SA has plenty of vaccine. People don’t want it. Misinformation campaigns aren’t just a US phenomenon. Beyond that, we have a vaccine delivery issue in many of these places. It’s not really a shortage of vaccine necessarily
Know you're tired of everything related to this but I had no idea this was an issue in places like South Africa and I'm sure a lot of people here are the same. Any articles about misinfo in South Africa or elsewhere we wouldn't expect?
Iunno I'll try putting it all together. TMEM245 is a transmembrane protein from humans, us. Virus replication inside cells seems to be fairly chaotic (I'm not really on the up and up on virology), but at some point in this particular virus's lineage, some TMEM245 mRNA, from the person infected with covid, made its way in to a region of this variant of covid's genetic code. This sort of thing is a bit rare but it happens, usually with viruses that have lysogenic strategies (that is, some viruses insert themselves and hide out in your DNA relatively 'silently'). Because it's a transmembrane protein, parts of TMEM245 are inside and parts of it are outside, in a person's cells. When the guy mentioned that it's "highly conserved," they mean that TMEM245 in most people looks pretty much exactly the same. During your growing, you start developing an immune system. Your immune system has a certain window where it has to learn what your own body looks like, so it doesn't attack itself. This is typically accomplished by immune cells rubbing against some other cells, and screening out cells that make you attack yourself. You may remember those cards that the military uses for "most wanted terrorists" or whatever. It's like testing a soldier's recognition of those cards vs. cards that have pictures of his own platoon soldiers faces on them. If that soldier gets it wrong and picks a soldier from is own platoon, that soldier being tested is liquidated. Don't want your body being allergic to itself, after all. This guy thinks that because TMEM245 is so ubiquitous, and that your immune system will typically avoid being sensitive to things that appear everywhere in a normal body regularly, that this may act to pacify/evade (a bit) part of your immune system, kinda like wearing a fake moustache in a room full of people with moustaches. There are a couple assumptions there, like how much of TMEM peptide present in the covid viral particle is exposed, is it folded in a way that's recognizable and can actually interact with the immune system. Evidently its presence in the NTD (N terminal Domain, proteins are a string of legos, essentially, and one end almost always has a Nitrogen and the other end almost always has a Carbon (C-Terminal) ) doesn't hurt the spike protein binding What he's also saying, is that it's easy to check how much TMEM may contribute to helping evade our immune responses. If the whole thing is sequenced, make a COVID in the lab that doesn't have the TMEM parts and see if antibodies attack it more efficiently or not. Nailing that down would also give scientists another thing to target Edit: ehh its prob nothing
You couldn't be more "off" than I am and I, for one, will certainly not be calling you "dumb" that's for sure.
It was in some tweets I saw yesterday - SA told Pfizer not to send more vaccine and someone from SA talked about the Misinfo problem and people not willing to be vaccinated
Is the The NY Times referencing the mainboard? If so, we’ve come a long way from flat gilly, poor Ron and spying on the traveling peoples of the Carolinas…. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/style/anti-vaccine-deaths-social-media.html
Trevor Bedford thread Guy takes a stab at the possible immune evasion of omicron https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1464922715865948160.html
Valid but its ability to bypass the highest level of vaccine protection to even infect is kinda making me eye the toilet paper at my grocery store with greedy eyes.
Really hoping a lot of those infant hospitalizations are out of an abundance of caution due to new variant. This under 2 vaccine seems like it is going to drag on forever to get here.
https://trials.modernatx.com/ Sigh, if you want to see see about getting your under 5 kids vaxxed through clinical trials Becoming the joker second by second
Omicron is just trolling us all ahead of the Omega strain that gets the last laugh with complete immune evasion and R0 of 50+
That this could be as bad as early info suggests, possibly putting kids in crosshairs (like, more than usual in the US), and not having <5 year old child vax stuff nailed down by now. Its very shitty
Extremely slim silver lining could be the kids in that age group are disproportionately in cross hairs bc they aren’t vaccinated, which means vaccine still offers protection.
I have already read the link you provided and am considering it. I would 100% head to talk to my wife right now if I new he would be getting trial vaccine and not placebo.
Really eager to see the data from blood samples of those of us in the Pfizer/Moderna trials that have been boosted. They took my blood 1 month after getting my booster, hoping the assays or whatever they're doing right now is including that and not just two dose patients.
Paywall'd Spoiler The chief executive of Moderna has predicted that existing vaccines will be much less effective at tackling Omicron than earlier strains of Covid-19 and warned it would take months before pharmaceutical companies can manufacture new variant-specific jabs at scale. Stéphane Bancel said the high number of Omicron mutations on the spike protein, which the virus uses to infect human cells, and the rapid spread of the variant in South Africa, suggested the current crop of vaccines may need to be modified next year. “There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level . . . we had with Delta,” Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He added: “I think it’s going to be a material drop. I just don’t know how much because we need to wait for the data. But all the scientists I’ve talked to . . . are like ‘this is not going to be good’.” The Moderna chief executive’s comments come as other public health experts and politicians have tried to strike a more upbeat tone about the ability of existing vaccines to confer protection against Omicron. All the scientists I’ve talked to . . . are like ‘this is not going to be good’ Stéphane Bancel On Monday, Scott Gottlieb, a director of Pfizer and former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, told CNBC: “There’s a reasonable degree of confidence in vaccine circles that [with] at least three doses . . . the patient is going to have fairly good protection against this variant.” Joe Biden, US president, subsequently said Omicron was “a cause for concern, not a cause for panic,” adding that the government’s medical experts “believe that the vaccines will continue to provide a degree of protection against severe disease”. However, Bancel said scientists were worried because 32 of the 50 mutations in the Omicron variant are on the spike protein, which the current vaccines focus on to boost the human body’s immune system to combat Covid-19. Most experts thought such a highly mutated variant would not emerge for another one or two years, Bancel added. Moderna and Pfizer have become the vaccine suppliers of choice for most of the developed world due to the high effectiveness of their jabs, which are based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology. In August, Moderna announced that people vaccinated with two doses of its jab “maintained antibodies through six months, including against variants of concern such as the Delta variant”. But studies suggest the company’s vaccine is less effective at preventing outbreaks of Delta than earlier strains of the virus. A Stanford University study of a Delta outbreak at a California prison published last month found that the company’s jab was 56.6 per cent effective against infection. That was substantially lower than the level in studies conducted before the emergence of Delta, the researchers said. Moderna and Pfizer are now working on new vaccines to target the Omicron variant, which the World Health Organization has said poses a “very high risk”. Bancel said data giving an indication of how the existing vaccines perform against the Omicron variant, and whether it causes severe disease, should become available within two weeks. But he said it would take several months before an Omicron-specific vaccine could be produced at scale, and suggested there might be a case for giving more potent boosters to the elderly or people with compromised immune systems in the meantime. “[Moderna] and Pfizer cannot get a billion doses next week. The maths doesn’t work. But could we get the billion doses out by the summer? Sure,” said Bancel, who predicted Moderna could make a total of 2bn-3bn doses in 2022. But he said it would be risky to shift Moderna’s entire production capacity to an Omicron-targeted jab at a time when other variants are still in circulation. Bancel also hit out at critics who have accused vaccine makers of not doing enough to support jab rollouts in developing countries such as South Africa, where only a quarter of the population is fully inoculated, according to Johns Hopkins University. “This was mostly a policy decision by the rich countries. In the US, we were told we had no choice but to give 60 per cent of our output to the US government. That was not a Moderna decision, that was a US government decision,” he said. Bancel also said there was a surplus of jabs earmarked for Africa and that 70m Moderna vaccines were sitting in warehouses because Covax — an international body tasked with inoculating low income nations — or individual governments had not taken delivery of them. He said: “We are running out of space. It’s because either they don’t have customs documents, or they don’t have fridge space, or because the ability to get doses in arms is a challenge.”
hello darkness 2022 at least we got in what might be (TBD) the best college football season in the past 10 years
Why can’t the vaccine target both delta and omicron, is there a reason an individual shot cant teach the body how to make both spike proteins to avoid issues with both delta and omicron?
fffffffff if this is really hitting toddlers hard. I have a two year old who goes to day care. My wife will quit her job to stay home if this is true.