Great, so we're going from a not-so-safe vaccine to a not-so-safe drug. Meanwhile, other countries like Thailand and India have already done some legwork on herbal remedies that are safe and possibly effective in mitigating covid...the Western world is so strangely backwards with its excessive focus on new technologies.
Thanks for this analysis. Nucleoside analogs sound like a terrible idea except perhaps as a last ditch treatment for the seriously ill.
As for the infection trends, I think it is important to consider that this virus, like influenza, rises and falls on its own rhythm regionally and that very little of this pattern is attributable to any human action or lack thereof. In almost all cases waves of infection have crested and declined despite failing to reach the level of population immunity that the models required in order to see a decline.
Even before vaccination some countries like Brazil have seen long plateaus while others like India have seen brief, intense waves.
My sense is that we don't create the waves, but we can modulate them. It also seems to me that vaccination has modulated the wave upward, with more infections in high-vax than in low-vax countries in recent months despite demonstrated short term efficacy. I still think spike tolerance may be playing a role, but not in a forever spike sort of way, more along the lines of affecting overdispersion of transmission and perhaps creating superspreaders among the vaccinated.
The modelers seem to believe we are in the last wave. I think that we could well see our worst wave yet this winter as the modulating effects of seasonal stimulus and waning (and quite possibly negative) vaccine efficacy combine.
Interesting that there is a plateau in Nucleocapsid antibodies given that we'd expect S to rise as more Brits have gotten their gmo-shot(s). Is no one else developing N antibodies, even after recovering from all of the breakthrough infections? Or, is it too soon to tell???
Remember that St. Jude study where the N T-cells seemed to drop off on 6 of 10 patients post jab and we didn't have enough samples to really know what was going on?
One thing odd about Israel is that the IFR, after all these jabs and boosters, seems (eyeballing the cases and deaths data in the same frame) almost the same as in the first wave.
Great, so we're going from a not-so-safe vaccine to a not-so-safe drug. Meanwhile, other countries like Thailand and India have already done some legwork on herbal remedies that are safe and possibly effective in mitigating covid...the Western world is so strangely backwards with its excessive focus on new technologies.
Thanks for this analysis. Nucleoside analogs sound like a terrible idea except perhaps as a last ditch treatment for the seriously ill.
As for the infection trends, I think it is important to consider that this virus, like influenza, rises and falls on its own rhythm regionally and that very little of this pattern is attributable to any human action or lack thereof. In almost all cases waves of infection have crested and declined despite failing to reach the level of population immunity that the models required in order to see a decline.
Even before vaccination some countries like Brazil have seen long plateaus while others like India have seen brief, intense waves.
My sense is that we don't create the waves, but we can modulate them. It also seems to me that vaccination has modulated the wave upward, with more infections in high-vax than in low-vax countries in recent months despite demonstrated short term efficacy. I still think spike tolerance may be playing a role, but not in a forever spike sort of way, more along the lines of affecting overdispersion of transmission and perhaps creating superspreaders among the vaccinated.
The modelers seem to believe we are in the last wave. I think that we could well see our worst wave yet this winter as the modulating effects of seasonal stimulus and waning (and quite possibly negative) vaccine efficacy combine.
Hey Brian,
Did you see what's going with the UK S and N antibody testing?
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1025358/Vaccine-surveillance-report-week-41.pdf
Page 21-23 figures 3, 4a, 4b
Interesting that there is a plateau in Nucleocapsid antibodies given that we'd expect S to rise as more Brits have gotten their gmo-shot(s). Is no one else developing N antibodies, even after recovering from all of the breakthrough infections? Or, is it too soon to tell???
Remember that St. Jude study where the N T-cells seemed to drop off on 6 of 10 patients post jab and we didn't have enough samples to really know what was going on?
One thing odd about Israel is that the IFR, after all these jabs and boosters, seems (eyeballing the cases and deaths data in the same frame) almost the same as in the first wave.