#covid vaccines

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive (Daily updates!)

At a Glance ~Researchers found that current COVID-19 vaccines fail to generate mature and durable antibody-producing cells in the bone marrow. ~The findings could help explain why protection tends to decline over time. ~Better understanding of long-term immune responses could lead to improved vaccines that provide enduring protection.

Some vaccines offer long-lasting protection. For instance, the tetanus vaccine provides protection for at least 10 years. With other vaccines, protection may begin to decline within a few months. To provide enduring immunity, a vaccine must elicit production of long-lived plasma cells, a type of immune cell that matures over time in the bone marrow and can rapidly trigger production of disease-fighting antibodies.

The mRNA vaccines developed for the SARS-CoV-2 virus have proven effective at preventing severe COVID-19 and reducing hospitalizations. These vaccines trigger production of antibodies that home in on the virus’s spike protein. But protective antibodies can begin to fade as soon as three months later and lead to breakthrough infections. Researchers have been puzzled by this waning protection, since SARS-CoV-2-specific immune cells can often be found in the bone marrow.

To better understand why protection against SARS-CoV-2 dwindles months after vaccination, a research team led by Dr. F. Eun-Hyung Lee of Emory University took a closer look at immune cells in the bone marrow of 19 healthy adults. Participants ranged in age from 20 to 65. All had previously received between two and five doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Samples of their bone marrow were evaluated within 33 months after receiving their initial COVID-19 vaccine shot.

The participants had also received an influenza vaccine within a year of giving their bone marrow samples. And all had previously received tetanus shots and boosters. Their responses to these previous vaccines were used for comparison.

The researchers used a cell-sorting technique called flow cytometry to separate each participant’s bone marrow immune cells into different groupings. These included short-lived antibody-secreting cells and long-lived plasma cells that confer lasting protection. Results appeared in Nature Medicine on September 27, 2024.

The scientists found that they could readily detect long-lived plasma cells that target tetanus and influenza. In contrast, while shorter-lived antibody-secreting cells specific to SARS-CoV-2 were abundant, long-lived ones were mostly absent. Even among five participants who had recent SARS-CoV-2 infections and vaccinations, long-lived plasma cells against the virus were scarce in the bone marrow samples.

The findings hint that newly created antibody-secreting cells against SARS-CoV-2 are unable to become fully mature and long-lasting once they reach and settle into the bone marrow. In contrast, vaccines against tetanus and influenza prompt antibody-producing cells to mature within bone marrow and become long-lived plasma cells. Future studies will need to investigate how to generate long-lived plasma cells against SARS-CoV-2.

“The holy grail of vaccine researchers is the generation of long-lived plasma cells,” Lee says. “Our findings demonstrate that current SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines do not provide such long-lasting protection within bone marrow. Further research is needed to determine if updated vaccines, new delivery schedules, or other factors might provide such protection.”

—by Vicki Contie

[culturevulturette]

This was always the claim. Don't let them gaslight you.

[long-anti-covid]

article date: July 26, 2024

"Historically, when we're talking about COVID vaccines, we're talking about boosters that would happen at some time post your previous vaccine," said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital and an ABC News contributor. "Now we're targeting annual vaccines for COVID-19 that is similar to flu. It's a reformulation based on what's circulating, and this is why we're talking about an annual campaign rather than a booster," he continued.

[pandemic-info]

News on Fall Boosters

(I focus on Novavax for reasons previously discussed on this blog, searchable via its tag.)

June 14, 2024 - Novavax Submits Application to U.S. FDA for Updated Protein-based 2024-2025 Formula COVID-19 Vaccine

Novavax's JN.1 vaccine has demonstrated broad cross-neutralizing antibodies against multiple variant strains, including KP.2 and KP.3, indicating the potential to protect against forward drift variants.

June 27, 2024 - U.S. CDC & ACIP Recommend Use of Authorized and Approved 2024-2025 COVID-19 Vaccines

Today the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted unanimously in favor of a universal recommendation for the use of 2024-2025 COVID-19 vaccines ... Novavax intends to provide doses of our 2024-2025 COVID-19 vaccine at the start of the vaccination season and upon EUA by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Aug. 14, 2024 - COVID is surging again. Here’s the latest on new variants, updated vaccines, and masking

Novavax, an American biotechnology company, had already developed a JN.1-targeted vaccine and the company said it wouldn’t have time to change the formulation before the fall. Novavax’s vaccine is the only protein-based COVID-19 vaccine

[I disagree with Mark Sawyer, MD's quote in the article that “It’s important to have Novavax as an option because some people are still concerned about mRNA”. I in particular have no issue with "mRNA tech", have taken it, and am familiar with it due to having worked on some of the earliest science-journalistic reporting about it. Many choose Novavax for other reasons, again, discussed previously / elswhere, and will continue to as long as it confers equal or better protection vs mRNA options.]

Is it time to wear a mask again? ... Sawyer also recommends masking while traveling or in high-risk situations.“ If you’re in a community where the virus is surging, as so many people are, it is smart to wear a mask if you’re in indoor, crowded conditions,” he says.

[*For some of us it isn't "again"; we didn't stop in any situation where it was "smart" to.]

Despite COVID not being a seasonal illness, new vaccines are still being offered on a seasonal schedule. Updated boosters are again expected in September.

[montmorillionite]

I went to go get my flu shot and COVID booster today, and successfully got my flu shot.

I'm between insurance at the moment and do you want to know what the COVID booster costs without insurance? $200. Fucking ridiculous. I'm lucky that I get insurance through my job in a couple weeks so I can wait till then but holy fuck. I really feel and worry for anyone who isn't insured at the moment.

[theculturedmarxist]

There have been many scandals associated with covid in the last nearly 4 years.

I want to tell you about another one that has got zero media coverage.

The top-line is this: the UK government gave more than 2.3 million vulnerable and older people a covid vaccine that isn’t matched to the currently dominant covid strains. And they did it to save money.

The dominant covid strains right now are known as the XBBs. They have been dominant since late summer in most places, when they took over from the BA strains of omicron.

But rather than give people the new more effective XBB vaccine, the British government decided to use up their stockpile of the older BA vaccines first.

The worst thing is, those who got the outdated vaccine were those first in line for vaccines, such as older people and people with health conditions.

But they won’t know this.

So 2.3 million vulnerable people in the UK are walking around thinking they are well-protected this winter against covid when they’re not.

The British government didn’t hide why it did this. On the official government webpage it spells it out. In bold are the clues hiding in plain sight.

“The choice of vaccine products for autumn 2023 has been determined based on available data on vaccine safety, effectiveness and immunogenicity, logistical factors, programmatic deliverability and a bespoke cost effective assessment. Other vaccines which may offer similar protection, but which would incur additional costs, are expected to be less cost effective within the bespoke cost-effectiveness assessment compared to pre-procured Omicron-variant mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.”

What they are saying, under the cover of the gross language of ‘bespoke cost effectiveness assessment,’ is that they’d already bought the older vaccines and it was cheaper to use them than buy extra new ones.

They used people’s bodies as asset dumps for old medical stock.

In the UK the booster roll-out began on September 11th. We know that in Scotland they switched over to XBB on September 25th and in England and Wales they switched to the new ones on October 2nd, as confirmed that day by Meaghan Kall, an epidemiologist at the UK’s health security agency responsible for covid.

But by September 29th the British government reported 2.35 million people had been covid boosted. So we know this was largely with the old vaccine (save 4 days in Scotland). In response to my thread on Twitter, many reported receiving the old vaccine. Even now, people are saying they’re still only being offered the old vaccine.

Boosting people with a vaccine not matched to the dominant strains will certainly lead to worse outcomes as an average than if these people had received the updated vaccine. People will die for this penny pinching.

But then the British government has for some time now been relaxed about killing people for austerity.

The Brits are also tightly restricting access to covid vaccines, in contrast to almost every other country. And in a final twist, the Brits are now stockpiling the new XBB vaccines and are almost certainly going to take the same approach to deploying an outdated vaccine next time round.

When I tweeted about this, the Guardian journalist George Monbiot responded and we subsequently exchanged emails. Monbiot did then write a very good column about the ongoing burden of covid in the UK and the various public health failures.

But the article omitted any mention of the millions who were given the older vaccine.

I can’t criticise Monbiot. I wouldn’t be surprised if he included this and it was cut by his editors. And his article stands head and shoulders above almost any other reporting of covid in the mass media, a mass media that has played a key part in normalising the transmission of a virus that has become the leading cause of infectious disease death in the world today.

These lies and misinformation about covid in the mass media continue. Last week was no exception.

The BBC’s health editor Nick Triggle wrote a truly noxious covid story full of half-truths, lies by omission and propaganda. He said covid was less deadly than the flu, that it is becoming a seasonal ‘bug’, that people who were concerned about rising hospitalisations were just anxious. (Nick Triggle’s sister-in-law is a Tory member of parliament, which might explain some things).

In the US, the New York Times interviewed the epidemiologist and long-time covid downplayer Michael Mina who said rates of long covid are drastically falling - without citing a shred of evidence - and said repeated exposure to covid for most people will not be harmful and will build immunity. In the comments below the piece, one person said the “excellent story begs the question as to whether healthy people should take any precautions against covid.” Job done.

Then there was the ‘long cold’ research paper which was amplified across global media.

If you missed it, the thrust was that long colds might be as common as long covid. So far, so fine.

But the findings were stripped of critical context in relation to covid.

It failed to acknowledge that even if long colds do exist, and almost certainly they do, Sars-Cov-2 is a different beast, behaving in a completely different way to other common cold-causing coronaviruses.

And rather than the conclusion here being ‘ok, so if long colds are this common, long covid might be very common too and maybe we should do something about it,’ the stories led us towards the conclusion that long covid itself is nothing to worry about because post-viral illness is nothing new.

All of this would have been bad enough without mentioning the methodology.

The study was conducted in 2020-2021 and relied on people self reporting a respiratory illness that they said wasn’t covid. We know for a fact that far fewer people got a respiratory illness that wasn’t covid in these years, so I expect a good number of these ‘not covids’ leading to ‘long colds’ were, in fact, covids leading to long covid. But again, the media stories failed to provide any of this context. Nick Triggle was one of those who wrote a story.

Triggled twice in two weeks.

Over and over, it seems that those who are concerned about covid come armed with data, and those who aren’t come armed with gut feeling in order to keep business-as-usual ticking over.

It’s 2019 again! Stop worrying!

Normalisation is the most powerful sociological force in the world today. Through a captured media, the ruling class can make us absorb a pandemic, accept climate collapse and shrug at apartheid. Change is unnecessary because nothing is wrong. It is just the natural order, flowing.

We also found out this week that just 2% of Americans have stepped up for the new covid jab, a rate of uptake that can be traced back to the early over-hyping of vaccines and the manufacturing of a narrative that says covid is mild and we’ve all achieved immunity now anyway.

I didn’t know where we’d be nearly four years on from the start of the pandemic, but I didn’t think we’d be here. New waves, millions being infected, thousands dying every week. And a media and public knowledge blackout of Novavax, the most effective vaccine. A vaccine we’ve known is the most effective for over two years.

It is tiring to keep up, to keep bearing witness to these fuck-ups, to this cruelty.

But we have to.

Because to believe in change means documenting the incompetence, the failure, the lies and the indifference that eventually compels that change to come.

[nowstomorrow]

"What about people who had mRNA doses previously but want to consider Novavax? There have been several studies now that found mixing the two, getting mRNA and then Novavax actually gave better results than just mRNA on its own.

One study found that getting Novavax as a booster after mRNA "may enhance the persistence and durability of vaccine-mediated immunity compared to mRNA options" with slower decay rate compared to an mRNA booster dose and less side effects than mRNA boosters.

A randomized controlled trial found that getting a Novavax dose after Pfizer mRNA elicited the highest humoral and peak cellular immune responses.

The mRNA + Novavax combination also had the lowest rate of breakthrough infections and the study also found fewer moderate and severe systemic adverse effects for Novavax than Pfizer mRNA.

Neutralising antibodies against Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 were higher with Novavax after mRNA compared to two mRNA doses."

- sources and graphs at the link:

[vizthedatum]

This is a brief vent and tangential aside about the healthcare hype surrounding naming some of the current trending and contagious COVID-19 variants, the "FLiRT" variants (of course, please stay safe this summer (2024) with COVID-19).

Linking my Substack article about this, which gets updated with corrections

--

Here are some highlights of this post (the TLDR):

- It's a vent about naming the FLiRT COVID-19 variants (a well-known stereotype that scientists like to make acronyms or catchy names).

- It's an explanation of how the naming FLiRT came to be.

- I'm bothered and irked because, in an attempt to distinguish variants, "FLiRT" doesn't. Additionally, it makes light of an ongoing pandemic.

- I really am not critiquing the person or people who came up with the name; I'm more upset about the name (and its playful connotations) catching on in the media and becoming a part of our ever-growing COVID-19 zeitgeist.

- I added some very brief (potentially useful?) insight at the end of my vent about how vaccine development should focus more on KP.2 and KP.3's F456L mutation rather than the JN.1 strain.

[liberty1776]

With people suddenly dropping dead all over the mRNA-vaccinated world, with oncologists reporting massive increases in cancers, turbo-cancers never previously encountered, with studies documenting menstrual and fertility problems with Covid-vaccinated women, with young children having heart attacks, with a new form of blood clots that look like linguine, with outbreaks of Guillain-Barre syndrome and neurological ailments, myocarditis, pericarditis, spinal cord and brain inflammations, and every other kind of health horror, a controlled narrative explanation is needed.  Big Pharma is dealing with the problem by rounding up a collection of its grant-bribed medical researches to admit the problem but to trivialize  it … Continue reading →

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

Melbourne researchers have discovered more than 200 new vaccine target candidates from the COVID-19 virus, SARS-CoV-2, that could lead to the development of vaccines with a longer lasting broader immunity than existing vaccinations.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, research led by Prof Anthony W. Purcell and first-authored by Dr. Asolina Braun from the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, investigates seven proteins of the COVID-19 virus that could become targets for new vaccines.

The initial vaccines designed to combat COVID-19 were targeted against the original Wuhan strain Spike protein. However, while this approach led to the generation of several highly effective, safe vaccines within an astonishingly brief timeframe, it also comes with some limitations, according to Dr. Braun. "The SARS-CoV-2 virus has mutated its Spike protein leading to lower efficacy of current vaccines," she said.

"Also, the original vaccines focused on B cell-mediated antibody responses for developing immunity. We now know that recruiting the other arm of the immune system, the T cells, can help to maintain immunity for longer."

In the study the researchers describe more than 200 SARS-CoV-2-derived peptides that could be targets for new and improved vaccines against COVID-19 and validate that a number of those peptides can trigger T cell responses in convalescent individuals.

Reflecting on this achievement, lead investigator Prof Tony Purcell remarks, "As part of a long term collaboration with Evaxion Biotech, we pivoted and turned our attention to SARS-CoV-2 during the pandemic. Rather than continue the mainstream attention that focused predominantly on the Spike glycoprotein, we turned our attention to other more conserved viral proteins as potential next generation vaccine targets.

"The combination of the Monash team's epitope discovery by immunopeptidomics and protein chemistry, T cell immunology at the Peter Doherty Institute and Evaxion's AI-guided bioinformatics expertise was critical to the development of this paper that highlights the potential of several conserved viral proteins as vaccine candidates."

According to Dr. Braun, COVID-19 still continues to pose a high burden on health systems worldwide, and "this continued burden is mainly caused by the spread of several new variants. Thus, an unmet need remains for the development of novel vaccines able to target several viral strains and confer wide-spread protection in the global population," she said.

"The next generation of vaccines will benefit from eliciting both B-cell and T-cell mediated immunity toward multiple COVID proteins. Our study has uncovered promising candidates for the development of just such vaccines."

More information: Asolina Braun et al, Mapping the immunopeptidome of seven SARS-CoV-2 antigens across common HLA haplotypes, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-51959-6 www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-51959-6

[bernie-buddy]

So the "Florida Surgeon General" just called for a halt in Covid vaccines, citing one (1) paper.

Being skeptical of anything involving Ron DeSantis, I went to actually read the paper.

Just one problem, I don't understand any of this.

If anyone can decipher this paper and make it readable, be my guest:

[uboat53]

You know, I think we're at the point now where Covid-19 vaccine mandates aren't necessary in most places, but places that care for the elderly are most definitely one of the exceptions to that.

Yes, to most people Covid-19's risk is fairly low (though higher than I think we'd be comfortable with if we did the math), but people over 65 are definitely not in that category.

Places like nursing homes and health care facilities that primarily cater to the elderly should still have Covid-19 vaccine mandates (and probably flu vaccine mandates as well). No one wants grandma to die because someone who was supposed to take care of her gave her a deadly virus instead.

[airbrickwall]

[gwydionmisha]

I always ask them to do my left as a matter of course. I now feel lucky.

[theculturedmarxist]

Abstract

Whether SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccines confer exposure-dependent (“leaky”) protection against infection remains unknown. We examined the effect of prior infection, vaccination, and hybrid immunity on infection risk among residents of Connecticut correctional facilities during periods of predominant Omicron and Delta transmission. Residents with cell, cellblock, and no documented exposure to SARS-CoV-2 infected residents were matched by facility and date. During the Omicron period, prior infection, vaccination, and hybrid immunity reduced the infection risk of residents without a documented exposure (HR: 0.36 [0.25–0.54]; 0.57 [0.42–0.78]; 0.24 [0.15–0.39]; respectively) and with cellblock exposures (0.61 [0.49–0.75]; 0.69 [0.58–0.83]; 0.41 [0.31–0.55]; respectively) but not with cell exposures (0.89 [0.58–1.35]; 0.96 [0.64–1.46]; 0.80 [0.46–1.39]; respectively). Associations were similar during the Delta period and when analyses were restricted to tested residents. Although associations may not have been thoroughly adjusted due to dataset limitations, the findings suggest that prior infection and vaccination may be leaky, highlighting the potential benefits of pairing vaccination with non-pharmaceutical interventions in crowded settings.