We identified a total of 65 studies from 19 different countries. Our meta-analyses showed that protection from past infection and any symptomatic disease was high for ancestral, alpha, beta, and delta variants, but was substantially lower for the omicron BA.1 variant. Pooled effectiveness against re-infection by the omicron BA.1 variant was 45·3% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 17·3–76·1) and 44·0% (26·5–65·0) against omicron BA.1 symptomatic disease. Mean pooled effectiveness was greater than 78% against severe disease (hospitalisation and death) for all variants, including omicron BA.1. Protection from re-infection from ancestral, alpha, and delta variants declined over time but remained at 78·6% (49·8–93·6) at 40 weeks. Protection against re-infection by the omicron BA.1 variant declined more rapidly and was estimated at 36·1% (24·4–51·3) at 40 weeks. On the other hand, protection against severe disease remained high for all variants, with 90·2% (69·7–97·5) for ancestral, alpha, and delta variants, and 88·9% (84·7–90·9) for omicron BA.1 at 40 weeks.
Interpretation
Protection from past infection against re-infection from pre-omicron variants was very high and remained high even after 40 weeks. Protection was substantially lower for the omicron BA.1 variant and declined more rapidly over time than protection against previous variants. Protection from severe disease was high for all variants. The immunity conferred by past infection should be weighed alongside protection from vaccination when assessing future disease burden from COVID-19, providing guidance on when individuals should be vaccinated, and designing policies that mandate vaccination for workers or restrict access, on the basis of immune status, to settings where the risk of transmission is high, such as travel and high-occupancy indoor settings.

Natural immunity acquired from a Covid infection may protect as well against severe illness as vaccines, according to science.

Immunity acquired from a Covid infection is as protective as vaccination against severe illness and death, study finds

The immunity generated from an infection was found to be “at least as high, if not higher” than that provided by two doses of an mRNA vaccine. //

Immunity acquired from a Covid infection is as protective as vaccination against severe illness and death, study finds

The immunity generated from an infection was found to be “at least as high, if not higher” than that provided by two doses of an mRNA vaccine.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)02465-5/fulltext

Without wastewater sampling, the eradicated virus could have easily spread.

An eradicated form of wild polio surfaced in routine wastewater monitoring in the Netherlands last year, offering a cautionary tale on the importance of monitoring for the tenacious virus, researchers report this week in the journal Eurosurveilance.

The sewage sample came up positive for infectious poliovirus in mid-November and genome sequencing revealed a strain of wild poliovirus type 3, which was declared globally eradicated in 2019. Its potential revival would be a devastating setback in the decades-long effort to stamp out highly infectious and potentially paralytic germ for good. //

For brief background, there are three types of wild polioviruses: type 2 and type 3 have been eradicated, with the former being knocked out in 2015. Wild poliovirus type 1 continues to circulate in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are also occasional vaccine-derived polioviruses that circulate in communities with low vaccination rates, which recently occurred in New York.

The positive wastewater sample last year was the first and only indication of a polio infection with the bygone strain in the Netherlands. It occurred in an employee of a vaccine production facility run by Bilthoven Biologicals, which makes inactivated polio vaccines. The Netherlands had set up routine wastewater surveillance around the production site to monitor for such a viral escape. //

reviewer1 Smack-Fu Master, in training
3y
40
As a brief supplementary primer on poliovirus vaccines, there are two major versions, Salk's inactivated polio vaccine and Sabin's oral polio vaccine. Both of them are incredibly good at protecting against the paralytic disease of poliomyelitis. They are both less than 100% effective at preventing infection and replication of the virus in a vaccinated person's intestinal tract. So they protect the vaccinated person but should not be counted on to build towards herd immunity because they don't prevent someone from getting infected, making a few million new copies of the virus and putting those back into the water supply (or whatever else they touch without washing their hands properly). For more, see: https://www.who.int/teams/health-pr...specifications/vaccines-quality/poliomyelitis

The oral polio vaccine is better at producing a mucosal immune response in the intestines, so it's better at preventing someone from getting meaningfully infected at all. However, the oral polio vaccine uses live attenuated virus. The tricky thing about live virus is that it mutates and, given enough time, those mutations can undo the attenuation mutations and allow it to become more virulent.

So each vaccine has strengths and weaknesses. At this point, I think the most important thing to know is that being vaccinated for poliovirus protects against getting sick, not against getting infected, and infected people can and do shed virus that can infect others. //

FreeRangeOrganicSoyLatteCappuccino Ars Praetorian
2y
2,629
Uncivil Servant said:
Just to be clear, the inactivated vaccine still protects against infection as well as paralytic polio, but the oral attenuated vaccine provides better protection against the initial infection compared to the inactivated vaccine.

There's an important distinction between "the inactivated vaccine is less effective in preventing (non-paralytic) infection compared to the oral attentuated vaccine" and "the inactivated vaccine does not prevent (non-paralytic) infections".

The oral vaccine also has some advantages in terms of storage and transporation in rural areas of developing nations. It's also a lot easier to administer, especially to young children. But yes, it comes with risks. Hopefully soon polio will go the way of smallpox and rinderpest.
Click to expand...The inactivated vaccine (iPV) provides minimal protection against intestinal mucosal infection. So a person vaccinated with iPV is immune from paralytic complications of polio, can still be infected with polio and continuously poop out viral particles. iPV protects the person, not the population.

The oral vaccine (OPV) provides protection against BOTH intestinal mucosal infection and the paralytic complications of polio. However, there is a chance that the OPV mutates and reverts back to an active virus.

Presumably, this vaccine factory worker was working with a lab sample of type 3 polio and got sloppy with technique. That some worker was presumably vaccinated using the iPV which protected them from paralytic polio, but did NOT protect them from getting polio into their gut and replicating/shedding virus.

CKing123 Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
7y
192
mgforbes said:
Does getting both the injected and oral version of the vaccine confer better immunity, or is it a case of when you've had one, the other one doesn't work?
So OPV (Oral Polio Vaccine) provides antibodies in the guts which means you can blunt transmission and provides protection against infection for a few months. IPV (Inactivated Polio Vaccine) only creates antibodies in blood so you can still get infected and shed the virus (you can for OPV after a while too, but you will blunt transmission). However, the antibodies in blood prevent polio from getting to nerves and causing paralysis. However, if you ever have had OPV, you can be given IPV later and it will increase antibodies in the guts once again without requiring you to take OPV again.

How we are born - by Caesarean-section or vaginal delivery - alters how our immune system responds to vaccines, a Scottish and Dutch study suggests.

Babies born vaginally had double the level of protective antibodies produced after childhood vaccines.

The researchers said the difference was caused by the types of good bacteria, which colonise our bodies at birth.

And while C-section babies do get protection, it may need topping up with probiotics or extra vaccines.

Our birth is the moment we emerge from the sterile world of the womb to one teeming with microscopic life.

Microbes - including bacteria, fungi, viruses and archaea - make our bodies home and eventually outnumber our "human" cells.

This hidden half of ourselves is known as the microbiome and one of its roles is training our immune system early in life.

There are two kinds of vaccines against polio. One, given via injection, uses an inactivated virus and is known as IPV. The other is an oral vaccine, using a weakened but not fully inactivated strain, and is known as OPV. OPV, the original polio vaccine you might remember getting if you’re of a certain age, was widely used in America for decades. It is cheap, easy for anyone to administer, and provides strong protection against the virus. However, since it was not inactivated, it could cause paralytic polio in some recipients and was not safe to administer to the immune-compromised nor their close contacts. Due to these problems, America, like most Western nations, transitioned to the safer, inactivated IPV vaccine injection decades ago.

As our overworked fact-checkers are learning to their unease, it turns out there’s another big problem with the OPV vaccine: vaccine-derived polioviruses. When immunodeficient people are exposed to the weakened OPV version of the disease, the virus can stay in their gut for years, slowly mutating into new strands, which can then emerge and spread to infect others.

The good news? If your children have been vaccinated against polio with IPV, they are safe from any scary polio symptoms even when the oral-vaccine-derived variants show up in your town. A frightening reemergence of polio is unlikely in America as long as traditional childhood vaccination rates hold steady. On the other hand, considering that we are facing a catastrophic loss of trust in the public health community due to a long train of abuses, such as the scary push to inflict unnecessary experimental vaccines on children, we may not be able to count on those traditional vaccination rates holding up for long.

One Seattle morning, Carolina Reid sat in a room with nine other volunteers, each waiting to take part in a clinical trial for a new, experimental malaria vaccine.

Reid's turn came. She put her arm over a cardboard box filled with 200 mosquitoes and covered with a mesh that keeps them in but still lets them bite. "Literally a Chinese food takeout container" is how she remembers it. A scientist then covered her arm with a black cloth, because mosquitoes like to bite at night.

Then the feeding frenzy began.

"My whole forearm swelled and blistered," says Reid. "My family was laughing, asking like, 'why are you subjecting yourself to this?'" And she didn't just do it once. She did it five times.

"We use the mosquitoes like they're 1,000 small flying syringes," explains University of Washington, Seattle physician and scientist Dr. Sean Murphy, lead author on a paper in Science Translational Medicine released on August 24 detailing the vaccine trials.

The insects deliver live malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites that have been genetically modified to not get people sick. The body still makes antibodies against the weakened parasite so it's prepared to fight the real thing. //

He and his colleagues went this route because it is costly and time consuming to develop a formulation of a parasite that can be delivered with a needle. The parasites mature inside mosquitoes so at this proof of concept stage – as early stage trials are called — it makes sense to use them for delivery.

"They went old school with this one," says Dr. Kirsten Lyke, a physician and vaccine researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. "All things old become new again.

The two-dose, protein-subunit vaccine is intended for a primary series, not boosters.

The CDC said the number was revised March 15 due to a “coding logic error,” according to a footnote on the agency’s COVID Data Tracker. Pediatric death counts were not the only ones to be lowered — total deaths were reduced by roughly 70,000.

“An adjustment was made to COVID Data Tracker’s mortality data on March 14 involving the removal of 72,277 — including 416 pediatric deaths — deaths previously reported across 26 states because CDC’s algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related,” Jasmine Reed, a spokesperson for the CDC, told the Washington Examiner. “Working with near real-time data in an emergency is critical to guide decision-making, but may also mean we often have incomplete information when data are first reported.”

According to the CDC’s weekly provisional data, only 921 children have died for reasons “involving COVID-19,” an even lower number than the official data tracker now presents. The provisional data reported by the CDC typically lags by some period of time. //

The CDC has encountered other issues with data reporting before. The agency was criticized in February after The New York Times reported that a large portion of the data being collected by the agency regarding COVID-19 was not being made available to the public. Earlier this year, Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that hospitalization data for kids could also be misleading, as many of the children hospitalized with COVID-19 were there for reasons other than the virus.

Israeli health officials recently reported the country’s first case of polio in over 30 years.

An unvaccinated child, 4, from Jerusalem, contracted the highly transmissible virus, making it the first polio case in Israel since 1988, the Israeli Health Ministry said Sunday. //

Most people infected with poliovirus (about 72 out of 100) are asymptomatic. Approximately 1 out of 4 people with poliovirus infection will develop flu-like symptoms, and about 1 out of 500 infected will develop more serious health effects.

Sewage testing in Jerusalem indicates a potential for many asymptomatic cases. A new vaccine campaign is being implemented. //

The recently reported case was identified in a child who was 3 years and 9 months old and showed symptoms of paralysis, said Oliver Rosenbauer, a spokesman for the WHO.

He said this was an isolated case of a vaccine-derived poliovirus, a mutated form of the virus that can be fostered by the oral vaccine used in many countries and can cause paralysis when spread over a period of time between unvaccinated children.

“It is definitely not a wild poliovirus, imported from Pakistan or Afghanistan,” Mr. Rosenbauer said in an email, referring to the main and most dangerous form of the virus. “That we know for certain. But more needs to be found out, in terms of where or how this strain emerged, and whether it is circulating.” //

simpsonson | March 9, 2022 at 8:13 pm
Is it possible that this case (and others potentially) is a result of terrorist biowarfare as payback for Israel making Jerusalem its capital?

Milhouse in reply to bart simpsonson. | March 9, 2022 at 10:33 pm
Very very unlikely. This particular case is a weird variant that seems to have mutated from the oral vaccine. This cannot happen to the injected vaccine, which is why in most first-world countries that is now used instead of the oral one; but in Israel, because of its proximity to areas where polio still exists, both varieties are used — the shot in infancy, and then the oral as a booster in mid-childhood.

In people who had been infected with SARs-CoV-2 and were then vaccinated, the outcome was completely different: All the vaccines provided a major immunological boost against re-infection, and the differences between the mRNA shots and the other ones "began to blur," says John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who was not involved in the study.

Of the five vaccines tested, four produced nearly identical immune reactions. This group included Pfizer's mRNA shot as well a shot made by AstraZeneca, the Sputnik V shot made by the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Russia, and one from Cansino, a Chinese company. A fifth vaccine, CoronaVac, made by Sinovac Biotech in China, was the worst performer, though still protective to some degree. //

The study's point that vaccinating after a case of COVID provides protection against future infections is supported by a newly-published Israeli study. Researchers found that unvaccinated individuals who had recovered from COVID and were then given the Pfizer vaccine had significantly lowered reinfection risks after getting a Pfizer vaccine.

Summing up the two findings, Moore says "The Israeli paper tells you that vaccinating convalescent people has real-world benefits and the Rockefeller paper tells you the vaccine you use [either mRNA or non-mRNA] is inconsequential — you get the benefits from each."

For those hesitant in getting jabbed with the relatively new technology represented by mRNA vaccines, it might be reassuring to know that the old-fashioned way still works. In fact, laboratory studies found that two doses of the Sanofi-GSK vaccine stimulated the production of more neutralizing antibodies than mRNA vaccines already on the market, according to the companies.

The "BioNTainer" is a rather bland looking modular structure, but scientists here say two of these beige, two-storey containers could churn out up to 50 million doses of vaccine a year.

BioNTech intends to provide the containers, raw materials and know-how at no cost.

In return the host country would provide the land and, ensure that local infrastructure such as water and electricity is sufficient and reliable, and find people to work in the container.

So-called "filling and finishing" of the product would also happen in Africa.

The vaccines produced would be for use in the country where it was made or exported to other members of the African Union at a not-for-profit price.

"It's not cheap, we're talking millions" says BioNTech's Chief Operating Officer Sierk Poetting. "We're financing this at our own risk. We've developed this at our own risk. It's our goal to bring this to Africa."

One way (maybe the only way) we’re going to get out of this pandemic is to vaccinate a large portion of the global population. To the WHO, this means reaching 70% of the population by mid-2022, which is ~3 billion unvaccinated people with 6-9 billion doses before another variant of concern.

A diverse portfolio of vaccines that utilizes a number of different biotechnologies is of critical importance. While mRNA vaccines are innovative and effective, they pose logistical storage challenges to reach remote communities. The mRNA pharmaceutical companies are also not sharing their vaccine patent, which doesn’t allow others to manufacture. In addition, a diverse portfolio of vaccines frees up supply bottlenecks, provides options for those allergic to vaccines ingredients, and, among vaccines that use more traditional biotechnologies, will reduce vaccine hesitancy.

Two new vaccines have been added to our global repertoire: NVX-CoV2373 and CORBEVAX. These will be nothing short of game changers for the pandemic. Here is their story and how they work:

NVX-CoV2373

NVX-CoV2373 was created by Novavax, a small pharmaceutical company from Maryland. Before the pandemic they almost lost it all, but made a huge comeback after Operation Warp Speed took a chance on them. (I recommend reading their history over coffee; it’s fascinating). This will be their first vaccine to make it to the market.

Novavax is using a different vaccine biotechnology from other COVID19 vaccines. It contains the coronavirus spike protein combined with an immune-boosting compound from the soapbark tree. Once the immune system encounters the spike protein (which is harmless alone), the body produces antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and thus protect from future infection.//

CORBEVAX

The second game changer vaccine is called CORBEVAX; in fact it’s been dubbed the “The World’s COVID-19 Vaccine.” This work was not led by a big (or small) pharmaceutical company but by two scientists at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine: Drs. Maria Elena Bottazzi and Peter Hotez. The two have been working together on coronavirus vaccines for the past two decades, including the development of a SARS vaccine in 2003. So when the pandemic hit, they were able to quickly pivot to COVID19. They were not funded through Operation Warp Speed. In fact, they had a very difficult time receiving funding from the government so they turned to philanthropic support, including from Tito’s Vodka.

Another brief review of the literature by Kojima and Klausner in The Lancet Infectious Diseases had a different conclusion; “Given the evidence of immunity from previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, however, policy makers should consider recovery from previous SARS-CoV-2 infection equal to immunity from vaccination for purposes related to entry to public events, businesses, and the workplace, or travel requirements.”

Therein lies much of the data and the crux of the debate. Is Prior Covid as good as vaccination and why are people with confirmed Covid getting mandated to be vaccinated? //

Which brings us to hybrid immunity. The vaccine immunity is specific to the spike protein, whereas the immunity from infection is directed to the whole virus, and it is clear they are complementary. Every study, and there are more than 25, that has looked at neutralizing antibodies and memory B and T cells has showed there is additivity of the immune response when a person has both forms of immunity. The Science Magazine succinct review by Shane Crotty is outstanding, with the summary Figure below

Table 1. Recommended Adult Immunization Schedule for ages 19 years or older, United States, 2021

Table 1. Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule for ages 18 years or younger, United States, 2021

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IMMUNE RESPONSE | COVID-19
How past pandemics may have caused Parkinson's
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(Image credit: Alamy)
MRI image of the brain (Credit: Alamy)
By David Cox
31st January 2022
Surviving a pandemic isn't always the end of the story – some viruses can have health effects that linger on for decades, eventually leading to a range of devastating diseases.
Article continues below

I
In the 1960s, epidemiologists studying the long-term prognosis of survivors of the 1918 Spanish Influenza began to notice an unusual trend. Those who were born between 1888 and 1924 – meaning they were either infants or in young adulthood at the time of the pandemic – appeared to have been two or three times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease at some point in their life than those born at different times.

It was a striking finding. For while the potential neurological consequences of flu infections have been documented by doctors for centuries – there are medical reports of this which date back to 1385 – the sheer scale of the Spanish Flu, which infected around 500 million people globally, meant scientists could link a heightened risk of disease to the pandemic. //

Neurologists attempting to understand why this happens believe that each of these viruses are capable of crossing into the brain, and in some cases damaging the fragile structures which control the co-ordination of movement, known as the basal ganglia, initiating a process of degeneration which can lead to Parkinson's. //

"There are several studies highlighting that people who have recovered from Covid often have long-term central nervous system deficits including loss of sense of smell and taste, brain fog, depression, and anxiety. The numbers are troubling."

While Sars-CoV-2 can invade brain tissue, the scientific jury remains open on whether it will contribute to neurodegenerative disease. Coronaviruses are generally known as "hit and run viruses", because they tend to cause fairly short disease, even if this proves deadly in some cases. In contrast, DNA viruses such as Epstein-Barr can linger permanently in the body and are more associated with long-term illness.

More than two-thirds of cases of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 are among people who have been reinfected with the virus, a new study said Wednesday.

Imperial College London researchers reported that around 3,582 people — or about 66% of participants in the study — who tested positive in January had already been infected with the virus, CNBC reported. //

In December, UK health officials also estimated that the risk of reinfection with the Omicron variant was about 5.4 times greater than with Delta.

Malone discusses a controversial October 2020 email from National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins to Anthony Fauci in response to the Great Barrington Declaration. In it, Collins called three of the declaration’s authors “fringe” epidemiologists and demanded a “quick and devastating published take down of its premises”. I completely agree this was problematic.

As I have argued elsewhere, 2020 was a time of deep uncertainty about the science surrounding Covid-19 and the appropriate policy response to the pandemic. Collins is not an epidemiologist, and he has no standing to decide what counts as a “fringe” view within that field. As NIH director, his job is to foster dialogue among scientists and acknowledge uncertainty. Instead, he attempted to suppress legitimate debate with petty, ad hominem attacks.

The efforts to censor Malone and McCullough have massively backfired, with both men gaining prominence and publicity from the attempts to shut down their speech. More generally, I strongly disagree with efforts to censor scientists, even if they are incorrect, and no matter the implications of their words, as I believe the harms of censorship far exceed any short-term gains.

One problem, which has been on full display in this controversy, is that censorship may draw more attention to incorrect ideas. Another is that in the middle of any crisis, the answers to many scientific and policy questions will be uncertain. Disagreement on these questions is natural, and attempts to suffocate “harmful” speech run the risk of stifling critical debates, including by silencing third parties who may have important contributions but who fear the professional or reputational consequences of speaking up.

Perhaps the most serious objection to censorship is that the censors themselves are not fit for the task. Censors are unaccountable. They may be biased, misinformed or undereducated. They may lack perspective. In short, they are as fallible as the people they are trying censor. This is especially true in science, where, as history shows us, consensus views can turn out to be false, while controversial or heretical ideas can be vindicated.

Finally, in the modern world, where the censor is so often a giant technology company, there is tremendous potential for abuse. The same tools used to suppress scientific “misinformation” may someday be used to solidify political power and stifle dissent.

Cases of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome and Guillain-Barré syndrome have been reported after receipt of Janssen COVID-19 vaccine.

On December 16, 2021, after reviewing updated vaccine effectiveness and safety data, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices made a preferential recommendation for the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines over the Janssen adenoviral-vectored COVID-19 vaccine in all persons aged ≥18 years in the United States.

What are the implications for public health practice?

Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are preferred over the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine for primary and booster vaccination. The Janssen COVID-19 vaccine may be considered in some situations, including for persons with a contraindication to receipt of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.