It's going to be interesting how they manage the booster shots project. Variants can come to light at any time.
Work to target a vaccine on a particular feature of the variant can only commence once the variant has come to light and after sufficient time has passed to characterise the behaviour and structure of the variant.
And even once a variant has been found and characterised, it will take time to modify a vaccine to suit it, then it will take a period to synthesize the new vaccine and another period to trial the new vaccines to ensure they work. Even then, other delays occur, manufacture, approvals, roll outs. It will be necessary to do a lot of redundant parallel planning and development. It's going to cost a lot.
With all these random occurrences, dependencies and variable delays and costs, it's going to be tricky to optimise the booster shots project. They are going to go through a lot of white board space to crystalise all these plans. There is a lot hanging on the booster shots project, the work done so far will feed into it, there is little margin for error, but it will be a miracle if it all works out optimally. Project management is a hard life.
It just going to be like the annual flu shot. Low to moderate efficacy with whole age groups showing little or no positive health effect. Like old people. The annual flu shot is considered a huge success if the efficacy gets above 40% in a particular year. Usually its closer to 20%.
The big difference is that there is a very real health benefit to younger people from the flu shot. Influenza is a real morality risk for under 55's. There are no health benefits with current and any future SARs CoV 2 vaccines for the under 55's. The SARs CoV 2 vaccines serious adverse effect morality rate is around 70x (so far) that of influenza vaccines and although mostly very old sick people are dying enough younger people die to make the under 55 risk / benefit cost very negative with the SARs CoV 2 vaccines.
So an annual high risk vaccine for a endemic infectious diseases that only kills a very narrow cohort of sick and frail people at the rate they normally die and is of little or no serious health risk to the rest of the population.
Thats a good a definition of public health policy insanity if there ever was one.
It seems you are wrong on the flu deaths by age assertion. Older age groups are much more impacted. Look at the data referenced below.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/970800/influenza-deaths-by-age-and-gender-england-wales/
In asserting that covid vaccination has no benefit to under 55's you must want herd immunity to be achieved by natural infection, so maximising the numbers of deaths, delaying the achievement of herd immunity, maximising the chance of new problematic variants. Along side that there would be more deaths, and a longer period of restrictions. Surely this is not in your interest!
On the nature of a targeted booster shot, it is likely to be the most successfully targeted one possible. The efforts made and focus on the virus mutations are far beyond what has gone before with Flu.
Oxford/Johnson *if* anyone is still using them in a years time will likely see annual.
Have they resolved the problem of acquired immunity to the viral vector for adenovirus vectored vaccines?
Or do they intend to use a different adenovirus as the vector for each booster (which would surely require a full clinical trial)?
According to Mike Yeadon this is all a big con. The smallest variance so far has been 0.3% and the immune systems of those who had the original Sars, which was 80% the same (so 20% different), can recognise Sars-Cov 2. They are already planning the new vaccines.
Well, I don't know Mike Yeadon, but he has a lot to say. He might be great, I'd never heard of him a year ago. But I don't usually malign people gratuitously, so I'll give Dr Yeadon the benefit of he doubt for a bit.
A virus is a logical mechanism like a clock, that can be studied and understood. It will have components that exactly suit the task they must perform, which cannot be modified much without spoiling the whole effect. And there are other components where some margin exists in the exact form, which can be modified slightly without breaking the whole function and which may even be changed in ways to enhance the effect, and which also disguise the salient feature. So all these variants would have to manage, with trial and error and by probing nature, to find a variation of the latter type.
That's a long winded way to get to the Spike protein, which is its grappling hook, which is likely to be a very critical form since it plays such a vital role in the virus' survival cycle. If this is modified too much, it won't be much of a hook, you can't really change hooks that much before they become stumps or blobs which would be useless.
So it might have been wise to target vaccines at the spike, since it is such an obvious salient feature that the virus can only alter in limited ways.
Nonetheless, we're talking about large proteins with many atoms arranged in a vast permutation space, so perhaps some changes to the spike are viable and which serve to disguise at the same time. It's hard to know what the odds of that are, but Yeadon seems to think viable alterations which serve to also disguise might be rare. I hope he's right. Is it a lot to ask of a mutation. Imagine if we asked a person to do that; change your appearance so even your own workmates don't recognise you, and do it all in one step and do your old job better than you did before...you can see how hard it would be.
It's a big ask. professor adam finn seems to think so too.
https://www.countytimes.co.uk/news/19240850.indian-covid-variant-wont-put-us-back-square-one/
In any case, I wonder if it is possible to predict, with a machine learning algorithm, what mutation might occur in the spike which both enhance and disguise the protein. I hope somewhere there are some clever people working on that.
This has just been a way for pharmaceuticals companies to open up a huge adult market. e huge sums of money. Skip the vaccine or your life will be regulated until you die.
That's one theory, but there is another theory. For example the AZ Oxford vaccine is sold at cost, no profit. I read some simple calculations today that suggest that if a person over 60 catches covid19, there is a ~ 1 in 200 chance they'll die. But if they are fully vaccinated, the chance is 1 in a million. So it protects the elderly very well, less important, the younger you are.
So in the longer term, it will be an annual shot like flu.
We don't know enough about the new variant threat to judge. But it has to be a possibility that travel restrictions will stay for years, if only to enable all other sectors to operate freely.
Why do you want that insanity?!
You want to permanently deprive people of their leisure, relaxation and a huge number of people of their livelihood just so some people can go to the theatre?!
This isn't an either or decision. This isnt a super infectious virus. Its not a super deadly virus. And with vaccination even those susceptible aren't going to get seriously sick from it (yes even variants. T-cell responses).
Variants are going to happen whether there's travel or not. The UK gets 7000+ trucks to/from mainland Europe per day on its own without everything else.
Variants will also emerge locally as a result of selection pressure.
You really need to get out of the mindset that the only "solution" is to hide behind the sofa for a few years and hope the problem goes away.
Unless you want to go back to living in the 1800s where nobody went more than a few miles from home its time to abandon that insanity and get on with life. Let people live with the risk they're personally prepared to accept for whatever it is they want to do.
