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Omicron Boosters and Original Antigenic Sin

12 points by hprotagonist 5y ago

TurkishPoptart 5y ago
Let's also take a moment to whack another conspiracy theory while we're at it. You can find plenty of finger-wagging BS artists out there who will assure you that the "so-called variants" are nothing more than a plot to keep injecting people with vaccines over and over. This crowd differentiates a bit when you ask them why the evildoers want to keep doing that, with some of them muttering about 5G cell phone towers, others about dosages of the latest nanobots for tracking and crowd control, the really hard-core ones going on darkly about plots to weaken the population in order to kill off various targeted groups outright, and others just saying that it's all a plot to keep making money. If any of this were the case, would you see an open discussion in the literature (with piles of data) about how an Omicron booster provided no extra benefit? You would not. So these people should buzz off, too, although they won't. Decades from now they'll be boring everyone around them in the rest home about the same stuff. Jesus. This article takes quite a turn for the op-ed. The "conspiracy" is that governments are mandating people to take booster shots that may have little-to-no real benefit aside from making the producers loads of money.
- bigodbiel 5y ago
  I like the spin where it isn’t OAS that’s the issue, but how the WT mRNA vaccine was so spectacular, that upgraded shots were never needed to begin with. I haven’t seen the study, but how would naive omicron variant vaccinees fare? I believe that is the main issue here.
  - 22c 5y ago
    https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.03.479037v1?s=08 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.03.479037v1?... Here's the original study. The folks who performed the study have existing COVID-19 vaccine patents. The study (perhaps conveniently for the patent holders) only tests whether "boosting" with Omicron specific vaccines would provide a benefit to those subjects who already received 2 doses of mRNA-1273 (eg. Moderna). They didn't test how effective the mRNA-1273.529 (Omicron) specific vaccines were when given to the subjects on their own (at least not in this study).
newbamboo 5y ago
I think this was Brett Weinstein’s hypothesis regarding original antigenic sin.
ComradePhil 5y ago
Or that Omicron is mild enough that it would not have caused the disease to unboosted or completely unvaccinated subjects... had they included those groups in the study. From the original paper: > since we sought to compare two different mRNA boosts, we did not have an unboosted group to determine whether the boost enhanced protection. How are they able to get away with deliberately bad study designs?
- 22c 5y ago
  I think it's enough for them to say to those who have already been vaccinated with mRNA-1273 that there's essentially a "vendor lock-in" effect going on and that using an Omicron (or whatever variant comes next) specific booster won't provide any more benefit (for better or worse) than simply getting another dose of the same vaccine they already had. I would be interested to know what would happen in the case where subjects have natural immunity then get mRNA-1273 then later get mRNA-1273.529. I would hypothesize that there would be a measurably different immune response to both the initial vaccine doses as well as the booster.

12 points by hprotagonist 5y ago

Let's also take a moment to whack another conspiracy theory while we're at it. You can find plenty of finger-wagging BS artists out there who will assure you that the "so-called variants" are nothing more than a plot to keep injecting people with vaccines over and over. This crowd differentiates a bit when you ask them why the evildoers want to keep doing that, with some of them muttering about 5G cell phone towers, others about dosages of the latest nanobots for tracking and crowd control, the really hard-core ones going on darkly about plots to weaken the population in order to kill off various targeted groups outright, and others just saying that it's all a plot to keep making money. If any of this were the case, would you see an open discussion in the literature (with piles of data) about how an Omicron booster provided no extra benefit? You would not. So these people should buzz off, too, although they won't. Decades from now they'll be boring everyone around them in the rest home about the same stuff. Jesus. This article takes quite a turn for the op-ed. The "conspiracy" is that governments are mandating people to take booster shots that may have little-to-no real benefit aside from making the producers loads of money.

bigodbiel 5y ago
I like the spin where it isn’t OAS that’s the issue, but how the WT mRNA vaccine was so spectacular, that upgraded shots were never needed to begin with. I haven’t seen the study, but how would naive omicron variant vaccinees fare? I believe that is the main issue here.
- 22c 5y ago
  https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.03.479037v1?s=08 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.03.479037v1?... Here's the original study. The folks who performed the study have existing COVID-19 vaccine patents. The study (perhaps conveniently for the patent holders) only tests whether "boosting" with Omicron specific vaccines would provide a benefit to those subjects who already received 2 doses of mRNA-1273 (eg. Moderna). They didn't test how effective the mRNA-1273.529 (Omicron) specific vaccines were when given to the subjects on their own (at least not in this study).

newbamboo 5y ago

I think this was Brett Weinstein’s hypothesis regarding original antigenic sin.

ComradePhil 5y ago

Or that Omicron is mild enough that it would not have caused the disease to unboosted or completely unvaccinated subjects... had they included those groups in the study. From the original paper: > since we sought to compare two different mRNA boosts, we did not have an unboosted group to determine whether the boost enhanced protection. How are they able to get away with deliberately bad study designs?

22c 5y ago
I think it's enough for them to say to those who have already been vaccinated with mRNA-1273 that there's essentially a "vendor lock-in" effect going on and that using an Omicron (or whatever variant comes next) specific booster won't provide any more benefit (for better or worse) than simply getting another dose of the same vaccine they already had. I would be interested to know what would happen in the case where subjects have natural immunity then get mRNA-1273 then later get mRNA-1273.529. I would hypothesize that there would be a measurably different immune response to both the initial vaccine doses as well as the booster.