It is happening again:
Too late. The overreaction is well underway.
Just heard this morning on the radio that all travelers over the age of 2 will need a negative covid test 24 hours prior to flying into the US. But on the plus side that’s not necessarily 24 hours from arrival time, it’s 24 hours from departure.
But this does not pertain to those driving or walking into the country.
It’s simple, all transport workers need to be fully vaccinated (3 shots of mRNA vaccine) and get a booster shot every six months for the next decade until Covid is finally under control.
Covid is going to continue to be a major problem disrupting the economy for many years to come. Especially in the Third World, including certain US States. The US will be the last major economy to recover from Covid.
Omicron evades the available vaccines.
More to the point, what will be required for entry into the US by ship?
Just to clarify, it’s not 24 hours. It is one day. As in calender day. Take a test on Tuesday to fly on Wednesday. Per the CDC site.
There’s no way to know that yet. They’re are too few confirmed cases for a real world analysis and scientists haven’t had time to grow it in a lab to test it against existing antibodies yet.
We won’t be a major economy by the time it’s over, we will be a 2nd rate autocracy.
There are over 30 mutations to the spike protein. We can’t know the sun is going to rise tomorrow yet, but we can make a hell of a guess.
At BEST you can say “there’s a decent chance that the vaccine will be less effective”. But that’s not what you said, you made a definitive statement that it “evades the available vaccines” without even preliminary data to back up your claim.
The preliminary data is in the mutations to the spike protein. A previously engineered study with 20 mutations evaded the vaccine.
You can say ‘Maybe the vaccines will still be effective!’ but you’re the one reaching, not me.
At the beginning of this we all knew to expect mutations evading the vaccines unless we managed to vaccinate it into outright extinction overnight (pipe dream). It’s a brand new virus in humans, with lots of room to adapt and evolve. I think some hubris crept in when the vaccines worked so well against the original virus.
What exactly do you mean by “evaded the vaccine”?
Those crafty little Omicron viruses hide behind red blood cells when they see a vaccine induced antibody approaching, blocking it’s way to the lungs
PS> You are aware that Corona viruses have now been found to have a mind of their own according to the media?
Vaccine induced antibodies didn’t recognize the virus because of the extensive mutations to the spike protein.
All of the currently available vaccines with the exception of Sinovac train your body to respond to the spike protein. If the spike protein changes too much, that response is ineffective and can even be harmful. Luckily, the antibody levels drop much faster than people were hoping, so that’s unlikely to be an issue.
There is some question of ‘Well, the vaccines prevent severe disease’ because they prevent your bodies immune overreaction and subsequent cytokine storm. That’s not impossible but the data on that is extremely limited. When people say ‘still effective against severe disease’ they don’t realize how small those numbers are and how difficult it is to get that data. So they’re basically working off manufacturer claims, and those are always suspect.
Since natural infection trains your immune system against all the components of the virus mutations to the spike protein are unlikely to render the immune response ineffective. Ideally, Omicron will cause mild disease, spread rapidly, and whoever gets to decide can arbitrarily call this over.
Delta had 13 to 17 mutations to the spike protein and if you look at cases it’s glaringly obvious that the available vaccines were not effective against it, despite claims to the contrary.
Why people want to claim that the Alpha variant vaccines are going to be effective against Omicron is beyond me. It’s public health, we’re not rooting for sports teams here.
Obviously. What I’m trying to clarify is do you think it will mean that Omicron will 100% escape vaccine antibodies?
To the contrary, while it’s too soon to tell for certain, it appears that the mRNA vaccines do protect effectively against the Omicron Variant.
It also appears that Omicron is a fairly mild version of Covid, even though it is more transmissible.
Although the Northeastern states have done very well against Covid, and have fairly high vax rates, cases are surging again after Thanksgiving travel.
Meanwhile in Alaska, the vax rate is only 52%, but the case rate has dropped in half from about a month ago.
I would have to see some sort of mechanism of action where it wouldn’t to think otherwise.
There are very good reasons why you don’t want antibodies against a particular strain of a coronavirus floating around in your body for long periods of time. What’s yet to be determined isn’t that Omicron will evade Alpha vaccine antibodies but how the vaccinated immune system will respond to it.
Hopefully that won’t be a concern.
[quote=“MAK, post:18, topic:61602”]
Well, the educated guess of people who know this topic will was that there would be at least some effectiveness of the original vaccine against new variants. The data that has now come out, from two different labs, say is true.
From WAPO yesterday re: effectiveness of vaccine against omicron:
As expected, virus-blocking antibodies generated by two shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine dropped steeply in the face of omicron’s many mutations. But building a higher wall of immune protection appeared to restore protective levels of antibodies…
“With omicron, with these data over the past 24 hours, I’d say it’s unequivocal that boosting for the winter is important,” said Shane Crotty, an immunologist at La Jolla Institute for Immunology who was not involved in the studies released this week. “For the general public, the good news is the boosters are going to work, full stop.”
…But such research…does not predict, necessarily, how the virus will spread in the general population…Differences in the experiments and the blood samples being tested mean the public is on the cusp of being deluged with a host of confusing data points…