The COVID-19 Science and Medicine Question Thread

OVERBORED said:
he bad side is they make the process so prohibitively long and arduous that drug companies will not venture to find treatments to lesser known illnesses that are easily treated simply because its not economically feasible to do so.
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They have the "Orphan Drug" rules for this problem. It's sort of a "EUA" scenario...
 
What is the current thinking on whether or not recovered COVID individuals should get a vaccine. My Brother recovered from COVID and the VA Hospital recommended he get vaccinated, which he did. Thanks.
 
WhatKnot said:
What is the current thinking on whether or not recovered COVID individuals should get a vaccine. My Brother recovered from COVID and the VA Hospital recommended he get vaccinated, which he did. Thanks.
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Yes, as of June or so, it was recommended that all recovered COVID patients be vaccinated. Not sure if they need to get 2 shots of the mRNA vaccines or not. I do know they were told to wait a few months after recovery to get vaccinated.
 
Problem with those who were infected and recovered is the level of antibodies produced is unpredictable. That along with the constant mutation of the virus would lead me to recommend getting vaccinated even if you had covid.

Friend of mine has a15yr old daughter who was exposed at a volleyball tournament. She's tested positive and is now symptomatic.

This thing is sooooo unpredictable!
 
Roccus7 said:
Yes, as of June or so, it was recommended that all recovered COVID patients be vaccinated. Not sure if they need to get 2 shots of the mRNA vaccines or not. I do know they were told to wait a few months after recovery to get vaccinated.
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Would you think that means 12 - 16 weeks or something else?
 
90 days after diagnosis is the recommended waiting period to get vaccinated after having had COVID-19 so 12-16 weeks is about right. As always, ask your family doctor first!
 
OVERBORED said:
This fall will likely see covid booster shots/Flu hybrid vaccines all based on the mRNA model.
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Great Hybrid vaccines will they be FDA approved? Do they plan on filling people full of shots for every new strain until they get it right? Asking for a friend
 
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cany said:
Great Hybrid vaccines will they be FDA approved? Do they plan on filling people full of shots for every new strain until they get it right? Asking for a friend
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The mRNA technology of Pfizer & Moderna will be approved in the next month or 2. If added, additional mRNA sequences will need approval, but it will be like the yearly flu vaccine, where they get quick approvals.

Will every variant need a new formulation? Depends on the variant. All the current vaccines are very effective against all the variants. As I've mentioned many times, the BEST thing about COVID-19 is it's method of cell invasion. It's distinctive and unique spike protein is its "key" to open a cell and luckily it's structure that binds to the cell, is very immunogenic, meaning our immune systems LOVE to make antibodies against it.

Also in our favor is that the spike protein must maintain a very specific structure, just like a door key, to "open" the cell, so it cannot change much without losing its ability to open the "cell door". The structural conservation of the spike protein means that the subtle changes in it between variants don't negatively impact the antibodies in vaccinated people. Therefor to date, the current vaccines are maintaining effectivity against all the variants in a person who is fully vaccinated.

Now we are battling evolutionary pressure here, and viruses mutate, especially if they are running rampant. Can a new mutation, change the spike protein's structure enough that even though it retains its ability to infect a cell, it can evade antibodies in vaccinated people? Who knows, anything is possible? That's why it's critical to contain the virus, shutting down its transmission which drops the frequency of mutation.

As far as boosters, the vaccine manufacturers are monitoring the antibody levels and strength in vaccinated people. Like the tetanus vaccine, your antibodies may loose potency over time and you get a booster. At this moment, there is debate when and if COVID vaccines will need to have a booster.

Tell your friend to roll up his sleeve...
 
Once again, "for your friend"....lol.....mRNA technology has been around for 30 YEARS!

Its not new or untested............Its been used before with great results. As with ANY drug, it doesn't agree with anyone.

As far as pumping people full of shots, when you're dealing with a pandemic, the goal is immunity. Whatever it takes!
 
The New York Times

Those Virus Sequences That Were Suddenly Deleted? They're Back​

Carl Zimmer
Sat, July 31, 2021, 7:15 AM

A batch of early coronavirus data that went missing for a year has emerged from hiding.

In June, an American scientist discovered that more than 200 genetic sequences from COVID-19 patient samples isolated in China early in the pandemic had puzzlingly been removed from an online database. With some digital sleuthing, Jesse Bloom, a virus expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, managed to track down 13 of the sequences on Google Cloud.

When Bloom shared his experience in a report posted online, he wrote that it “seems likely that the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence.”

But now an odd explanation has emerged, stemming from an editorial oversight by a scientific journal. And the sequences have been uploaded into a different database, overseen by the Chinese government.

The story began in early 2020, when researchers at Wuhan University investigated a new way to test for the deadly coronavirus sweeping the country. They sequenced a short stretch of genetic material from virus samples taken from 34 patients at a Wuhan hospital.

The researchers posted their findings online in March 2020. That month, they also uploaded the sequences to an online database called the Sequence Read Archive, which is maintained by the National Institutes of Health, and submitted a paper describing their results to a scientific journal called Small. The paper was published in June 2020.

Bloom became aware of the Wuhan sequences this spring while researching the origin of COVID-19. Reading a May 2020 review about early genetic sequences of coronaviruses, he came across a spreadsheet that noted their presence in the Sequence Read Archive.

But Bloom could not find them in the database. He emailed the Chinese scientists on June 6 to ask where the data went but did not get a response. On June 22, he posted his report, which was covered by The New York Times and other media outlets.

At the time, a spokesperson for the NIH said that the authors of the study had requested in June 2020 that the sequences be withdrawn from the database. The authors informed the agency that the sequences were being updated and would be added to a different database. (The authors did not respond to inquiries from the Times.)

But a year later, Bloom could not find the sequences on any database.

On July 5, more than a year after the researchers withdrew the sequences from the Sequence Read Archive and two weeks after Bloom’s report was published online, the sequences were quietly uploaded to a database maintained by China National Center for Bioinformation by Ben Hu, a researcher at Wuhan University and a co-author of the Small paper.

On July 21, the disappearance of the sequences was brought up during a news conference in Beijing, where Chinese officials rejected claims that the pandemic started as a lab leak.

According to a translation of the news conference by a journalist at the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency, the vice minister of China’s National Health Commission, Dr. Zeng Yixin, said that the trouble arose when editors at Small deleted a paragraph in which the scientists described the sequences in the Sequence Read Archive.

“Therefore, the researchers thought it was no longer necessary to store the data in the NCBI database,” Zeng said, referring to the Sequence Read Archive, which is run by the NIH.

An editor at Small, which specializes in science at the micro and nano scale and is based in Germany, confirmed his account. “The data availability statement was mistakenly deleted,” the editor, Plamena Dogandzhiyski, wrote in an email. “We will issue a correction very shortly, which will clarify the error and include a link to the depository where the data is now hosted.”

The journal posted a formal correction to that effect on Thursday.

It is not clear why the authors did not mention the journal’s error when they requested that the sequences be removed from the Sequence Read Archive, or why they told the NIH that the sequences were being updated. Nor is it clear why they waited a year to upload them to another database. Hu did not respond to an email asking for comment.

Bloom could not offer an explanation for the conflicting accounts, either. “I’m not in a position to adjudicate among them,” he said in an interview.

On their own, these sequences can’t resolve the open questions about how the pandemic originated, whether through a contact with a wild animal, a leak from a lab or some other route.

In their initial reports, the Wuhan researchers wrote that they extracted genetic material from “samples from outpatients with suspected COVID-19 early in the epidemic.” But the entries in the Chinese database now indicate that they were taken from Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University on Jan. 30 — almost two months after the earliest reports of COVID-19 in China.

While the disappearance of the sequences appears to be the result of an editorial error, Bloom felt that it was still worthwhile looking for other sequences of coronaviruses that might be lurking online. “It definitely means we should keep looking,” he said.

© 2021 The New York Times Company
 
Question for our resident scientist. If the Lambda strain is not responding well to the vaccine already in your honest opinion how many more strains until it is totally ineffective?

just to clarify I am talking about current vaccines already out. Not those in phase 3 trials, etc.
 
No idea Ben. The spike protein binding site has to stay relatively conserved or the bug will lose infectivity. No clue as to how much is too much.
 
Great question!

My best guess is the vaccine composition might change similar to the annual flu shot depending on the dominant strains.

As long as the spike protein is the main driver of symptoms and illness, the current vax will work.
 
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