Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Miguel Sanchez]

 

[Todd_is_God]

Broken, broken people

[TheScarf]

Covid has absolutely fucking ruined some people.

[Elixir]

That Ding fraud should be before a judge, imho.

[Am Featha Taigh Nan Clach]

I strongly suspect the reason some of these scientists types are taking what seem like wildly unneccessary 'precautions' is because they have high functioning autism rather than because they're nuts.

[Louis Litt]

The airport boy in the middle looks like he's being attacked by something off stranger things 

[SweeperDee]

Floored with it. Thought I had pneumonia. Had to get an OOH appointment at 1am this morning as 111 said they had to rule out other things. Feel awful. Double vaccinated.

[Elixir]

Still seeing some crackpots in masks despite the utterly glorious 30°C+ heat in our nation's capital these past two days. 

Tbf, still see some folk in jumpers or jackets as well.

 

[Loonytoons]

You've spectacularly missed the point.
For vaccines to be effective, an immune response against a virus needs to be generated when it attempts to infect you. If a vaccine can do this against a variant that was not known when it was created, then prior infection from a variant that was known at the time would also do this equally well. The opposite is, of course, also true but one cannot be true and the other false.
Flu vaccines are not the same btw. The flu virus itself is fairly stable, with known variants which can be vaccinated against. When the dominant flu strain differs from what is expected, the vaccine is largely ineffective.
Last winter is a great example of this in a covid sense - the vaccines used were created before Omicron BA.2 existed, and, as that was the dominant variant at the time, then based on the number of positive tests recorded they appeared to do very little (if anything) to prevent infection. The claim that they instead reduced the severity of infection is convenient because the level of vaccine coverage makes it almost impossible to prove or disprove.

I've not really missed anything. I've a half decent knowledge of how the immune system works and you seem to be overlooking how quickly Covid is creating new dominant variants and the lack of even medium term memory immunity to Covid.

Removing vaccines and waning immunity memory from the discussion.

Someone getting the first Covid strain infection is likely to have a strong immune response to the same variant and subsequent variants up to the point where the variants illicit a poor memory response to immune system. In other words, you'll get infected again. You will then have a memory response to that and the next few strains.
Introducing vaccines and immunity drop off, there IS an immunity memory drop off AND the virus itself is mutating; tweaking vaccines to be a better match to current strains is a sensible approach.

I reckon I had Omicron BA.1, might have been Delta as both were on the go at that time.
Now, I may have been infected again by BA.4 or BA.5 and my memory cells were good enough to fight the infection off but that would unlikely cause a memory response to that strain as I didn't get fully infected. I'm fully expecting to catch either the next dominant strain or the one after that though.

Re the flu vaccine being similar, that was in regards to having to alter current covid vaccines that are losing their efficacy in exactly the same way they have to alter flu vaccines that lose their efficacy, not how the viruses themselves are similar.

You seem to be suggesting that once you've been vaccinated or caught Covid you no longer need vaccinated but if you've been vaccinated or caught flu you'll need a jab for the dominant strain for your immune response to prevent it.

[Todd_is_God]

1 hour ago, Loonytoons said:

You seem to be suggesting that once you've been vaccinated or caught Covid you no longer need vaccinated but if you've been vaccinated or caught flu you'll need a jab for the dominant strain for your immune response to prevent it.

It's really not that deep tbh. It's quite a simple point - if, as claimed by the experts, an infection from a previous variant provides no protection from a future variant, then a vaccine created to protect against that same previous variant would also provide no protection. Given the complete failure of the vaccines to prevent the wave of December 2021 / January 2022 I'd be more inclined to agree that infection from a previous variant does indeed provide little protection from future variants. Acknowledging that the vaccines also then provide little protection is something that just isn't going to be done, though.

If any variant is going to cause a wave of infections this Autumn / Winter then it's almost certainly going to be a new one and not any of BA.2, BA.4 or BA.5. When these new variants do appear, they've followed a pattern of arrive, spread rapidly and widely, then burn out all in a shorter time frams than any vaccine tweaking could be done and rolled out.

As it's simply not possible to create a vaccine for something that does not currently exist, then it's unlikely that any of the currently available vaccines would actually offer any protection at all, beyond the impossible to prove or disprove claim that "they don't stop you catching it, but they make it less severe".

Edited July 19, 2022 by Todd_is_God

[Wee Bully]

4 minutes ago, Todd_is_God said:

It's really not that deep tbh. It's quite a simple point - if, as claimed by the experts, an infection from a previous variant provides no protection from a future variant, then a vaccine created to protect against that same previous variant would also provide no protection. 

If any variant is going to cause a wave of infections this Autumn / Winter then it's almost certainly going to be a new one and not any of BA.2, BA.4 or BA.5.

As it's simply not possible to create a vaccine for something that does not currently exist, then for any of the currently available vaccines to offer any protection at all, then natural infection must also offer protection. One cannot be true without the other.

I'm not sure why you are struggling to grasp this point.

Good to see you back home on here after making a raging c**t of yourself on the hot weather thread. Keep fighting the good fight!

[Todd_is_God]

1 minute ago, Wee Bully said:

Good to see you back home on here after making a raging c**t of yourself on the hot weather thread. Keep fighting the good fight!

[Loonytoons]

1 hour ago, Todd_is_God said:

It's really not that deep tbh. It's quite a simple point - if, as claimed by the experts, an infection from a previous variant provides no protection from a future variant, then a vaccine created to protect against that same previous variant would also provide no protection. Given the complete failure of the vaccines to prevent the wave of December 2021 / January 2022 I'd be more inclined to agree that infection from a previous variant does indeed provide little protection from future variants. Acknowledging that the vaccines also then provide little protection is something that just isn't going to be done, though.

If any variant is going to cause a wave of infections this Autumn / Winter then it's almost certainly going to be a new one and not any of BA.2, BA.4 or BA.5. When these new variants do appear, they've followed a pattern of arrive, spread rapidly and widely, then burn out all in a shorter time frams than any vaccine tweaking could be done and rolled out.

As it's simply not possible to create a vaccine for something that does not currently exist, then it's unlikely that any of the currently available vaccines would actually offer any protection at all, beyond the impossible to prove or disprove claim that "they don't stop you catching it, but they make it less severe".

 

Ah, I see where this is coming from now, after a bit of digging.

Basically it looks like previous infections of previous strains (or vaccinations) are having a dampening effect on the immune system as far as the Omicron variants are concerned, i.e. poor memory immunity to the Omicron family variants leading to breakthrough infections.  Apologies that I missed that, if it had been posted before. 

You're last sentence does warrant further investigation by the scientists; does vaccination actually reduce the severity?  I did mention that previously as something that needs looked at.

That said, vaccines can be tweaked to illicit an immune response to different parts of viruses.  Binding spikes have been the historic choice of target as that is how the immune system generally works to provide immunity to reinfection, i.e. infected cells covered in viral binding spike proteins get flagged for destruction by the immune system and memory cells are created from this.  Different parts of the virus could be targetted that haven't been dampened by previous infection/vaccination which, I think, has been looked at.  Might not help in the short term though, it all comes down to just how pathogenic the next variant is.

 

[NorthernLights]

There does seem to be a fairly common arguement from pro-maskers etc that YOU shouldn't be travelling but MY trip is virtuous and therefore ok.

 

[Gnash]

1 hour ago, NorthernLights said:

There does seem to be a fairly common arguement from pro-maskers etc that YOU shouldn't be travelling but MY trip is virtuous and therefore ok.

 

This account is a parody, right?

[Zetterlund]

6 hours ago, NorthernLights said:

There does seem to be a fairly common arguement from pro-maskers etc that YOU shouldn't be travelling but MY trip is virtuous and therefore ok.

 

Looks like she's more likely to hyperventilate and pass out due to restricting her own flow of oxygen. Another human broken beyond repair.

[Detournement]

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jul/20/unvaccinated-review-the-most-infuriating-tv-show-of-the-year-so-far

The Guardian and the BBC seem to think it's 2021 again.

The vaccine does nothing to prevent infection or transmission of the current variants and millions of unvaccinated people are going about their lives at big events, going on holidays and studying or working as normal yet pish like this is still being published. 

Edited July 21, 2022 by Detournement

[scottsdad]

Was in a Teams call and one woman told me that her husband had caught Covid. 

The one time he didn't wear his mask to the supermarket, he caught it (apparently). Now they are all going about double masked. 

Fair enough - but how can they say with certainty that that is when he caught it?

[scottsdad]

2 minutes ago, oaksoft said:

Fry gathers seven of the roughly 4 million Britons who have chosen not to receive a Covid vaccine, in the hope of better understanding them.

Does she really want to understand them though?

Or just "expose them" and "convert them"?

Don't get me wrong, I'm pro-vaccine but the constant demonising of unvaccinated people making decisions over their own bodies over the last year has been a pretty depressing state of affairs.

 

TV is a strange land. Voyeurs looking to find out how "they" live. "They" change depending on who we're talking about. Remember Benefits Street? - trying to "understand" folk on benefits but really designed as televisual clickbait so folk at home could faint in horror at folk on benefits smoking fags.

Same thing here. 

[Dawson Park Boy]

On a positive note, was in a hospital (private)on Monday and wasn’t even asked to wear a mask despite being ready with the exemption. Even the admin lady agreed that’s it’s all a big charade and we need to just live with it.