COVID-19 - who's got some?

[ehsnils]

I was asked this today and I had no answer for it.

 

"has there ever been a point in the history of this country (the United States) where an experimental vaccine was pushed this hard by the Government?".

Answer comes in 10 years.

[cww516]

I was asked this today and I had no answer for it.

 

"has there ever been a point in the history of this country (the United States) where an experimental vaccine was pushed this hard by the Government?".

 

None of the COVID vaccines you can get in the States are experimental, so I guess the answer to that part of the question is technically a "no". They've all gone through clinical trials, gotten FDA (emergency) approval, and are in the process of getting full approval, so there's not really anything "experimental" about them at this point. No more experimental than remdesivir, and definitely much less experimental (and in some cases, much safer) than hydroxychloroquine, or invermectin, or ingestion/injection of household cleaning products, or any of the other "alternatives". Also, developments of vaccines as we know them today didn't really kick off until the late 1800s, and other than the Spanish Flu, there hasn't really been a global pandemic of this magnitude since then.

 

The government pushes vaccination against plenty of other diseases pretty hard, though- mumps/measles/rubella, viral meningitis, all the fun shots you have to get before you can be enrolled in school. Other notable mentions include polio (I've never met anyone who had it, probably because of the vaccine that became available in the 1950s and was initially administered in schools) and smallpox (eradicated before I was born due to global vaccination efforts which were funded, in no small part, by the United States). I guess the tl;dr answer to whether or not the government has pushed any vaccine this hard before would be "yes, pretty much all the time".

 

 

Nope.

 

Nor have they EVER before claimed that a vaccine is MORE effective than your natural antibodies from contracting a virus like they are doing with this one...

 

Which natural antibodies, the ones you get as a result of contracting the virus that the vaccine is meant to keep you from contracting in the first place?

 

Putting my snark aside, and assuming you're talking about the antibodies you get from having contracted the virus, the answer is still "yes, they actually have"- the yearly flu shot is a booster vaccine to help protect you against contracting the newest mutation(s) of the 1918 Spanish Flu virus, and those flu shots generally get pushed pretty hard. The reason for that, and the point I'm driving at, is that having been infected with one strain of the virus doesn't make you immune to all of them, as evidenced by cases of individuals catching COVID more than once, or getting the flu more than once over the course of their life. So far, all of the COVID strains use the same (or similar enough) method of getting into your cells, and since that particular protein is what's targeted by the antibodies created in response to a vaccine, those vaccines have thus far (and I'm actively knocking on my wooden desk) been generally effective against all of them.

[DickDastardly00]

People who have already had Covid may have better efficacy if they get the Johnson and Johnson vaccine

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210730/Prior-SARS-CoV-2-infection-enhances-Johnson-and-Johnson-Ad26COV2S-vaccine-immunogenicity.aspx

 

The study findings show that when vaccination with Ad26.COV2.S vaccine after natural infection has occurred, the infection primes the immune system. The resulting immune response shows three-fold higher spike binding antibody titers, but a 12-13-fold higher titer of neutralizing antibodies and antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity activity (ADCC).

 

Moreover, the immune response in the previously infected vaccinated groups holds good against the D614G, Beta, and Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2. Conversely, vaccination alone resulted in significantly lower titers against the beta and delta VOCs, with 85% and ~80% of samples failing to show neutralizing activity against the two, respectively.

[ammcinnis]

None of the COVID vaccines you can get in the States are experimental, so I guess the answer to that part of the question is technically a "no". They've all gone through clinical trials, gotten FDA (emergency) approval, and are in the process of getting full approval, so there's not really anything "experimental" about them at this point.

...

I guess the tl;dr answer to whether or not the government has pushed any vaccine this hard before would be "yes, pretty much all the time".

Quoted for truth.

 

Other notable mentions include polio (I've never met anyone who had it, probably because of the vaccine that became available in the 1950s and was initially administered in schools) ....

I was among the legions of school children who stood in long lines in 1955 waiting to receive our first shot of the Salk vaccine. Prior to that, we kids and our parents lived in fear of infection during each summer "polio season;" among other things, swimming in public pools was out of the question. Our family knew several people who contracted serious (i.e. paralytic) cases of polio, including our across-the-street neighbor; we were all exposed at one time or another. Later in life I was friends with Pam Henry, who had been a national "March of Dimes" poster child in 1959. Prior to the Salk vaccine, polio was an accepted, if feared, fact of life in the U.S. Edited August 3, 2021 by ammcinnis

[ammcinnis]

He's vitally concerned about Pres. Biden's statement about forcing federal employees to be vaccinated ... Today's question was whether the Constitution would protect federal employees from such heavy handed tactics.

When you work for the federal government, the President really is "the boss of you."

[Enlight]

They've all gone through clinical trials, gotten FDA (emergency) approval, and are in the process of getting full approval, so there's not really anything "experimental" about them at this point. No more experimental than remdesivir, and definitely much less experimental (and in some cases, much safer) than hydroxychloroquine, or invermectin, or ingestion/injection of household cleaning products, or any of the other "alternatives".

 

 

Remdesivir, hydoxycloroquine, and ivermectin have received full FDA approval for their respective uses, no comparison to ingestion/injection of household cleaning products. The COVID vaccines have not received full FDA approval. Emergency approval was conditional upon there being no other known treatments at the time - a condition that could change. That the current vaccines should get full approval as a foregone conclusion should be of concern to anyone who believes in process.

Edited August 4, 2021 by Enlight

[HDTurbo]

This whole past 2 years highlights how little we know about the “immune system” esp., on an individual basis, as well as what we thought we knew about viruses in general. I hope, for lack of any other immediate lessons, that we do learn more in the long run, pushing science through the nagging uninformed anti-science people clouding the vision and veracity of what truly is good science. Jesus Christ, we got to the moon and back in the 60s…or did we?

[boxkita]

As long you keep in mind a couple of facts, sure we went to the moon:

1. news media is motivated to make a profit, not report the actual facts

2 Government is motivated to expand to feel a void, not actually govern.

 

All that effort to go to the moon, then we retired? How many years did it take to put something on Mars? And we did get Voyager out of the solar system (unless the Carl Sagan picture is fake, too)?

[cww516]

You missed the part about how we had to beat the Soviets there, because communism is bad- that alone would be more than enough to motivate the US to go to the moon...

 

 

Remdesivir, hydoxycloroquine, and ivermectin have received full FDA approval for their respective uses, no comparison to ingestion/injection of household cleaning products. The COVID vaccines have not received full FDA approval. Emergency approval was conditional upon there being no other known treatments at the time - a condition that could change. That the current vaccines should get full approval as a foregone conclusion should be of concern to anyone who believes in process.

 

Sorry, that was the snark sneaking back in.

 

Remdesivir is FDA approved as a broad-spectrum antiviral (thanks, Wikipedia), but currently only has emergency approval for use in treating COVID-19, so the testing done on that particular use case is approximately equivalent to what's been done to test the currently-available vaccines. It has full approval for other uses, but not treating COVID-19.

 

Hydroxychloroquine is a fully-approved anti-malarial that was studied early on as a potential treatment, but later abandoned after trials determined it to be pretty much completely ineffective at treating COVID-19.

 

Invermectin is an anti-parasitic that's approved for use in humans and animals, primarily for killing (or preventing) worm infestations and getting rid of lice. Studies did show that it starts to act like an anti-viral (and target SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures) if you use enough, but considering the amount a person would have to take to actually see that effect is enough to be highly toxic, those studies were quickly abandoned.

 

Ingestion/injection of cleaning products was an idea pitched by an individual who also suggested direct injection of sunlight as a potential method of killing the virus, preached about hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure, and also spent some time pumped full of dexomethasone (approved glucocorticoid, often used as a treatment for individuals with dangerously-low blood oxygen levels alongside supplemental oxygen) and remdesivir (see above).

 

 

 

 

The point I was trying to make is that people who refuse the vaccine because it's "experimental" and later die because they ate too much horse de-wormer confuse the hell out of me. Same with people who won't get vaccinated because they "don't know what's in it" while sucking down a hot dog. (Fun fact, Moderna open-sourced the genetic code in their vaccine, and it's available on github.) I'm not suggesting that the vaccines shouldn't follow established processes to gain full approval, and I would definitely agree that they should- I believe Pfizer actually just submitted their application to start that process not too long ago. Just saying that if I'm given a choice of preventative measures, I'm going to go with the one that was developed by real-life vaccine researchers and has successfully gone through multiple rounds of clinical trials, rather the one peddled by some crackpot social media influencer trying to get people to like, subscribe, and hit that bell icon. Willful ignorance is definitely a real thing, and it's actively killing people.

[Enlight]

Invermectin is an anti-parasitic that's approved for use in humans and animals, primarily for killing (or preventing) worm infestations and getting rid of lice. Studies did show that it starts to act like an anti-viral (and target SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures) if you use enough, but considering the amount a person would have to take to actually see that effect is enough to be highly toxic, those studies were quickly abandoned.

Some additional literature on Ivermectin that comments the issues raised by your post (highlighting is mine):

 

Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19

 

 

Since 2012, a growing number of cellular studies have demonstrated that ivermectin has antiviral properties against an increasing number of RNA viruses, including influenza, Zika, HIV, Dengue, and most importantly, SARS-CoV-2.9–17 Insights into the mechanisms of action by which ivermectin both interferes with the entrance and replication of SARS-CoV-2 within human cells are mounting. Caly et al18 first reported that ivermectin significantly inhibits SARS-CoV-2 replication in a cell culture model, observing the near absence of all viral material 48 hours after exposure to ivermectin. However, some questioned whether this observation is generalizable clinically given the inability to achieve similar tissue concentrations used in their experimental model using standard or even massive doses of ivermectin.19,20 It should be noted that the concentrations required for an effect in cell culture models bear little resemblance to human physiology given the absence of an active immune system working synergistically with a therapeutic agent, such as ivermectin. Furthermore, prolonged durations of exposure to a drug likely would require a fraction of the dosing in short-term cell model exposure. Furthermore, multiple coexisting or alternate mechanisms of action likely explain the clinical effects observed, such as the competitive binding of ivermectin with the host receptor-binding region of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, as proposed in 6 molecular modeling studies.21–26 In 4 of the studies, ivermectin was identified as having the highest or among the highest of binding affinities to spike protein S1 binding domains of SARS-CoV-2 among hundreds of molecules collectively examined, with ivermectin not being the particular focus of study in 4 of these studies.27 This is the same mechanism by which viral antibodies, in particular, those generated by the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The high binding activity of ivermectin to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein could limit binding to either the ACE-2 receptor or sialic acid receptors, respectively, either preventing cellular entry of the virus or preventing hemagglutination, a recently proposed pathologic mechanism in COVID-19.21,22,26–28 Ivermectin has also been shown to bind to or interfere with multiple essential structural and nonstructural proteins required by the virus to replicate.26,29 Finally, ivermectin also binds to the SARS-CoV-2 RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp), thereby inhibiting viral replication.30

 

 

Attached is a chart showing COVID hospitalizations and deaths before and after Ivermectin intervention on a population level in eight Peruvian states. The linked meta-analysis also discusses 6 Randomized Controlled Studies and 5 Observational Controlled Studies for those who prefer.

 

 

A withdrawn Ivermectin study has dominated news on the topic lately (Huge study supporting ivermectin as Covid treatment withdrawn over ethical concerns), but I would ask people to slow down and remember what we learned in school, which is that a meta-analysis combines the results of multiple studies and removing one study does not necessarily invalidate its conclusions. For whatever reason, the media has focused on the retraction of this one study instead of the meta-analysis.

 

 

My only aim here is for Ivermectin not to be written off as an anti-parisitic. These compounds found in nature are complex and we continue to find novel applications for them. My current understanding is that Ivermectin, is not an anti-viral, per se, but it interrupts viral replication by binding to the spike protein. That means that most of its benefit are as a prophylactic (preventative). It does less to help the patient once they are already fully infected (virus replication slows on its own in the later stages of infection).

[boxkita]

I've abandoned science sites for lgt.com. Perhaps SBT needs to start marketing the covid research community to use this site for information sharing?

 

[Enlight]

Too bad in this case it leads right back to the science sites. We have a long way to go.

[boxkita]

Too bad in this case it leads right back to the science sites. We have a long way to go.

 

all the hard work of reading the science sites is done. the bickering about validity of the science is way more important. We [royal] deliver in spades on all counts , especially on the opinions part

[DrD123]

unfortunately, the vaccinate vs. don't vaccinate decision is a largely psychological issue now. My thought is that if you want to convince someone who hasn't vaccinated yet to get the shot, hammering on them with how horrible everything is, how they're just going to get covid and die or kill other people, and how they're otherwise a garbage human for not getting it is much more likely to make them dig in and push back harder than it is to get the result you want.

 

The carrot works way better than the stick

[boxkita]

So instead of intubation we give them a carrot?

 

Washington state law says you don't have to show proof of vaccination only have to state you had the shots. The local dealerships require employees to have a copy of their vaccination card on file to avoid wearing masks, which is legal under state law (businesses can set their own standard of proof). My vocational college has decided wearing a mask is mandatory regardless of vaccination status and can send you home for not wearing it (this is a violation of state law). The college is trying very hard to get ppl vaccinated. I'm not sure they have thought this plan through. I'm guessing they will be stopping ppl in the hallways next demanding to see cards.

[NSFW]

Shaden... Schadenfra... Schadenfuckit you know the word I'm thinking of.

 

 

https://www.star-telegram.com/news/coronavirus/article253276493.html

 

 

"I would never wish death upon a man, but I have read many an obituary with great satisfaction."

- Mark Twain

[HDTurbo]

I wonder if they'll eventually tell his son....

[ehsnils]

I wonder if they'll eventually tell his son....

He'll probably find out in the future.

[DrD123]

So instead of intubation we give them a carrot?

 

Washington state law says you don't have to show proof of vaccination only have to state you had the shots. The local dealerships require employees to have a copy of their vaccination card on file to avoid wearing masks, which is legal under state law (businesses can set their own standard of proof). My vocational college has decided wearing a mask is mandatory regardless of vaccination status and can send you home for not wearing it (this is a violation of state law). The college is trying very hard to get ppl vaccinated. I'm not sure they have thought this plan through. I'm guessing they will be stopping ppl in the hallways next demanding to see cards.

Sadly, if you want to persuade folks to get vaccinated who, left to their own devices, won't do it, you need to have an incentive so that they want the incentive and are willing to get the shot to get it.

 

Folks have been anti-vaccinations since long before COVID, and many of them are pretty set in their ways.

 

I vaccinated so that I would be ok, and wouldn't have to worry about them so much. The mRNA vaccines are extremely effective at preventing infection, and if it does get through, preventing severe disease.

[NSFW]

Some peoples' purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

 

 

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/dick-farrell-anti-vaccine-radio-host-dies-covid.html

[ammcinnis]

Some peoples' purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to sustain any level of empathy for those people who refuse vaccination purely as a political statement or as an act of narcissism. ("It's all about ME, and what I want!") I fear we are witnessing Darwinian evolution in real time.

[ehsnils]

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to sustain any level of empathy for those people who refuse vaccination purely as a political statement or as an act of narcissism. ("It's all about ME, and what I want!") I fear we are witnessing Darwinian evolution in real time.

 

 

Most likely we are - but I'd expect the Corona to be a minor filter removing some unviable genetic combinations and promoting some that basically are immune to the virus.

 

 

Next step in the evolution would be to have a higher resilience against hot weather.

[ammcinnis]

Apropos those who have chosen to refuse vaccination based on misinformation:

 

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled." ~ Mark Twain

 

"It's not what people don't know that hurts them, it's what they know that ain't true." ~ Will Rogers

Edited August 11, 2021 by ammcinnis

[Yoda_One]

Concerning those who have chosen to refuse vaccination based on misinformation:

 

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled." ~ Mark Twain

Even though I might not agree with individuals which chooses not to get vaccinated, I do believe that the right to choose is one of our basic rights which the founders established. Even our creator felt it was our basic right which made man above all His other creations.

 

Laughing at Oneself and with Others is good for the Soul.

[HDTurbo]

His dad must be proud

https://www.thedailybeast.com/chet-hanks-goes-on-anti-vaxx-rant-despite-parents-tom-hanks-and-rita-wilsons-covid-19-hospitalization