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[martinuzz]

So far, 51 people have been arrested, of whom more than half are children. Two people are still in hospital with gunshot wounds. The police cannot comment on the reason for opening fire, because it is still under investigation.

[LordBaal]

Sometimes I'm pretty certain mankind has no future.... then I watch the news and all doubt is dispelled.

In all seriousness, this is a regretable state of affairs. The news of the land of wooden shoes already hit local reporters here. You have to fuck up really hard to lift the constant shitty local state and get noticed by Venezuelan media which has either an endless stream of right at home disgrace to offer or claims everything is fine in a We Happy Few style.

[Grim Portent]

Protestors, pissed off with new corona measures and pissed off with the descision to ban fireworks at New Years Eve again, started rioting and throwing heavy fireworks at the police in the Dutch city of Rotterdam. The city is under emergency lockdown now, subways, trains and cars are not allowed to enter the city center.

Just now, multiple people were injured when police fired warning shots. Number and severity of casualties not yet known.

I think this is the first time in my country in more than 50 years that police use live rounds against rioters. Damn.

Protesting against a fireworks ban is honestly fucking stupid, so I'm more curious about the new corona measures they're protesting against. What I could find was some stuff about letting businesses be more strict about the criteria for someone to be allowed to use their services, making a negative covid test insufficient. Was there anything else bothering them or is it as petty as it looks like to me?

[martinuzz]

People with too much testosteron and frustrations from 2 years of restrictive measures exploding over futile stuff.
There's a lot of people here who are very lightly inflammable when it comes to their yearly fireworks 'hobby'. Before corona, a fireworks ban never made it through politics, whether on national or on local levels, even though it has been tried many times.

'Muh fireworks, muh traditions, muh freedoms'.

I hate the yearly fireworks, on behalf of my cats and everyone else's poor pets.

[Bumber]

The CDC has found that those who were vaccinated have a stronger immune response when compared to those who have virus induced immunity.

Source?

I found this, which says they don't have sufficient data on natural immunity. It mentions the vaccines lead to "a more consistent and higher-titer initial antibody response", but that says nothing about long-term immunity.

Here's a pre-print thingy stating that natural immunity seems to be more effective than the vaccines alone. (While having both provides the best protection.) There are several such articles, but I don't think enough quality data has been collected to be conclusive.

I'm pretty sure it aligns with traditional medical knowledge that natural immunity is more broad than vaccine-induced immunity. We have an mRNA vaccine that was designed to target only the spike protein of the alpha variant. Natural immunity picks up on all the various viral fragments, which means the virus has to mutate more to evade it. It seems strange to me that we're giving boosters of a vaccine built for alpha that's begun showing breakthroughs for delta, when we should be deploying a new delta vaccine instead. (Or the SpFN vaccine, if that pans out.) Leave the boosters for those 80 years and up, who have trouble maintaining the vaccine antibodies to begin with.

Or we could give the boosters to healthy people and deliberately infect them with the alpha variant for the full immunity. It sounds like a terrible idea, but there's logic to it. (I guess the viral sample could be weakened/dead, though there's probably a reason why the vaccine doesn't work that way in the first place.) /ramblings

[delphonso]

Happy to oblige. Should have sourced it the first time.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/vaccine-induced-immunity.html#anchor_1635539757101

'Whereas there is a wide range in antibody titers in response to infection with SARS-CoV-2, completion of a primary vaccine series, especially with mRNA vaccines, typically leads to a more consistent and higher-titer initial antibody response.'

This is where the CDC details that those who have infection-induced immunity are more likely to be hospitalized from Covid than.those with vaccine-induced immunity.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm

I doubt the booster and current vaccines aren't being tweaked to deal with variants. There is also the fact that those who are vaccine immune will still encounter virus loads and will continue to develop immunities to anything that doesn't break through into a full case. There is no reasonable case to encourage the risk of infection-induced immunity when we have a vaccine.

[Starver]

Vaccines can basically flood the system with the "Photo ID" bits of the big bad virus, but without the "Actually being armed and dangerous" elements.

Catching the actual thing isn't so certain. You might find it gets stomped on straight away (especially if you previously flyposted the alert around your system, and the militia are still ready and willing to pounce on what you just caught) but if it doesn't and it goes on a rampage while the system's still trying to work out what you have then...

Fully attenuated viruses may help, but you need a similar amount of them (and of course they'd be coming in bigger quantities.mol^-1) to the fragments experimentally decideded to be the optimal recognition factor if you can't afford to convey the whole Who's Who entry and just have to describe their most unique facial feature for various reasons.

I instincively think that 'two-factor' subset-immunisation might be a good approach, to drastically counter feature-drift selection, but I'm just guessing there. Multiple 'brands' of vaccine as first/second/booster (when I get my booster, it'll almost certainly be different from my 1st+2nd, but not for that reason) should go some way to that. A good mix of instantaneous depth and long-term breadth in the protective envelope. (Again, IANAImmunologist. Just juggling the pure maths in my head. Real World results may vary, your home is at risk if you do not keep up the repayments.)

[McTraveller]

Blargh, all kinds of people we know have been testing positive recently.  Even quite a few people which are asymptomatic.  My wife just said someone she works with tested positive and "she was hanging out with her all day yesterday."

We are vaccinated, so it's now a statistics game with general hygiene and whatever the breakthrough infection rate is (1%?).

The joys of living in the state with the highest per-capita positive rate in the country.

[ChairmanPoo]

Blargh, all kinds of people we know have been testing positive recently.  Even quite a few people which are asymptomatic.  My wife just said someone she works with tested positive and "she was hanging out with her all day yesterday."

We are vaccinated, so it's now a statistics game with general hygiene and whatever the breakthrough infection rate is (1%?).

The joys of living in the state with the highest per-capita positive rate in the country.

It depends on exposure and when you received the last dose too. IIRC with the variants the efficacy for the pfizer and mlderna vaccines was downgraded to ~80%

Of note: in my current workplace everyone who ended up in  ICU in the last 6 months was either  unvaxxed or immunocompromised.

Last unvaxxed I saw in ICU died from DIC secondary to covid. Pretty ghastly

[Iduno]

The joys of living in the state with the highest per-capita positive rate in the country.

Highest *reported* rate. Everyone is lying about the numbers, and a lot are preventing tests. Because lower numbers are better for the economy.

[Egan_BW]

if someone dies of disease but nobody is there to hear it, did it make a sound?

[Bumber]

I doubt the booster and current vaccines aren't being tweaked to deal with variants.

I don't have any reason to believe they are until I hear otherwise, and the CDC certainly hasn't been touting that. Tweaking would probably require going through the whole approval process again, not to mention the shift in production. (Edit: Unless you just mean they're working on it, but they certainly aren't waiting for that to push more of the old vaccine on the vaccinated population, to the obvious benefit of big pharma and the detriment of the 3rd world.)

Someone my mom knows apparently got COVID a week after receiving the booster. Don't recall if it was symptomatic or not.

[martinuzz]

Existing vaccines aren't being tweaked to deal with variants, exactly because what Bumber said. They'd have to go through testing and approval stages again.

[Starver]

From January 2021: How to redesign COVID vaccines so they protect against variants

Vaccine developers tested the currently available COVID-19 vaccines in phase III trials involving tens of thousands of participants before regulators authorized the drugs' use. But that kind of testing for a revamped vaccine would be slow and difficult now that the first-generation vaccines are being deployed worldwide, says immunologist Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia: “I can’t imagine how they could do a phase III trial for a variant.”

It’s unclear how much clinical data would be needed to approve a COVID-19 vaccine update. New seasonal flu vaccines typically do not require fresh trials. But regulators do not have the assurance of decades of experience and clinical data with COVID-19 vaccines. “They might say, ‛It’s a brand new vaccine, let’s do a couple of clinical trials,’” says Weissman.

I haven't seen much explicitly about this since then, though this was a few months later and represents somewhat of an official summary.

But I imagine it is all being planned, still, behind the scenes. Just isn't 'news', or worthwhile trying to keep the (no longer as desperate for something, anything, to be developed) masses and their media informed.


For my part, the deal-breaker is more if there's that lesser response to an 'update' amongst those already earlier-variant protected. If this is an issue then either you need to make a more provoking version for 'booster' purposes, or only use the tweaked version in recipients still with 'naďve' immune systems (and there's a lot of them out there). Technical and/or logistic issues, of course.

[feelotraveller]

Out of Africa, here we go again with world domination... well maybe...

A new variant has been detected in Southern Africa (Botswana probably, although other sources say South Africa) that looks very threatening as it contains a huge number of mutations with a majority being on the spike protein.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/24/scientists-warn-of-new-covid-variant-with-high-number-of-mutations
https://www.dw.com/en/south-africa-scientists-detect-new-covid-19-variant/a-59934908

Worth reading both to pair the conservatism (here,  ) of the guardian with the sensationalism of deutsche welle. 
(The bbc coverage is somewhat in between: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59418127).

(Vaccines haven't been tweaked for this one yet.)