SARS II: Respiratory Boogaloo

Joy.

The one true failing of the medical/scientific profession is that we have not yet isolated the "mindnumbingly stupid fucking cunt" gene and eliminated it.

And don't give me Geordi's speech from The Masterpiece Society. Blind folk have something to contribute.

You don't, unless we can somehow convert your idiocy into green electricity or something.

Perhaps some form of dynamo hooked up to your teachers' graves?

That's a bit harsh, just because you didn't like my joke.

It's amazing how Americas response has bounced back and forth. In the first months of last year the USA looked like the gold standard in terms of vaccination.

You know as a anxious as I was, as someone not in any of the high-priority groups, to get the vaccine, I'm starting to think that maybe keeping it officially restricted (but relatively easy to get if you tried) longer to help build demand (a la Facebook's early growth, or Antoine-Augustin Parmentier and the potato) would have been better.

Yeah, you know what? Biden should loudly demand that the FDA ban anyone who hasn't gotten a vaccine from getting one. Say with a start date 3 months from now. Betcha every holdout will suddenly decide to get vaccinated.

I like that idea, but how about if he were to announce that in 90 days everyone who's not vaccinated will have to pay full price for the jabs?

Here's something interesting on the Long Covid Front: Canadian Doctors (you know the same ones who work under that 'socialist' system that can't possibly be as good as the 'Murican one) think they've cracked the code on what causes it.
A team of researchers based at five centres across Ontario have zeroed in on a microscopic abnormality in the way oxygen moves from the lungs and into the blood vessels of long COVID patients in their trial.

This abnormality could explain why these patients feel breathless and are unable to perform strenuous activities, says lead researcher Grace Parraga, Tier 1 Canada research chair in lung imaging at Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.

“Those feelings of breathlessness are completely consistent with our finding that we’re not moving the oxygen as efficiently as we should,” she said.

The research team acknowledges the sample size of this study, which has been peer-reviewed, is small and therefore that results should be considered “exploratory and hypothesis-generating.”

But that hasn’t tempered their excitement at the prospect of making headway in understanding long COVID and taking one step closer to understanding how to treat it.

Interesting, and no mention of the Bends that divers get and means that they can't ever go diving again because they're at such a high risk of dying that it isn't safe for them to go back to diving. I have to wonder if there isn't something similar going on in both cases.

48?

He looks like he was 70.

Cancer will do thar

Well, I've got it again, 7 months after the last time...

Goddamn it!

I’m going to try to verify the papers in the article actually say what the article says they say… I really hope it’s a bad misinterpretation.

I took a quick pass at this. At first glance, it looks like the phrase "it is now possible" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

To answer one question, it is clear that the cases being studied do represent new infections as opposed to a single infection having an oddball course -- one involved people who got Delta and then quickly got Omicron, and one involved people who got Omicron BA.1 and then got Omicron BA.2.

But the numbers are extremely small, and nearly everyone in the study was uncaccinated. So it's possible, but it also seems that it's very unlikely, and if you're fully vaccinated it's unlikelier still.

I'm double boosted. If there's a new booster with a specific formula for new variants, I'll get it. Unless and until then...no

Nope. This is documenting cases of Delta -> Omicron reinfection in 3-13 weeks.

Appears to be accurate.

This was the most worrying of the links particularly from the abstract, and while the abstract is worded very poorly, the paper makes it clear (barely): vaccines + previous wild-type/Wuhan Hu-1 (WT), alpha, and maybe delta (but especially WT*) infection dampens the immune response to omicron relative to vaccines alone, and vaccines alone are insufficient against omicron. Notably, while the abstract is worded to be rather ambiguous about this, the results do not appear to say that omicron makes subsequent omicron infection more likely. As far as future variants go, it's unsettling that this "hybrid-immunity damper" exists†, but I don't think we have any particular way of modeling this going forward. We'll just have to wait and see. As long as omicron remains in its current form we'll be okay. It probably certainly has to do with the geometry of the proteins in question rather than the genetic distance;the alpha-delta lineage is distinct from the WT-omicron lineage, but has less of a damper. To use a Star Wars analogy, if your immune system receives "plans for super weapon with a big round emitter and equatorial trench" and then sees and fights off a Starkiller Base, it'll be fine against the Death Star. But if it receives "plans for super weapon with a big round emitter and equatorial trench" and then sees a Death Star (and I think vice versa, but I don't have time to dig that far into the charts), it has no idea that Starkiller Base could possibly exist and is even less prepared than if it had only received the plans.

* I can't emphasize enough how bad this one is. Of the 3 major immune system groups -- antibodies, T-cells, and B-cells -- only the B-cells confer any protection. Having had WT and getting vaccinated confers no antibody or T-cell protection against omicron at all, much less than vaccines alone. No data on whether omicron-specific vaccines restore this, as the paper is from before they were developed.

† this is a big deal. If this group finds a mechanism and can target it, collectively that would probably be Nobel-worthy, especially if it has applications to other pathogens.

Not a paper, and I'm not going to watch a 1 hour video for this. It's consistent with what we know.

This is a literature review of T-cell differentiation, hyperactivation, and apoptosis pathway hypotheses. It's not clear at all that this has anything to do with the previous study (not the video), as it appears to be in the context of active COVID infections, not immunity to future infections. Waning immunity from vaccines was predicted outside the context of the hybrid-immunity damper. So this seems kinda misleading. Not necessarily wrong, as it turned out, and this mechanism happening during the infection could well be responsible. But I don't see anything in that review that indicates that it was predicted, or an obvious causal link.

Again this is current infection (and in particular, in severe disease), not between infections. Anything that causes massive T-cell death is going to be bad, but you still have to prove that the heightened differentiation and apoptosis lasts indefinitely. I don't think this has done so. The main study above (with the bold in the responses) could potentially have answered this by looking at cohort members with multiple breakthrough infections of different strains (WT+alpha+omicron, WT+delta+omicron, WT+alpha+delta+omicron), and looking at the T-cell reactivity during the last infection. If the hypothesis is correct, then the reactivity should be even lower than WT+omicron + omicron patients as the T-cells become more overspecialized every time. If it's wrong, it'll be higher than WT+omicron patients, as the immune system generates somewhat more general T-cells. The raw data may contain such numbers, but I don't have the time or energy to dig through it, but that's the data I'd like to see to be confident in the article.

This is an accurate summary of his position, but he's not saying that the immune response gets worse with each infection, nor do I find that exact quote.

This is an opinion piece, and it's by one of the authors of the major study. Bad news: he says the data show omicron doesn't protect well against subsequent omicron. Good news: he doesn't say anything about each infection making the immune response worse, or that there is cumulative immune system damage, or that omicron infection makes subsequent omicron infection more likely, only not much less. Otherwise it's in line with my summary of the paper.

s/Previous/Recent/ and this is accurate.

Okay, that's not what the Chinese study said. It provides two alternative hypotheses and does not pick between them, merely ruling others besides those two out. The other hypothesis (also shared by the previous paper) is that the similarity of the spike protein to another one is causing broad activation of non-specific T-cells leading to a systemic inflammatory response. This would seem to be broadly incompatible with the T-cell overspecialization and apoptosis hypothesis, except that none of the COVID infections were severe (contra other studies linked to so far), and one was asymptomatic. So there's no data to rule out either one, as this paragraph does.

"could open doors" would be more accurate. It's also possible that the hit that trust in the medical system has taken as a result of politics around COVID is having knock-on effects with other diseases.

To quote the link's in-house expert: "This research suggests that having COVID-19 is linked to an increased risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, however this was no stronger than the link to other respiratory diseases like the flu. Diseases like Alzheimer’s develop in the brain over many years and COVID-19 has only been present in Europe since early 2020. It may be that people in the very early stages of Alzheimer’s are more susceptible to catching diseases like COVID-19. While the announcement of these findings is potentially concerning, we will need to see results of this study in a peer-reviewed publication before we can draw any real conclusions from this research." IOW, this is still speculative. It's not even an actual study yet, not peer-reviewed or published. Just some early findings presented at a conference.


There are a lot more links but I've spent way too much time on this already. There are two core problems with this article that really undermine its narrative: 1. The evidence for 2-3 week omicron-omicron reinfections is not linked to, and may not exist; someone else can go find it if it does. 2. The evidence for more than a temporary immune system ablation is simply not present, and it narratively conflates that with the apparently very real hybrid-immunity damper.

Does this undermine its policy prescriptions, which are to mask up, resume an eradication policy, and get variant-specific COVID vaccines or universal beta-coronavirus vaccines deployed? No, I don't think it does. The hybrid-immunity damper is by itself a big reason to do that - huge even. The pandemic will reassert itself less and less predictably every time there's a new variant, and there will be new variants as long as those better vaccines are not universally deployed and people are not masking. But the picture of dire indefinite immune system consequences for everyone on an individual level is only one possibility, and not a super well-founded one, though it can't be eliminated by data yet.

More issues I missed:

Sen. Joe Manchin Tests Positive for COVID-19

Would need to be miner's lung to expect any serious positive change in his attitude.

Is it really news anymore, when celebrities and politicians get covid?

Yes because they’re the ones telling us how to live our lives so it’s good to expose their hypocrisy.