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Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 154

By July 20, 2022Commentary

Just anecdotally, there is lots of CV-19 everywhere.  I know people across the country who are testing positive as well as people here in Minnesota.  All home testing and self-managed, all pretty mild.  But it is apparently enough for the obsessed to start putting mask mandates and other restrictions back in place.  Be very interesting as fall approaches to see the tension Democrats feel between not giving the voters one more reason to hate them and their innate tendencies to want to control people and lock everything down.

CV-19, like many respiratory viruses, has mutated and evolved frequently, which limits the effectiveness of the immune response derived from either vax or prior infection.  And those immune responses play a role in which mutations are selected and become dominant.  This paper, while largely a modeling exercise, examines the role of vaccination and prior infection in driving the evolution of CV-19.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Here is a truly idiotic paper based on a wildly flawed premise that anyone with clear eyes can tell is false.  The authors claim that people not getting vaccinated is why we haven’t reached herd immunity.  There is no such thing as population immunity with CV-19.  An astounding per cent of the population has either vax-derived or prior infection-derived immune responses or both.  That per cent is far in excess of what would traditionally be required to substantially slow transmission.  It isn’t going to happen.  No matter how many boosters we give people or how many times they get infected, they are still susceptible to a future infection.  So the nonsense about the relatively small number of unvaxed people, and even smaller number of people who may be unvaxed and have had no prior infection, being the reason we aren’t seeing less transmission, is just gibberish.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Instead of prioritizing children’s education and social development, during the epidemic policy makers worried about their role in transmission.  This paper from Italy looked at several methods for ascertaining the role of open schools on case levels.  Supposedly opening schools was generally associated with higher case levels, but the range of the alleged effect was very large and any effect appeared to occur only in younger age groups and had no impact on elderly age groups, where the serious disease risk is much higher.  (Medrxiv Paper)

In a study among healthy university students, antibodies declined within a few months following an infection.   The authors implied that antibodies lasted longer following vaccination, but the follow-up period is too short to draw that conclusion.  What the study really shows is that CV-19 is a mild enough risk that the immune system isn’t going to spend a lot of energy being in a high state of readiness for a potential re-infection.  (Medrxiv Paper)

There has been interest in understanding the effect of infection and immune response in regard to the common seasonal coronavirus on a CV-19 infection.  The authors found that basically everyone has some immune response to those seasonal coronaviruses.  But those antibodies did not appear to be associated with the likelihood of a CV-19 infection.  But betacoronavirus antibodies did appear to be boosted as a result of a CV-19 infection.  CV-19 is most akin to betacoronaviruses.   (JID Article)   This study came to the same conclusion.  (JID Article)

Vaccine effectiveness among nursing home residents.  The study ended in November 2021, so before Omicron, which limits the value.  Vaccine effectiveness in the period more than 5 months after vaccine was 33% for Pfizer and 77% for Moderna.  Rates of infection were 78% lower among residents with a prior infection and vax compared to those with neither.  Although not highlighted, having a prior infection lowered subsequent infection risk to the same level as those residents who were vaxed but had no prior infection experienced. The big picture is that having a prior infection is about as good as vax and the combination somewhat better.  (JID Article)

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