Tag Archives: Moderna vaccine

Your Covid update for the day

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Can I take time off from being snarky and welcome a moment of sanity? Any minute now, the British government’s expected to announce a hotel quarantine on returning travelers. 

Travel in the age of Covid

Up to now, we’ve had a do-it-yourself quarantine: You go home, you add water and shake vigorously, you take a Covid test or two, then you wait ten days or until the world’s ready for you to emerge blinking into the sunlight. 

Or you do none of that. Who’ll know?

And that’s the problem with the do-it-yourself system. Some unknown percent of arriving travelers go home, have a nice shower, and since they’ve added water consider the thing done, so they go out and buy groceries. And, of course, even the people who take the quarantine seriously have to get home, leaving a viral trail from the airport to wherever they live.

The noise accompanying the expected change is all about the newer, scarier Covid variants from Brazil and South Africa, so it’s not clear yet whether the quarantine will apply to everyone coming into the country or just to people coming from countries known to have the variant. 

If it’s limited to a few countries, it’ll be the policy equivalent of wearing your mask underneath your nose and pretending you’ve done your bit to battle Covid. Most countries don’t do enough virus sequencing to know which variants they’re dealing with. In other words, the variants are circulating in more countries than we know about.

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Irrelevant photo: I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think this is a viola. At any rate, it was a volunteer last summer.

In another moment of startling good sense, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said it was “far too early” to talk about people booking summer holidays. 

The travel industry is not happy about any of this.

 

Vaccine news

Moderna reports that its vaccine is effective against both the British and South African Covid variants, although it’s not as effective against the South African variant as they’d like. The company will test a second booster shot, making a total of three shots, with the third one designed specifically for the South African variant.

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If you’ve been reading stand-your-hair-on-end stories about people in Europe dying after getting a Covid vaccine, go find your comb and get your hairdo in place: There’s no evidence that their deaths had anything to do with the vaccine. 

In most countries, early vaccinations have focused on the elderly, and–well, the thing about old people is that we develop the habit of dying. In larger numbers than other age groups. So the vaccinated group included a lot of people who weren’t well to start with. And they died, but their deaths haven’t been linked to the vaccines. 

I subscribe to, among other things, a conspiracy-inflected newsletter, and it’s been counting the dead gleefully, without hinting that there might be extenuating circumstances. 

It helps me remember how crazy the world’s gotten lately.

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The fear that Covid will mutate until it’s beyond the reach of vaccines has kept the news–and I assume sensible scientists as well–focused on Covid’s new variants. So let’s talk about variants:

They happen by accident. Mutations are random–they have no plan and no goal. If you’re not a fan of evolution, this is the time to change the channel, because what I’m talking about is evolution at work, but speeded up enough that we can see it happening. Some of the variations are disasters for the virus and they fall off social media. Some don’t matter–they don’t have good publicity agents, they post on Twitter but no one likes or retweets them, and we never hear about them. 

Some, though, work well. I’m taking that from the virus’s point of view, remember, so that means they’re more infectious or they change clothes so the vaccine-primed immune system stops recognizing them. They’re the Kim Kardashians of the virus world. 

The reason I’m dragging you through all this is that the more times the virus mutates, the more chances it has to hit on a winning formula. So the more people become infected, the greater the chance the virus has of becoming even scarier. 

In people with suppressed immune systems, it may get to mutate even more freely.

Could it mutate enough times to become less scary? Of course. The process can go in any direction. But we can’t know which one it’ll take. It’s not a bet I’d like to make. If you hear someone saying that no one is safe until we’re all safe, this is what they’re talking about. 

Bjorn Meyer of the Pasteur Institute said that with vaccination and the distancing and cleaning measures that are in place around the world, the virus’s successful mutations are more likely to affect how easily it’s transmitted rather than how lethal it becomes. I have no idea why that should be true, so I’ll just have to take his word for it and skip merrily on to the next item.

 

Antibody therapy

A joint Swiss, Czech, and Italian effort has developed a second-generation double antibody that protects against Covid.

A what?

I know. Me too. Think of it as an arranged marriage. The researchers introduced two natural Covid antibodies that target separate sites on the virus and fused them into a single artificial molecule. As long as they both may live or until one of them has an affair with some other antibody, whichever comes first.

In pre-clinical trials, the artificial antibody neutralized Covid and its variants and kept the virus from changing its structure. If it changes its structure, remember, the antibody has to close its eyes and count to seven while the virus hides.

The antibody stands a good chance of both preventing and treating Covid but it still needs to go through human trials before. If it does go into use, it looks like a single injection will reduce the viral load in the lungs and minimize inflammation. 

Politics, economics, and interviews

I don’t know about you, but I was impressed that England had instituted a £500 grant for low-income people who test positive for Covid and have to self-isolate. It didn’t sound like enough, but it was better than nothing. Until I found out that three-quarters of the people who apply for it are turned down.

Local governments say they’re having to turn people down because the criteria are too narrow.

Thanks, guys, you’ve renewed my faith in the incompetence of the current government.

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Speaking of which: Britain’s work and pensions secretary walked out on a TV interview when she didn’t like the interviewer’s paraphrase of what she said.

Okay, it was a Zoom interview. It’s hard to walk out them with any flair, but she did turn off her camera. 

It started when Therese Coffey said Britain’s death rate was so high because it had an obesity problem and an older population. To translate that, it means, None of this is the government’s fault. 

The interviewer, Piers Morgan, turned it so the seams showed. So the public was too old and too fat, then?

“I think that’s a very insulting thing that you’ve just said,” Coffey answered. “I also have to point out that you started this interview late. Unfortunately I have to go to other broadcasters as well, and I wish we had more time.”

“It was you that boycotted the programme,” Morgan said. “Please don’t play the ‘we haven’t given you enough time’ card, because we gave you eight months and you didn’t turn up.”

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A recent report tells us that the wealth of the world’s ten richest people has increased enough during the pandemic to pay for the planet’s entire population to be vaccinated. And enough pocket money will be left over to make up for the income the poorest of them have lost. 

So how much is that in numbers? It’s £400 billion. Of course, if you have to split that with nine other people, all you get to take home is £40 billion.

 

The almost obligatory snippet of good news

I’m not doing well on the good news front, but research from the University of Illinois reports that the psychological problems of lockdown tend to fade with time as people adjust to the new normal. 

Sorry–best I could do today. 

Herd immunity, sterilizing immunity, and the current best guesses

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Britain is now the proud operator of several mass vaccination centers, with more promised shortly, and general practitioners are scheduling their oldest patients for vaccination. But that doesn’t mean we’re out of trouble. The number of hospital cases is still rising and there’s talk of the current lockdown not being tight enough.

And we just approved a third vaccine, Moderna’s. Not long ago, Boris Johnson was crowing at Scotland (which on average isn’t happy about having left the European Union) that if they’d stayed in the EU they wouldn’t have gotten vaccines so quickly. So it’s a nice little piece of irony to read that, approved or not, we won’t get or hands on this third vaccine until April because we’ve left the European Union.

I know I shouldn’t think that’s funny, but I can’t help myself.

 

Irrelevant photo: heather

Are we close to herd immunity?

The latest statistical modeling says one in five people in England may have already had Covid. How did they come up with that number? Since the official statistics inevitably underestimate the number of infections (a big chunk of people don’t get sick but carry the disease without knowing it or showing up in the statistics) and since the track and trace system is widely recognized as being roughly as useless as it is expensive, they get their statistics by comparing the number of deaths in an area to the estimated infection rate, putting them in a blender with a few other number and a dash of cinnamon, then baking at 160 C. for fifty minutes. 

In some areas, they estimate that one person in two has had the disease. The number of infected people may be up to five times higher than the number on the test and trace books.

Is that herd immunity? 

Nope. Exactly how many people would have to have had the bug to create herd immunity is still unknown, but a computational biologist estimates that 70% of the population will need to be vaccinated to stop the pandemic in the US. But that only applies to the US; it’s not a fixed number. People behave differently in different places, which upsets the numbers–they’re touchy little beasts–so they arrange themselves into different patterns. 

The number also depends on how long immunity lasts–no one knows yet–and on whether the vaccine turns out to keep people from passing on the infection. 

Most of our commonly used vaccines prevent severe illness but don’t give us what’s called sterilizing immunity. In other words, they keep us from getting sick–or at least from getting very sick–but they don’t kill off every bit of the disease that’s running around inside us. 

On the positive side, having less of the disease circulating inside our complicated little innards may (notice how much wiggle room I’ve left myself there) mean we pass on a milder form of the disease if we do give it to someone else.

An experiment with a chicken virus and a flock that was half vaccinated found that the unvaccinated birds came down with a milder disease than if the whole flock had been left unvaccinated. So even if the current vaccines don’t give us sterilizing immunity, Covid may yet follow that pattern and become milder once a significant portion of our flock has been vaccinated.

May. No one’s offering us a guarantee.

And no, none of the vaccines currently in use will cause us to grow feathers.

 

Transmission and hospitalization

In Britain, the current crop of hospitalized Covid patients are younger than they were during the first peak of the virus. People under 65 now make up 39% of hospital admissions. In March that was 36%. It’s not a huge change, but it is a change, and it’s worth noticing. 

The best guess is that the over 65s are more likely to be out of circulation. We left the party early and are tucked up in our little beds just now. That makes us less likely to become infected and less likely to show up in either the hospital or the statistics. But so much emphasis has been put on the elderly being vulnerable that we tend to think the non-elderly are made of steel.

They’re not. They can get very sick from this thing. In particular, pregnant women seem to be more vulnerable than non-pregnant women (or non-pregnant men, for that matter) in their age groups. 

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Half of all Covid transmissions come from people with no symptoms, including from people who never do develop symptoms. 

What does that mean in practice? That every one of us needs to act as if we could be carrying it. And that we need to look at our friends and family and neighbors as if they could be carrying it. That we need to look at other human beings and think, Oooh, yuck, germs! 

That’s not, I admit, a policy recommendation. It’s not even a real recommendation. It’s just an observation on how much it goes against the grain to live this way.

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A study reports that Covid can still be transmitted after seven days. Or after ten days. After ten days, 76% of the people tested still had detectable levels and 86% did after seven. 

So recommending a shorter period of isolation is a gamble. On the one hand, the theory goes that people are more likely to actually isolate themselves if you demand a shorter time. On the other hand, they can still be shedding the virus at the end of it.

The problem is not only that some people are jerks and don’t put the safety of others first. The larger problem is that a lot of people can’t afford to miss a day’s work–they’re living on the edge as it is. So when mass testing’s offered, they don’t show up because they can’t afford to be told to stay home. If they do end up getting tested and are positive, they stagger to work for as long as they can anyway. Because the hounds of hell are nipping at their heels. 

Already 70,000 households have become homeless during the pandemic and some 200,000 are teetering on the edge. There’s money available to people who have to self-isolate, but not to everyone and it’s not enough to cover the bills anyway. 

And if that doesn’t hold your attention, some people are still being told they’ll be fired if they don’t come to work.

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On a happier note, my partner’s been scheduled for her first vaccination. If all goes well (stop laughing–it could) I should be in line in mid-February.