Submitted by MyLifeisAsaJoker t3_yg6seo in science
What does this even mean?
The title sounds like omicron is genetically different enough from the original strain that antibodies trained to kill covid can’t kill it as efficiently
It means that the original vaccines are useless, but you should still get them to reduce the risk of severe covid symptoms, even if the vaccines don’t work on the new variants. And also, get all four boosters that may or may not be effective against new strains of covid, even though they might not work. Is that clear?
They are not useless. Like you said, the old vaccines are still effective at reducing risk of severe illness.
The clinical trials proved that the boosters are effective as well
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But wouldn't they be counterproductive to use now, if there's immunological imprinting? You would imprint your immune system to be biased towards suboptimal response, which compared to if you used the new vaccine you would get the currently most optimal response, which would imply consequences for many years to come if first times your immune system sees the virus have more weight on what kind of memory the immune system will have?
It could only be beneficial if Wuhan variant was to come back, but it might never because it was so far out of optimal spread and since so many people's immune system is imprinted to be specifically against the Wuhan variant.
Sounds like if you wanted to bias your immune system correctly, even an infection with current variant would be better since it would more likely bias your immune system correctly.
If you bias your immune system incorrectly it will have more trouble responding to any new instances of the infection that is closer to achieving full potential than immune system more accurately biased.
In addition I wonder if it would be better if people were imprinted with different types of vaccines, to avoid making it too easy for the virus to mutate into a combination of mutations that can bypass a single type of immunity of the whole population. You could work out 10 different types of most popular variations and randomly assign this to people for virus to have harder time getting into the optimal state to bypass everyone's immunological imprinting.
Are the original vaccines better than no vaccine against omicron? Absolutely. Studies have proven it's better than nothing.
What about considering immune imprinting? Although likely matters less now since most everyone, even unvaccinated have likely had their first imprint already. But how would imprinting specifically work? Would it be something like 50 percent weight on the first one, 25 on the 2nd etc, then it seems like it could still matter.
>The many, distinct mutations in their infection machinery have enabled them to escape from antibodies elicited from the original series of vaccines
You are correct, I missed the part about the original vaccines still being effective, my bad.
Assuming you bring this up in good faith, I will respond in kind. There is more to autoimmune response than antibodies alone. While antibodies are one powerful strategy for the body to incapacitate pathogens, there are things such as T cell response which are also "trained" by immunization in general. So pointing out antibodies as being less effective isn't enough to discount the effectiveness of any one vaccine.
Not looking to debate, just pointing out there are nuances to complex topics such as immunology. And that even extends to politics, news, history, and well, just about every aspect of life.
Everyone is just doing their best to get through the short and confusing life we each get to live. And the present moment is more confusing than ever, with so much information available at any given moment. Which is why it would be great to be able to rely on the consensus of experts in their respective fields.
But trust in our institutions is wavering. How can we trust people we don't know? I try to think about when I take a trip to the grocery store, I don't wish harm on the stranger next to me choosing a can of chilli off the shelf. So why should I assume that people in academia are any different?
But people can have good intentions and still be swayed by money or coercion. So maybe all the experts are being paid off or threatened? When I think of that, I think about how complex that would be to pull off. First you have to assume that every national government is working together on this since academia spans world wide. And we can't get all our governments to agree on simple things.
You'd also have to get people to all agree from all areas of the world, from all walks of life, to sully the field they spent many years of their lives working hard to be a part of. But in a world where journalism celebrates gotcha articles, you'd imagine a good number of scientists would grab their real data and publish it. And then people could verify it and they'd be lauded as a hero.
The simpler answer, I think, is that instead of a conspiracy to pay off all experts and keep everything hush, hush they are just doing their 9 to 5 like you and I probably both do.
But what if they are just wrong? Well to that I'd say you can bring that up to just about anything. The point is we make our best guess with our current body of knowledge. Some things we can have a lot of confidence in. But in most cases the safest answer at any given time is what the consensus of current experts agree upon. And yes that has resulted in mistakes in the past, but there is a reason we can look back on them as mistakes. The reason we don't put leeches on sick patients for all sorts of ailments is because we learned better and moved on.
Vaccines and immunology have been around for quite some time now. Enough time for us to move past the leeches stage. But even if not, even if we are doing the equivalent of blood letting, or some other archaic practice to handle this pandemic, it's our current best guess. And keep in mind that our current best guesses in all sorts of fields working together have resulted in a super computer in your pocket or hand, judging by the standards of just a few years ago, historically speaking.
Anyways, I wish you best of luck in your endeavors! Take care.
The original, not updated, mRNA vaccines are 60% effective at preventing infection with the omicron strain. And 95+% effective at preventing serious disease.
And as this linked article says about this study,
> Through their experiments, the scientists learned that vaccine boosters and hybrid immunity (acquired through a history of an infection and vaccination) both induce neutralizing antibodies in the bloodstream against Omicron BA.1, BA.2, BA.2.12.1 and BA.4/5.
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