WHO warns vaccinated travellers could still need to be quarantined

[Bosworth]

I think the 12 week thing is unusually smart.

The Pfizer vaccine was tested at t+3 weeks for the second dose. That was a fairly arbitrary timing and there is nothing to suggest that, like many other vaccines, the top up won’t be just as effective 12 weeks or even a year after the first shot.

Now clearly there are unknowns: new type of mRNA content, limited test pool etc. But from memory the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine after just one shot was something like 70%. That’s not bad and well above the 50% threshold the WHO set for effectiveness.

Is it better to have two to three times as many people protected over the next three months at 70% or a third as many at 80-90%? That’s a couple of million and therefore potentially thousands of lives.

I suspect everyone will eventually get two or more vaccines and an annual booster so this really is a short term numbers game.

[Bosworth]

I’d add that it is so sad that so many people are living without hope, including some friends of mine, some of which are younger than me and in their thirties. They have almost zero risk of dying from this thing yet have locked themselves away almost exclusively since March. I convinced them to join a family holiday in July in a huge house in the country, but they left half way through as they couldn’t handle the risk from my having popped to John Lewis to pick up some bits (fully masked, gloved, as distances as I could, and hygienic).

I worry that their psyche has been permanently damaged. They will never be comfortable with normal life again no matter how low the risk is.

Already their marriage is struggling, they have turned down work as they don’t want to commit to being in an office when the time comes, and they are living in absolute fear.

It won’t end well.

[jennyjj01]

I delayed posting, but I'm still not sure what "more conspicuous" means, Jenny, in your original post, if I interpret it I *know* I'll get it wrong, I'm useless at that, can you say more?

I've isolated like crazy during the pandemic, as I'm amongst the more vulnerable - and what really concerns me isn't the death rate, which I understand/agree isn't huge. What concerns me is long covid/ organ damage/ extreme fatigue - that's a *much* higher percentage of the numbers infected.

And today's vaccine news! Bleeping hell - so, people are just getting one vaccine for ages, rather than two within a month - and I've seen a press statement from Pfizer saying their vaccine is untested at that level of delay. Just wonderful: snatching defeat from the jaws of victory comes to mind

Hi Arzosah,

It was maybe an ill thought out and flippant concept, but let's for the sake of interest say that having taken the vaccine, one was rendered 'safe' and 'symptom free' from the virus but could still catch and super-spread it. Let's try a silly thought experiment:-

Imagine an AIDS vaccine that only stopped the vaccinated person getting ill, but allowed him to be a carrier and super-spreader. How relaxed would he be about his sex life? And how big a risk might he pose as a superspreader? We might be better off if he had never had the vaccine and continued to use protection.

If the COVID vaccine turned our skin bright pink, then all the bright pink folks would know that they personally were safe to mix with each-other and indeed with anyone, but the un-vaccinated would know to stay the hell away from them. Maybe not bright pink, but what if they got a certificate, badge or little tattooed bar code. Remember these vaccinated folks would quite understandably get confident, but the danger is if they could still super-spread. That might make them more likely to be a danger than our fellow unvaccinated, and probably younger contacts.

Since vaccines are soon to go medics and carers, imagine if it only rendered them safe, but they could still catch and spread. Would that not make hospitals and care environments MORE dangerous to the unvaccinated. An infected nurse or carer would currently get sent home, but if he/she had the vaccine, got infected and carried on oblivious, then wouldn't that be a recipe for disaster?

I guess the crucial question is not 'will the vaccine protect me', but will it also stop me from infecting my unvaccinated contacts, and that that question has not yet been answered just boggles belief.

A vaccine will be a wondrous thing, don't get me wrong, but if it only masks the symptoms and doesn't stop the spread, we will have a long battle ahead.

I hope the fundamental 'immunity' question gets the right answer, and soon.

[Nurseandy]

Hi jenny, I completely get your point about healthcare staff potentially being superspreaders after being vaccinated but just wanna point out they are, & will continue to be, wearing ppe to help prevent them spreading it even after they've been vaccinated.
I'm sure there will of course be the odd idiot who doesn't think the rules/guidance applies to them.

[Arzosah]

Thank you Jenny! Completely get it, and it ties in with questions I've been asking myself - because of my age, I'm likely to get the vaccine quite a bit sooner than others on here, and when I started to hear "immunity doesn't mean you can't pass it on", I was, "wtf?"

begins rant/
In general, all pandemic diseases flare and subside ... until they don't. Mutations are chance, and whether they spread or not depends partly on chance, but mostly on whether they're "helpful" to the disease in spreading, like the B117 obviously is. With 23 mutations at once, it's a matter of chance that none of them have seemed to increase the seriousness of the illness. It could have been the outlier that increased both transmission rates and mortality/seriousness. Another mutation might still be. This mutation increased transmission rates by up to 0.4, I believe. What if the S African variant increases the rates by another 0.4? Again, its not about the death rate, not to me, it's about the length of time in hospital and the lingering after effects, I still don't think they're being paid enough attention.
/end rant.

[redskies]

I've posted this link here before, but feel it's relevant to the discussion around mutations.

Every time a virus jumps host & replicates, there is a chance it makes a 'mistake' in the replication & those are mutations. Some are significant, most are not. As a *general* rule, viruses evolve to become less lethal to hosts. Given the way this one has been behaving, I wouldn't care to speculate.


This link tracks the virus genomes - amongst other things, like flu - and maps changes to it. As you can see, it's significantly different from the first *documented virus in Wuhan.

https://nextstrain.org/



*I don't believe this began in Wuhan. It showed up in a sewer water sample taken in Barcelona in March 2019. I suspect Wuhan was the tipping point, so from that perspective, there's probably a whole host of other mutations that we don't & never will know about. There's a couple of other beasties out there that are the same, most notably MCR-1; we know where they were first documented, but the chances of finding an origin are slim to snowball in hells.

[Stonecarver]

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nc ... after.html


https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavir ... us-vaccine

Both have said and are saying very likely to be protected against covid

[Bosworth]

There seems to be an accepted truth on here that once vaccinated, it is still possible to become infected and to be so without symptoms and to be shedding high volumes of virus such that you become a super-spreader.

They isn’t backed up by the facts. Where is this fear coming from?

[Nurseandy]

There seems to be an accepted truth on here that once vaccinated, it is still possible to become infected and to be so without symptoms and to be shedding high volumes of virus such that you become a super-spreader.

They isn’t backed up by the facts. Where is this fear coming from?

Sadly no one knows for sure yet which is the problem - quick screenshot of the NHS page captured just now. There's a plethora of articles, some reputable, some not if you google covid vaccine transmission. Would post more but my heads a bit thick this morning

[Nurseandy]

Although further to my earlier post, I've attempted to dig deeper and I've not found any actual papers to prove it. The issue appears to be that transmission post vaccination has not been researched so they just don't know.
Think I may go & have another drink now