My father tested negative for spike specific antibodies 2 weeks after the 2nd Pfizer vaccine (he's not the only one), and as I didn't find any data on people who test negative (and I know that the vaccine has 94% efficiency preventing COVID), he's still mostly not leaving his apartment.
He'll have a test against the viruses themselves next week, but he'll need to wait 2 weeks for the result for that test.
(not the person you asked) I opted to have one done (out of pocket) when I was doing an unrelated blood test, since I had gotten sick around the time COVID started to be an issue in my area. It's just a matter of checking an additional checkbox on the lab request (if you have the blood taken at a lab) or asking your doctor "hey, can you please also check box X" if the sample is taken at a doctor. Would have definitely stuck to the bare minimum of government-mandated precautions if it had been positive.
1. It was a single player, the rest were other staff
2. Vaccines don't prevent infection, they reduce severity by training the body's immune system. Natural exposure works the same way. This it is not surprising that 8/9 Yankees which tested positive were asymptomatic
This is incorrect - from population studies, we now know that both the mRNA vaccines reduce infection rates and reduce severity of symptoms for those who do get infected. In fact, they both show about 90% efficacy at preventing infection at all. That number is probably trending down a bit with all the new strains, but it is still very high.
I suppose that depends on how infection is defined. Nothing prevents the virus from entering the body and triggering a positive test result, especially when the tests are run with longer cycle times
If you're trying to make a point, I'd ask you make it more clearly. The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines prevent infection, as the literature makes clear. What exactly is not clear?
> Vaccines don't prevent infection, they reduce severity by training the body's immune system
You said:
> I don't know where this misinformation came from, but it is absolutely false. COVID vaccines have been shown to prevent infection...
and cited a link which stated that
> "... two mRNA vaccines can reduce the risk of all SARS-CoV-2 infections, not just symptomatic infections."
So, the vaccines reduce the risk of being the virus being present, as well as the risk that the virus being present will cause symptoms (and by implications, the risk of severe symptoms).
Your link uses the term "infection" to cover both:
* virus present, no symptoms
* virus present, symptoms present
Many people (including GP) would tend to use "infection" to refer to a single condition: virus present.
So in that sense, GP is correct: the vaccine does not necessarily prevent the vaccine from being present in the body, but it is effective at reducing the risk that this will cause symptoms.
Of course, your link also implies that there a reduction in the risk that detectable virus will occur after exposure to the virus (which is great!). But my reading of the whole document suggested that the authors are keen to allow for the possibility that a fully vaccinated person may still have detectable viral load in their body. Ergo, it does not "prevent infection".
If I smear some virus on you, you are not infected. An infection is defined by the growth of a pathogen, not its mere presence. When researchers look for an infection, as described in this study, they do not find an infection in most cases, hence the conclusion that infections are not taking hold and the vaccine is preventing an infection.
This entire argument feels pedantic and is based on the idea that the researchers are just playing fast and loose with words.
"The word infection can denote any presence of a particular pathogen at all (no matter how little) but also is often used in a sense implying a clinically apparent infection (in other words, a case of infectious disease).This fact occasionally creates some ambiguity or prompts some usage discussion; to get around this it is common for health professionals to speak of colonization (rather than infection) when they mean that some of the pathogens are present but that no clinically apparent infection (no disease) is present. "
I think most ball players got J&J, which has a decently lower prevention number. The encouraging news was that they all ended up asymptomatic, which is the next best thing
Yes, All of the Yankee players who were vaccinated had J&J. Also, most were completely asymptomatic and no one had serious symptoms. All-in-all, it was a success story for vaccines.
I wonder if an expert could chime in on this. If someone tests negative for antibodies a few weeks after a vaccine, should that person get vaccinated again? Maybe with a different vaccine?
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have protection. The antibody tests only look For one thing, but the body has many mechanisms of protection from the vaccine. That is one of the reasons why they’re not suggested to be used for the general population.
I know that it doesn't mean that he isn't protected, but I didn't find data on the protection against severe covid disease with the conditional probability of spike specific antibody test being negative after being properly vaccinated. Instead of just guidance I would like to see data.
Anyways that's why there are specific, slower test that can test his protection against specific virus mutations.
From the article, a section called "Prediction of the potential for long term protection" at the bottom of the Results:
> The estimated neutralization level for protection from severe infection is approximately sixfold lower than the level required to protect from any symptomatic infection. Thus, a higher level of protection against severe infection is expected for any given level of vaccine efficacy against mild SARS-CoV-2 infection. Assuming that this relationship remains constant over time, it appears probable that immunity to severe infection may be much more durable than overall immunity to any infection. Long-term studies of antibody responses to vaccinia, measles, mumps or rubella suggest that these responses generally stabilize with half-lives of >10 years. We therefore projected beyond the reported decay of SARS-CoV-2 responses (out to 8 months after infection5), assuming that after 8 months following the infection the decay rate will slow down. We modeled the decay rate of the neutralization titer, assuming that it slowed linearly to a 10-year half-life over 1, 1.5 or 2 years (details in Methods). This analysis predicts that even without immune boosting, a significant proportion of individuals may maintain long-term protection from severe infection by an antigenically similar strain, even though they may become susceptible to mild infection (Fig. 3b,c).
Sounds like good news. This study appears to be saying that the vaccines do a 6x better job of preventing severe covid infection than the known 94% efficacy preventing even mild symptoms from appearing, and that long term immunity [0] might be expected to last decades, similar to other vaccines.
[0], EDIT: "long term protection against severe sickness", as opposed to "immunity", as pointed out by PeterHolzwarth in comment below
I believe the paper indicates otherwise, in regards to immunity. To help make sense of the paper, I read this Science Daily article that reviews it, and contains some comments from the paper's authors.
Here, one of the people associated with the paper mentions:
"Vaccination works very well to prevent both symptoms and severe disease in the short to medium term, but efficacy is predicted to decline over the first few months for most of these vaccines,"
"However, it is very important to understand the difference between immunity against infection and protection from developing severe disease. Our study found that a 6-fold lower level of antibodies is required to protect against severe disease. So even though our analysis predicts that we will start losing immunity to mild infection in the first year after vaccination, protection from severe infection should be longer lived," says Dr Khoury.
Key is that distinction between immunity and protection against severe sickness.
I'm one of those people. I (like many) have already had Covid-19, and there is enough research suggesting that naturally acquired immunity protects as least as good (and likely better) than getting one of the vaccines.
Now the virus has become endemic, there is much less reason to get vaccinated. For the low-risk and healthy.
I feel this depends on what we mean when we say "common cold."
I perceive the topic as characterized by answers to the questions of:
1. How easily can I catch the virus?
2. How likely am I to experience severe symptoms when infected?
3. Are there treatments that will significantly help me if I experience severe symptoms?
My readings indicate covid appears to be more infectious than influenza, but I do not know the comparison between the common cold viruses and covid on this front.
I am uncertain if covid is more or less likely to cause severe symptoms vs influenza. I believe, however, that the viruses that represent the common cold (rhinoviruses) can be definitely characterized as being much more benign in regards to symptoms.
I feel a key issue is #3 - there are few known compounds that can reliably aid in treatment of someone who is experiencing severe symptoms for covid. This is an area of rapidly expanding research now, of course.
> I believe, however, that the viruses that represent the common cold (rhinoviruses) can be definitely characterized as being much more benign in regards to symptoms.
There are at least four endemic cold-coronaviruses, plus the adenovirus family, plus a bunch more. The severity of most of these respiratory infections depend a lot on patient comorbidities, and immune history.
The OP asked a simple question that requires no definitional equivocation. You are complicating the question unnecessarily.
The question is: will the virus become endemic. The simple answer is "yes", because it is already endemic: it has multiple mammalian reservoirs, is found in every country on earth, and is ubiquitous in the human population. It is endemic.
Theories about severity, treatment, etc., are completely irrelevant.
It's a digression to make an ideological argument about the severity of Covid, and imply that it cannot therefore be endemic.
A "severe" disease can indeed be endemic, and the "common cold" actually kills a substantial number of people every year. They're completely orthogonal concepts.
How is it irrelevant? It seems like some of the most relevant considerations when explicitly asking about something compared to the common cold, which is exactly what they did.
This was a super weird reaction to someone's detailed yet brief and thoughtful response.
The people achieving immunity through vaccination are at a huge disadvantage compared to those with natural immunity. As shown in research from the other day, natural antibodies target several proteins and more of the spike protein than Pfizer immunity does. Additionally, natural immunity stimulates both the innate immune response and killer T cell response.
I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing ADE among vaccinated individuals - there's a good chance their antibodies will be non neutralizing when challenged with live virus a year from now.
Also, it appears governments are motivated to hide information about the vaccine. It's come out the CDC is performing PCR testing for vaccinated individuals with a lower cycle count than for the unvaccinated. There's no reason to trust anything coming out of the CDC with regards to vaccination.
I don’t believe this is clear at all. So far, it actually seems the mRNA vaccines as well as the viral vector vaccines greatly attenuate the severity of COVID among those who do catch a variant.
There is only one study to estimate the effectiveness of the mrna vaccines. It was quite small, and performed only on those who received pristine mrna injections.
It's come out that the mass produced vaccine has significant mrna degradation. It's unclear how many people's vaccines were even effective.
Additionally you have 9 Yankees players who were fully vaccinated contracting the virus, so its not 95% effective in preventing infection and there's a very real risk of Merek's disease as a result.
Furthermore, Pfizer is on record as saying a 3rd dose will be needed. Meanwhile, natural immunity has been shown to be robust and long lasting.
AFAIK the only player to have tested positive for COVID in that outbreak is Gleyber Torres (the rest were support staff), who had an actual COVID infection before, which undermines your idea that getting COVID is somehow superior to getting vaccinated.
And as already mentioned, the Yankees received the J&J vaccine, which is not an MRNA vaccine.
Naturally the hacker's echo chamber will downvote my wrongthink into oblivion. I hate this community. Proceed to shadowban everyone you disagree with. Bye.
Do you have a link to the research you’re citing from the other day? Also the basis for your implication that there’s a known difference in T cell response for natural immunity vs vaccine immunity?
That antibody research doesn’t seem to support your initial assertion of vaccinated individuals being at a huge disadvantage compared to those with natural immunity.
Your point about T cell response seems reasonable. A natural T cell response may be able to target internal viral proteins. But backing up a bit, I’m struggling to find the overall “so what”. If a person is worried about getting covid and doesn’t want to be at a “disadvantage” they should...get covid?
Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines cause production of the full COVID spike protein. There is no reason to believe or even suspect that antibodies produced in response to that do not target the same regions of that spike protein that they would if produced in response to spike protein from the actual virus.
How does your argument here correspond with the numerous articles discussing how the mRNA vaccines are effective against the numerous variants?
There's a big scare every time there's a new variant, followed by another article a couple weeks later about how the vaccine is X > 50% effective against [ new variant ].
The high cycle counts of the PCR tests in the US make all official numbers suspect. Particularly in combination with implicit political pressure against the previous administration, and an overzealous press. The entire system - academic, medical, news and entertainment - is rotten with bias and society collectively is worse off for it, especially with respect to handling this pandemic.
It's hard to find a source now but these PCR tests were being run with cycle counts anywhere from 30-40; in this regime you are extremely likely to amplify noise and generate a huge percentage of false positives. The inventor of the PCR tests made similar comments regarding abuse of the PCR process during the HIV/aids pandemic - and wouldn't you know it, Dr. Fauci was involved in [mis]managing that pandemic as well. His self serving publication and premature press release created an ultimately unfounded stigma around HIV positivity. There is simply no reason to trust the guy now, regardless of his overtly warm, anti-trump persona. And now he has repeatedly denied before congress that he was affiliated with funding/conducting gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. But the publications, with authors publicly and directly linked to Fauci and funds he managed, are freely available online. This should be a far bigger story.
"It's come out the CDC is performing PCR testing for vaccinated individuals with a lower cycle count than for the unvaccinated."
Do you have anything to back up this conspiracy theory? I'm also wondering how many of the ~1 million tests per day are being performed by the CDC itself?
We would have seen evidence of ADE by now. From convalescent plasma to naturally re-exposed and reinfected to the individuals vaccinated almost a year ago now.
And the vaccines target spike because there were concerns about ADE with vaccines against the SARS-CoV-1 nucleocapsid protein, but not spike.
Pfizer stimulates both CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells responses:
The headline might be what you expect, but the article contains mathematical details about the relationship between antibody levels from the vaccines and neutralization. It also models antibody levels over time to see what immune protection we'll have in the future. Did we know the expected efficacy of the vaccine against severe Covid 750 days post-vaccine before?
My partner is the recipient of an organ transplant and is on anti-rejection meds. She's already had both shots of Pfizer. So we're following the research closely. Researchers are beginning to look at how the vaccine works in the immunosuppressed. The initial results aren't great. In one study[1], 46% didn't have any antibodies after both shots. 39% had antibodies only after the second shot. Only 15% received antibodies after the first shot.
I know this research is still in early stages and the initial sample size was relatively small. And T-cell responses were not measured. There's a decent chance the situation isn't as bad as it initially seems. But it's still discouraging.
[1] Antibody Response to 2-Dose SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine Series in Solid Organ Transplant Recipients
I hope a consequence of this is that we'll begin to treat antibody levels as an alternative proof of immunity to vaccine documentation. Vaccines are a means to an end, not an end themselves. If someone has the requisite antibody immunity from having had the virus, we shouldn't necessarily be vaccinating those people.
For one, there are people all around the world waiting for vaccines. If the antibody levels can be used as a general stand in for immunity, there are people that need the vaccines more than those who have the requisite antibodies.
Secondly, intentionally triggering an immune response isn't exactly good for you. The assumption is that a vaccine arrives at an immune response in a less harmful way than getting the infection itself...but for those who have had the infection (and demonstrated a sufficiently high antibody count), retriggering an immune response is subjecting a person to a needless secondary immune response.
It also has something to do with what A means in ADE. To make long story short next questions you should ask are:
* what antibody classification systems exists, which one is used and why?
* what's the difference between non-cyclic (natural smallpox, plague, measles) and cyclic (HIV, T-cell leukemia, serum hepatitis, herpes)?
* what does ID have to do with the IFNγR1 gene?
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadHe'll have a test against the viruses themselves next week, but he'll need to wait 2 weeks for the result for that test.
2. Vaccines don't prevent infection, they reduce severity by training the body's immune system. Natural exposure works the same way. This it is not surprising that 8/9 Yankees which tested positive were asymptomatic
The Yankees are reported to be using the J&J vaccine, which is a viral vector product.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0329-COVID-19-Vacci....
> while this study evaluated vaccine effectiveness against infection, including infections that did not result in symptoms.
and also:
> The study demonstrates that these two mRNA vaccines can reduce the risk of all SARS-CoV-2 infections, not just symptomatic infections.
You'll note that this implies a somewhat different definition of "infection" than the one I think you're reaching for.
> Vaccines don't prevent infection, they reduce severity by training the body's immune system
You said:
> I don't know where this misinformation came from, but it is absolutely false. COVID vaccines have been shown to prevent infection...
and cited a link which stated that
> "... two mRNA vaccines can reduce the risk of all SARS-CoV-2 infections, not just symptomatic infections."
So, the vaccines reduce the risk of being the virus being present, as well as the risk that the virus being present will cause symptoms (and by implications, the risk of severe symptoms).
Your link uses the term "infection" to cover both:
Many people (including GP) would tend to use "infection" to refer to a single condition: virus present.So in that sense, GP is correct: the vaccine does not necessarily prevent the vaccine from being present in the body, but it is effective at reducing the risk that this will cause symptoms.
Of course, your link also implies that there a reduction in the risk that detectable virus will occur after exposure to the virus (which is great!). But my reading of the whole document suggested that the authors are keen to allow for the possibility that a fully vaccinated person may still have detectable viral load in their body. Ergo, it does not "prevent infection".
This entire argument feels pedantic and is based on the idea that the researchers are just playing fast and loose with words.
"The word infection can denote any presence of a particular pathogen at all (no matter how little) but also is often used in a sense implying a clinically apparent infection (in other words, a case of infectious disease).This fact occasionally creates some ambiguity or prompts some usage discussion; to get around this it is common for health professionals to speak of colonization (rather than infection) when they mean that some of the pathogens are present but that no clinically apparent infection (no disease) is present. "
The "95% protection rate" doesn't really mean people don't get infected. Vaccinated people get in contact with as much virus as others.
What it means is their immune system defeats 95% of the infections before you notice you're sick.
But if you get a test while your body is in the middle of crushing such a small infection, you'll test positive.
Anyways that's why there are specific, slower test that can test his protection against specific virus mutations.
tia
> The estimated neutralization level for protection from severe infection is approximately sixfold lower than the level required to protect from any symptomatic infection. Thus, a higher level of protection against severe infection is expected for any given level of vaccine efficacy against mild SARS-CoV-2 infection. Assuming that this relationship remains constant over time, it appears probable that immunity to severe infection may be much more durable than overall immunity to any infection. Long-term studies of antibody responses to vaccinia, measles, mumps or rubella suggest that these responses generally stabilize with half-lives of >10 years. We therefore projected beyond the reported decay of SARS-CoV-2 responses (out to 8 months after infection5), assuming that after 8 months following the infection the decay rate will slow down. We modeled the decay rate of the neutralization titer, assuming that it slowed linearly to a 10-year half-life over 1, 1.5 or 2 years (details in Methods). This analysis predicts that even without immune boosting, a significant proportion of individuals may maintain long-term protection from severe infection by an antigenically similar strain, even though they may become susceptible to mild infection (Fig. 3b,c).
Sounds like good news. This study appears to be saying that the vaccines do a 6x better job of preventing severe covid infection than the known 94% efficacy preventing even mild symptoms from appearing, and that long term immunity [0] might be expected to last decades, similar to other vaccines.
[0], EDIT: "long term protection against severe sickness", as opposed to "immunity", as pointed out by PeterHolzwarth in comment below
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210517105727.h...
Here, one of the people associated with the paper mentions:
"Vaccination works very well to prevent both symptoms and severe disease in the short to medium term, but efficacy is predicted to decline over the first few months for most of these vaccines,"
"However, it is very important to understand the difference between immunity against infection and protection from developing severe disease. Our study found that a 6-fold lower level of antibodies is required to protect against severe disease. So even though our analysis predicts that we will start losing immunity to mild infection in the first year after vaccination, protection from severe infection should be longer lived," says Dr Khoury.
Key is that distinction between immunity and protection against severe sickness.
*not sure if these are the exact number I remember from the lecture.
Type C can infect humans but is typically mild and has not yet caused a serious epidemic.
Type D is not known to infect humans at all.
Now the virus has become endemic, there is much less reason to get vaccinated. For the low-risk and healthy.
I perceive the topic as characterized by answers to the questions of:
1. How easily can I catch the virus?
2. How likely am I to experience severe symptoms when infected?
3. Are there treatments that will significantly help me if I experience severe symptoms?
My readings indicate covid appears to be more infectious than influenza, but I do not know the comparison between the common cold viruses and covid on this front.
I am uncertain if covid is more or less likely to cause severe symptoms vs influenza. I believe, however, that the viruses that represent the common cold (rhinoviruses) can be definitely characterized as being much more benign in regards to symptoms.
I feel a key issue is #3 - there are few known compounds that can reliably aid in treatment of someone who is experiencing severe symptoms for covid. This is an area of rapidly expanding research now, of course.
There are at least four endemic cold-coronaviruses, plus the adenovirus family, plus a bunch more. The severity of most of these respiratory infections depend a lot on patient comorbidities, and immune history.
The question is: will the virus become endemic. The simple answer is "yes", because it is already endemic: it has multiple mammalian reservoirs, is found in every country on earth, and is ubiquitous in the human population. It is endemic.
Theories about severity, treatment, etc., are completely irrelevant.
Will the virus become endemic and be a common illness? Yes.
Focusing on the "common cold" is a way of making the question about severity, which is clearly not the intent.
A "severe" disease can indeed be endemic, and the "common cold" actually kills a substantial number of people every year. They're completely orthogonal concepts.
This was a super weird reaction to someone's detailed yet brief and thoughtful response.
I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing ADE among vaccinated individuals - there's a good chance their antibodies will be non neutralizing when challenged with live virus a year from now.
Also, it appears governments are motivated to hide information about the vaccine. It's come out the CDC is performing PCR testing for vaccinated individuals with a lower cycle count than for the unvaccinated. There's no reason to trust anything coming out of the CDC with regards to vaccination.
It's come out that the mass produced vaccine has significant mrna degradation. It's unclear how many people's vaccines were even effective.
Additionally you have 9 Yankees players who were fully vaccinated contracting the virus, so its not 95% effective in preventing infection and there's a very real risk of Merek's disease as a result.
Furthermore, Pfizer is on record as saying a 3rd dose will be needed. Meanwhile, natural immunity has been shown to be robust and long lasting.
Are you scared? Or intentionally spreading misinformation?
And as already mentioned, the Yankees received the J&J vaccine, which is not an MRNA vaccine.
Natural immunity robust and long lasting: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/health/coronavirus-immuni...
Killer t cell importance: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00367-7
There's a big scare every time there's a new variant, followed by another article a couple weeks later about how the vaccine is X > 50% effective against [ new variant ].
It's hard to find a source now but these PCR tests were being run with cycle counts anywhere from 30-40; in this regime you are extremely likely to amplify noise and generate a huge percentage of false positives. The inventor of the PCR tests made similar comments regarding abuse of the PCR process during the HIV/aids pandemic - and wouldn't you know it, Dr. Fauci was involved in [mis]managing that pandemic as well. His self serving publication and premature press release created an ultimately unfounded stigma around HIV positivity. There is simply no reason to trust the guy now, regardless of his overtly warm, anti-trump persona. And now he has repeatedly denied before congress that he was affiliated with funding/conducting gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. But the publications, with authors publicly and directly linked to Fauci and funds he managed, are freely available online. This should be a far bigger story.
Do you have anything to back up this conspiracy theory? I'm also wondering how many of the ~1 million tests per day are being performed by the CDC itself?
On your second point, this is a recommendation for all tests, nor just the ones performed by the CDC (do they test themselves?)
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/downloads/Information-...
And the vaccines target spike because there were concerns about ADE with vaccines against the SARS-CoV-1 nucleocapsid protein, but not spike.
Pfizer stimulates both CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells responses:
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/pfizer-reports-strong-...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.17.20140533v...
And the stuff in there about IL-4 and IL-5 and "the absence of a potentially deleterious TH2 immune response" is all about "no signs of ADE".
I know this research is still in early stages and the initial sample size was relatively small. And T-cell responses were not measured. There's a decent chance the situation isn't as bad as it initially seems. But it's still discouraging.
[1] Antibody Response to 2-Dose SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine Series in Solid Organ Transplant Recipients
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2779852
For one, there are people all around the world waiting for vaccines. If the antibody levels can be used as a general stand in for immunity, there are people that need the vaccines more than those who have the requisite antibodies.
Secondly, intentionally triggering an immune response isn't exactly good for you. The assumption is that a vaccine arrives at an immune response in a less harmful way than getting the infection itself...but for those who have had the infection (and demonstrated a sufficiently high antibody count), retriggering an immune response is subjecting a person to a needless secondary immune response.
The I in HIV and the ID in the name of the associated disease mean something important here.
It also has something to do with what A means in ADE. To make long story short next questions you should ask are:
https://doi.org/10.35825/2587-5728-2020-4-3-338-373