into contact with vax'd people and having a miscarriage showed up a couple weeks ago in my homeschool group.  There's too much stupid, and people just don't understand the difference between causation and correlation or negative control groups.  It's a good thing I'm playing social distance with them still because I don't think I can look at these people with a straight face anymore.

[Matryoshka]

Well, now it will be easy to avoid the crazies, who were running around unmasked screaming and spitting at masked people, as now they'll want to stay far away from us vaxed people.  And if they're carrying a mutant strain and umasked, I'm very happy for them to stay far away from me.  If they think it's because I could give them cooties instead of the other way around, not gonna split hairs about what seems like a good outcome!

[ktgrok]

2 hours ago, popmom said:

Where’d you get the shirt? I got a Pfizer t off Etsy. I LOVE it. 

Life is Good. (edited to correct the name and add link). I love their shirts, and since it is summer (and Florida) I was happy to see they had it in a tank top. They had several vaccine related shirts 🙂

1 hour ago, Syllieann said:

The mosquitoes they're releasing in Florida are actually engineered to inoculate people against their will.  That way tptb can ensure that the microchips get distributed to enough people that they can enact their master plan.

OK, maybe not, but the thing about people coming into contact with vax'd people and having a miscarriage showed up a couple weeks ago in my homeschool group.  There's too much stupid, and people just don't understand the difference between causation and correlation or negative control groups.  It's a good thing I'm playing social distance with them still because I don't think I can look at these people with a straight face anymore.

Ugh, I hate that multiple people are hearing this...it means it really is the new conspiracy theory. It's just SO stupid though. Like....if you think the virus isn't a big deal, why would you care that you might catch it from a vaccinated person (if that were possible, which it is not). It not only is biologically impossible, but it is also totally illogical to fear that the vaccine can give you a virus that you already have said isn't anything to fear. 

In good news, I hope people DO think mosquitoes are carrying microchips, it will make our nature walks nicer if the crazy people stay home! (as a native Floridian I've been hearing paranoia about these darned GM mosquitoes for YEARS now - since they started researching it. I am SOO tired of explaining why this is not the scary thing they think it is. Or that these are not native mosquitoes to start with. That the diseases they spread are way more dangerous than mutant mosquitoes. Etc etc)

Edited April 28, 2021 by ktgrok

[Corraleno]

1 hour ago, Syllieann said:

The mosquitoes they're releasing in Florida are actually engineered to inoculate people against their will.  That way tptb can ensure that the microchips get distributed to enough people that they can enact their master plan.

In a public hearing yesterday in Orange County, CA, a County Supervisor literally asked the head of the county health department, on camera, if the vaccine involves "the injection of a tracking device." After the doctor stopped laughing, he assured the supervisor that there are no microchips in covid vaccines.

[Laura Corin]

Cross posting report on vaccine side effects

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00224-3/fulltext

[Laura Corin]

Good round up by expert statisticians of recent studies on transmission after vaccination 

https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/commentisfree/2021/may/02/vaccinated-people-less-likely-to-pass-covid-on?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

[KSera]

8 hours ago, Laura Corin said:

Good round up by expert statisticians of recent studies on transmission after vaccination 

https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/commentisfree/2021/may/02/vaccinated-people-less-likely-to-pass-covid-on?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

It looks like the study only addressed transmission after one jab, right? Which is very good news to see so much reduction after a single shot. Someone else shared a link yesterday about the significant increase in benefit provided by the second dose, which improves transmission reduction even more. 

[Laura Corin]

5 minutes ago, KSera said:

It looks like the study only addressed transmission after one jab, right? Which is very good news to see so much reduction after a single shot. Someone else shared a link yesterday about the significant increase in benefit provided by the second dose, which improves transmission reduction even more. 

The UK has delayed second jabs, so there are limited data on that.

[KSera]

13 minutes ago, Laura Corin said:

The UK has delayed second jabs, so there are limited data on that.

Right. I knew that was why it was like that, but thought it might be helpful to point that out for anyone skimming. It’s good to see that strategy has been very successful there. 

[Pen]

On 4/23/2021 at 11:30 AM, Corraleno said:

Small study in the New England Journal of Medicine from Rockefeller University comparing 417 fully vaccinated employees with 1491 unvaxed. There were 32 covid cases in the unvaxed group (2.15%) vs 2 cases in the vaxed group (0.48%), although the vaxed group had much higher risk of exposure (18% HCWs or first responders, vs 1.2% in the unvaxed group).

Both of the breakthrough cases were mild, despite involving variants with multiple mutations of concern. One person had a variant with the E484K mutation (associated with evasion of antibodies) as well as characteristics similar to B117 (associated with higher viral loads and higher rates of transmission). This person had a very high viral load, but also had very high antibody levels, and all symptoms were resolved within a week.

Both cases were also infected fairly close to the 2 week mark after their second shot, so they may not have developed full immunity by then: one tested positive at 2.5 weeks, so was likely exposed before the 2 week mark, and the other had an unvaccinated partner who tested positive three weeks after her first shot, so he may have been infected (and contagious) around the two week mark.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2105000

(moved from Personal Experience thread)

How many deaths and what was case fatality rate in the non-vaccinated vs vaccinated groups in this study? I realize it’s a small size study, especially the vaccinated group is small, but I would like to know anyway. 

[Pen]

On 4/23/2021 at 11:30 AM, Corraleno said:

Small study in the New England Journal of Medicine from Rockefeller University comparing 417 fully vaccinated employees with 1491 unvaxed. There were 32 covid cases in the unvaxed group (2.15%) vs 2 cases in the vaxed group (0.48%), although the vaxed group had much higher risk of exposure (18% HCWs or first responders, vs 1.2% in the unvaxed group).

Both of the breakthrough cases were mild, despite involving variants with multiple mutations of concern. One person had a variant with the E484K mutation (associated with evasion of antibodies) as well as characteristics similar to B117 (associated with higher viral loads and higher rates of transmission). This person had a very high viral load, but also had very high antibody levels, and all symptoms were resolved within a week.

Both cases were also infected fairly close to the 2 week mark after their second shot, so they may not have developed full immunity by then: one tested positive at 2.5 weeks, so was likely exposed before the 2 week mark, and the other had an unvaccinated partner who tested positive three weeks after her first shot, so he may have been infected (and contagious) around the two week mark.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2105000

(moved from Personal Experience thread)

Also of note they were using 40 cycle PCR amplification.  
 

Which probably  means results are not worthwhile.  Here is Fauci himself so stating: 

 

https://kevinbae.com/2020/dr-fauci-and-the-new-york-times-confirmed-the-pcr-tests-are-too-sensitive-to-be-considered-worth-anything/

[freesia]

1 hour ago, Pen said:

Also of note they were using 40 cycle PCR amplification.  
 

Which probably  means results are not worthwhile.  Here is Fauci himself so stating: 

 

https://kevinbae.com/2020/dr-fauci-and-the-new-york-times-confirmed-the-pcr-tests-are-too-sensitive-to-be-considered-worth-anything/

Did you read the NYT article your blog referenced.  It doesn’t say that higher cycle positives aren’t evidence of disease.  It is. The positives aren’t false at all. It means that there is not enough virus present to infect someone else.  The scientists felt that the results needed to have the cycles reported in order to narrow who needed to be quarantined.

[Corraleno]

27 minutes ago, Dreamergal said:

Does anyone know more about the Russian vaccine ? I have not been paying attention. I read something about it having issues. I do not know what exactly. Russia has sent vaccines to India so I am asking.

Here's an excerpt from a NYT article:

A statement by Slovakia’s drug regulator questioning the Russian vaccine suggested potentially serious quality-control problems in the manufacture of Sputnik V and threatened recent progress made by Russia in winning acceptance for its product.

That progress has rested largely on a peer-reviewed article published in The Lancet in February that gave the Russian vaccine a thumbs-up. It said that Sputnik V had an 91.6 percent efficacy rate against Covid-19, an endorsement that Moscow has used to raise confidence in the vaccine and strengthen the Kremlin’s hand in vaccine diplomacy.

Slovakia’s regulator, the State Institute for Drug Control, however, said in a statement that vaccine batches imported into the East European country did “not have the same characteristics and properties” as the version of Sputnik V reviewed by The Lancet.

The Russian Direct Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund that financed Sputnik V’s development and has spearheaded a push for its use abroad, did not address the substance of the Slovak agency’s statement but dismissed it as “disinformation” and “fake news.” In a series of dismissive messages on Twitter, the fund accused the state regulatory agency of carrying out an “act of sabotage,” claiming that Slovakia had violated the terms of its contract and demanding that the doses be returned.
..........
 

Sputnik V is manufactured at seven locations in Russia, and also at plants in India and South Korea. A number of other countries have signed manufacturing contracts, including Brazil, Turkey and Serbia. Russia has consistently delivered fewer doses of the vaccine than initially promised, suggesting glitches in manufacturing. Producing vaccines at scale is a difficult process and ramping up production has presented problems for Western vaccines, too.

Noting that about 40 countries are using or scheduled to use the Russian vaccine, the Slovak regulatory agency asserted that “these vaccines are only associated by the name.” That raised questions about deviations from the formula reviewed in The Lancet.

“The comparability and consistency of different batches produced at different locations has not been demonstrated,” the Slovak regulator said. “In several cases, they appear to be vaccines with different properties (lyophilisate versus solution, single-dose ampoules versus multi-dose vials, different storage conditions, composition and method of manufacture).”

The Slovak statement could damage Russia’s efforts to establish Sputnik V as a reliable brand. It could also exacerbate lingering doubts left by the vaccine’s highly politicized rollout in Russia, where President Vladimir V. Putin announced that the drug was ready for use in August, before clinical trials had finished.

Russia has repeatedly denounced foreign questioning of its vaccine as the fruit of anti-Russian conspiracies and prejudice, ignoring complaints that Mr. Putin, rushing last summer to declare a Russian victory in the race for a vaccine, violated standard procedure by declaring Sputnik V safe before trials had finished.

 

 

Edited May 2, 2021 by Corraleno

[Corraleno]

24 minutes ago, Dreamergal said:

The way I understand is that the efficacy is less than tested, but it still works and offers some protection right? 

I'm sure it provides some level of protection, or the Russians wouldn't even be using it on their own population. Most of it is manufactured in Russia, including the doses that were sent to Slovakia, but they also have a plant in India. I would assume that the Sputnik vaccine that is available in India is manufactured there, so perhaps there are fewer quality control issues there?

One thing about Sputnik that is unusual is that it uses two different adenoviruses (A5 & A26) for the 1st & 2nd shot, and their (alleged) efficacy rates are based on that. I don't know if the Indian manufacturer of Sputnik is making both versions, or if they even have the capability of tracking who has had which dose under such extreme circumstances, but I would assume that even one shot of Sputnik would probably be similar to J&J, which uses the same A26 that Sputnik uses in one of its doses.

[Penelope]

I know we were talking about the monitoring system for adverse effects in the US. It might have been in the other thread.

https://khn.org/news/article/detecting-rare-blood-clots-was-a-win-but-us-vaccine-safety-system-still-has-gaps/

Quote

“The good news for a very rare event is it will pop up on VAERS,” Goodman said on a call with reporters, referring to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System jointly run by the FDA and CDC since 1990.

But other potentially dangerous, unanticipated reactions to vaccines may not be so obvious in VAERS, a system that is believed to miss many potential side effects — or in the nation’s additional monitoring systems, including the Vaccine Safety Datalink and the CDC’s new phone-based tracking program, v-safe.

“It’s quite a hodgepodge of different systems of collecting data,” said Dr. Katherine Yih, a biologist and epidemiologist who specializes in vaccine surveillance at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. “It’s worth stating that it’s not as good as it could be.”

Quote

The Vaccine Safety Datalink, though highly regarded, did not include enough vaccinations within its data from nine hospital systems covering 12 million people to catch the J&J issue, CDC officials said. And enrollment in v-safe has been less than expected, with about 6 million people enrolled by the end of March, just 6.4% of those who had been vaccinated at that point.

That means that, at a time when about 100 million Americans have been fully vaccinated against covid, the U.S. continues to rely on a patchwork network of vaccine monitoring systems that may fail to monitor a large enough swath of the population, experts told KHN.

“I’m very concerned about this,” said Goodman, who also led the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, or CBER, and is now a professor of infectious diseases at Georgetown University. “I think we should be seeing that reporting on all of these vaccines. It was promised four months ago that it was happening.”

Quote

Vaccine safety experts said they were concerned that the FDA scaled back a system known as the Post-Licensure Rapid Immunization Safety Monitoring network, or PRISM, long regarded as a workhorse of surveillance.

“Prior to PRISM, I felt like we were sort of in the dark ages,” Steve Anderson, director of the FDA’s Office of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, said at a 2016 workshop. “When PRISM came along, for us it was really a game changer.”

PRISM linked four large health plans in different parts of the country with eight state immunization registries. During the H1N1 pandemic, it detected signals for three adverse events possibly linked to the vaccines and was used to rule out the two that weren’t related and the one, Guillain-Barré syndrome, that was.

The system included records from nearly 40 million people, said Daniel Salmon, former director of vaccine safety at the National Vaccine Program Office. Having a large volume of records of vaccinated people “really drives your ability to figure out what’s going on,” he said.

PRISM, which was repurposed for drug safety, now contains data from about 60 million people, but it has not been used to track vaccine reactions during the covid pandemic, said Salmon, who oversaw safety monitoring for the H1N1 vaccine.

“With PRISM, we tested it in a crisis and it operated for a decade,” he said. “I was really surprised when it wasn’t used for covid. That was why we built it.”

Quote

The concern is that officials have leaned heavily on VAERS, a “passive” system that relies on reports from patients and health care providers to flag issues after vaccination that may or may not be related to the shots. A robust “active” surveillance system can search large volumes of patient care records to compare rates of adverse events in people who received vaccines with those who didn’t.

In addition, some vaccine safety experts point to a lack of clear authority in the area. The Trump administration shut down the NVPO, a federal office with expertise in monitoring vaccine safety, merging it into a government agency focused on infectious diseases.

As a result, monitoring of covid vaccine safety is fragmented among federal agencies, said Salmon, who now directs the Institute for Vaccine Safety at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“There is no single person in charge,” he said. “You need to have somebody in charge.”

 

[Penelope]

15 hours ago, Dreamergal said:

Thank you.

The way I understand is that the efficacy is less than tested, but it still works and offers some protection right? 

 

 

There are big questions about whether Sputnik is safe.

Among other concerns, Brazil’s drug regulators rejected the vaccine after finding, in the manufacturer’s own data, that one of the adenoviral vectors was replication-competent and formed plaques in cell culture. The vectors should have had their replication gene removed so that they cannot multiply in the vaccine recipient’s cells, once injected. 
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/russias-covid-19-vaccine-safe-brazils-veto-sputnik-v-sparks-lawsuit-threat-and

Quote

Both of the adenoviruses that make up Sputnik V, known as Ad5 and Ad26, are churned out by cultured human cells called HEK293 cells. The adenoviruses ferry the coronavirus spike gene to the vaccine recipient’s cells, which then make spike, prompting an immune response. In order to stop the adenoviruses from replicating once inside their human host, the vaccinemaker removed a gene they need for reproduction, called E1. The viruses can copy themselves in HEK293 cells, which are engineered to have a stand-in E1 gene, but they are not supposed to be able to replicate once they are separated from the human cells and packaged in the final vaccine product.

It’s long been known that Ad5 can on rare occasions acquire the E1 gene from the HEK293 cells, converting what is supposed to be a crippled virus into an RCA. Although adenoviruses typically cause mild colds, they can rarely kill people, and immunocompromised people who receive a vaccine that inadvertently contains RCAs could be at particular risk.

Vaccinemakers and others have developed tests to check for replicating adenoviruses in their products. Anvisa said that although the standard worldwide has been zero tolerance for the presence of replicating adenovirus in the vaccine, Gamaleya established an acceptable limit of 5000 replication-capable virus particles per vaccine dose. The Russian quality control documents displayed by Anvisa during the press conference state the batches tested had “less than 100” replication-capable particles per dose.

During yesterday’s press conference, Mendes also showed video of parts of an online meeting in March between officials from Anvisa and the vaccine’s developer. In one of the clips, Anvisa officials ask Gamaleya representatives why they had not changed their production methods once they “had detected the RCA occurrence in your production” The Gamaleya representatives responded that they were aware of the risk, but that changing the process “would take too much time.”

Mendes noted that Anvisa has analyzed the quality control documentation on other adenovirus-based COVID-19 vaccines, such as those made by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, and found no evidence of replication-competent viruses in those companies’ final products.

 

Quote

Anvisa also reported a long list of other issues with the vaccine that it wants the Russians to address. Those include the lack of detailed information on the 63 cases of adverse events and four deaths reported during the clinical trial. (The Lancetpaper on Sputnik V’s efficacy trial reported no serious adverse events or deaths were deemed to be related to vaccination.)

The Brazilian agency also complains that during an inspection trip to Russia in April its technicians were only allowed to visit three of seven manufacturing sites—and were not allowed to visit Gamaleya’s quality-control center. As a result, “It is not possible to verify the existence of standards within the … facilities,” according to an Anvisa report published Monday with the veto announcement.

 

[Not_a_Number]

As someone born in the former USSR... I'd be pretty hesitant to take a Russian-made vaccine, lol. 

[mommyoffive]

Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe (msn.com)

[mommyoffive]

US coronavirus: Not reaching herd immunity by fall could have dire consequences, expert says (msn.com)

 

Last week, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice said the state was offering a $100 savings bond to residents 16 to 35 who get a shot, in a push to get more younger residents vaccinated.

Edited May 3, 2021 by mommyoffive

[Syllieann]

5 minutes ago, mommyoffive said:

US coronavirus: Not reaching herd immunity by fall could have dire consequences, expert says (msn.com)

 

Last week, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice said the state was offering a $100 savings bond to residents 16 to 35 who get a shot, in a push to get more younger residents vaccinated.

Do you think someone who is already vaccinated might get it again for the $?  I worry about that with the incentives.

[mommyoffive]

Just now, Syllieann said:

Do you think someone who is already vaccinated might get it again for the $?  I worry about that with the incentives.

Good point.  I hadn't even thought about that until the other thread was posted about getting 2 vaccines.  I think they need to come out with real information on doing to the public.  

[Pen]

20 hours ago, freesia said:

Did you read the NYT article your blog referenced.  It doesn’t say that higher cycle positives aren’t evidence of disease.  It is. The positives aren’t false at all. It means that there is not enough virus present to infect someone else.  The scientists felt that the results needed to have the cycles reported in order to narrow who needed to be quarantined.

No.

Eith regard to studies I take a look at the PCR cycles to try to figure out what they are evaluating. 

If someone had CV19 symptoms, it may make sense to ramp up test cycles to try to determine if it might be related to SARS-Covid-2.  Depending on situation. But afaik that’s not what the study was doing.

“Disease” was (in before  CV19 times to my knowledge and experience ) normally determined by being unwell. Sick.  
 

 

Normally Someone sick (and often only if sick enough to seek medical care) then would be tested . It is fairly unprecedented to test large groups of people who have no evidence of sickness - especially using a test that is ramped up in cycles. 
 

The study did not (though I may have misread this aspect) just test sick people. That being the case using lower cycles to better distinguish real cases from “noise” would make sense. 

One does not for example normally subject a large population in winter all to have influenza tests regardless of having any symptoms, for eaxample.  One does not normally even do that with all hospital workers. Or everyone in a college dorm. Have you experienced that? Maybe I am an older generation and things changed long before CV that I did not realize. And certainly not with an over-sensitive test. Where one may be getting “noise” not significant results. 

The point I was trying to make is that studies based on PCR tests with cycle thresholds at 40 may not tell us accurately useful distinctions between experimental and control groups. 
 

I also do not know though if when level is described as greater than 40 if that means it is necessarily at same level greater than 40 . That’s something about PCR reporting I do not understand as yet. Does greater than 40 mean one group could have been at 41cycles and the other at 51 cycles for example. If anyone knows I’d be interested in the answer.  Iirc the cycles go up by a 3fold increase, so even 42 compared to 41 can be quite significant increase. 

Edited May 3, 2021 by Pen

[Not_a_Number]

10 minutes ago, Pen said:

Normally Someone sick (and often only if sick enough to seek medical care) then would be tested . It is fairly unprecedented to test large groups of people who have no evidence of sickness - especially using a test that is ramped up in cycles. 

I am not sure what you're saying. The point of testing asymptomatic people for COVID-19 is that we KNOW asymptomatic people can be infectious. 

[Not_a_Number]

1 hour ago, mommyoffive said:

Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe (msn.com)

Yes, I've gotten that sense. But really, the true sense I've gotten is that we're going to have urban pockets in which the virus doesn't thrive and rural pockets in which it does 😕 . 

My zip code has something like 70% of its adults vaccinated already. I'm sure that there won't be much virus here pretty soon, especially if immunity lasts a year. But looking at the vaccine coverage map, that won't be the case in large swaths of the US. 

I don't know what that's going to do to us all culturally, but probably nothing good. 

[KSera]

29 minutes ago, Pen said:

 

Normally Someone sick (and often only if sick enough to seek medical care) then would be tested . It is fairly unprecedented to test large groups of people who have no evidence of sickness

This isn’t normal times. We’re in the middle of a pandemic with an illness that spreads even from people that have no symptoms. So far more than 3.2 million people have died of Covid-19 since this started a little over a year ago, and that is most surely an under count. Catching all the cases we can is one of the ways to reduce the spread to keep that number from growing more than it has to, thus, the more cases caught early, the better. We’ve seen what happens when this disease is allowed to spread without mitigation. We have scores of people in the world dying now because there’s not enough oxygen at the hospitals.
 

I know some people like to brush off those who die because they believe they’re too fat or don’t eat right or don’t have enough vitamin D or are brown or poor or any other reason that makes it seem like a “them” problem and not a “me” problem, but fortunately our public health systems don’t operate under that morality. Catching cases to quarantine them is one of the best tools we have. Even better one is vaccination. We could literally end this pandemic in the US and get everything back to normal this year, if everyone who was medically safe to be vaccinated would do so. As it is, it is being acknowledged that it doesn’t look like there’s any way we’re going to reach that milestone, due to too many people declining the vaccine, so we are going to be stuck in this situation for who knows how long, due to people being unwilling to care for their neighbor as themself, and do what is needed to stop this from spreading freely. 

[wathe]

2 hours ago, Pen said:

 

Normally Someone sick (and often only if sick enough to seek medical care) then would be tested . It is fairly unprecedented to test large groups of people who have no evidence of sickness - especially using a test that is ramped up in cycles. 
 

 

I disagree.  

Broadly, screening for asymptomatic disease is a major part of preventive care.

More specifically, with respect to testing for infectious disease, we do test broadly for asymptomatic infections in certain populations.  We have universal HIV and syphilis testing  for pregnant women here.  MDs who perform high risk procedures are all tested for HIV and HepB at regular intervals as part of maintaining a license to practice.  Hospital workers are regularly tested to tuberculosis.  Blood donors are tested for HIV.

edited to fix spelling typo.  tuberculosis.

Edited May 3, 2021 by wathe

[Syllieann]

1 hour ago, Not_a_Number said:

Yes, I've gotten that sense. But really, the true sense I've gotten is that we're going to have urban pockets in which the virus doesn't thrive and rural pockets in which it does 😕 . 

My zip code has something like 70% of its adults vaccinated already. I'm sure that there won't be much virus here pretty soon, especially if immunity lasts a year. But looking at the vaccine coverage map, that won't be the case in large swaths of the US. 

I don't know what that's going to do to us all culturally, but probably nothing good. 

I don't think vaccine coverage really needs to be as high in rural areas to get herd immunity.  They aren't going to be using public transport, living in condos/apartments, or using elevators in public buildings very often.  Even within the home, sq. footage is likely to be higher per person on average, reducing household spread.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if we needed something like 80% in urban areas and 60% in rural areas.

[frogger]

2 hours ago, Syllieann said:

I don't think vaccine coverage really needs to be as high in rural areas to get herd immunity.  They aren't going to be using public transport, living in condos/apartments, or using elevators in public buildings very often.  Even within the home, sq. footage is likely to be higher per person on average, reducing household spread.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if we needed something like 80% in urban areas and 60% in rural areas.

Not all rural areas are that rural. Many of them are very conservative suburbs right next to big cities. 

[wathe]

2 hours ago, Syllieann said:

I don't think vaccine coverage really needs to be as high in rural areas to get herd immunity.  They aren't going to be using public transport, living in condos/apartments, or using elevators in public buildings very often.  Even within the home, sq. footage is likely to be higher per person on average, reducing household spread.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if we needed something like 80% in urban areas and 60% in rural areas.

I don't know.  There is plenty of indoor social activity in rural areas. 

18 minutes ago, frogger said:

Not all rural areas are that rural. Many of them are very conservative suburbs right next to big cities. 

Right.  And lots of American urban areas that aren't actually all that dense.  NYC density is the exception, not the rule.

[wathe]

Also, agricultural processing facilities (meat packing plants etc) are mostly rural.  Migrant farm workers living in crowded conditions are also mostly in rural areas.  I don't think that "rural" is going to change the percentage immunized needed to achieve herd immunity.

[Danae]

4 hours ago, Pen said:

“Disease” was (in before  CV19 times to my knowledge and experience ) normally determined by being unwell. Sick.  
 

Normally Someone sick (and often only if sick enough to seek medical care) then would be tested . It is fairly unprecedented to test large groups of people who have no evidence of sickness - especially using a test that is ramped up in cycles. 
 

 

Pap smears.  Colonoscopies.  Mammograms.  Glucose Tolerance Tests.  PSA screening.  Bone density scans. 

[wathe]

A quick google gives me numerous papers and stats suggesting that covid rates (cases per 100 000) are higher in rural areas than in urban areas, and so are death rates.  One, Two, Three, four, five.  

The absolute numbers are lower for rural areas because the populations are smaller, but the relative numbers are higher.

Rural is not protective.

[Not_a_Number]

5 hours ago, Syllieann said:

I don't think vaccine coverage really needs to be as high in rural areas to get herd immunity.  They aren't going to be using public transport, living in condos/apartments, or using elevators in public buildings very often.  Even within the home, sq. footage is likely to be higher per person on average, reducing household spread.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if we needed something like 80% in urban areas and 60% in rural areas.

I think we already tried that this year. COVID-19 mostly seems to spread via superspreader events: large gatherings in which people spend lots of time together. So public transit is unlikely to be the issue: what's likely to be the issue is a movie theater, or a concert hall, or a church. People do those things in rural (and suburban) areas, too. 

South Dakota has like 11 people per square mile and yet has made it into the list of places with the worst death rates 😞 . I think we ought not to assume that a lower density is definitely going to save people. 

I wonder what the correlation between death rates and population density is... someone ought to check. I betcha it's positive, although that could be a fake effect due to the fact that it first exploded in the Northeast, which is also dense... 

[Pen]

10 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

I am not sure what you're saying. The point of testing asymptomatic people for COVID-19 is that we KNOW asymptomatic people can be infectious. 

It had certainly seemed so early on— for example from media reporting about the UK businessman “superspreader”, the Washington choir, and the Italy marathon runner, all seemingly at least to have been presymptomatic if not actually asymptomatic.

then, as time went on that seemed not so much to be true...perhaps especially as people came to recognize what “symptoms “ consisted of. ? (Perhaps just loss of smell, or a slight cold-like feeling briefly, for example.)

or perhaps the early appearance of there being significant Asymptomatic superspreader events was itself wrong (really just media reports iirc, that got many of us including me very worried , but not scientific studies) 

or perhaps it was right for early on and later the virus had changed

or perhaps this huge 9million  plus person evaluation quoted from below is false

bold added below: 
 

“The screening of the 9,865,404 participants without a history of COVID-19 found no newly confirmed COVID-19 cases, and identified 300 asymptomatic positive cases with a detection rate of 0.303 (95% CI 0.270–0.339)/10,000. The median age-stratified Ct-values of the asymptomatic cases were shown in Supplementary Table 1. Of the 300 asymptomatic positive cases, two cases came from one family and another two were from another family. There were no previously confirmed COVID-19 patients in these two families. A total of 1174 close contacts of the asymptomatic positive cases were traced, and they all tested negative for the COVID-19. There were 34,424 previously recovered COVID-19 cases who participated in the screening. Of the 34,424 participants with a history of COVID-19, 107 tested positive again, giving a repositive rate of 0.310% (95% CI 0.423–0.574%).

Virus cultures were negative for all asymptomatic positive and repositive cases, indicating no “viable virus” in positive cases detected in this study.

All asymptomatic positive cases, repositive cases and their close contacts were isolated for at least 2 weeks until the results of nucleic acid testing were negative. None of detected positive cases or their close contacts became symptomatic or newly confirmed with COVID-19 during the isolation period. In this screening programme, single and mixed testing was performed, respectively, for 76.7% and 23.3% of the collected samples. The asymptomatic positive rates were 0.321 (95% CI 0.282–0.364)/10,000 and 0.243 (95% CI 0.183–0.315)/10,000, respectively.

The 300 asymptomatic positive persons aged from 10 to 89 years, included 132 males (0.256/10,000) and 168 females (0.355/10,000). The asymptomatic positive rate was the lowest in children or adolescents aged 17 and below (0.124/10,000), and the highest among the elderly aged 60 years and above (0.442/10,000) (Table 1). The asymptomatic positive rate in females (0.355/10,000) was higher than that in males (0.256/10,000) “

It’s from Nature usually considered a good journal— but then we have seen Lancet publish fraudulent studies, so it is hard to know at this point. Imo. 
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w?fb

Edited May 4, 2021 by Pen

[Penelope]

18 minutes ago, Pen said:

It had certainly seemed so early on— for example from the UK businessman “superspreader”, the Washington choir, and the Italy marathon runner, all seemingly at least to have been presymptomatic if not actually asymptomatic.

then, as time went on that seemed not so much to be true...perhaps especially as people came to recognize what “symptoms “ consisted of. ? (Perhaps just loss of smell, or a slight cold-like feeling briefly, for example.) or perhaps the early appearance of there being significant Asymptomatic superspreader events was wrong

or perhaps it was right and the virus had changed

or perhaps this huge 9million  plus person evaluation quoted from below is false

bold added below: 
 

“The screening of the 9,865,404 participants without a history of COVID-19 found no newly confirmed COVID-19 cases, and identified 300 asymptomatic positive cases with a detection rate of 0.303 (95% CI 0.270–0.339)/10,000. The median age-stratified Ct-values of the asymptomatic cases were shown in Supplementary Table 1. Of the 300 asymptomatic positive cases, two cases came from one family and another two were from another family. There were no previously confirmed COVID-19 patients in these two families. A total of 1174 close contacts of the asymptomatic positive cases were traced, and they all tested negative for the COVID-19. There were 34,424 previously recovered COVID-19 cases who participated in the screening. Of the 34,424 participants with a history of COVID-19, 107 tested positive again, giving a repositive rate of 0.310% (95% CI 0.423–0.574%).

Virus cultures were negative for all asymptomatic positive and repositive cases, indicating no “viable virus” in positive cases detected in this study.

All asymptomatic positive cases, repositive cases and their close contacts were isolated for at least 2 weeks until the results of nucleic acid testing were negative. None of detected positive cases or their close contacts became symptomatic or newly confirmed with COVID-19 during the isolation period. In this screening programme, single and mixed testing was performed, respectively, for 76.7% and 23.3% of the collected samples. The asymptomatic positive rates were 0.321 (95% CI 0.282–0.364)/10,000 and 0.243 (95% CI 0.183–0.315)/10,000, respectively.

The 300 asymptomatic positive persons aged from 10 to 89 years, included 132 males (0.256/10,000) and 168 females (0.355/10,000). The asymptomatic positive rate was the lowest in children or adolescents aged 17 and below (0.124/10,000), and the highest among the elderly aged 60 years and above (0.442/10,000) (Table 1). The asymptomatic positive rate in females (0.355/10,000) was higher than that in males (0.256/10,000) “

It’s from Nature usually considered a good journal— but then we have seen Lancet publish fraudulent studies, so it is hard to know at this point. Imo. 
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w?fb

I remember when that came out. Call me skeptical, but it was out of Wuhan where they have a vested interest in showing they controlled the pandemic and everything is fine there. 
 

I agree with you in that I don’t think anyone is sure how much true asymptomatic transmission occurs, and it might be very, very little. I remember at least one other contact tracing study that showed that it was only a fraction of 1% in households. 
And some studies sort of had asymptomatic and presymptomatic in a group together.

The trouble is that PRE-symptomatic does seem to result in a lot of transmission, and when you’re presymptomatic, you think you’re asymptomatic— until you’re not.

What I thought was odd was that Covid was presented as this weird, strange virus that was the only one to do this, because it definitely is not. Or maybe that’s just what I happened to hear. Maybe they initially thought it would be more like SARS-1.

[JennyD]

11 minutes ago, Penelope said:

Maybe they initially thought it would be more like SARS-1.

I think this was it.  With both SARS-1 and MERS, people were/are most contagious when they are quite ill.  So the initial assumption was that SARS-COV-2 would spread similarly, hence all the early focus on fever screening.  

[Pen]

21 minutes ago, Penelope said:

I remember when that came out. Call me skeptical, but it was out of Wuhan where they have a vested interest in showing they controlled the pandemic and everything is fine there. 
 

I agree with you in that I don’t think anyone is sure how much true asymptomatic transmission occurs, and it might be very, very little. I remember at least one other contact tracing study that showed that it was only a fraction of 1% in households. 
And some studies sort of had asymptomatic and presymptomatic in a group together.

The trouble is that PRE-symptomatic does seem to result in a lot of transmission, and when you’re presymptomatic, you think you’re asymptomatic— until you’re not.

What I thought was odd was that Covid was presented as this weird, strange virus that was the only one to do this, because it definitely is not. Or maybe that’s just what I happened to hear. Maybe they initially thought it would be more like SARS-1.

this might be an interesting discussion on Asymptomatic spread

https://theprint.in/science/why-asymptomatic-spread-of-covid-has-become-so-bizarrely-controversial/462891/

 

 

I think perhaps we also need to keep in mind that people are usually not likely to say they did ____ (attend choir, fly on a plane...) knowing they weren’t really feeling well, especially if it leads to deaths. So there may be a bias towards declaring oneself to have been totally asymptomatic if a cluster were to develop. 
 

and also imo (obviously everyone else’s “mileage may vary” on everything  ) we need to keep in mind that vaccines may or may not prevent spread 

 

it may be that spread after vaccine and Asymptomatic spread are both rare, but not zero. 

Edited May 4, 2021 by Pen

[Not_a_Number]

1 hour ago, Penelope said:

The trouble is that PRE-symptomatic does seem to result in a lot of transmission, and when you’re presymptomatic, you think you’re asymptomatic— until you’re not.

Exactly. When people say "asymptomatic," they mean "never shows symptoms." Those people don't seem to spread. But the pre-symptomatic people do. 

[frogger]

I'm really really hoping that Pfizer is fully approved soon. Our city assembly decided that Emergency Orders are in place until 70% of over 16 are vaccinated but it appears that everyone who has wanted a vaccine has already gotten one so we are stuck. I'm really hoping with full approval some more will jump onboard but I kind of doubt it will be that much so does that mean we are stuck with emergency orders indefinitely? Arghhh

[ktgrok]

21 hours ago, Penelope said:

I know we were talking about the monitoring system for adverse effects in the US. It might have been in the other thread.

https://khn.org/news/article/detecting-rare-blood-clots-was-a-win-but-us-vaccine-safety-system-still-has-gaps/

 

 

19 hours ago, Pen said:

No.

Eith regard to studies I take a look at the PCR cycles to try to figure out what they are evaluating. 

If someone had CV19 symptoms, it may make sense to ramp up test cycles to try to determine if it might be related to SARS-Covid-2.  Depending on situation. But afaik that’s not what the study was doing.

“Disease” was (in before  CV19 times to my knowledge and experience ) normally determined by being unwell. Sick.  
 

 

Normally Someone sick (and often only if sick enough to seek medical care) then would be tested . It is fairly unprecedented to test large groups of people who have no evidence of sickness - especially using a test that is ramped up in cycles. 
 

The study did not (though I may have misread this aspect) just test sick people. That being the case using lower cycles to better distinguish real cases from “noise” would make sense. 

One does not for example normally subject a large population in winter all to have influenza tests regardless of having any symptoms, for eaxample.  One does not normally even do that with all hospital workers. Or everyone in a college dorm. Have you experienced that? Maybe I am an older generation and things changed long before CV that I did not realize. And certainly not with an over-sensitive test. Where one may be getting “noise” not significant results. 

The point I was trying to make is that studies based on PCR tests with cycle thresholds at 40 may not tell us accurately useful distinctions between experimental and control groups. 
 

I also do not know though if when level is described as greater than 40 if that means it is necessarily at same level greater than 40 . That’s something about PCR reporting I do not understand as yet. Does greater than 40 mean one group could have been at 41cycles and the other at 51 cycles for example. If anyone knows I’d be interested in the answer.  Iirc the cycles go up by a 3fold increase, so even 42 compared to 41 can be quite significant increase. 

But...the point wasn't to find how many people were sick, it was to compare the vaccinated vs unvaccinated. Which it did. 

[mommyoffive]

$100 as an Incentive to Get a Shot? Experiment Suggests It Can Pay Off. (msn.com)

[Terabith]

8 hours ago, frogger said:

I'm really really hoping that Pfizer is fully approved soon. Our city assembly decided that Emergency Orders are in place until 70% of over 16 are vaccinated but it appears that everyone who has wanted a vaccine has already gotten one so we are stuck. I'm really hoping with full approval some more will jump onboard but I kind of doubt it will be that much so does that mean we are stuck with emergency orders indefinitely? Arghhh

Yeah, our church cannot go back to meeting in person until our community has either 70% or 75% of the community vaccinated.  (Not the church; the surrounding city.)  

I'm really glad that our church has met outside for the last year, but I would like us to return to normal at SOME point, and that requires vaccinations.  

[Pen]

3 hours ago, ktgrok said:

 

But...the point wasn't to find how many people were sick, it was to compare the vaccinated vs unvaccinated. Which it did. 

Well, I am not sure that that is true. 
 

Corraleno I think posted it here for the purpose you give—which I am dubious about being able to pull from that study in a reliable way for important life decisions...because I don’t know if there was apples to apples (so to speak) comparison being made . 
 

if I recall correctly, the actual purpose of the study was different, didn’t require an apples to apples comparison of the two groups, but then people have seen those figures and clung on to them in a way not originally the purpose of the study — but hey — I admit that I read tons on this stuff. I’ll go back and look as maybe I am wrong in which case I will apologize. 
 

ill come back and edit or add an extra post as I find actual study again and what they said was their purpose and conclusion.  Or apologize if I remembered that wrong.