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0 pointshackingforfun4y ago0 comments

I appreciate your answer and agree that in general it's good to keep safe in any we can, including the things you mentioned. I also agree that the discussion is quite polarized, however, at this point I tend to think the vaccine benefits outweigh the cons.

I'm wondering, at what point, if ever, would you decide that the COVID vaccines are safe / worth it? Honest question.

Also, as someone else mentioned here [1], isn't natural immunity plus vaccine-induced immunity considered even better than natural immunity alone? I haven't fact checked this but they said that was also found from one of the Israel studies. Based on this, wouldn't it still make sense to get the vaccine?

You also mentioned the media. Isn't it possible that conservative media is also manipulating the truth for their narrative? 90% of Fox News staff is vaccinated and yet they still cast doubt on the vaccine [2]. Also, Tucker Carlson won't say if he's been vaccinated or not [3], yet he's one of the big proponents telling people not to get vaccinated. I hear this criticism that the media is spreading misinformation, but it seems like if that's the case, we should consider that it could be happening on both sides.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28617742

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/15/fox-news-vacci...

[3] https://www.thedailybeast.com/cnn-host-alisyn-camerota-calls...

0 comments

winocm4y ago

Antibiotic selection does not have the same dynamics as viral evolution does.

This graphic demonstrates a good example as to the epitope coverage across S by both B-cells and T-cells: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2021/07/05/202...

You would need to have a variant that selects past all of the epitope coverage of both B/T-cell and bypasses affinity maturation too. NTD and RBD already has great coverage, but the rest of the pre-fusion spike confirmation used in vaccines these days has even more coverage than just with RBD alone. I think that's why BNT162b1 failed, as it was a mRNA encoded receptor binding domain only.

Given how large the breadth (as in epitope coverage) already is in RBD alone, you would most likely disrupt ACE2 receptor binding too at the same time if there was a such a massive change all at once to render a vaccine useless.

If you managed to achieve an evolution rate of 250+ AA substitutions extremely quickly, all in one fell swoop, I’d have much much bigger concerns.

A lot of the variants these days select for escape for RBD class 1 and 2 nAbs, even Mu as of now (R346K is in this weird overlap between the different classes as per the Barnes classification).

You may want to see the following:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00573-0

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2852-1

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abf9302

I think I read some others, but I'll have to dig through my browser history more.

mythrwy4y ago

Viral evolution may have different _mechanisms_ then antibiotic evolution (which is what you go on to post about) but this does not mean it does not have similar _dynamics_, i.e patterns of growth.

swader9994y ago

The vaccines are suitable for the vulnerable - older with comorbidities. Vaccinating the entire population with a leaky vaccine and a virus that can shift and live in animal reservoirs is a recipe to breed more dangerous variants.

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