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Won’t there always be a variant popping up somewhere in some part of the world though? The idea that “if we all got vaccinated, we could have zero variants” re

Won’t there always be a variant popping up somewhere in some part of the world though? The idea that “if we all got vaccinated, we could have zero variants” reeks of “zero COVID” thinking

datameta 5y ago
More unvaccinated people -> more people getting covid -> more chances for mutation into variants It's really that simple. We want as few active infections as possible globally so that existing vaccinations can work for the variants they were made in mind with. Otherwise we will be at the disadvantage in a perpetual arms race trying to quickly stamp out the global "fires" of new variants.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  If you actually want that, then you need some kind of megaproject to build vaccine factories to supply the entire world and to distribute them to the whole world's population. This virus doesn't respect borders.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    Yes in fact, that's the core of what a lot of people have been wanting by trying to get an IP waiver from the WTO. You don't even need new factories, as there's tons of factories out there that are itching to make the various vaccines.
    - vimy 5y ago
      It was my understanding that the developing world doesn’t have the required infrastructure nor qualified workers to manufacture the complex covid vaccines. So the whole patent point is moot.
      - monocasa 5y ago
        Your understanding is incorrect, hence the ongoing process for the WTO waiver. Even the mRNA vaccines aren't that crazy, it's a culture of e. coli that's been genetically engineered to produce the vaccines; the manufacturing steps themselves are pretty run of the mill bio reactor stuff with slightly more stringent temperature controls on the tail end. The non mRNA vaccines are pretty much equivalent to any other standard vaccine.
    - hcurtiss 5y ago
      With an IP waiver, you make it less likely you'll have a vaccine for the next one, defeating the entire purpose.
      - monocasa 5y ago
        No you don't; the vaccines were funded almost entirely with public money anyway.
        hcurtiss 5y ago
        Their manufacture was. The mRNA research was a huge private bet (after some companies had given up).
        monocasa 5y ago
        The largest source of Moderna's R&D funding was nearly $1B in grants from the US Government.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - shaklee3 5y ago
    This has already happened. There's a world organization distributing millions of vaccines, and soon billions.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- AuryGlenz 5y ago
  In a world where the delta variant can infect fully vaccinated people fairly easily, aren’t the vaccinated the real problem? The unvaccinated aren’t putting any particular pressure on the virus when it comes to evolving around the vaccines, but the vaccinated are. Unless we could magically get the cases to zero this problem isn’t going away. Mask mandates will slow things, but eventually you’ll need enough people to actually get infected to drop the replication rate.
  - geedy 5y ago
    Variants occur in both unvaccinated and the vaccinated. Given enough time, a virus will tend evolve to become more infectious period. Somebody else could confirm this, but it seems to me that the current known variants of concern are not responses to vaccination.
    - johncearls 5y ago
      Only the vaccinated will preferentially evolve variants that are resistant to the vaccine. The vaccines are leaky, as evidenced by the recent outbreak in the Northeast. A saner strategy with leaky vaccines is to vaccinate the small population that is vulnerable and let the rest of the population of develop a natural herd immunity. Otherwise you are creating a fitness advantage to resistant strains.
      - XorNot 5y ago
        This is not how it works, and "natural" herd immunity has never been a real concept in epidemiology - which it is clear you are speculating on without bothering to read about but should also be trivially obvious from the fact that until vaccines none of the vaccine preventable diseases ever went extinct on their own. Or how the flu hits every single year.
        johncearls 5y ago
        > Herd immunity is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that can occur with some diseases when a sufficient percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through vaccination or previous infections, thereby reducing the likelihood of infection for individuals who lack immunity. Right from wikipedia.
telxos 5y ago
"We need to be more like the Chinese and be smart about this"
Barrin92 5y ago
the dynamic is a feedback loop in either direction. More vaccinations means slowdown of spread which means slower rate of mutation and in turn easier ways to control the virus. Faster transmission means faster rate of mutations and having a harder time controlling the virus. 'Zero covid' or near-zero covid anyway does not 'reek' because it is perfectly attainable. The virus could be squashed pretty much completely. The fact that we cannot do it is the result of institutionalized failure, resignation and normalization of dysfunction, not actually a matter of fact. We have in fact eradicated one highly transmittable, airborne virus through a global vaccination effort already, namely smallpox. And that was almost half a century ago.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Haven’t we seen several recent papers suggesting animal reservoirs for the virus? If those papers are correct, it seems that elimination from the Earth is never going to happen (well, it’ll happen when the sun turns into a red giant).
- mdorazio 5y ago
  > We have in fact eradicated one highly transmittable, airborne virus through a global vaccination effort already, namely smallpox. And that was almost half a century ago. Exactly. It was half a century ago when the global population was half what it is today and travel (especially international) was massively lower as well. Also Smallpox had a much lower mutation rate than COVID does, and it's not transmissable until obvious symptoms develop (much different than COVID). Thinking the same strategy would work today is kind of a pipe dream.
- lionhead 5y ago
  >The virus could be squashed pretty much completely. In Korea, we tried, succeeded for a couple of weeks, then failed.
- curmudgeon22 5y ago
  A core difference is the smallpox vaccine had/has sterilizing immunity while the covid vaccines do not. I think given non-sterilizing immunity and the rate and scale of global vaccine roll outs, zero covid is virtually impossible.
foolinaround 5y ago
This point needs to be stated more loudly. People here pretend that if only USA was 100% vaccinated, then there will not be another variant. There will always be another part of the world where a variant will arise, and eventually make its way here to the US. OTOH, the USA is unique in the freedom it offers compared to any other country in the world, and a key ingredient in my opinion to its success. One of the most shocking aspects to me is how the US citizens have changed to so nonchalantly willing to give away their freedoms and those of their neighbours. I would not have believed if someone told me this 2 years ago. And in the past years, I had often wondered about the 'good' Germans during the time of the Nazis, and why they did'nt first lift a finger when the atrocities against the Jews started, and later, a good number of them actively participated in elimination of the Jews. the last year has been quite an eye opener. My hope is that more US citizens, regardless of their political persuasions and belief about the vaccines step back and think about the uniqueness of the freedoms they enjoy, and their willingness to throw it all away.
- xxpor 5y ago
  Most people's moral framework isn't deontological, fortunately for everyone.
  - logicchains 5y ago
    And that's why governments managed to kill over a hundred million people in the past century, because they convinced people it was for some "Greater good".
    - katbyte 5y ago
      Are you comparing vaccines and masks to genocide?
      - foolinaround 5y ago
        Are you intentionally missing the point? The mindset of fear that is inculcated that pits one group against another is the similarity that starts it off. 1940s Germany: Germans were convinced that Jews were the outer, not deserving of protection 20th century communism, too many examples - China, Russia, Cambodia, etc : Different classes - writers, teachers, scientists were identified as the outer group, and hate was inculcated Today's scenario: the 'unvaccinated' are made as the other group.
Taniwha 5y ago
Think about the end game here - we have evidence of ~4 covid viruses that have adapted to humans, one of which may have been responsible for an epidemic a couple of 100 years ago. Now days they are relatively benign, they make up part of what we call "the common cold". This is historical evidences that covid viruses in humans evolve to become relatively benign, likely this happens faster if we let it kill more people more quickly, but, well, modern medicine. So what will it take for the current covid variant to reach this state - we'll need it to evolve a benign version that out competes the current covid-delta . A benign version of a virus that out competes its more lethal cousins is something that we also call a "live vaccine". So why shouldn't we help it along? if we know it's going to happen naturally why not make it happen faster? past attempts to generate live vaccines have mostly worked but have not always gone well, but they were made with technologies that essentially consisted of whacking them with a mallet and hoping they would stay dead - the mRNA vaccines are much more like engineering. Why not take an existing relatively benign vaccine and fit it out with a protein coat similar enough to C19 and release that? Obviously this is not something one would do blindly, it would require lots of testing, especially with immunocompromised people. And testing (without releasing it early) would be hard - tested people would need to remain in lockdown. Of course the crazy anti-vaxxers would scream bloody blue murder - but given that their current propaganda already paints the current vaccines as "live vaccines" and warns people to stay away from the vaccinated that horse would seem to have already bolted

Won’t there always be a variant popping up somewhere in some part of the world though? The idea that “if we all got vaccinated, we could have zero variants” reeks of “zero COVID” thinking

datameta 5y ago

More unvaccinated people -> more people getting covid -> more chances for mutation into variants It's really that simple. We want as few active infections as possible globally so that existing vaccinations can work for the variants they were made in mind with. Otherwise we will be at the disadvantage in a perpetual arms race trying to quickly stamp out the global "fires" of new variants.

zarzavat 5y ago
If you actually want that, then you need some kind of megaproject to build vaccine factories to supply the entire world and to distribute them to the whole world's population. This virus doesn't respect borders.
- monocasa 5y ago
  Yes in fact, that's the core of what a lot of people have been wanting by trying to get an IP waiver from the WTO. You don't even need new factories, as there's tons of factories out there that are itching to make the various vaccines.
  - vimy 5y ago
    It was my understanding that the developing world doesn’t have the required infrastructure nor qualified workers to manufacture the complex covid vaccines. So the whole patent point is moot.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      Your understanding is incorrect, hence the ongoing process for the WTO waiver. Even the mRNA vaccines aren't that crazy, it's a culture of e. coli that's been genetically engineered to produce the vaccines; the manufacturing steps themselves are pretty run of the mill bio reactor stuff with slightly more stringent temperature controls on the tail end. The non mRNA vaccines are pretty much equivalent to any other standard vaccine.
  - hcurtiss 5y ago
    With an IP waiver, you make it less likely you'll have a vaccine for the next one, defeating the entire purpose.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      No you don't; the vaccines were funded almost entirely with public money anyway.
      - hcurtiss 5y ago
        Their manufacture was. The mRNA research was a huge private bet (after some companies had given up).
        monocasa 5y ago
        The largest source of Moderna's R&D funding was nearly $1B in grants from the US Government.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- shaklee3 5y ago
  This has already happened. There's a world organization distributing millions of vaccines, and soon billions.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
AuryGlenz 5y ago
In a world where the delta variant can infect fully vaccinated people fairly easily, aren’t the vaccinated the real problem? The unvaccinated aren’t putting any particular pressure on the virus when it comes to evolving around the vaccines, but the vaccinated are. Unless we could magically get the cases to zero this problem isn’t going away. Mask mandates will slow things, but eventually you’ll need enough people to actually get infected to drop the replication rate.
- geedy 5y ago
  Variants occur in both unvaccinated and the vaccinated. Given enough time, a virus will tend evolve to become more infectious period. Somebody else could confirm this, but it seems to me that the current known variants of concern are not responses to vaccination.
  - johncearls 5y ago
    Only the vaccinated will preferentially evolve variants that are resistant to the vaccine. The vaccines are leaky, as evidenced by the recent outbreak in the Northeast. A saner strategy with leaky vaccines is to vaccinate the small population that is vulnerable and let the rest of the population of develop a natural herd immunity. Otherwise you are creating a fitness advantage to resistant strains.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      This is not how it works, and "natural" herd immunity has never been a real concept in epidemiology - which it is clear you are speculating on without bothering to read about but should also be trivially obvious from the fact that until vaccines none of the vaccine preventable diseases ever went extinct on their own. Or how the flu hits every single year.
      - johncearls 5y ago
        > Herd immunity is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that can occur with some diseases when a sufficient percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through vaccination or previous infections, thereby reducing the likelihood of infection for individuals who lack immunity. Right from wikipedia.

telxos 5y ago

"We need to be more like the Chinese and be smart about this"

Barrin92 5y ago

the dynamic is a feedback loop in either direction. More vaccinations means slowdown of spread which means slower rate of mutation and in turn easier ways to control the virus. Faster transmission means faster rate of mutations and having a harder time controlling the virus. 'Zero covid' or near-zero covid anyway does not 'reek' because it is perfectly attainable. The virus could be squashed pretty much completely. The fact that we cannot do it is the result of institutionalized failure, resignation and normalization of dysfunction, not actually a matter of fact. We have in fact eradicated one highly transmittable, airborne virus through a global vaccination effort already, namely smallpox. And that was almost half a century ago.

sokoloff 5y ago
Haven’t we seen several recent papers suggesting animal reservoirs for the virus? If those papers are correct, it seems that elimination from the Earth is never going to happen (well, it’ll happen when the sun turns into a red giant).
mdorazio 5y ago
> We have in fact eradicated one highly transmittable, airborne virus through a global vaccination effort already, namely smallpox. And that was almost half a century ago. Exactly. It was half a century ago when the global population was half what it is today and travel (especially international) was massively lower as well. Also Smallpox had a much lower mutation rate than COVID does, and it's not transmissable until obvious symptoms develop (much different than COVID). Thinking the same strategy would work today is kind of a pipe dream.
lionhead 5y ago
>The virus could be squashed pretty much completely. In Korea, we tried, succeeded for a couple of weeks, then failed.
curmudgeon22 5y ago
A core difference is the smallpox vaccine had/has sterilizing immunity while the covid vaccines do not. I think given non-sterilizing immunity and the rate and scale of global vaccine roll outs, zero covid is virtually impossible.

foolinaround 5y ago

This point needs to be stated more loudly. People here pretend that if only USA was 100% vaccinated, then there will not be another variant. There will always be another part of the world where a variant will arise, and eventually make its way here to the US. OTOH, the USA is unique in the freedom it offers compared to any other country in the world, and a key ingredient in my opinion to its success. One of the most shocking aspects to me is how the US citizens have changed to so nonchalantly willing to give away their freedoms and those of their neighbours. I would not have believed if someone told me this 2 years ago. And in the past years, I had often wondered about the 'good' Germans during the time of the Nazis, and why they did'nt first lift a finger when the atrocities against the Jews started, and later, a good number of them actively participated in elimination of the Jews. the last year has been quite an eye opener. My hope is that more US citizens, regardless of their political persuasions and belief about the vaccines step back and think about the uniqueness of the freedoms they enjoy, and their willingness to throw it all away.

xxpor 5y ago
Most people's moral framework isn't deontological, fortunately for everyone.
- logicchains 5y ago
  And that's why governments managed to kill over a hundred million people in the past century, because they convinced people it was for some "Greater good".
  - katbyte 5y ago
    Are you comparing vaccines and masks to genocide?
    - foolinaround 5y ago
      Are you intentionally missing the point? The mindset of fear that is inculcated that pits one group against another is the similarity that starts it off. 1940s Germany: Germans were convinced that Jews were the outer, not deserving of protection 20th century communism, too many examples - China, Russia, Cambodia, etc : Different classes - writers, teachers, scientists were identified as the outer group, and hate was inculcated Today's scenario: the 'unvaccinated' are made as the other group.

Taniwha 5y ago

Think about the end game here - we have evidence of ~4 covid viruses that have adapted to humans, one of which may have been responsible for an epidemic a couple of 100 years ago. Now days they are relatively benign, they make up part of what we call "the common cold". This is historical evidences that covid viruses in humans evolve to become relatively benign, likely this happens faster if we let it kill more people more quickly, but, well, modern medicine. So what will it take for the current covid variant to reach this state - we'll need it to evolve a benign version that out competes the current covid-delta . A benign version of a virus that out competes its more lethal cousins is something that we also call a "live vaccine". So why shouldn't we help it along? if we know it's going to happen naturally why not make it happen faster? past attempts to generate live vaccines have mostly worked but have not always gone well, but they were made with technologies that essentially consisted of whacking them with a mallet and hoping they would stay dead - the mRNA vaccines are much more like engineering. Why not take an existing relatively benign vaccine and fit it out with a protein coat similar enough to C19 and release that? Obviously this is not something one would do blindly, it would require lots of testing, especially with immunocompromised people. And testing (without releasing it early) would be hard - tested people would need to remain in lockdown. Of course the crazy anti-vaxxers would scream bloody blue murder - but given that their current propaganda already paints the current vaccines as "live vaccines" and warns people to stay away from the vaccinated that horse would seem to have already bolted