COVID-19 vaccine discussion

Here is an excellent article on the manufacturing process of Paxlovid that will give you a sense of how incredibly powerful Pfizer's manufacturing capability is.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/making-paxlovid

2 hours ago, SizzleChest said:

There were issues that held them up and it had nothing to do with not partnering with a large pharma.

You’d think the industry would have learned their lesson when Dr Nichols at Devlin Macgregor got caught switching samples for Provasic. 

Why don't you think me up one of those donuts with sprinkles.

1 hour ago, SizzleChest said:

Not my tale to tell.  Sorry.

There is always money in the banana stand. 

On 2/10/2022 at 6:41 PM, dcbc said:

Add me to the list of people who added Vitamin D at the onset of the pandemic and somehow have managed to avoid it thus far without much additional effort since getting my second shot.  My luck may run out tomorrow, but my antibodies still are outside of range (>2,500) 6 months after my booster.  It's a weird ass disease and the later I get it, if at all, the better.

Wife, two toddlers, and I have been on >150% Vit C, D, and Zinc since Covid began. We had an unidentified virus in the household in February 2020 but were skeptical it was alpha covid. For the past year we are about 5/10 on masking behavior and are triple Moderna’d. After two years, Omicron finally got us last week per PCR and antigen tests. Two year old vomited for half a day and was over it. Wife and I had hangover type headache on Day 0, then cough/congestion/mucous for 5 days. (Unvaccinated) 4 year old has almost identical symptoms and timing except never had the headache. Nobody ever had a fever. Hopefully my kids are loaded up with great natural antibodies and Tcell memory now. 
 

As stated much earlier in the thread, I am a medical scientist and not anti-vax, but I have had legitimate safety concerns about how the mRNA vaccines were steam rolled through, as well as being statistically certain that this kind of vaccination has any efficacy impact on non-at-risk populations. Unvaccinated friends in area had nearly the same symptoms and duration as my wife and me. Who the hell knows. Olds and fats should still get vaccinated though. 

15 hours ago, Dontshootrude said:

Here is an excellent article on the manufacturing process of Paxlovid that will give you a sense of how incredibly powerful Pfizer's manufacturing capability is.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/making-paxlovid

That's a fun read. I spent about a decade doing small molecules in oncology for a large pharma. I'm on the biology side, so my chemistry knowledge is a bit on the 'I slept at a Holiday Inn last night' level, but after a while you do learn some of the salient points. Always enjoyed sitting in with the chemistry team, all wearing 3D glasses while they rotate around the pocket on the kinase we were targeting, overlaying how all the chemical variants they made grew or reached into hydrophobic areas or made contact with key amino acid residues. Space age.

I think a lot of small molecules that make it to market probably have similar issues as paxlovid. One thing he didn't mention that I saw was multiple chiral centers. Each time you make that reaction, you have multiple outputs and sometimes only one spacial orientation has the properties you need. The odds are almost never 50:50, and invariably the stuff I worked on always needed the one product that was 20% of the reaction. That's a nuisance in the preclinical stage and a colossal issue at the commercial stage.

There's a lot of work as these programs move to IND to ensure that the chemical synthesis doesn't utilize some process which isn't scalable.

I know industry gets a bad rap, but I hope that's due to the business/marketing side. The science is incredible, and I'm constantly fascinated by how much work goes in to make these drugs at scale - whether it's small molecule, biologics, or even cell therapy.

2 hours ago, Murfdogg21 said:

As stated much earlier in the thread, I am a medical scientist and not anti-vax, but I have had legitimate safety concerns about how the mRNA vaccines were steam rolled through, as well as being statistically certain that this kind of vaccination has any efficacy impact on non-at-risk populations. Unvaccinated friends in area had nearly the same symptoms and duration as my wife and me. Who the hell knows. Olds and fats should still get vaccinated though. 

Curious what 'medical scientist' means, as this is...an interesting opinion not at all grounded on the facts.

New study looking at 150k people in the VA - even a mild case has impacts on heart health, regardless of comorbitities. So that's fun.

Nature : Heart-disease risk soars after COVID — even with a mild case

Spoiler

Even a mild case of COVID-19 can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems for at least a year after diagnosis, a new study¹ shows. Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in similar people who hadn’t had the disease.

What’s more, the risk was elevated even for those who were under 65 years of age and lacked risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes.

“It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, it doesn’t matter if you smoked, or you didn’t,” says study co-author Ziyad Al-Aly at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the chief of research and development for the Veterans Affairs (VA) St. Louis Health Care System. “The risk was there.”

Al-Aly and his colleagues based their research on an extensive health-record database curated by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. The researchers compared more than 150,000 veterans who survived for at least 30 days after contracting COVID-19 with two groups of uninfected people: a group of more than five million people who used the VA medical system during the pandemic, and a similarly sized group that used the system in 2017, before SARS-CoV-2 was circulating.

People who had recovered from COVID-19 showed stark increases in 20 cardiovascular problems over the year after infection. For example, they were 52% more likely to have had a stroke than the contemporary control group, meaning that, out of every 1,000 people studied, there were around 4 more people in the COVID-19 group than in the control group who experienced stroke.

The risk of heart failure increased by 72%, or around 12 more people in the COVID-19 group per 1,000 studied. Hospitalization increased the likelihood of future cardiovascular complications, but even people who avoided hospitalization were at higher risk for many conditions.

“I am actually surprised by these findings that cardiovascular complications of COVID can last so long,” Hossein Ardehali, a cardiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, wrote in an e-mail to Nature. Because severe disease increased the risk of complications much more than mild disease, Ardehali wrote, “it is important that those who are not vaccinated get their vaccine immediately”.

Ardehali cautions that the study’s observational nature comes with some limitations. For example, people in the contemporary control group weren’t tested for COVID-19, so it’s possible that some of them actually had mild infections. And because the authors considered only VA patients — a group that’s predominantly white and male — their results might not translate to all populations.

Ardehali and Al-Aly agree that health-care providers around the world should be prepared to address an increase in cardiovascular conditions. But with high COVID-19 case counts still straining medical resources, Al-Aly worries that health authorities will delay preparing for the pandemic’s aftermath for too long. “We collectively dropped the ball on COVID,” he said. “And I feel we’re about to drop the ball on long COVID.”

 

The paper : Long-term cardiovascular outcomes of COVID-19

Edited February 13, 2022 by Txzen

I’m not sure what your point is by posting those studies in reply to my post. I was not debating the risks of Covid-19, even a mild case of it. I was stating that my highly vitamined, triple Moderna vaxxed, late 30s wife and I experienced similar symptoms in intensity and duration as my unvaccinated 4 year old and several unvaccinated 30s/40s we know. This is clearly not universal, but in science and medicine you should consider the minority results as well. I have mentioned previously that I have minor concerns about safety, but they weren’t enough that my wife and I ever seriously considered not getting vaccinated. I am still on the fence about kids younger than 5, maybe a bit older, and now that my kids have recovered from one bout of Covid I might kick their vaccination decision down the road 6-12 months. I’m sure you’ll have some aloof cunt comment to this too, like you do every time I post on this thread. 

On 2/12/2022 at 2:22 PM, XYZ said:

I am still flabbergasted that starting in early 2020, when a strong correlation between vitamin D deficiency and severity of covid 19 was found, the gov’ment didn’t start a campaign to get people to test their vitamin D levels and supplement if needed. Unbelievable.

Or weight.  Diabetes.  Hypertension.  The whole gambit.  What's the stat?  The overwhelming majority of deaths had close to 4 comorbidities?

Really the only one you don't have some measure of control over is of course age.  

1 minute ago, BabaYaga said:

Or weight.  Diabetes.  Hypertension.  The whole gambit.  What's the stat?  The overwhelming majority of deaths had close to 4 comorbidities?

Really the only one you don't have some measure of control over is of course age.  

Well and of course the millions of people who were born with diabetes or conditions that cause high blood pressure. Also the "most deaths had close to 4 comorbidities" was talking about vaccinated people. Not saying you were, but many people have taken that line as a reason why people don't need to get vaxxed.

7 minutes ago, TXSooner518 said:

Well and of course the millions of people who were born with diabetes or conditions that cause high blood pressure. Also the "most deaths had close to 4 comorbidities" was talking about vaccinated people. Not saying you were, but many people have taken that line as a reason why people don't need to get vaxxed.

Millions are.  The vast majority are not.  Most suffer from lifestyle choice maladies that as stated, have gone almost completely undiscussed.  

Two years ago, it didn’t make sense for the government to tell people that they needed to get their BMIs down to 25. The pandemic had just started, and people needed months of diet and exercise to get there. It made more sense to tell them to stay home and wear masks when they went out. 
Plus, the government’s time, in those early days, was better spent keeping the economy afloat and clearing decks for vaccines to be invented. 
 

This is two years later. Now, there is no excuse for people to be obese. They should know better and they have had time to do something about it. Also, the government should realize that there is no benefit any longer to talking around the subject- Covid is a lot worse if you’re fat. 

23 hours ago, Murfdogg21 said:

I’m not sure what your point is by posting those studies in reply to my post. I was not debating the risks of Covid-19, even a mild case of it. I was stating that my highly vitamined, triple Moderna vaxxed, late 30s wife and I experienced similar symptoms in intensity and duration as my unvaccinated 4 year old and several unvaccinated 30s/40s we know. This is clearly not universal, but in science and medicine you should consider the minority results as well. I have mentioned previously that I have minor concerns about safety, but they weren’t enough that my wife and I ever seriously considered not getting vaccinated. I am still on the fence about kids younger than 5, maybe a bit older, and now that my kids have recovered from one bout of Covid I might kick their vaccination decision down the road 6-12 months. I’m sure you’ll have some aloof cunt comment to this too, like you do every time I post on this thread. 

I actually came here to post that study (which had just published) just because it challenged even my assumption of minimal risk to those with no comorbidities, and spoke to your question as to the efficacy of vaccination for not-at-risk populations. 

I'm not an aloof cunt, I'm a sarcastic one. Well, maybe aloof in that I don't know who the fuck you are, as outside of a few people who post decent scientific info here I don't pay attention to the names of those who routinely post the usual crap (unfounded vaccine safety concerns, statements of steamrolled development, 'I know people who were never vaxxed and we had the same outcome', etc.). If I always post in response to you, well, FAFO I guess. 

 

1 hour ago, Txzen said:

I actually came here to post that study (which had just published) just because it challenged even my assumption of minimal risk to those with no comorbidities, and spoke to your question as to the efficacy of vaccination for not-at-risk populations. 

I'm not an aloof cunt, I'm a sarcastic one. Well, maybe aloof in that I don't know who the fuck you are, as outside of a few people who post decent scientific info here I don't pay attention to the names of those who routinely post the usual crap (unfounded vaccine safety concerns, statements of steamrolled development, 'I know people who were never vaxxed and we had the same outcome', etc.). If I always post in response to you, well, FAFO I guess. 

Username does not check out at all.

1 hour ago, Txzen said:

I actually came here to post that study (which had just published) just because it challenged even my assumption of minimal risk to those with no comorbidities, and spoke to your question as to the efficacy of vaccination for not-at-risk populations. 

I'm not an aloof cunt, I'm a sarcastic one. Well, maybe aloof in that I don't know who the fuck you are, as outside of a few people who post decent scientific info here I don't pay attention to the names of those who routinely post the usual crap (unfounded vaccine safety concerns, statements of steamrolled development, 'I know people who were never vaxxed and we had the same outcome', etc.). If I always post in response to you, well, FAFO I guess. 

 

This might be the common correlation - causality issue. The risk factors for serious problems from SARS-CoV-2 infection are not dissimilar from heart disease, so it would only make sense that people who had bad Covid-19 cases would be more at risk for cardiac events.

On 2/11/2022 at 8:41 AM, BabaYaga said:

Vit D is critical.  Absolutely critical to your everyday health.  Dr. Cooper and his clinic in Dallas has been beating this drum for decades now.  They suggest 5,000 IU's/day

Add to the list of 1000 things that flummoxed me about the response ... Vitamin D and zinc my not be panaceas but hardly controversial. We have such a weird resistance to any messaging around prophylactics whether medication or lifestyle.

On 2/11/2022 at 6:41 AM, BabaYaga said:

Vit D is critical.  Absolutely critical to your everyday health.  Dr. Cooper and his clinic in Dallas has been beating this drum for decades now.  They suggest 5,000 IU's/day

Yup it's a good idea to get your levels checked. It's also super cheap, worth every penny.

19 minutes ago, Harrison Bergeron said:

Add to the list of 1000 things that flummoxed me about the response ... Vitamin D and zinc my not be panaceas but hardly controversial. We have such a weird resistance to any messaging around prophylactics whether medication or lifestyle.

Who argued against vitamin d and zinc? On here, or in your personal social medias?

7 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Who argued against vitamin d and zinc? On here, or in your personal social medias?

Last year, there were a lot of folks lumping zinc and Vitamin D in with ivermectin in lieu of vaccines.  Not on here so much.  But out there.  Nothing wrong with a daily dose of zinc and Vitamin D.

51 minutes ago, dcbc said:

Last year, there were a lot of folks lumping zinc and Vitamin D in with ivermectin in lieu of vaccines.  Not on here so much.  But out there.  Nothing wrong with a daily dose of zinc and Vitamin D.

Agreed. There were people who only promoted prophylactics as well as reactionaries who freaked out at any mention of prophylactics. Rationally it should be both.

Third Texas Cares draw yesterday. Six months out from my Pfizer booster and my antibody count is still >2500. 

13 hours ago, Harrison Bergeron said:

Add to the list of 1000 things that flummoxed me about the response ... Vitamin D and zinc my not be panaceas but hardly controversial. We have such a weird resistance to any messaging around prophylactics whether medication or lifestyle.

The issue became binary:  with the vax on side, and virtually everything else on the other.  Like most messaging, it was distilled down to it's most simple form.  Whether intentional or not, that is another question.  Any nuance on the issue went out the window a long time ago and seems only now is slowly creeping back in.  

On 2/13/2022 at 12:49 PM, Txzen said:

Curious what 'medical scientist' means, as this is...an interesting opinion not at all grounded on the facts.

New study looking at 150k people in the VA - even a mild case has impacts on heart health, regardless of comorbitities. So that's fun.

Nature : Heart-disease risk soars after COVID — even with a mild case

  Reveal hidden contents

Even a mild case of COVID-19 can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems for at least a year after diagnosis, a new study¹ shows. Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in similar people who hadn’t had the disease.

What’s more, the risk was elevated even for those who were under 65 years of age and lacked risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes.

“It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, it doesn’t matter if you smoked, or you didn’t,” says study co-author Ziyad Al-Aly at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the chief of research and development for the Veterans Affairs (VA) St. Louis Health Care System. “The risk was there.”

Al-Aly and his colleagues based their research on an extensive health-record database curated by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. The researchers compared more than 150,000 veterans who survived for at least 30 days after contracting COVID-19 with two groups of uninfected people: a group of more than five million people who used the VA medical system during the pandemic, and a similarly sized group that used the system in 2017, before SARS-CoV-2 was circulating.

People who had recovered from COVID-19 showed stark increases in 20 cardiovascular problems over the year after infection. For example, they were 52% more likely to have had a stroke than the contemporary control group, meaning that, out of every 1,000 people studied, there were around 4 more people in the COVID-19 group than in the control group who experienced stroke.

The risk of heart failure increased by 72%, or around 12 more people in the COVID-19 group per 1,000 studied. Hospitalization increased the likelihood of future cardiovascular complications, but even people who avoided hospitalization were at higher risk for many conditions.

“I am actually surprised by these findings that cardiovascular complications of COVID can last so long,” Hossein Ardehali, a cardiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, wrote in an e-mail to Nature. Because severe disease increased the risk of complications much more than mild disease, Ardehali wrote, “it is important that those who are not vaccinated get their vaccine immediately”.

Ardehali cautions that the study’s observational nature comes with some limitations. For example, people in the contemporary control group weren’t tested for COVID-19, so it’s possible that some of them actually had mild infections. And because the authors considered only VA patients — a group that’s predominantly white and male — their results might not translate to all populations.

Ardehali and Al-Aly agree that health-care providers around the world should be prepared to address an increase in cardiovascular conditions. But with high COVID-19 case counts still straining medical resources, Al-Aly worries that health authorities will delay preparing for the pandemic’s aftermath for too long. “We collectively dropped the ball on COVID,” he said. “And I feel we’re about to drop the ball on long COVID.”

 

The paper : Long-term cardiovascular outcomes of COVID-19

One of the hardest nuts to crack with doing post-acute sequelae work is building the comparison group, and avoiding introduction of a variety of biases. This group has a number of very nice papers on the topic, with the same fundamental issues potentially suppressing rate of events in the control group. 

Edited February 15, 2022 by Anastasis

36 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

The issue became binary:  with the vax on side, and virtually everything else on the other.  Like most messaging, it was distilled down to it's most simple form.  Whether intentional or not, that is another question.  Any nuance on the issue went out the window a long time ago and seems only now is slowly creeping back in.  

There is truth to that.  But it's damned well not the whole truth.  MOST of us around here who are big vaccine fans did not take a mutual exclusivity position re therapeutics.  Our big pushback on the ivermectin etc. crowd was that their evangelism WAS one of exclusivity: "Don't get vaxxed, it's only the flu, and if you get it, Ivermectin/HCQ/etc. is a magical cure."  Instead, almost all of us said that the path forward from pandemic to endemic was exactly what we're seeing: 1) effective vaccines (while their efficacy against transmission isn't as good as we'd like against the new variant, efficacy against hospitalization/death is very strong, which is the most important), 2) effective therapeutics (monoclonal antibodies and some of the "one pill" treatments are getting us there although, again, Omicron throws a curve ball), and 3) eventual mutation of the virus to a less-lethal form (again, mixed bag with Omicron -- less-lethal on a per-case basis, but much more virulent).  Therapeutics have always been an expected part of the mix.

Other drugs/treatments/paths to health haven't been neglected.  Shit, my whole family has been religious about taking vitamin D since this started.  We've been pretty good about wearing masks in crowded spaces, and we got KN-95s as soon as they became available.

There is absolutely a wide lane occupying the middle path here.  But the characterization of the more pro-vax crowd as being "anti-therapeutic" is just not accurate, outside of an outlier here and there.  What most of us have been and remain opposed to is quackery about "therapeutics" that was consistently pitched as an ALTERNATIVE to vaccination that obviated any need for vaccination -- it is regularly paired with conversations about how the vaccines are "rushed, risky," all the standard anti-vax tropes.

Hell, if there is a valid study out there that ends up proving that ivermectin has any reasonable therapeutic benefit, I'll cheer that result.  It would be great news.

13 hours ago, dcbc said:

Last year, there were a lot of folks lumping zinc and Vitamin D in with ivermectin in lieu of vaccines.  Not on here so much.  But out there.  Nothing wrong with a daily dose of zinc and Vitamin D.

To be clear, I supplement Vitamin D and have before the start of the pandemic.  But I don't think benefit is certain.  I've seen a lot of debate as to whether increased vitamin D is actually inherently protective for Covid or if Vitamin D level is just a biomarker of otherwise generally healthier/unhealthy (or older/younger) people.

2 minutes ago, Skipper said:

To be clear, I supplement Vitamin D and have before the start of the pandemic.  But I don't think benefit is certain.  I've seen a lot of debate as to whether increased vitamin D is actually inherently protective for Covid or if Vitamin D level is just a biomarker of otherwise generally healthier/unhealthy (or older/younger) people.

I'd agree it's not a "protective" against any specific externality, but it is proven to be a substantial boost for overall health and wellness, helping the host via a strengthened immune system.  

6 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

There is truth to that.  But it's damned well not the whole truth.  MOST of us around here who are big vaccine fans did not take a mutual exclusivity position re therapeutics.  Our big pushback on the ivermectin etc. crowd was that their evangelism WAS one of exclusivity: "Don't get vaxxed, it's only the flu, and if you get it, Ivermectin/HCQ/etc. is a magical cure."  Instead, almost all of us said that the path forward from pandemic to endemic was exactly what we're seeing: 1) effective vaccines (while their efficacy against transmission isn't as good as we'd like against the new variant, efficacy against hospitalization/death is very strong, which is the most important), 2) effective therapeutics (monoclonal antibodies and some of the "one pill" treatments are getting us there although, again, Omicron throws a curve ball), and 3) eventual mutation of the virus to a less-lethal form (again, mixed bag with Omicron -- less-lethal on a per-case basis, but much more virulent).  Therapeutics have always been an expected part of the mix.

Other drugs/treatments/paths to health haven't been neglected.  Shit, my whole family has been religious about taking vitamin D since this started.  We've been pretty good about wearing masks in crowded spaces, and we got KN-95s as soon as they became available.

There is absolutely a wide lane occupying the middle path here.  But the characterization of the more pro-vax crowd as being "anti-therapeutic" is just not accurate, outside of an outlier here and there.  What most of us have been and remain opposed to is quackery about "therapeutics" that was consistently pitched as an ALTERNATIVE to vaccination that obviated any need for vaccination -- it is regularly paired with conversations about how the vaccines are "rushed, risky," all the standard anti-vax tropes.

Hell, if there is a valid study out there that ends up proving that ivermectin has any reasonable therapeutic benefit, I'll cheer that result.  It would be great news.

You're taking a nuanced approach to one side and casting dogmatic aspersions to the other.  

You're taking a nuanced approach to one side and casting dogmatic aspersions to the other.  

Correct. Based on the actual positions actually taken by people.

19 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

You're taking a nuanced approach to one side and casting dogmatic aspersions to the other.  

It's always easier to take a nuanced approach to the group with which one, at least, partially aligns.  And to be fair, I find it hard to look at members of a group who, for a period of time, advocated that drinking their own urine was the key to overcoming a novel viral infection in lieu of a vaccine, and do much more than slowly back away.

Edited February 15, 2022 by dcbc

Just now, dcbc said:

It's always easier to take a nuanced approach to the group with which one aligns

Ding, ding, ding!

5 hours ago, BabaYaga said:

Ding, ding, ding!

It so happens that I resemble my own remark insofar as I have an inability to see much nuance on the "anything but the vaccine" side of the equation.  The first thing I wrote makes more sense when it's considered in light of the part about people's drinking their own urine.

Edited February 15, 2022 by dcbc

4 minutes ago, dcbc said:

It so happens that I resemble my own remark insofar as I have an inability to see much nuance on the "anything but the vaccine" side of the equation.

This.  

39 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

I'd agree it's not a "protective" against any specific externality, but it is proven to be a substantial boost for overall health and wellness, helping the host via a strengthened immune system.  

That's the thing. I don't think it's 'proven'. It's associated with reduced risk of any number of issues but I don't think results have panned out in controlled studies.  If you've seen something pass along.  And again, I do supplement it as a "no harm potential benefit" approach but there are quite a few doctors out there that thinks it's just a biomarker for health and supplementing doesn't really help.

Just now, Skipper said:

That's the thing. I don't think it's 'proven'. It's associated with reduced risk of any number of issues but I don't think results have panned out in controlled studies.  If you've seen something pass along.  And again, I do supplement it as a "no harm potential benefit" approach but there are quite a few doctors out there that thinks it's just a biomarker for health and supplementing doesn't really help.

It's been posited that it is one of the primary reasons of differing levels of melanin in people's skin color.  I'd say it's a pretty big deal.  Europeans are much lighter to act as pigmentation solar panels to help them get as much Vit D as possible (not the only thing of course)

Back in 2012 The Cooper Health center in Dallas was banging this drum as loudly as they can.  That Vit D and Omega fatty acids are arguably two of the most important supplements you can take.  

31 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

This.  

52 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

It's been posited that it is one of the primary reasons of differing levels of melanin in people's skin color.  I'd say it's a pretty big deal.  Europeans are much lighter to act as pigmentation solar panels to help them get as much Vit D as possible (not the only thing of course)

Back in 2012 The Cooper Health center in Dallas was banging this drum as loudly as they can.  That Vit D and Omega fatty acids are arguably two of the most important supplements you can take.  

Look dude.   I'm not telling you that you shouldn't take Vitamin D.  I'm saying there have been RCT's trying to PROVE the benefits of Vitamin D supplementation that have failed.  Erin Michos has been all over this from a heart disease perspective for years.  2012 is a lifetime ago in research years.    Recent article:  Vitamin D, Calcium, Other Vitamins, and Supplements Do Not Prevent CVD | tctmd.com

 

Here is a key quote and explains why many professionals feel it is more likely than not that the relationship between Vitamin D and Covid are more likely observational and not causal

Low levels of 25[OH]D are associated with multiple poor health outcomes, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. “People in poor health in general have low vitamin D levels, and these are the same people at increased risk of cardiovascular disease,” she said, adding, “Associations don’t necessarily mean a causal relationship.”

 

18 minutes ago, Skipper said:

Look dude.   I'm not telling you that you shouldn't take Vitamin D.  I'm saying there have been RCT's trying to PROVE the benefits of Vitamin D supplementation that have failed.  Erin Michos has been all over this from a heart disease perspective for years.  2012 is a lifetime ago in research years.    Recent article:  Vitamin D, Calcium, Other Vitamins, and Supplements Do Not Prevent CVD | tctmd.com

 

Here is a key quote and explains why many professionals feel it is more likely than not that the relationship between Vitamin D and Covid are more likely observational and not causal

Low levels of 25[OH]D are associated with multiple poor health outcomes, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. “People in poor health in general have low vitamin D levels, and these are the same people at increased risk of cardiovascular disease,” she said, adding, “Associations don’t necessarily mean a causal relationship.”

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-fallible-mind/202202/striking-link-between-vitamin-d-levels-and-omicron%3famp

12 minutes ago, Skipper said:

Look dude.   I'm not telling you that you shouldn't take Vitamin D.  I'm saying there have been RCT's trying to PROVE the benefits of Vitamin D supplementation that have failed.  Erin Michos has been all over this from a heart disease perspective for years.  2012 is a lifetime ago in research years.    Recent article:  Vitamin D, Calcium, Other Vitamins, and Supplements Do Not Prevent CVD | tctmd.com

 

Here is a key quote and explains why many professionals feel it is more likely than not that the relationship between Vitamin D and Covid are more likely observational and not causal

Low levels of 25[OH]D are associated with multiple poor health outcomes, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. “People in poor health in general have low vitamin D levels, and these are the same people at increased risk of cardiovascular disease,” she said, adding, “Associations don’t necessarily mean a causal relationship.”

 

Nobody is saying it's anything close to a "cure" for Covid or any other malady.  Only that it plays a key role in the body's overall immune quality.

I'd also be curious on studies like this to see how they account for the multiple other factors of the subjects such as diet, exercise, etc.  Seems hard to control for over time?  This study seems a perfect case study as the quote mentions obesity, diabetes, and CVD all need to be addressed at both the medical and behavioral level.  VitD is just a part of that overall toolkit.  Not a silver bullet.  

3 minutes ago, JimmyJames said:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-fallible-mind/202202/striking-link-between-vitamin-d-levels-and-omicron%3famp

I don't think anyone is debating that there is an association.  That was clearly established very early on.  It's whether or not it's causal and whether or not supplementing is beneficial.   Again, I supplement Vitamin D from a "no harm potential benefit" standpoint.

5 minutes ago, Skipper said:

I don't think anyone is debating that there is an association.  That was clearly established very early on.  It's whether or not it's causal and whether or not supplementing is beneficial.   Again, I supplement Vitamin D from a "no harm potential benefit" standpoint.

Fair enough and I’m not a scientist so I can’t really argue well over studies and scientific causal relationships. 
 

However that vitamin D helps you fight viruses makes perfect logical sense. There’s a reason why guys in Nigeria have dark skin and guys in Ireland have pasty white skin.
 

Natural selection over thousands of years drove that and i believe it had to do with the areas relationship to the sun. It’s almost impossible to get sufficient vitamin D from food unless you want to eat mushrooms and salmon all the time and all day so in the past you had to get it from the sun. If you lived in Nigeria you got plenty of sun. If you lived in Ireland you almost never did. So light skin in Ireland and dark skin in Nigeria. 
 

Viruses are everywhere, we’ve lived with them forever and are never going away and actually help by killing off bacteria. It just makes sense to me that vitamin D is kind of like our anti biotic when it comes to viruses. 

30 minutes ago, Skipper said:

I don't think anyone is debating that there is an association.  That was clearly established very early on.  It's whether or not it's causal and whether or not supplementing is beneficial.   Again, I supplement Vitamin D from a "no harm potential benefit" standpoint.

One argument I have heard between Dr Rhonda Patrick and Dr Masterjohn are supplementation levels - Masterjohn posits that over supplementation is largely unnecessary, but beneficial to those at a deficit.  Saying that is you are low, there are great benefits to get back up to adequate levels, but thousands and thousands of IU's are largely a waste.

Talk about the D not going away.

[Insert South Austin mom jokes here.]

I take supplements, multivitamin, extra vitamin D and omega 3, zinc, a smattering or other things. I also acknowledge that the benefit of these supplements is based on absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever and that there's a more than decent chance it's just made up bullshit by an unregulated industry selling snake oil.  But why not?

The thing I find interesting is how many folks banging the C, Zinc, and D drum during this pandemic just accept that these magic pills work in spite of zero hard evidence while at the same time decry the use of vaccines backed with years of actual study and development by real scientists (unlike whatever hourly wage earner is packing god knows what into those veggie capsules that supplements come in). 

So what's the real difference between the two?  Marketing.  That's it.  Marketing.  Some people are so susceptible to marketing that they will fight you if you dare besmirch the good name of a powdered supplement which may not even contain what the label on the bottle says since there's no regulation of the industry.  It's weird how many people are comfortable accepting an acknowledged fairy tale (or at best wishful thinking) as hard cold fact but will stare something based on hard evidence in the eye and say, "That's clearly bullshit being pushed by big pharma for profit!  Now, I need to get going as the vitamin store closes at 6:00 - also what do you know about Athletic Greens?  They seem legit." 

Again, I think it's a good idea to take vitamins and believe on a certain level that there is a benefit based on the fact I feel better when I take them and worse when I don't.  I also accept that it could all be a placebo.  There's literally no way to know. 

 

Also - on the fat thing, I've seen a bunch of fatties get Covid and barely feel sick at all, and I've seen some skinny healthy people get hospitalized with it.  I'm not saying it doesn't play a role, but trying to blame Covid deaths on weight seems more than a little shortsighted. 

17 minutes ago, Samson's Wig said:

The thing I find interesting is how many folks banging the C, Zinc, and D drum during this pandemic just accept that these magic pills work in spite of zero hard evidence while at the same time decry the use of vaccines backed with years of actual study and development by real scientists (unlike whatever hourly wage earner is packing god knows what into those veggie capsules that supplements come in). 

Yeah.....this was another maddening thing.  "Doing the research" led millions to 1) doubt and denigrate a complex and scientifically backed and tested vaccine development and roll out process, while 2) accepting any number of pitched "cures" -- from supplements, to oleander extract, to HCQ, to god knows what else -- which had functionally ZERO scientific development and testing (at least for their applicability to COVID cases).  When you reject the thing that is MORE scientifically vetted and tested for the thing that is LESS scientifically vetted and tested, and your reasoning is "I don't trust that the first thing was scientifically vetted and tested enough".....the cognitive dissonance is strong.

I mean they're literally called supplements---something to add to something else.  I happen to think that something else is vaccines and common sense.  But for others, it's apparently ivermectin and/or morning urine or oleander extract. 

Edited February 16, 2022 by dcbc

Had my 3rd and final Texas Cares blood draw yesterday.   S protein antibody count is still 2500+ and still no prior infection. 

I had my booster on Nov.4th, full dose. 

13 minutes ago, Borachio said:

Had my 3rd and final Texas Cares blood draw yesterday.   S protein antibody count is still 2500+ and still no prior infection. 

I had my booster on Nov.4th, full dose. 

Heading out to get mine today.  They did a pretty substantial rework of the survey.  Should be interesting what they are able to glean from all the data that they have collected. 

mRNA vaccine-induced antibodies more effective than natural immunity in neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 and its high affinity variants

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-06629-2

Quote

Data further revealed that the samples from mRNA vaccinated individuals had a median of 17 times higher RBD antibody levels and a similar degree of increased neutralization activities against RBD-ACE2 binding than those from natural infections. Our data showed that N501Y RBD had fivefold higher ACE2 binding than the original variant. While some antisera from naturally infected subjects had substantially reduced neutralization ability against N501Y RBD, all blood samples from vaccinated individuals were highly effective in neutralizing it. Thus, our data indicates that mRNA vaccination may generate more neutralizing RBD antibodies than natural immunity. It further suggests a potential need to maintain high RBD antibody levels to control the more infectious SARS-CoV-2 variants.

 

On 2/16/2022 at 9:17 AM, Anastasis said:

Heading out to get mine today.  They did a pretty substantial rework of the survey.  Should be interesting what they are able to glean from all the data that they have collected. 

Still >2500 spike antibodies. Full dose moderna booster on 08/28/21.

Also still N-ab negative. 

Edited February 17, 2022 by Anastasis

What's "N-ab"  again?