Mega-Thread: Coronavirus Pandemic

[Endus]

What is the conspiracy here? Edge here is saying that mutations escaping the vaccines is working as intended:

The conspiracy is in the utterly baseless claims you made that the truth was being hidden and disinformation was being spread on purpose by the media.

The reason vaccines have limited efficacy with Covid-19 unlike other diseases like polio and smallpox is that Covid is highly mutable, in the first place. And polio and smallpox weren't. Questioning the efficacy of vaccines against Covid on this basis is nonsense, and demonstrates a lack of understanding of the underlying pathogen.

And all of this is the opposite of vaccines that offer sterilizing immunity against contact-based viruses. Viruses that should not ever become endemic. The official institutions are not making the distinction here. They're still busy gaslighting people about what they promised.

You're deeply confused as to why smallpox and polio vaccines were so effective, and COVID and influenza vaccines are currently not as effective. Also on the time scales involved.
Smallpox's earliest vaccination-type efforts started back at the end of the 18th Century. It wasn't until 160 years later that the WHO made a concerted global effort to eradicate the virus. Even once started, it had limited effect for years, before the intensified Eradication Program of 1967 kicked off. And even then, it took another decade of concerted efforts globally before the goal was finally achieved in 1977, nearly 200 years after Jenner first figured out that cowpox could be used to generate immunities in human patients.
Polio, similarly, saw a global eradication effort kick off in 1988, and that effort is still ongoing, and by no means complete.

Meanwhile, COVID's only been a factor for humans for a couple years, as near as we can tell. Expecting the same outcomes as smallpox and polio after both diseases had multi-decadal global eradication campaigns is absolute lunacy.

All you're doing is demonstrating a weird hostility to vaccination programs. It's rather disturbing and you're right on the conspiracy fringe on all of this.

[Iain]

The conspiracy is in the utterly baseless claims you made that the truth was being hidden and disinformation was being spread on purpose by the media.

The reason vaccines have limited efficacy with Covid-19 unlike other diseases like polio and smallpox is that Covid is highly mutable, in the first place. And polio and smallpox weren't. Questioning the efficacy of vaccines against Covid on this basis is nonsense, and demonstrates a lack of understanding of the underlying pathogen.



You're deeply confused as to why smallpox and polio vaccines were so effective, and COVID and influenza vaccines are currently not as effective. Also on the time scales involved.
Smallpox's earliest vaccination-type efforts started back at the end of the 18th Century. It wasn't until 160 years later that the WHO made a concerted global effort to eradicate the virus. Even once started, it had limited effect for years, before the intensified Eradication Program of 1967 kicked off. And even then, it took another decade of concerted efforts globally before the goal was finally achieved in 1977, nearly 200 years after Jenner first figured out that cowpox could be used to generate immunities in human patients.
Polio, similarly, saw a global eradication effort kick off in 1988, and that effort is still ongoing, and by no means complete.

Meanwhile, COVID's only been a factor for humans for a couple years, as near as we can tell. Expecting the same outcomes as smallpox and polio after both diseases had multi-decadal global eradication campaigns is absolute lunacy.

All you're doing is demonstrating a weird hostility to vaccination programs. It's rather disturbing and you're right on the conspiracy fringe on all of this.

A headstart is not an advantage!

You can keep vaccinating the entire globe with these covid vaccines several times a year for a thousand years and you won't come anywhere near the spectacular results of polio and smallpox vaccines eradicating the disease.

It's been two years since the development on the first strain started and we're still using that same vaccine today.

Even Fauci himself said we'll need entirely different types of vaccines if we want general covid vaccinations rather than chasing mutations that are as good as gone by the time you update the vaccine.

Just don't do it. Smallpox vaccines gives us the means to eradicate several diseases and all their strains, don't try to draw parallels with a vaccine that inherently can't.

If you want to claim success, then point at the speed of development and the impressive scale at which the covid vaccines have been rolled out. That's a logistical wonder and deserves to be recognised.

[Endus]

A headstart is not an advantage!

You can keep vaccinating the entire globe with these covid vaccines several times a year for a thousand years and you won't come anywhere near the spectacular results of polio and smallpox vaccines eradicating the disease.

It's been two years since the development on the first strain started and we're still using that same vaccine today.

Even Fauci himself said we'll need entirely different types of vaccines if we want general covid vaccinations rather than chasing mutations that are as good as gone by the time you update the vaccine.

Just don't do it. Smallpox vaccines gives us the means to eradicate several diseases and all their strains, don't try to draw parallels with a vaccine that inherently can't.

If you want to claim success, then point at the speed of development and the impressive scale at which the covid vaccines have been rolled out. That's a logistical wonder and deserves to be recognised.

You're still not making a single argument against covid vaccines that isn't just straight-up anti-vaxxer conspiracy disinformation.

The comparisons to smallpox are particularly bad, since the techniques that work on one phage won't automatically have an analogue with another. Particularly as smallpox doesn't have, for instance, animal reservoirs, while COVID does.

[Iain]

The comparisons to smallpox are particularly bad, since the techniques that work on one phage won't automatically have an analogue with another. Particularly as smallpox doesn't have, for instance, animal reservoirs, while COVID does.

Each excuse you make for covid being as endemic is valid, and indeed also used as criticism by antivaxxers. It's two sides of the same coin. Can't be helped.

What matters to me, and what should matter to anyone else, is that indeed many of these excuses/criticisms do not apply to monkeypox. Which means that we need an entirely new mode of communication to get people to recognise that this massive ineffectual effort we applied to covid while knowing it's an endemic disease are also the same measures that are able to eradicate monkeypox.

You recognise that monkeypox is different. But you dismiss them because it makes the covid approach look more hopeless in comparison. It's understandable, but it's also a sunk cost fallacy. Zero monkeypox is achievable. It's not even difficult. But it's not happening as long as people associate those measures with the results of covid measures.

[Yunru]

You would think that a record heat (45*C) will kill off this virus, but it went from 20 Jun (400 infections) to 28 Jul (1690).

And yes people dont wear masks any more and it shows.

[Zan15]

A headstart is not an advantage!

You can keep vaccinating the entire globe with these covid vaccines several times a year for a thousand years and you won't come anywhere near the spectacular results of polio and smallpox vaccines eradicating the disease.

It's been two years since the development on the first strain started and we're still using that same vaccine today.

Even Fauci himself said we'll need entirely different types of vaccines if we want general covid vaccinations rather than chasing mutations that are as good as gone by the time you update the vaccine.

Just don't do it. Smallpox vaccines gives us the means to eradicate several diseases and all their strains, don't try to draw parallels with a vaccine that inherently can't.

If you want to claim success, then point at the speed of development and the impressive scale at which the covid vaccines have been rolled out. That's a logistical wonder and deserves to be recognised.

Do you even realize how many changes to the small pox vaccine have been implemented?

Heck we are already on the 3rd generation of some major changes to that vaccine while we are only on the 2nd year of the covid vaccine.

Each major change which improved effectiveness and improved safety took decades, not years.

[Forogil]

You mean how surprisingly long the approval process is and how it doesn't need to be that long?

How there is such a backlog because the appropriate divisions of the govt are not funded enough?

How something can just jump the line in the approval process to get priority handling like never before in history?

You realize most of the delay in getting these things to market are caused on purpose, right? Like marketing, product pipeline, product funding plans, govt backlog, etc etc.

They are not "on purpose" as some kind of weird conspiracy.

For covid-vaccines FDA-personnel spent thanksgiving reading the reports - that's not how it is normally done.

And lots of drugs fail in phase I, phase II, or even phase-III, so you often don't start the next phase until you see that the first one worked - here they ignored that and combined phases, which would have been money down the drain if the vaccines totally failed, but that risk was deemed worth it. Especially you don't normally build a plant and produce millions of doses of a drug, and then wait for approval as was done here. (And, sometimes it failed and millions of doses had to be given away.) Similarly it normally takes time to recruit volunteers - it was a non-issue here.

The reason companies did that was in part due to to governments (pre-orders and similar contracts) and partially because the companies also understood the importance.

As part of that there were rolling reviews so that FDA began reading parts of the documents before the trial was completed - if the trial had failed that would also had been wasted effort.

Given that previous mRNA-vaccines hadn't even gotten to phase III that was pretty bold. (A different mRNA-drug had been approved.)

- - - Updated - - -

The smallpox vaccine offers sterilizing immunity. Just like the polio vaccine it has shown itself to be able to eradicate these diseases from most of the world entirely.

The smallpox vaccine doesn't guarantee sterilizing immunity, as CDC describes it at 95% effective in preventing infection.
The idea with sterilizing immunity is that it should totally stop the spread - polio was partially eradicated with a vaccine that could spread the polio.

Basically if everyone is vaccinated the spread of the disease will be so low that it doesn't matter if a few could in theory get a small infection or not. People have noticed that e.g. measles vaccines don't fully stop the infection.

More importantly monkeypox/smallpox and covid-19 are different viruses: one is a large double-stranded DNA-virus, the other a small respiratory single-stranded RNA-virus. All of those factors matter - it is as if the respiratory immune systems and such small viruses have evolved to be in a constant state of flux.

All the logic that was used to push the covid vaccine on the public, it all appies to monkeypox right now. Masking, washing your hands, socially distancing and indeed vaccinating. It prevents the spread where the covid vaccine could not.

Masking, and physical distancing seems quite unimportant for monkeypox, as it mostly requires physical contact.

And on the other hand I'm still not sure if people have found that handwashing matters much for covid (but it certainly helps with some other diseases, and especially early on it was good to reduce those diseases). (Actually looking at meta-studies it seems the result is still unclear - especially as people knowing about covid-19 caused them to wash their hands and take other precautions.)

And the approved vaccines for monkeypox is only estimated to be 85% effective - but in contrast to covid-19 vaccines it may be taken post-exposure (as stated - different viruses).

[Yunru]

So any report on this virus now just totaly died. Its like it doesnt exist.

However numbers here are rising:
22 aug -- 1606
15 sept -- 2005
5 oct -- 2293

What i find interesting however is how virus heat by date went down from 2630 cases to 567 and then it jumped back when cold weather/rain happened.
Also people totaly forgot to wear masks now....

Only half of population is fully vaccinated.

[Spectral]

Also people totaly forgot to wear masks now....

Most of us didn't "forget".

[diller]

Also people totaly forgot to wear masks now....

People only tend to wear masks when they are told to.

I'm all for wearing masks but I don't wear one unless the government advises people to wear one, which they currently don't.

[Mayhem]

So any report on this virus now just totaly died. Its like it doesnt exist.

However numbers here are rising:
22 aug -- 1606
15 sept -- 2005
5 oct -- 2293

What i find interesting however is how virus heat by date went down from 2630 cases to 567 and then it jumped back when cold weather/rain happened.
Also people totaly forgot to wear masks now....

Only half of population is fully vaccinated.

The world is hard at work trying to produce the one variant that finally kills off half the population or so.

Wait, I think I have a chart here for what variants are currently around..

[Tuor]

People only tend to wear masks when they are told to.

I'm all for wearing masks but I don't wear one unless the government advises people to wear one, which they currently don't.

I had to go yeaterday to a public service, i was the only one using a mask there, no one told me or even demanded me to use it, its just i still haven't got covid and i don't have plans to get it if i can avoid. I also no longer use the mask on a daily base, its just in places where are huge concentration of unknown people.

[Yunru]

I had to go yeaterday to a public service, i was the only one using a mask there, no one told me or even demanded me to use it, its just i still haven't got covid and i don't have plans to get it if i can avoid. I also no longer use the mask on a daily base, its just in places where are huge concentration of unknown people.

Yeah same here. Bus, shops and hospitals.
Also since i started wearing mask i got way less sick than usualy over the year.


This is interesting tho:


China tourist CCPV trap.

[Rasulis]

Kinda lost track of how many Covid vaccine shots I had. According to my record, 5 shots. The fifth one (Moderna bivalence) was together with my flu, pneumonia, tetanus and shingle in late September. Five different vaccines in one day.

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah same here. Bus, shops and hospitals.
Also since i started wearing mask i got way less sick than usualy over the year.


This is interesting tho:

China tourist CCPV trap.

Why do you think expats are leaving China? Actually, even the Chinese, those who can, are leaving China.

[Forogil]

The world is hard at work trying to produce the one variant that finally kills off half the population or so.

Except that the recent variants aren't more deadly - just more contagious, and we can see that peaks in hospitalizations and especially deaths are just a fraction of previous peaks in almost all countries (obviously vaccinations and prior infections help reduce those rates).

Obviously, things can get darker during the winter.

[Mayhem]

Except that the recent variants aren't more deadly - just more contagious, and we can see that peaks in hospitalizations and especially deaths are just a fraction of previous peaks in almost all countries (obviously vaccinations and prior infections help reduce those rates).

Obviously, things can get darker during the winter.

Yep, recent variants aren't more deadly until they are, and then whoops. The just more contagious bit is the thing that should worry everyone, but no, it doesn't because people seem to be of the ludicrous idea that a virus cares for its host or some other fairy tale nonsense.

[Forogil]

Yep, recent variants aren't more deadly until they are, and then whoops. The just more contagious bit is the thing that should worry everyone, but no, it doesn't because people seem to be of the ludicrous idea that a virus cares for its host or some other fairy tale nonsense.

A virus doesn't care for its host, but they "care" for themselves.

For most viruses that mean they prioritize being contagious - and deadliness is just something that happens. Coronaviruses have been around for a long time - ten thousand or possibly hundreds of millions of years (the science is a bit unclear), and the respiratory system is designed to handle frequent viral infections and generally keep them contained.

[NineSpine]

Yep, recent variants aren't more deadly until they are, and then whoops. The just more contagious bit is the thing that should worry everyone, but no, it doesn't because people seem to be of the ludicrous idea that a virus cares for its host or some other fairy tale nonsense.

That's not what anyone says.

What people say is that evolution does not favor deadlier viruses. It favors viruses that keep the host alive to spread itself.

[Mayhem]

A virus doesn't care for its host, but they "care" for themselves.

For most viruses that mean they prioritize being contagious - and deadliness is just something that happens. Coronaviruses have been around for a long time - ten thousand or possibly hundreds of millions of years (the science is a bit unclear), and the respiratory system is designed to handle frequent viral infections and generally keep them contained.

The coronavirus is contagious days prior to causing symptoms. So it got that part already going, everything that's happening after is of no interest to the virus but to us it is.

[Forogil]

The coronavirus is contagious days prior to causing symptoms. So it got that part already going, everything that's happening after is of no interest to the virus but to us it is.

The latter doesn't follow - that the virus is contagious prior to causing symptoms doesn't mean that it stops being contagious once you show symptoms.