Dontshootrude

Probably? It is hard to keep track. There have been a few interesting manuscripts on the subject. This one comes to mind where they saw COVID evolution in a single immunocompromised patient receiving convalescent plasma treatment: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03291-y

If you are in a higher risk category you can try to get a monoclonal antibody infusion, but if you are healthy you should clear the infection in a couple of days thanks to your prior vaccination.

This is correct. The thought is a lot of these variants are coming from unvaxxed immunocompromised individuals that have persistent long lasting infections. This allows the virus to have a huge number of replication cycles thus increasing the odds a random mutation will occur which leads to a competitive benefit.

I just updated my saved credit card with one from my Privacy account and set the spend limit to $1. So fuck them they won't be scamming me too. Thanks for the heads up.

Oh shit. Well that doesn't bode well. I'll definitely be cancelling before the free trial period is over.

I just signed up for the free trial. What's wrong with it?

Which treatments was he referring to? I have a big problem with the meme treatments that became political we've seen throughout the pandemic. Hydroxychloroquine, for example, had little evidence to support it and only became a thing when President Idiot said it worked in a press conference. Ivermectin quickly turned into a political symbol as well. There has been an impressive push to get proven treatments (corticosteroids, monoclonal antibodies) to the people who need them. Pfizer's rapid development of its COVID specific protease inhibitor is unprecedented as well.

It is long. Skip to "The Analysis" section to get to the point. The Sociological Takeaway is a great conclusion as well.

Scott Alexander did a great job breaking down the evidence on his blog. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted

There is going to be little protection from becoming infected, but protection from severe disease/hospitalization/death is going to remain very high. This aligns with what we are seeing on the ground as omicron is resulting in very few hospitalizations and deaths. To reinforce this, T cell data was released examining how well they should recognize omicron. TL;DR, the T cell epitopes are largely conserved. T cells recognize more of the protein than B cells/antibodies, so it makes sense that they should be harder for the variants to escape. This will allow our immune systems to rapidly recognize, respond, and adapt to this variant.

Along the same lines, why does a US citizen need a negative test to reenter the country if they are fully vaxxed AND boosted? The policies are way out of line.

I found a local farm that raises wagyu cattle. I picked up this tritip roast the other day. It did not suck.

When I see people discussing vaccination vs natural immunity, I often feel like people are treating the argument like a sporting event or a race. I believe the entire argument should be reframed. We don’t need to know which one is better, we need to know if they are adequate, and at this point we can conclusively say that both are adequate and are roughly equivalent for our end goals. We know the vaccines are generating good long-term immunity. We see that with the clinical, immune response, and booster studies. Natural immunity is producing similar results, but like the vaccines, it isn't some magic shield that will protect you from getting COVID forever. I'm certain we will see reinfections in recovered individuals as well because antibody response/immunity wanes after an infection is cleared just like after vaccination. And I think natural immunity is a lot harder to study clinically, because enrollment of applicable patient groups, selecting controls, etc is much more challenging compared to designing the same studies looking at vaccine efficacy. As such we don't have the same data that shows reinfection rate vs time from recovery like we do with the vaccines, and that might be muddling the message some. The example I like to give is to pretend there are two firing squads. In one firing squad you put 12 soldiers on the firing line, and in the second you put ten. Are the outcomes appreciably different? This is closer to the reality of the differences between vaccinated and natural immunity. Why our public health officials don’t recognize natural immunity is beyond me. The data is there to support that decision, and several other countries around the world are doing so. In the European Union, for example, their COVID digital certificate allows for travel and access to public places and it can be obtained from infection recovery. At the very least, people in this category should only be required to receive one mRNA shot as there has been almost no documented benefit from getting a second shot that close after the first when recovered from infection. And again, many countries around the world have adopted this policy. I think we should too, especially now that people's jobs are on the line and we are already facing significant labor and supply chain issues. With all that being said, if you haven't had the infection and are left with the choice of the vaccine or infection, the choice clearly favors vaccination. The small added benefit from natural immunity is not worth the substantially increased risk and unknown long term effects of the actual infection.

What's not clear? Serious question.

There are actually 4 targets in the Thermofisher kit which is used by a large number of labs in the US and Europe. The PCR amplifies separate targets in the ORF1ab, S, and N genes, along with a control (MS2). https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/clinical/clinical-genomics/pathogen-detection-solutions/covid-19-sars-cov-2/multiplex.html?SID=fr-taqpath-2 The S gene drops because of a deletion in the region targeted by the TaqMan probe that coincidentally was also in the UK (alpha) variant. The N and ORF1ab targets are conserved and therefore will amplify when omicron is present.

FYI: the S gene PCR is never run in isolation. The N gene is the major target of every assay I can think of, including the CDC and WHO tests, and those targets are conserved among all the variants seen thus far. I don't worry very much about false negatives from mutations at this point, and PCR is still far more accurate than the antigen tests.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/covid-test-false-positive-failure-cdc-documents Buzzfeed is normally trash, but this article is by far the most comprehensive and accurate description of the testing disaster in early 2020. Really good read.

welandedonthemoon.jpg

God damn it. Pos rep.

Did he get it from you?

New rock bottom? Losing to a 1-8 Kansas a home.....Jesus Christ.

The zoomed in picture is not reliable. That is my take away.

This is so painful.

The reporting on this story reinforces the polling regarding the trust in media: https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-dips-second-lowest-record.aspx

I've heard the recovery from TURP is not fun. I'm glad you are already getting relief. Were you having trouble sleeping through the night? If so hopefully the procedure will give you relief from that as well.