What industry lies to the people it is supposed to be making healthier with their products, time and time again, covering up facts in order to protect a billion-dollar continuing revenue stream that is derived entirely on the principle of addiction?
Tell me again which industries outright own the media groups reporting on their failings/not reporting on their failings? There is nothing comparable to the Big Pharma's influence over Western society, by any stretch of the imagination.
> What industry lies to the people it is supposed to be making healthier with their products,
Many.
> time and time again, covering up facts in order to protect a billion-dollar continuing revenue stream
Many.
> that is derived entirely on the principle of addiction?
Wait, are we talking tobacco? Coffee? Facebook?
> Tell me again which industries outright own the media groups reporting on their failings/not reporting on their failings?
Big pharma owns the newspapers now?
> There is nothing comparable to the Big Pharma's influence over Western society, by any stretch of the imagination.
Fossil fuels, easily.
Have there been bad actors, bad decisions, evil people? Yep, in every walk of life. Writing off entire industries because of it is myopic. Calling out pharma as worse than all others is just nonsense.
"The Defender" is a quack site and that article is conspiracy theory bullcrap.
You might want to get your 'news' somewhere else, and try to think a little more critically about where you pick up information.
"Big Pharma" has issues, and could do with tighter regulation, especially in the USA. Other countries manage it. And none of that means we throw out good science and good medical products like vaccines.
Do you really think a criminal organization such as Pfizer doesn't have its own propaganda fund? This is a company that knowingly lied to its users about the efficacy and dangers of its drugs, and opted to cover it up and eventually pay a billion dollar fine, rather than actually address their failings.
Blind faith in authoritarian institutions is not a good way to direct public health policy - especially when those institutions have a long and sordid track record of human rights abuses and outright criminal behaviour.
As usual when the HPV vaccine is mentioned, I want to stress how important it is to get it, for anyone but those that absolutely do not have sex. HPV can cause warts and serious cancers in the mouth/throat, anus, penis and vaginal tract/cervix. Warts alone can be a severe mental and physical burden requiring several visits to a dermatologist and potentially extremely dangerous medicine like Imiquimod.
The HPV vaccines protect against the most dangerous of the many known HPV strains. The HPV vaccines are even assumed to be a therapy for infection already present. Many people have at least a few HPV strains somewhere in their body. Almost everyone who engages in casual sex has them.
HPV has been promoted primarily for women, to protect against cervical cancer, but men are also at risk: It can cause cancer at/in your penis, anus and throat! MSM (men having sex with men) are especially at risk.
Public health messaging has been excruciatingly slow here too, it's gradually being recommended more and more for males too in the last few years by public health agencies as an actual health intervention for males (previously the idea was more about reducing transmission to females). So yes, second this, everyone should get this vaccine, and it's probably not too late to get some benefit from it since there are multiple strains you can vaccinate against (you'll almost certainly have some strains if you're aged 20+ though). That said, for multiple reasons there's no real need to panic and rush out to get it if you're older and monogamous.
I paid about 450€ for the 3x HPV vaccine series in Austria, which is absurd. In my time as casual sex addict I have seen three cases of severe anal condylomata outbreaks that I all sent to a dermatologist, all three not vaccinated. I myself had two anal warts (interestingly, right after the second vaccine) that I got cut out, luckily they never came back.
The uncertainty caused in most people that engage after having read the claim is the highest honor. Knowing the truth wouldn't change the interaction. It wouldn't change me. It would only change something inside of your head. Thus, does it matter?
If GPT-3 is that good then in this case it's still offering good public health advice. I think it's a person posting but with the GPT-3 thing as their description as that'd be pretty funny, but unless there are obvious errors we'll never know.
I feel like making errors is only human. Wouldn't making no errors at all be strange? As the saying goes, only the dead make no errors.
I generally only offer public health advice that I have diligently researched myself. If I can't substantiate my claims with a source, I will mention that. Also, it's not like I only make very well accepted claims. For example, I am against Covid vaccination for people not at risk, especially children.
You do have to keep in mind that I am not a healthcare professional and never claimed to be. I am just an interested layman.
There is some evidence that at least some HPV vaccines can help against existing, symptomatic HPV.* The one I linked was with a quadrivalent HPV vaccine, so, not the Gardasil-9 that is currently in use. I know there are even more case reports about this topic out there. If it works like that for already symptomatic infection, it will work equally or better against asymptomic / presymptomatic infection. But, an authoritative answer to your question does not exist.
Besides that, there is the high likelihood that you aren't infected with all variants of HPV the vaccine protects against, so go for it.
I can only repeat my claim, that getting the HPV vaccination series is a good idea for almost everyone at every age (the younger the better), besides almost esoteric exceptions (e.g. those severely immunocompromised people that also don't create covid vaccine antibodies and monks with life long sexual abstinence).
Is there any information why this is the case for covid, but not some other vaccines? What makes all the Covid vaccines so very bad at their job? Is it just the mutation speed of covid?
e.g. the pox vaccine some people received 50 years ago still seems to protect against monkeypox now and the HPV vaccine also seems to provide long lasting protection ("at least 10 years, probably more").
Clue, look at the general behaviour of all virii within the similar genus. C19 is a new variety, but C-class virii are and have been well researched for decades.
And almost every, single, time. C19 is behaving like a new C-class virus with some new symptoms such as a chesty cough and a risk of pneumonic like symptoms in those who have non perfect health. I.e. it's not been bioengineered to kill it be more or less contagious, or cause people to grow a 3rd arm.
"Virii" is wrong. If it were a thing, it would be the plural of "virius", which isn't a word.
"The Latin word "virus" isn't widely attested, and never in the plural. It seems to refer to something like a miasma - that is, a substance, that has no plural.
The English word Virus, refering to a particle of an infectious agent, should therefore be treated as an English word, of which the plural form is "viruses".
[Edit] There are singular nouns in Latin that end in "-us", which do have a plural form, but that plural form is spelled the same as the singular form. So it's possible that the plural of the Latin "virus" was "virus". But as far as I'm aware, it wasn't a countable noun.
Also, if we want "virus" to mean a particle, then it's inconvenient for the plural to also be "virus" - we'd like a notation for referring to multiple particles.
[Edit 2] It's worse, isn't it? We refer to the "Covid-19 virus", meaning the global population of that group of strains; the individual strains in the group might then also be referred to as a singular "virus", in the sense in which we might refer to urban air-pollution being caused by "the car".
I gave up using words like "stadia" and "referenda" many years ago. I'm afraid I'm very pedantic about language, but I now think those are a sort of back-Latin, and they sound pretentious. "Stadium" and "referendum" are English words now, and the way normal people pluralise them is correct.
Well, I wasn't having a go at you. I just think it's an interesting word; I was throwing some light on its origins, and noting how the word "virii" is used as if it were an import word from Latin, but which never existed in Latin.
Your "sed" suggestion is interesting, but there are many abused words that my inner pedant would have to put through the filter. Not all of them are HTML markup. So I envision a kind of "super-sed", that can auto-translate all of my linguistic experience, including text, speech, video, and even road-signs, and make everything nice for me.
Neat startup plan: world-changing idea, huge ambition, no detailed explanation of how it works, but hell; fake it till you make it.
Unfortunately given the overton window allowed the definition of "vaccine" to dramatically change within 2 years it's difficult to get worked up on Greek Vs Latin grammar. The battle whilst correct is lost on a youth that prides internet selfies and tiktok.
I think there’s a reason there were no human corona virus vaccines prior to covid. They hadn’t figured out how to make one that was safe and effective.
The only coronavirus vaccine that I’m aware of prior to covid was one for dogs.
Consider the flu vaccine. This is one of the most widely used vaccines, and it only lasts for about a year. My understanding is it's due to the rate at which the virus mutates, as you allude. Essentially the flu is different every year, and the vaccines only work against last version as more variants are created. COVID similarly mutates frequently, leading to a similar situation. In contrast, monkeypox and HPV do not mutate frequently leading to variants.
Traditional vaccines are either weaker versions of the same virus created through "breeding" in animals or other manipulations OR they are replication deficient viruses, that means they can only replicated in specialized lab cells, but not in our real, normal cells.
Nanoparticle vaccines are less traditional in the sense that they do not contain a virus at all, but just particles that have the virus signature, to trick your immune system into building protection against the real virus, that has the same signature.
mrna and vector vaccines are even less traditional: They literally infect your existing, healthy cells and turn them into factories for nanoparticles. Eventually those cells are killed. The amount of particles produced for those vaccines is indeterminate, potentially leading to heavier side effects ("reactions") and the death of the infected cells itself is also not healthy.
Traditional vaccines are inactivated viruses, you inject killed viruses which are thus inactive but might still allow the immune system to react and build immunity, though you often need an adjuvant to trigger a strong enough response.
This is a protein based vaccine, some traditional vaccines also use this method, like the Hepatitis B vaccine, where basically you inject some of the protein from the virus instead of the whole virus as with the inactivated method. You can also combine multiple proteins into a nanoparticle as is done here. The idea of combining proteins from multiple various SARS into a nanoparticle is what's novel here.
mRNA vaccines on the other hand are new with COVID-19, they are kind of similar to protein vaccines in that they end up producing proteins from the virus, except instead of injecting the proteins directly, we take a segment of the genetic code of the virus and we deliver that to some of our cells so that they produce the protein for us.
Nice summary. Also explains why sputnik the vaccine from Russia was developed so quickly and was effective. Traditional vaccines work.
As for why they stifled production and roll out is another matter entirely, maybe mass production was difficult/expensive when there is a mad dash for reagents.
I'm not making a statement on it being better or lasting longer and in all honesty there is little data to prove that one way or the other.
and the safety, efficacy and all of the claims/statements from pfizer et. al. are trustworthy.
Look it up again, in western clinical trials it performed as well as was expected 70% or so efficacy as was claimed with almost no identified serious side effects. Of course the data at the start was optimistic, but then in the west it was portrayed as 1000% safe by proponents despite the growing number of lawsuits for the 0.001% of cases where it was extremely NOT.
mRNA vaccines have the advantage of being lower cost to make and faster to develop.
Traditional vaccines can work, but finding ways to kill or attune a virus in a way that still triggers an immune response that can fight off the live virus is tricky.
With protein based one, finding the right proteins and finding a way to produce those proteins for injection is also tricky.
I also forgot to mention Adenovirus Vaccines which are also kind of new in that there's only newer vaccines like for Ebola and malaria that are based on it. This similarly delivers genetic material from the virus to our cells so they produce the proteins, except the genetic material is delivered through another virus, instead of by using mRNA. Manufacturing the adenovirus carrier is trickier than manufacturing mRNA.
The Sputnik-V vaccine is an Adenovirus vaccine, so not something I'd consider a traditional vaccine, it has much more in common with mRNA, in that it programs our own cells to produce proteins, the difference is it does so by having an Adenovirus inject DNA into our cells, instead of having mRNA wrapped in lipids be the trigger to our cells.
Maybe the latter, certainly not the former. Otherwise that's like saying nuclear power is free once we've built the reactor. There are no magical 3d printers which will make an mRNA style treatment on demand and if there ever was the price tag would have more zeros than the average house.
Where to draw the line on mRNA style or not is clearly dependent on person to person as because of so many years of bad PR/press from biomed industry it's like saying what a datalake is to a storage expert and expecting them to know what you mean.
> Maybe the latter, certainly not the former. Otherwise that's like saying nuclear power is free once we've built the reactor. There are no magical 3d printers which will make an mRNA style treatment on demand and if there ever was the price tag would have more zeros than the average house
What do you mean? I'm not sure I'm totally following your analogy.
mRNA has a relatively simple manufacturing process that is quick compared to other vaccine techniques which should make it cheaper to produce.
> the expedite and simple nature of the production process is expected to lower production and operational costs when compared with the cell-based manufacturing of other biologicals such as proteins, antibodies, plasmid DNA and virus-like particles
This is a phrase that I've heard since forever in discourse about viruses.
As far as I'm aware, viruses aren't "alive" in any sense other than that they can reproduce - albeit by hijacking a living thing's cellular resources. A virus has no metabolism; even bacteria have metabolic processes, but not viruses. Viruses are almost minerals (and it's been shown that they can be crystalised).
So I'm curious to know what it means to say that the virus in a vaccine has been "killed". AFAIAA a virus is essentially a genetic payload and a coat. Damaging the coat would appear to be the wrong way to deactivate a virus for vaccine purposes; so what's referred to as "killing" must be some kind of change to the genetic payload?
It means to remove the parts of the virus that allow it to replicate or cause harm, I think often that's done by removing some of the genetic material of the virus, but it can also be done by damaging its envelope or other methods that would prevent it from being virulent (aka replicating and causing harm)
To the sibling commenters here: "traditional vaccines" are much more than killed-off viruses. They can be made of manufactured sub-units of viral proteins for example. There has been continuous development of vaccines ever since the first ones were developed.
In general, the problem is not getting (parts) of the virus into the body. This can for sure be done in many many ways. It's getting the immune system to care enough to start manufacturing and remembering the antibody formulae for future infections.
One traditional way is to add an "adjuvant" to the viral subunits (or similar), which is designed to trigger the immune system. In either case, usually you do require to trigger some kind of local inflammation. When your arm hurts after a vaccine injection it's a good thing.
It's different in that it is not a single virus, but a collection of proteins from multiple viruses. It can be engineered to illicit better immune response much more easily than a virus.
Can we _please_ finish opening restrictions and go back to fixing the economic damage that's been done that will be with us for the rest of our lives. Unlike the cough which went away months ago.
Influenza vaccines are offered yearly in many developed countries. Also your friend could have had influenza yesterday for all we know, at least the person you replied to mentioned a time period for their friend's infection.
You live in a country with a ~90% vaccination rate. Of course you see more vaccinated than unvaccinated get sick. How many of the people you are noticing getting Covid are dying between the two groups? How many of the unvaccinated are avoiding the vaccine for real or perceived health complications and have adjusted their behavior to avoid unnecessary exposure?
I guess China still has some and that majorly affects the supply chain, though a lot of the inflation seems due to the war in Ukraine which is unrelated to COVID or restrictions.
But I also think COVID itself is affecting the economy, because of the increase in sick time.
International travel for one, not to mention lots of places keeping bad policy/rules which are going to take years to be removed again in a lot of cases.
> But I also think COVID itself is affecting the economy, because of the increase in sick time.
Yes bob being off for 2 weeks is comparable to bob not being able to go to the office to do his job and ask questions for 2 years....
I mean that it's a variable in the equation. Sick leave happens a lot more often as people get COVID once every 6 months and need a few days off. This is an additional strain that continues even as restrictions lift.
During the lockdown, the economy boomed, the War in Ukraine from my vantage point seems like a much bigger catalyst.
Lockdowns did put a strain on production, but that should catch up again.
And what I find is the most difficult to know, is what if we hadn't lockdown, the original COVID and Delta were quite deadly and problematic for unvaccinated, had we all continued as normal we don't know the effect it would have had, could have been better, maybe worse.
If another pandemic happens, I hope we don't think what we did for COVID was too much, we lucked out a bit with Covid and it not being as deadly as it could have been, I think the initial lockdowns when people didn't know the virulence yet in some sense were a justifiable decision. You have to make a trade off, and a gamble. People rarely like to gamble with sickness and death.
Now I'm with you on lifting restrictions, doesn't seem needed anymore, people self-regulate now based on their own comfort levels. Though I'm a bit still surprised how many deaths are still occuring due to Covid, but finding good information on it has become so hard.
Remember that the USA still bans entry for any reason, no exceptions, for unvaccinated people. Soon they will bump that to anyone without a booster, at which point, most of the population of Switzerland will be banned from entering the USA. All this is utterly pointless of course. Omicron is not exactly absent from the US. Restrictions have very much not gone away.
That's true, it's interesting that they keep that requirement. To be precise, this only applies to non-us residents/citizens.
I haven't seen renewed analysis about vaccine efficacy at limiting spread and mutations, it's almost impossible to find unbiased non-politically charged information around it.
The US gov website seem to mention it's due to CDC advice to contain spread and mutations, but my initial assumption was that it could be because they want to avoid having to provide medical care to severely ill people.
You're looking for medical reasons where there aren't any. Other countries have removed such restrictions and nothing happened, because Omicron doesn't make unvaccinated people seriously ill - it has the same severity as a common cold - and people need health insurance anyway. The CDC doesn't provide medical care to anyone in any case, that's not their job.
The real reason they keep the mandates is because they can, and because it is ideologically pleasing to them to punish people who reject the intellectual authority of the state.
We're talking about non-residents/citizens, I'm not sure I buy your argument because of that, it doesn't seem to make sense to want to uphold the intellectual authority of the state against non-residents. Also restrictions have endured both Republican and Democrats, so it also doesn't seem ideological.
Hospitals in the US I believe will always treat you, but then send you a bill, they don't refuse emergency care.
You cannot become a US resident without showing good health because they don't want you to freeload, and you also are forced to take all vaccines and prove immunity.
Also, Covid is still killing people, it's definitely not like the cold, it's the third leading cause of death in the US now. I'm not saying this restriction helps in any way, but seems misguided to compare it to the common cold, at the very least it's closer to the influenza flu.
Virus particles are naturally occurring in human body and are mostly harmless. This vaccine may work on lab mice in ultra sterile environment. But in normal dirty humans it may cause severe allergic reaction, cytokine storm and painful death.
Are you talking about the Johnson and Johnson vaccine that was made using traditional (proven safe) technology?
Nothing is without risk. They determined the risk/benefit ratio wasn’t worth it because the vaccine wasn’t very effective (especially compared to the mRNA vaccines)
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadTell me again which industries outright own the media groups reporting on their failings/not reporting on their failings? There is nothing comparable to the Big Pharma's influence over Western society, by any stretch of the imagination.
Many.
> time and time again, covering up facts in order to protect a billion-dollar continuing revenue stream
Many.
> that is derived entirely on the principle of addiction?
Wait, are we talking tobacco? Coffee? Facebook?
> Tell me again which industries outright own the media groups reporting on their failings/not reporting on their failings?
Big pharma owns the newspapers now?
> There is nothing comparable to the Big Pharma's influence over Western society, by any stretch of the imagination.
Fossil fuels, easily.
Have there been bad actors, bad decisions, evil people? Yep, in every walk of life. Writing off entire industries because of it is myopic. Calling out pharma as worse than all others is just nonsense.
>Big pharma owns the newspapers now?
Why .. Yes, indeed .. haven't you been paying attention?
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/blackrock-vangua...
You might want to get your 'news' somewhere else, and try to think a little more critically about where you pick up information.
"Big Pharma" has issues, and could do with tighter regulation, especially in the USA. Other countries manage it. And none of that means we throw out good science and good medical products like vaccines.
Blind faith in authoritarian institutions is not a good way to direct public health policy - especially when those institutions have a long and sordid track record of human rights abuses and outright criminal behaviour.
The main innovation here appears to be the use of a variety of spike proteins instead of just one.
The HPV vaccines protect against the most dangerous of the many known HPV strains. The HPV vaccines are even assumed to be a therapy for infection already present. Many people have at least a few HPV strains somewhere in their body. Almost everyone who engages in casual sex has them.
HPV has been promoted primarily for women, to protect against cervical cancer, but men are also at risk: It can cause cancer at/in your penis, anus and throat! MSM (men having sex with men) are especially at risk.
Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) Vaccines : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine
I generally only offer public health advice that I have diligently researched myself. If I can't substantiate my claims with a source, I will mention that. Also, it's not like I only make very well accepted claims. For example, I am against Covid vaccination for people not at risk, especially children.
You do have to keep in mind that I am not a healthcare professional and never claimed to be. I am just an interested layman.
'Responses to "bad bot" comments are the only comments of this account written by a human.'
Especially after the next sibling comment here.
Looking at the comments I have to note that I am neither a "casual sex addict" nor have "anal warts".
* https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
Besides that, there is the high likelihood that you aren't infected with all variants of HPV the vaccine protects against, so go for it.
I can only repeat my claim, that getting the HPV vaccination series is a good idea for almost everyone at every age (the younger the better), besides almost esoteric exceptions (e.g. those severely immunocompromised people that also don't create covid vaccine antibodies and monks with life long sexual abstinence).
e.g. the pox vaccine some people received 50 years ago still seems to protect against monkeypox now and the HPV vaccine also seems to provide long lasting protection ("at least 10 years, probably more").
And almost every, single, time. C19 is behaving like a new C-class virus with some new symptoms such as a chesty cough and a risk of pneumonic like symptoms in those who have non perfect health. I.e. it's not been bioengineered to kill it be more or less contagious, or cause people to grow a 3rd arm.
"The Latin word "virus" isn't widely attested, and never in the plural. It seems to refer to something like a miasma - that is, a substance, that has no plural.
The English word Virus, refering to a particle of an infectious agent, should therefore be treated as an English word, of which the plural form is "viruses".
[Edit] There are singular nouns in Latin that end in "-us", which do have a plural form, but that plural form is spelled the same as the singular form. So it's possible that the plural of the Latin "virus" was "virus". But as far as I'm aware, it wasn't a countable noun.
Also, if we want "virus" to mean a particle, then it's inconvenient for the plural to also be "virus" - we'd like a notation for referring to multiple particles.
[Edit 2] It's worse, isn't it? We refer to the "Covid-19 virus", meaning the global population of that group of strains; the individual strains in the group might then also be referred to as a singular "virus", in the sense in which we might refer to urban air-pollution being caused by "the car".
I gave up using words like "stadia" and "referenda" many years ago. I'm afraid I'm very pedantic about language, but I now think those are a sort of back-Latin, and they sound pretentious. "Stadium" and "referendum" are English words now, and the way normal people pluralise them is correct.
Your "sed" suggestion is interesting, but there are many abused words that my inner pedant would have to put through the filter. Not all of them are HTML markup. So I envision a kind of "super-sed", that can auto-translate all of my linguistic experience, including text, speech, video, and even road-signs, and make everything nice for me.
Neat startup plan: world-changing idea, huge ambition, no detailed explanation of how it works, but hell; fake it till you make it.
The only coronavirus vaccine that I’m aware of prior to covid was one for dogs.
Nanoparticle vaccines are less traditional in the sense that they do not contain a virus at all, but just particles that have the virus signature, to trick your immune system into building protection against the real virus, that has the same signature.
mrna and vector vaccines are even less traditional: They literally infect your existing, healthy cells and turn them into factories for nanoparticles. Eventually those cells are killed. The amount of particles produced for those vaccines is indeterminate, potentially leading to heavier side effects ("reactions") and the death of the infected cells itself is also not healthy.
This is a protein based vaccine, some traditional vaccines also use this method, like the Hepatitis B vaccine, where basically you inject some of the protein from the virus instead of the whole virus as with the inactivated method. You can also combine multiple proteins into a nanoparticle as is done here. The idea of combining proteins from multiple various SARS into a nanoparticle is what's novel here.
mRNA vaccines on the other hand are new with COVID-19, they are kind of similar to protein vaccines in that they end up producing proteins from the virus, except instead of injecting the proteins directly, we take a segment of the genetic code of the virus and we deliver that to some of our cells so that they produce the protein for us.
I'm not making a statement on it being better or lasting longer and in all honesty there is little data to prove that one way or the other.
FYI Sputnik clinical trial results were based on clearly faked data, and that vaccines effectiveness is highly uncertain.
Look it up again, in western clinical trials it performed as well as was expected 70% or so efficacy as was claimed with almost no identified serious side effects. Of course the data at the start was optimistic, but then in the west it was portrayed as 1000% safe by proponents despite the growing number of lawsuits for the 0.001% of cases where it was extremely NOT.
Traditional vaccines can work, but finding ways to kill or attune a virus in a way that still triggers an immune response that can fight off the live virus is tricky.
With protein based one, finding the right proteins and finding a way to produce those proteins for injection is also tricky.
I also forgot to mention Adenovirus Vaccines which are also kind of new in that there's only newer vaccines like for Ebola and malaria that are based on it. This similarly delivers genetic material from the virus to our cells so they produce the proteins, except the genetic material is delivered through another virus, instead of by using mRNA. Manufacturing the adenovirus carrier is trickier than manufacturing mRNA.
The Sputnik-V vaccine is an Adenovirus vaccine, so not something I'd consider a traditional vaccine, it has much more in common with mRNA, in that it programs our own cells to produce proteins, the difference is it does so by having an Adenovirus inject DNA into our cells, instead of having mRNA wrapped in lipids be the trigger to our cells.
Maybe the latter, certainly not the former. Otherwise that's like saying nuclear power is free once we've built the reactor. There are no magical 3d printers which will make an mRNA style treatment on demand and if there ever was the price tag would have more zeros than the average house.
Where to draw the line on mRNA style or not is clearly dependent on person to person as because of so many years of bad PR/press from biomed industry it's like saying what a datalake is to a storage expert and expecting them to know what you mean.
What do you mean? I'm not sure I'm totally following your analogy.
mRNA has a relatively simple manufacturing process that is quick compared to other vaccine techniques which should make it cheaper to produce.
> the expedite and simple nature of the production process is expected to lower production and operational costs when compared with the cell-based manufacturing of other biologicals such as proteins, antibodies, plasmid DNA and virus-like particles
Here's a good paper on it: https://www.jmest.org/wp-content/uploads/JMESTN42352119.pdf
This is a phrase that I've heard since forever in discourse about viruses.
As far as I'm aware, viruses aren't "alive" in any sense other than that they can reproduce - albeit by hijacking a living thing's cellular resources. A virus has no metabolism; even bacteria have metabolic processes, but not viruses. Viruses are almost minerals (and it's been shown that they can be crystalised).
So I'm curious to know what it means to say that the virus in a vaccine has been "killed". AFAIAA a virus is essentially a genetic payload and a coat. Damaging the coat would appear to be the wrong way to deactivate a virus for vaccine purposes; so what's referred to as "killing" must be some kind of change to the genetic payload?
In general, the problem is not getting (parts) of the virus into the body. This can for sure be done in many many ways. It's getting the immune system to care enough to start manufacturing and remembering the antibody formulae for future infections.
One traditional way is to add an "adjuvant" to the viral subunits (or similar), which is designed to trigger the immune system. In either case, usually you do require to trigger some kind of local inflammation. When your arm hurts after a vaccine injection it's a good thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60320#C19/C20_coupler
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/experim...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-022-00074-6
The US Army/Walter Reed effort was probably the one that got the most widespread media coverage.
Can we _please_ finish opening restrictions and go back to fixing the economic damage that's been done that will be with us for the rest of our lives. Unlike the cough which went away months ago.
He is still coughing. Nothing went away.
And all deaths within 28 days of a positive test are 'covid deaths', even if they got run over by a bus or actually died of cancer.
I guess China still has some and that majorly affects the supply chain, though a lot of the inflation seems due to the war in Ukraine which is unrelated to COVID or restrictions.
But I also think COVID itself is affecting the economy, because of the increase in sick time.
> But I also think COVID itself is affecting the economy, because of the increase in sick time.
Yes bob being off for 2 weeks is comparable to bob not being able to go to the office to do his job and ask questions for 2 years....
During the lockdown, the economy boomed, the War in Ukraine from my vantage point seems like a much bigger catalyst.
Lockdowns did put a strain on production, but that should catch up again.
And what I find is the most difficult to know, is what if we hadn't lockdown, the original COVID and Delta were quite deadly and problematic for unvaccinated, had we all continued as normal we don't know the effect it would have had, could have been better, maybe worse.
If another pandemic happens, I hope we don't think what we did for COVID was too much, we lucked out a bit with Covid and it not being as deadly as it could have been, I think the initial lockdowns when people didn't know the virulence yet in some sense were a justifiable decision. You have to make a trade off, and a gamble. People rarely like to gamble with sickness and death.
Now I'm with you on lifting restrictions, doesn't seem needed anymore, people self-regulate now based on their own comfort levels. Though I'm a bit still surprised how many deaths are still occuring due to Covid, but finding good information on it has become so hard.
I haven't seen renewed analysis about vaccine efficacy at limiting spread and mutations, it's almost impossible to find unbiased non-politically charged information around it.
The US gov website seem to mention it's due to CDC advice to contain spread and mutations, but my initial assumption was that it could be because they want to avoid having to provide medical care to severely ill people.
The real reason they keep the mandates is because they can, and because it is ideologically pleasing to them to punish people who reject the intellectual authority of the state.
Hospitals in the US I believe will always treat you, but then send you a bill, they don't refuse emergency care.
You cannot become a US resident without showing good health because they don't want you to freeload, and you also are forced to take all vaccines and prove immunity.
Also, Covid is still killing people, it's definitely not like the cold, it's the third leading cause of death in the US now. I'm not saying this restriction helps in any way, but seems misguided to compare it to the common cold, at the very least it's closer to the influenza flu.
Nothing is without risk. They determined the risk/benefit ratio wasn’t worth it because the vaccine wasn’t very effective (especially compared to the mRNA vaccines)