mRNA tech is proving to be the best vaccine tech ever...right? Well, maybe not. What we are seeing over and over is the most highly vaccinated populations are seeing huge increases in infections.
The silver lining is that mortality is not following suit on a 1 to 1 basis, reducing overall suffering in families and communities considerably, and that is something to be grateful for.
Dr. John Campbell out of the UK again. Here he looks at the curious case of Gibraltar, followed by a look at Europe, experiencing a surge in cases and somewhat higher mortality as well.
He also raises a question for mRNA capacity for prolonged immunity via memory T cells, and the bad news here is it seems to be less effective than more conventional vaccine tech. These kind of questions are not resolved in competing press releases, or even in competing trials conducted by manufacturers, but one of Dr. Campbell's many good qualities is his apparent immunity to PR :)
In terms of the Omicrom variant we are still waiting to see if it belongs to the class of variants that appear toward the end of a pandemic where infectiousness is higher but mortality lower. That of course would be better than higher rates of both, so let's hope that is the case.
We still don't know what to make of the Omicron "50 mutations" part of the story. Last night I saw that Sinovac, the Chinese vaccine, was derived from a whole virus, a conventional approach to vaccine design, and is potentially effective against 20 mutations. Humm. Well here we have to wonder if conventional tried and tested tech will be more effective against Omicrom.
No comments:
Post a Comment