outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

So is Persad advocating that the FDA authorize the Pfizer vaccine for 6 mos. - 2 years, where efficacy has been shown? Or is he saying they should authorize for 6 mos. - 5 years, even though Pfizer says efficacy has not been shown, with 2 shots, for 2-4 year olds?

i think persad is advocating it be approved immediately at this dose for all under 5s.

the heavily trailed results (which are what caused the FDA to *ask* pfizer to submit while the trial for the third dose was WIP) are:

*efficacy* has not been shown at any age range. the goal of an immunobridging trial is to demonstrate safety and antibodies. they found levels comparable to vaccinated teenagers in 6m-2, but lower levels in 2-4. the lower levels were still higher than naive 2-4. there were no safety issues. it sounds like the omicron wave gave them a bit more efficacy data than expected but not enough for a strong result (which is not needed for approval).

i guess reasonable people can disagree about what the FDA should have recommended on tuesday, given what we know about the current data. that in itself is a pretty big clue that maybe the FDA shouldn't have encouraged pfizer to submit in this extremely unusual way. maybe then they wouldn't have announced a confidence boosting two month postponement on the day the data was supposed to be released.

good stuff from ed yong as per

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-pandemic-immunocompromised-risk-vaccines/622094/

🚨I wrote about immunocompromised people—what they’ve been through, their frustrations, and their hopes.

This is a plea to think about those who don’t get to be done with the pandemic, and to prioritize them as a matter of moral and medical urgency. 1/https://t.co/DBI6ssL1a5

— Ed Yong (@edyong209) February 16, 2022

Posted this to the other thread, but early reports on child long covid symptoms largely lacked controls, and controlled studies are increasingly suggesting it's not a big worry (albeit we can't 100% know if there's some down the road effect lurking)

https://www.statnews.com/2022/02/14/controlled-studies-ease-worries-widespread-long-covid-kids/?fbclid=IwAR0Tv2MEJq0ume-UThpLNwQH5RrVXaNILeLLDAQdJOqcjjV-Hxu8hauhuE0

What I find so confusing is that people mean REALLY DIFFERENT things by "long COVID," ranging from "I still felt overtired a month later" to "I am disabled to the point of not being able to work and likely will be for life"

Definitely. "Long COVID" is a misleading term because it sounds like some kind of long-lasting virus. It is in fact just a collection of symptoms. No one actually has "Long COVID," they have a two-month persistent cough caused by COVID, or a month of fatigue caused by COVID, or six months of anosmia caused by COVID, all of which are different. And in some cases it's just correlation, not causation, which is why the controls are so important (not to mention that a lot of early reports relied on surveys where there was no actual confirmation of COVID, and prolonged symptoms seemed to be higher in self-reported COVID vs test-proven COVID).

No one actually has "Long COVID," they have a two-month persistent cough caused by COVID, or a month of fatigue caused by COVID, or six months of anosmia caused by COVID, all of which are different.

Or they have permanent disability, which is really different!

promise this isn't the beginning of tweet diarrhea from me again. it's been a while, indulge me.

anyway, of course CNN picked up on a pre-print today about BA.2 subvariant of Omicron being 'more pathogenic' than BA.1 (original Omicron), which was done in a lab study with hamsters, and as of yet doesn't really match real world observation.

that isn't what i'm sharing, but rather, sharing real world data talking about what South Africa knows about BA.2 vs BA.1.

I now am retiring for 3 months as per my contract.

[Thread] 1. How fast is BA.2 (a subvariant of the #Omicron variant) spreading in SA and is it making people sicker than BA.1 (the original form of #Omicron)?

Cheryl Cohen, @nicd_sa: pic.twitter.com/59Nd1hlATJ

— Mia Malan (@miamalan) February 16, 2022

Definitely. "Long COVID" is a misleading term because it sounds like some kind of long-lasting virus. It is in fact just a collection of symptoms. No one actually has "Long COVID," they have a two-month persistent cough caused by COVID, or a month of fatigue caused by COVID, or six months of anosmia caused by COVID, all of which are different.

please don't post shit like this

for anyone reading this who has long covid, apologies for this, we all know it's wrong but we put up with it because our world is horrible

you're right it is all those things

plus a whole lot of other things

it's the kind of thing that may be technically accurate, in the same way that i can technically be accurate about a lot of things and reduce them down to a list of things that seems logical and minimal, reducing their actual pain to a taxonomy even when the real thing is every fucking shade of hue in the RGB, it's not about accuracy it's about the whole operation

you're right. It was insensitive of me. You are a good soul.

i don't like the downplaying of covid but i didn't need to go on like that, sorry. it says more about me than it does about you.

i think it's hard because obviously people who have been more directly affected by covid, physically, should probably not read this thread or other similar conversations on the internet. i think it's normal for people to speak of things in a matter of fact way, at an arm's length. i think you can do that if you have distance from the physical reality of the thing, or you can do that if you've mastered your emotions and dealing with trauma. i'm neither of those. i have told myself not to read this thread so many times.

at the same time, i also think it's normal for people affected by some kind of trauma to be drawn to it like moths to a flame

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/health/covid-vaccine-antibodies-t-cells.html

this was hopeful!

yeah at last

that's in line with what I'd heard too, re: "diminishing returns on boosters". also Apoorva is good.

definitely the type of article i needed to read today so thanks

how you feeling?!

i'm good. turns out it was a false positive after all, ten tests later. guessing maybe I had an abortive infection, a thing I only just learned about in the last week (where i was exposed but it never took hold).

which is good cos taht means the folks are doing well as well. :)

was your false positive a PCR?

yes, but a home PCR test (Lucira). so yours truly coulda fucked it up. lol...

the official test my study did and confirmed in a lab (taken last Thursday) came back negative - they confirmed with me this morning. they also checked for other viruses like RSV etc and found nothing.

I guess they happen (FPs), but they rarely happen to me.

well...except on this borad

A friend tested positive using a PCR yesterday (test taken on Monday morning). Not a single symptom, she said. Then she got a rapid PCR yesterday an hour before learning the results of the first....negative lol.

I.e. she tested negative with the second one. Now she wonders if she got a false positive the first time.

ugh. one thing that is possible is that both brands of PCRs have different 'cycle' cutoffs for a positive result. a 'cycle' being a cycle of amplification to the original sample to detect the viral RNA.

Lots of tests have cycle cutoffs that are above the level that would likely result in infectious disease, and there's no standard that all tests abide by - it's up to the testmakers themselves. so if it took 38 cycles to find the presence of viral RNA, and one test's cutoff was 40 cycles, the other 37, one test might pop positive, the other might not.

that's just a theory. either that or her immune system fought off the virus and it never took hold.

she might wanna try an antigen test in a day or two. the guidance around this isn't real clear, admittedly. they usually just tell you to trust the positive, but that's understandable, because the idea is that if you take two tests, and one is positive, and one is negative, you can't easily tell which one was wrong,and going back and living your life is like playing roulette a bit. If a series of tests over several days routinely come back negative (PCR or antigen), that would seem to suggest to me that it was a false positive.

(obv I'm not a doctor or scientist so these are just layman guesses and might be hilariously wrong) - should just write that after all my posts

Yeah, I advised her to go with antigen tests for a couple cycles if she suspects a PC -- we know now how well PCRs pick up dead viral residue in the nose.

PC = FP

i still want to do an antibody test to see if I maybe had it and didn't know it sometime in the past.

I got one done as part of my blood tests in December 2020 a couple weeks before testing became widespread. Reassuring.

ooof

Newly emerging data suggest the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine works substantially less well at preventing infection and hospitalizations in children aged 5 to 11 than it does in those aged 12 to 17 — a finding that is raising questions about whether the companies chose the wrong dose for the younger children.

https://www.statnews.com/2022/02/28/pfizer-covid-vaccine-kids-5-11/

How often are kids 5-11 hospitalized for covid?

ok socrates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzzYxTPYAcA

xxp In the study discussed, hospitalizations peaked at 0.35 per 100k of the vaccinated children aged 5-11, and 1.04 out of 100k for unvaccinated children aged 5-11.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.25.22271454v1.full.pdf

he isn't actually asking

exciting news, daughter gets her first shot this saturday, at the Museum of Natural History.

👍

Ugh caek that is really shitty news. And possibly going to be missed by some alongside the Ukraine news.

Thanks for sharing.

lmao https://www.statnews.com/2022/03/01/cdc-data-suggest-pfizer-vaccine-protection-holds-up-in-kids-5-11-raising-questions-on-earlier-study/

Just a lil' whoopsy-doopsy, no biggie.

Good vaccine

Finally. After years of no big outbreaks, thus little prior immunity, Hong Kong got an Omicron outbreak with fairly dismal vaccination rates, especially among the elderly.

Highly and properly-vaccinated New Zealand also got hit with Omicron.

See their cases vs deaths.😢 pic.twitter.com/NqkHv11AQN

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) March 4, 2022

HK is using the vax that didn't go through much trials that has been shown to be fairly ineffective, right?

good god @ that Chotiner interview

lol wrong thread

Wasn’t Twitter just clowning on an article that asserted HK’s “Zero Covid“ policy actually made them vulnerable?

…the company?

what's made them vulnerable is a lowish 2 dose vaccination rate, an extremely low booster rate, and (i assume, don't know for sure) some use of attenuated vaccines (sinovax etc.) which are about as effective as paracetemol against anything other than the original strain.

and apparently particularly low vaccination rates among the elderly according to tufekci. NZ by contrast has among the highest booster rates in the world (about the same as western europe, double that of the US and HK).

xxxpost Zero COVID should have given them the ability to achieve high vaccination, which would have prevented this, but one thing several Zero COVID countries ran into is that their strategies succeeded in keeping COVID at zero (or very low), so lots of people said "why the fuck should I get the vaccine, there aren't any cases!". then you run into extremely immune naive populations that have little infection-based or vaccine-induced immunity.

the other problem is, while Pfizer's vaccine is available there, the other one they use is CoronaVac, which studies showed that even with three shots of that vaccine, barely neutralized Omicron whatsoever. so anybody with that vaccine is quite possibly dealing with lower protection against severe disease as well.

not a great situation right now, though I don't know that I'd blame it on Zero COVID so much as that myriad of factors I mentioned above.