COVID 19 Vaccination Discussion

[jaylw314]

14 hours ago, RobertGary1 said:

For those in the low risk group, do you think its worth waiting for the next generation of vaccine? These are 1.0 versions; maybe 2.0 will cover more strains?

 

-Robert

Eventually vaccine 2.0 could cover other strains, and it sounds like this is in the works.  However, bear in mind that the whole reason there are new strains of virus coming out is BECAUSE of the number of infected cases.  The rate of mutations is proportional to the number of virus particles in the universe (we do have to include the ISS) and right now, there's a good bet there are more COVID-19 viruses out there than there have ever been any other virus ever.

That means any mechanism to lower infection rate sooner (including an imperfect vaccine) is better than a perfect solution later.  A perfect solution later (like vaccine 2.0 or 3.0) simply gives the virus more time and volume to come up with additional variants.

I think it's a pretty good bet that the South Africa variant originated in either the US or UK, since those had been until recently the main reservoirs of virus particles.  I think it's also a good bet that most or all of the surges in infection rates around the world in the later part of 2020 were the result of spread from the US, since the US has been the biggest reservoir of virus.

[steingar]

On 2/1/2021 at 10:05 AM, bradp said:

The hypothesis is that eventually this coronavirus will evolve into a common cold.  The question is of course how long that process of cycles or selection pressure and mutation rate will take.

The common cold is actually a collection of viruses including coronavirus.  The reason there's no vaccine against them is the symptoms just aren't that bad and don't warrant the expenditure.

On 2/1/2021 at 10:05 AM, bradp said:

This is one of the first examples of a zoonotic emerging disease of this scale that I’m aware of, and certainly there hasn’t been this degree of technological availability to measure the mutation rate.   

Zoonotic diseases have gotten loose among human populations throughout history.  All the viruses that affect humans are zoonotic, we haven't been around long enough to evolve our own.  Measles, mumps, smallpox, polio  and others have caused epidemic disease.  History is littered with epidemics you've never heard of that have wiped out huge populations.  This is just the latest of many.  Moreover, epidemics of antiquity like mumps and smallpox never lost their ferocity, negating your hypothesis, sorry.  So long as the virus can infect people I can't see any selective pressure for it to ameliorate its effects. It only kills a minority of its victims, so I don't see where the selective pressure is coming from.

[bradp]

1 hour ago, steingar said:

The common cold is actually a collection of viruses including coronavirus.  The reason there's no vaccine against them is the symptoms just aren't that bad and don't warrant the expenditure.

Zoonotic diseases have gotten loose among human populations throughout history.  All the viruses that affect humans are zoonotic, we haven't been around long enough to evolve our own.  Measles, mumps, smallpox, polio  and others have caused epidemic disease.  History is littered with epidemics you've never heard of that have wiped out huge populations.  This is just the latest of many.  Moreover, epidemics of antiquity like mumps and smallpox never lost their ferocity, negating your hypothesis, sorry.  So long as the virus can infect people I can't see any selective pressure for it to ameliorate its effects. It only kills a minority of its victims, so I don't see where the selective pressure is coming from.

I think you’re missing my point - but I’m not arguing with yours.  Measles mumps and smallpox have not been pandemic in nature  during the “genomic age”.  There was no ability to measure genetic variance over time with those viruses.  Maybe crudely with serology. This is a unique opportunity to learn a lot.  Like the British variant obtained the same mutation that the SA variant has.  There’s some selection pressure right there. Last I checked there were something like 60,000 academic papers on Covid so far.  This is a unique opportunity to watch, learn and hopefully prepare for the next pandemic.    

Re common cold.  That’s just a clinical constellation of symptoms.  I’m am positing that the SARS-CoV-2 will, given enough time (? What that means), and pressure (natural immunity, vaccination) end up clinically behaving like more endemic Coronavirus HKU1, NL63, 229E, OC43 etc.  The endemic variants have probably been around for hundreds if not thousands of years.  

[ilovecornfields]

3 hours ago, flyboy0681 said:

I was hoping to avoid a reaction but woke up today with 101 and achy from yesterdays second dose.

Tylenol and ibuprofen will be your friends today.

Edit: Maybe this will make you feel better about your response to the vaccine:

https://apple.news/AeK3zWukYRF-TvhE3o621TA

Edited February 2, 2021 by ilovecornfields

[1964-M20E]

Actually this is pretty impressive.

Before now only in science fiction shows like Start Trek could the doctor come up with a cure, antidote or vaccine in hours, days or weeks (still the realm of science fiction).  However, now in a short 9 months we have come up with 2 vaccines for this virus and a third on it's heels.  Along with that other places around the word have been developing vaccines as well. 

[Ross Statham]

6 hours ago, ilovecornfields said:

Tylenol and ibuprofen will be your friends today.

Edit: Maybe this will make you feel better about your response to the vaccine:

https://apple.news/AeK3zWukYRF-TvhE3o621TA

That’s a REALLY good article, and very much on point.  Really appreciate your posting this for laymen like me.   Not just a discussion about symptoms of the second dose, but real insight as to what’s happening with the immune system. Thanks! 

[ilovecornfields]

1 hour ago, Ross Statham said:

That’s a REALLY good article, and very much on point.  Really appreciate your posting this for laymen like me.   Not just a discussion about symptoms of the second dose, but real insight as to what’s happening with the immune system. Thanks! 

Thank you. This was an interesting article as well. Pretty significant milestone.

https://www.ksby.com/news/national/coronavirus/more-americans-have-gotten-the-covid-19-vaccine-than-have-tested-positive-for-the-virus

[Ross Statham]

24 minutes ago, ilovecornfields said:

Thank you. This was an interesting article as well. Pretty significant milestone.

https://www.ksby.com/news/national/coronavirus/more-americans-have-gotten-the-covid-19-vaccine-than-have-tested-positive-for-the-virus

Interesting.  That’s a significant milestone- wondering why more outlets haven’t picked the story. 

For those who haven’t read the story yet, there are now more people who have had at least one vaccination than have tested positive.  Perhaps we’ll get this licked yet.

[steingar]

20 hours ago, bradp said:

I think you’re missing my point - but I’m not arguing with yours.  Measles mumps and smallpox have not been pandemic in nature  during the “genomic age”.  There was no ability to measure genetic variance over time with those viruses.  Maybe crudely with serology. This is a unique opportunity to learn a lot.  Like the British variant obtained the same mutation that the SA variant has.  There’s some selection pressure right there. Last I checked there were something like 60,000 academic papers on Covid so far.  This is a unique opportunity to watch, learn and hopefully prepare for the next pandemic.    

I promise scientists are doing exactly this.  That's why these news stories exist.  Laypeople who no knowledge of genetics aren't detecting sequence variants.

20 hours ago, bradp said:

Re common cold.  That’s just a clinical constellation of symptoms.  I’m am positing that the SARS-CoV-2 will, given enough time (? What that means), and pressure (natural immunity, vaccination) end up clinically behaving like more endemic Coronavirus HKU1, NL63, 229E, OC43 etc.  The endemic variants have probably been around for hundreds if not thousands of years.  

Eventually COVID vaccines will make some headway.  At that point the only selective pressure on COVID19 will be to dodge the immune system (actually, it'll probably become an endemic disease of third world states like polio and ebola). Therein lies a big problem for the virus, since the only way it can avoid our vaccinated immune system is to alter its coat protein, which is it's means into the body.

[flyboy0681]

20 hours ago, ilovecornfields said:

Tylenol and ibuprofen will be your friends today.

Edit: Maybe this will make you feel better about your response to the vaccine:

https://apple.news/AeK3zWukYRF-TvhE3o621TA

Amazing, that first paragraph described that night exactly, sans the chattering teeth.

Today I woke up with normal temperature and feeling 100%.

[ilovecornfields]

33 minutes ago, flyboy0681 said:

Amazing, that first paragraph described that night exactly, sans the chattering teeth.

Today I woke up with normal temperature and feeling 100%.

No chattering teeth?! Sounds like you missed out on the full experience. Maybe you should get a third vaccine?

Just kidding. Glad you’re feeling better. As one of my coworkers commented after her 2nd shot “I’m ok with feeling like I’m dying as long as I’m not actually dying.”

I don’t know if I mentioned it already but some of the people I know who had COVID had the “2nd shot experience” with the 1st shot but it wasn’t any worse when they had the actual 2nd shot.

Remember, getting you’re 2nd shot doesn’t mean you get to stop making good choices.  You still may be able to infect others.

I also recommended that everyone take a picture of their vaccine card and put it on their phone because some people have lost or damaged their cards.

[mike_elliott]

21 hours ago, bradp said:

I think you’re missing my point - but I’m not arguing with yours.  Measles mumps and smallpox have not been pandemic in nature  during the “genomic age”.  There was no ability to measure genetic variance over time with those viruses.  Maybe crudely with serology. This is a unique opportunity to learn a lot.  Like the British variant obtained the same mutation that the SA variant has.  There’s some selection pressure right there. Last I checked there were something like 60,000 academic papers on Covid so far.  This is a unique opportunity to watch, learn and hopefully prepare for the next pandemic.    

Re common cold.  That’s just a clinical constellation of symptoms.  I’m am positing that the SARS-CoV-2 will, given enough time (? What that means), and pressure (natural immunity, vaccination) end up clinically behaving like more endemic Coronavirus HKU1, NL63, 229E, OC43 etc.  The endemic variants have probably been around for hundreds if not thousands of years.  

Im curious of your thoughts about gain of function research, Brad

[bradp]

5 hours ago, mike_elliott said:

Im curious of your thoughts about gain of function research, Brad

I think it’s super interesting stuff.  The papers looking at how and when some of these mutations likely occurred use probabilistic modeling that’s at the outer limits of my biostats level of understanding.  However the likelihood and inference is that these mutations occurred in either immune compromised individuals or “Covid long haulers”.  That has some important implications.  Especially when folks like at my hospital come up with some random PCR cycle number (it’s 30 this week) and say that if you’re beyond 30 (each cycle doubles the PCR product), you’re probably not that infectious so we’re just going to ignore that positive test and take you off isolation precautions.  There is a role for understanding the nuances of how much virus is present and whether that presence is likely to be infectious.  But the decision to take off isolation is actually much more complicated than that, requires an actual physician to interpret the test in context of the time course of the disease (or not for asymptomatic), physical findings, and the lab test (PCR plus other supporting data such as the presence or absence of antigen, antibody etc).  But this stuff can be important in the generation of new variants.   
 

It doesn’t really matter in whom or when these mutations occur - we’re just looking at Darwin working in real time (convergent evaluation) with clusters of mutations in certain hot spots on one or two critical places (that don’t kill the protein, that are usually on the surface of the 3D structure, and that usually have some functional activity in receptor binding, etc).  It’s just that the virus potentially has a lot of time in a individual host so that cycles of selection can occur over and over in that same host without that nagging immune system to get in the way.  That seems to be really interesting as you’d imagine that most mutations would have occurred at random times during the infection and transmission cycle.  

 

What we are not seeing much data on but is another academically interesting thing is the phylogeny / genetic diversity of the virus population in individuals.  ie among the billions of virions obtained in a single positive swab (from a single point in time, from a single location in the body), what is the genetic diversity of that population?  The virus is using a combination of its own (15 non structural proteins in the replication transcription complex (RTC))and our own mRNA copying and protein translation machinery- which has a certain “typo” rate.  There are going to be a dominant phylogeny in individuals.  But every once in a while if you look hard enough, you’re likely to find some diversity.  Now do the same thing over time.  Likely to find some diversity there too.  These variants are born of reproduction and repetition.  Probably 99.999% of the typos end in a dead end and that dominant phylogeny continues as the same variant. But some don’t matter in terms of protein coding and are passed on (silent  mutations), and one every once in a while will be the start of a new variant. 

[carusoam]

MS word of the day...

Phylogeny...

Way to go Brad!

https://www.britannica.com/science/phylogeny

Thanks for taking the time to share your experience!

Best regards,

-a-

[thinwing]

in the words of the great Ernst Haeckel.."Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny".....snd dose moderna nothing after 24 hrs

 

[1964-M20E]

On 2/2/2021 at 9:38 PM, ilovecornfields said:

Thank you. This was an interesting article as well. Pretty significant milestone.

https://www.ksby.com/news/national/coronavirus/more-americans-have-gotten-the-covid-19-vaccine-than-have-tested-positive-for-the-virus

Yes and at about 1MM+ vaccinations a day the vaccination rate far outpaces the infection rate.  By the end of Feb we should be up to 48MM+/- vaccinations

So with approximately 52 million exposed or vaccinated currently we have about 15% population exposed.  Then add in another 20% of the tested cases for those that may have had it but did not get tested that about 5MM so we are approaching 60MM people exposed and less likely or unlikely to get it now this is approaching 20% of the population.

These are rough numbers remember I'm an engineer I get things close not exact.

[MooneyMitch]

I’ve been told our county is closing two out of three vaccination locations due to lack of product. 

[PHFlyer08]

I’m in the Air Force, so I volunteered to get it, because I’m sure it’ll be mandatory at some point. I was given the Pfizer one. First shot, just had a sore arm for about three days.  Second shot was yesterday. Overall no reaction other than feeling a little tired and draggy today...but I also have a four year old kid which could explain the fatigue. 

[1964-M20E]

Well had my second moderna shot Friday.  Sore arm and felt tired on Saturday but otherwise nothing to speak of.  Of course Saturday was a nasty cold drizzly day so sitting around and watching TV was not a bad idea anyway.

 

[Hank]

I'm scheduled for Shot #1 next Tuesday morning. Pfizer. Will report back.

[Ross Statham]

On 1/28/2021 at 2:47 PM, Ross Statham said:

Greetings all,

Yesterday my darling bride and I received our first of two COVID-19 inoculations, which was a pretty smooth process.  (We are both age 65.)  They want us back in four weeks.  We live in a small county with only 25,000 residents, and it was conducted by the local health department with help from the Florida Department of Health.  They had given us an appointment date and time, and we drove up and got into an automobile line-- and all we had to do was roll our windows down while wearing masks.  It's now been 24 hours, and neither of us has had any side affects, other than my wife having a slightly sore arm.  (I had a much sorer arm getting my flu shot last year.)

I thought it might be interesting to hear about any experiences that others have had so far in this regard, especially side effects.

I started this thread four weeks ago with a posting about my first vaccination.  Here’s a report on our second.

My wife and I had our second Moderna shot 30 hours ago.  It’s now the evening of the day after.  The only symptom I exhibited was a sore arm this morning. I felt perfectly fine all day, and even managed to get in a 15 mile bike ride after work. My wife had a sore arm, body aches and a fever that started this morning and broke about 12 hours later. The bodyaches seem to be fading and she is feeling better.

As others have noted, stronger reactions but short term.  

[MISSILEFLYER]

On 1/29/2021 at 10:43 AM, ilovecornfields said:

Thanks! I had to take a break from social media for a while since I couldn’t reconcile what I was seeing every day in the hospital with the crazy stuff people were posting on the internet and it made me want to rip my hair out.

One of my colleagues said it felt like he was a fireman trying to put out a brush fire and random people would just show up, pour gasoline on the fire and tell him there’s no fire. I don’t know if any of you could tell, but it was making me a little irritable.

I guess for better or worse, at this point it seems like most people finally “get it” it’s just a shame so many people had to get burned before realizing what was in front of them the whole time.

Like someone else posted above, I’ve seen more people die this year than I have in the last 10 years combined. You start to get a little numb to it since there’s only so much you can do (high flow oxygen, decadron, proning, remdesivir, intubation..) Several of my colleagues have been diagnosed with PTSD and frankly I’m surprised it’s not more. Seeing the children with the post-COVID inflammatory syndrome really broke my heart too as many of the parents were under the mistaken impression that COVID doesn’t affect children and said they would have made different choices if they had know what could happen. Seeing children punished for adults bad behavior really takes a toll on you.

That being said, I actually feel more hopeful now than I have anytime since February. Somehow I managed not to get COVID or give it to my family which is nothing short of a miracle given the number of patients I saw and how many of my colleagues got it. My wife and I have been vaccinated and it looks like we finally have a chance of getting this thing  under control.

I’m finally looking forward to flying with a CFI again since, understandably, there were few willing to share a confined space with an ER doctor at the height of the pandemic. I certainly don’t blame them.

Hopefully we can start the healing process and move beyond this very dark chapter in all of our lives and come out the other end as better people.

Counterpoint.  I have an ER Dr. close friend that I recently asked “Is the hype real?”  “Are you overwhelmed”.  His direct quote: “No.  My colleagues need to STFU and do their job”.

Alrighty then.

[MISSILEFLYER]

On 1/29/2021 at 8:26 AM, steingar said:

Get the damn vaccine folks.  I've had young students get the 'rona and be wiped out totally for a week.  Something that can kick a 20 year old's six is going to do a number of mine.  Get the vaccine.  It's the only way we're going to stop the virus and get things back to some semblance of normal.

Who are the “folks” to whom you speak?  Is the vaccine suddenly “widely available to get”?  Perhaps you should go to an anti-vax’r site and provide the PSA?

Other than a questionable “19” year old helicopter pilot I thought vaccine distribution was for “others”  in healthcare and older than 60?

What am I missing?  Are there a bunch of MSers that need prodding?

 

[ilovecornfields]

35 minutes ago, MISSILEFLYER said:

Counterpoint.  I have an ER Dr. close friend that I recently asked “Is the hype real?”  “Are you overwhelmed”.  His direct quote: “No.  My colleagues need to STFU and do their job”.

Alrighty then.

Counterpoint. I have an internet troll close friend that I recently asked “Is Scott real? Should I actually read his posts and respond to them or just wait for him to get kicked off the site a 4th time, make up a new email and then come back and annoy us all over again.” His direct quote “I think he needs to STFU and get a job.” 
 

Consider yourself ignored.

[MISSILEFLYER]

19 minutes ago, ilovecornfields said:

Counterpoint. I have an internet troll close friend that I recently asked “Is Scott real? Should I actually read his posts and respond to them or just wait for him to get kicked off the site a 4th time, make up a new email and then come back and annoy us all over again.” His direct quote “I think he needs to STFU and get a job.” 
 

Consider yourself ignored.

I stated an opinion by a colleague, a counter to your narrative and that is what you give.  O.K Dr. Spock.  Not a personal attack by me.  Your response definitely was.  Thanks for the input.