6 ms·

If we had effective treatments and OTC therapies for this illness, the pressure to vaccinate against every resurgence and new mutation would basically disappear

by loteck 5y ago

If we had effective treatments and OTC therapies for this illness, the pressure to vaccinate against every resurgence and new mutation would basically disappear. With so much social difficulty with vaccines, this seems like the most likely long term path. Where's my cherry flavored Covidquil?

smt88 5y ago
This is absolutely wrong. A vaccine is a fraction of the cost of treatment, and it has no long-term side effects. Even better, a vaccine reduces the chance for a virus to mutate. Treatments, even if they work, are going to have side effects, and there are still unknown risks from a severe (unvaccinated) infection anyway. Vaccines are a miracle of proactivity, and there's no reason to try to replace them with something expensive, risky, and reactive.
- cickpass_broken 5y ago
  the cost of these vaccines is largely hidden, no? Each country made deals behind closed doors AFAIK. I've seen some estimates of $12-$30 a shot, but have no idea the validity of this. How much do the treatments cost? Is it vastly different? > No long term side effects. How do you know? I thought the only study/data from Pfizer covered 6 months. That's not very long term? https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v1.full-text https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v... I don't think we need to replace vaccines, but large swathes of the population still don't have access. It seems very likely that a multi-modal approach would allow us to treat more people, faster. Even Pfizer sees vaccination as well as treatment as the path forward: https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/antiviral-efforts https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/antiviral-efforts
  - smt88 5y ago
    > How much do the treatments cost? Is it vastly different? An average hospitalization costs $73,000 in the US, according to data collected from insurance claims[1]. That means that a single hospitalization costs the same as vaccinating 2,400 people (using your $30/shot estimate). > How do you know? I thought the only study/data from Pfizer covered 6 months. That's not very long term? Although I'm not an expert, a friend of mine is getting his PhD studying the immune system and explained it to me this way: Any additional risk of mRNA vaccines would (with almost 100% certainty) occur shortly after vaccination[2], theorized to be as a result of a strong(er) immune response. After the immune response has subsided, the vaccinated person's immune system would be hard to distinguish from someone who received a traditional vaccine because the goal of the vaccines is the same: to teach the immune system what the virus looks like[3][4] without actually requiring an active virus. So to put that together, we can be fairly confident in an mRNA vaccine's long-term safety because its long-term effects are similar to other vaccines that we've studied for more than 100 years and because the mechanism of action subsides within a few months[5]. 1. https://www.fairhealth.org/article/costs-for-a-hospital-stay-for-covid-19 https://www.fairhealth.org/article/costs-for-a-hospital-stay... 2. https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19-vaccine-wont-have-long-term-side-effects https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19... 3. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-are-mrna-vaccines-so-exciting-2020121021599 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-are-mrna-vaccines-so... 4. https://www.vumc.org/viiii/infographics/how-does-mrna-vaccine-compare-traditional-vaccine https://www.vumc.org/viiii/infographics/how-does-mrna-vaccin... 5. https://www.uab.edu/news/health/item/12143-three-things-to-know-about-the-long-term-side-effects-of-covid-vaccines https://www.uab.edu/news/health/item/12143-three-things-to-k...
    - AuryGlenz 5y ago
      Pandemrix was also similar to previous vaccines but caused an increase in narcolepsy, no? Immune systems are complicated.
      - smt88 5y ago
        Yes, and the reason it caused bad side effects was the strong immune response[1], which is a short term effect. That is exactly what has been extensively tested for the Covid vaccines. 1. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/why-pandemic-flu-shot-caused-narcolepsy https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/why-pandemic-flu-sho...
        yz1ruhzh 5y ago
        I'm not sure I understand what you mean by short term effect, the first sentence in the article you linked mentions it's an incurable disease and it took them years to admit it was linked to Pandemrix. English is not my native language so maybe I didn't understand what you meant by that.
        smt88 5y ago
        I understand the confusion. I meant that the long-term narcolepsy was caused by something that happened in the short-term while the immune system was still reacting to the vaccine. From that link: > The flu vaccine is designed to trigger antibodies to influenza’s surface proteins, but if it elicits antibodies to the nucleoprotein as well, those might well latch on to the hypocretin receptor, and eventually lead to death of the cells, the researchers thought. That couldn't just spontaneously happen a year after getting a vaccine.
        yz1ruhzh 5y ago
        Thank you for the explanation.
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    The prices the EU, at least, is paying are public. IIRC they range from about 2 eur for AZ to about 30 for the MRNAs. Today, there are no particularly effective treatments. Monoclonal antibodies might do something, and cost a few thousand quid, but you wouldn’t want to be relying on them as an alternative to a vaccine.
- ncal 5y ago
  You cannot say it has "no long-term side effects". also a new flu vaccine is developed every year because influenza viruses naturally mutate quickly, as do any viruses. Don't just write things that you wish were true.
  - smt88 5y ago
    > You cannot say it has "no long-term side effects" What are the long-term side effects of the vaccine? Or are you saying that you expect us to discover some in the future?
    - busymom0 5y ago
      Long term side effects won't be known for 5-10 years, especially as vaccinated people have kids. Reminder of the Thalidomide drug: > Thalidomide is a sedative drug discovered at the end of the 50s, which caused a worldwide tragedy. The drug has been prescribed to many pregnant women in order to relieve pregnancy nausea. It was later found that thalidomide caused irreversible damages to the fetus and thousands of children were born with severe congenital malformations. Many of them did not survive more than a few days after they were born. https://thalidomide.ca/en/the-canadian-tragedy/ https://thalidomide.ca/en/the-canadian-tragedy/
      - smt88 5y ago
        > Long term side effects won't be known for 5-10 years, especially as vaccinated people have kids. Good news, then. Viral vector vaccines (like the J&J version) have been studied and tested since the 1970s, and mRNA vaccines (like Pfizer) have been studied since the 1980s[1][2]. What ingredient in Covid vaccines do you suspect will become the new thalidomide? We know that the actual viral vector and mRNA components of the vaccines will degrade and disappear from the body in the short term[3], so it must be one of the other ingredients, right? It's also important to weigh the completely unknown long-term effects of Covid against the well-known long-term effects of training an immune system with a vaccine. 1. https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19-vaccine-wont-have-long-term-side-effects https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19... 2. https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/five-things-you-need-know-about-mrna-vaccine-safety https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga... 3. https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/where-mrna-vaccines-and-spike-proteins-go https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/where-mrna-vaccines-and-sp...
- _vertigo 5y ago
  Honest question here, do vaccines actually reduce the chance for covid to mutate? Spitballing, I would expect a vaccine to decrease the number of total mutations that can occur but also simultaneously increase the selective pressure on the virus, increasing the chance that any mutations that improve the virus’ ability to resist the vaccine become dominant. To make an analogy, does spraying every surface in a hospital with an antibacterial solution result in no bacteria or just make it more likely to see resistant bacteria? I’d guess it’s a function of how potent the solution was and how well every last surface was coated. If you start with a 10% solution, don’t achieve full coverage and keep ramping up slowly perhaps we’ll just see something like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8 Agree with the rest of your post though.
  - smt88 5y ago
    You're correct that it's possible for vaccines to be distributed in a way that promotes mutations[1]. You're also correct that there are many factors, including number of times the virus replicates and also selective pressure. At this point, it looks like our mRNA vaccines: - leave a short enough window between doses to minimize mutations - reduce viral load within a vaccinated person[2] - prevent many transmissions entirely[3][4][5] ...which, added all up, appears to net out the way you'd expect: the vaccine reduces the risk of mutations. 1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/10/965940914/covid-19-vaccines-could-add-fuel-to-evolution-of-more-coronavirus-mutations https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/10/9659409... 2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01316-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01316-7 3. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/fully-vaccinated-people.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... 4. https://www.physiciansweekly.com/covid-19-breakthrough-infections-involve-lower-viral-load-following-mrna-vaccination/ https://www.physiciansweekly.com/covid-19-breakthrough-infec... 5. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-crucial-vaccine-benefit-were-not-talking-about-enough1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-crucial-vacci...
- loteck 5y ago
  Goodness. Vaccine rates in the U.S. are stalling at 60%. Now the plan is to do booster shots after 8 months. What do you think is going to happen to those rates with the first booster? The second? Vaccines are great. Therapies are also great. This is absolutely not wrong.
lamontcg 5y ago
> Where's my cherry flavored Covidquil? Where's my portable cold fusion generator? Vaccines just fucking work right now. Much like wind and solar. Effective antivirals are like thorium nukes and carbon capture. Very hard problems that nobody can adequately solve.
- grepfru_it 5y ago
  https://sanotize.com/ https://sanotize.com/
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Snake oil.
rsynnott 5y ago
This doesn’t seem like a particularly likely path, given the… lacklustre performance of most antivirals. Like, no responsible doctor would ever say to an at-risk person “no need to get the flu vaccine; tamiflu exists”. Even if an effective antiviral shows up, realistically it’ll probably be more a tamiflu than a magic cure.

by loteck 5y ago

smt88 5y ago

This is absolutely wrong. A vaccine is a fraction of the cost of treatment, and it has no long-term side effects. Even better, a vaccine reduces the chance for a virus to mutate. Treatments, even if they work, are going to have side effects, and there are still unknown risks from a severe (unvaccinated) infection anyway. Vaccines are a miracle of proactivity, and there's no reason to try to replace them with something expensive, risky, and reactive.

cickpass_broken 5y ago
the cost of these vaccines is largely hidden, no? Each country made deals behind closed doors AFAIK. I've seen some estimates of $12-$30 a shot, but have no idea the validity of this. How much do the treatments cost? Is it vastly different? > No long term side effects. How do you know? I thought the only study/data from Pfizer covered 6 months. That's not very long term? https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v1.full-text https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v... I don't think we need to replace vaccines, but large swathes of the population still don't have access. It seems very likely that a multi-modal approach would allow us to treat more people, faster. Even Pfizer sees vaccination as well as treatment as the path forward: https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/antiviral-efforts https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/antiviral-efforts
- smt88 5y ago
  > How much do the treatments cost? Is it vastly different? An average hospitalization costs $73,000 in the US, according to data collected from insurance claims[1]. That means that a single hospitalization costs the same as vaccinating 2,400 people (using your $30/shot estimate). > How do you know? I thought the only study/data from Pfizer covered 6 months. That's not very long term? Although I'm not an expert, a friend of mine is getting his PhD studying the immune system and explained it to me this way: Any additional risk of mRNA vaccines would (with almost 100% certainty) occur shortly after vaccination[2], theorized to be as a result of a strong(er) immune response. After the immune response has subsided, the vaccinated person's immune system would be hard to distinguish from someone who received a traditional vaccine because the goal of the vaccines is the same: to teach the immune system what the virus looks like[3][4] without actually requiring an active virus. So to put that together, we can be fairly confident in an mRNA vaccine's long-term safety because its long-term effects are similar to other vaccines that we've studied for more than 100 years and because the mechanism of action subsides within a few months[5]. 1. https://www.fairhealth.org/article/costs-for-a-hospital-stay-for-covid-19 https://www.fairhealth.org/article/costs-for-a-hospital-stay... 2. https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19-vaccine-wont-have-long-term-side-effects https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19... 3. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-are-mrna-vaccines-so-exciting-2020121021599 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-are-mrna-vaccines-so... 4. https://www.vumc.org/viiii/infographics/how-does-mrna-vaccine-compare-traditional-vaccine https://www.vumc.org/viiii/infographics/how-does-mrna-vaccin... 5. https://www.uab.edu/news/health/item/12143-three-things-to-know-about-the-long-term-side-effects-of-covid-vaccines https://www.uab.edu/news/health/item/12143-three-things-to-k...
  - AuryGlenz 5y ago
    Pandemrix was also similar to previous vaccines but caused an increase in narcolepsy, no? Immune systems are complicated.
    - smt88 5y ago
      Yes, and the reason it caused bad side effects was the strong immune response[1], which is a short term effect. That is exactly what has been extensively tested for the Covid vaccines. 1. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/why-pandemic-flu-shot-caused-narcolepsy https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/07/why-pandemic-flu-sho...
      - yz1ruhzh 5y ago
        I'm not sure I understand what you mean by short term effect, the first sentence in the article you linked mentions it's an incurable disease and it took them years to admit it was linked to Pandemrix. English is not my native language so maybe I didn't understand what you meant by that.
        smt88 5y ago
        I understand the confusion. I meant that the long-term narcolepsy was caused by something that happened in the short-term while the immune system was still reacting to the vaccine. From that link: > The flu vaccine is designed to trigger antibodies to influenza’s surface proteins, but if it elicits antibodies to the nucleoprotein as well, those might well latch on to the hypocretin receptor, and eventually lead to death of the cells, the researchers thought. That couldn't just spontaneously happen a year after getting a vaccine.
        yz1ruhzh 5y ago
        Thank you for the explanation.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  The prices the EU, at least, is paying are public. IIRC they range from about 2 eur for AZ to about 30 for the MRNAs. Today, there are no particularly effective treatments. Monoclonal antibodies might do something, and cost a few thousand quid, but you wouldn’t want to be relying on them as an alternative to a vaccine.
ncal 5y ago
You cannot say it has "no long-term side effects". also a new flu vaccine is developed every year because influenza viruses naturally mutate quickly, as do any viruses. Don't just write things that you wish were true.
- smt88 5y ago
  > You cannot say it has "no long-term side effects" What are the long-term side effects of the vaccine? Or are you saying that you expect us to discover some in the future?
  - busymom0 5y ago
    Long term side effects won't be known for 5-10 years, especially as vaccinated people have kids. Reminder of the Thalidomide drug: > Thalidomide is a sedative drug discovered at the end of the 50s, which caused a worldwide tragedy. The drug has been prescribed to many pregnant women in order to relieve pregnancy nausea. It was later found that thalidomide caused irreversible damages to the fetus and thousands of children were born with severe congenital malformations. Many of them did not survive more than a few days after they were born. https://thalidomide.ca/en/the-canadian-tragedy/ https://thalidomide.ca/en/the-canadian-tragedy/
    - smt88 5y ago
      > Long term side effects won't be known for 5-10 years, especially as vaccinated people have kids. Good news, then. Viral vector vaccines (like the J&J version) have been studied and tested since the 1970s, and mRNA vaccines (like Pfizer) have been studied since the 1980s[1][2]. What ingredient in Covid vaccines do you suspect will become the new thalidomide? We know that the actual viral vector and mRNA components of the vaccines will degrade and disappear from the body in the short term[3], so it must be one of the other ingredients, right? It's also important to weigh the completely unknown long-term effects of Covid against the well-known long-term effects of training an immune system with a vaccine. 1. https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19-vaccine-wont-have-long-term-side-effects https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19... 2. https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/five-things-you-need-know-about-mrna-vaccine-safety https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga... 3. https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/where-mrna-vaccines-and-spike-proteins-go https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/where-mrna-vaccines-and-sp...
_vertigo 5y ago
Honest question here, do vaccines actually reduce the chance for covid to mutate? Spitballing, I would expect a vaccine to decrease the number of total mutations that can occur but also simultaneously increase the selective pressure on the virus, increasing the chance that any mutations that improve the virus’ ability to resist the vaccine become dominant. To make an analogy, does spraying every surface in a hospital with an antibacterial solution result in no bacteria or just make it more likely to see resistant bacteria? I’d guess it’s a function of how potent the solution was and how well every last surface was coated. If you start with a 10% solution, don’t achieve full coverage and keep ramping up slowly perhaps we’ll just see something like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8 Agree with the rest of your post though.
- smt88 5y ago
  You're correct that it's possible for vaccines to be distributed in a way that promotes mutations[1]. You're also correct that there are many factors, including number of times the virus replicates and also selective pressure. At this point, it looks like our mRNA vaccines: - leave a short enough window between doses to minimize mutations - reduce viral load within a vaccinated person[2] - prevent many transmissions entirely[3][4][5] ...which, added all up, appears to net out the way you'd expect: the vaccine reduces the risk of mutations. 1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/10/965940914/covid-19-vaccines-could-add-fuel-to-evolution-of-more-coronavirus-mutations https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/10/9659409... 2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01316-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01316-7 3. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/fully-vaccinated-people.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... 4. https://www.physiciansweekly.com/covid-19-breakthrough-infections-involve-lower-viral-load-following-mrna-vaccination/ https://www.physiciansweekly.com/covid-19-breakthrough-infec... 5. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-crucial-vaccine-benefit-were-not-talking-about-enough1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-crucial-vacci...
loteck 5y ago
Goodness. Vaccine rates in the U.S. are stalling at 60%. Now the plan is to do booster shots after 8 months. What do you think is going to happen to those rates with the first booster? The second? Vaccines are great. Therapies are also great. This is absolutely not wrong.

lamontcg 5y ago

> Where's my cherry flavored Covidquil? Where's my portable cold fusion generator? Vaccines just fucking work right now. Much like wind and solar. Effective antivirals are like thorium nukes and carbon capture. Very hard problems that nobody can adequately solve.

grepfru_it 5y ago
https://sanotize.com/ https://sanotize.com/
- lamontcg 5y ago
  Snake oil.

rsynnott 5y ago

This doesn’t seem like a particularly likely path, given the… lacklustre performance of most antivirals. Like, no responsible doctor would ever say to an at-risk person “no need to get the flu vaccine; tamiflu exists”. Even if an effective antiviral shows up, realistically it’ll probably be more a tamiflu than a magic cure.