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Notes -
Has anyone been following the scenes in China?
The government has changed the definition of a COVID death, apparently to slice the death statistics after relaxing zero-COVID and cases surge. Omicron emerged last year as it ripped through Africa, and that variant seemed less dangerous (although more contagious) than its ancestors. It's suspected that it could be a subvariant of that. Also worth mentioning that China has ordered its first batch of foreign vaccines from Germany, but only for German expats living in China. Too early to tell and we don't have the full facts yet, but I won't be surprised if the situation is grimmer than the PRC government is willing to disclose.
On the other hand, it's amazing how the western mainstream media has reverted to parroting COVID-regime talking points again, after months of calling zero COVID insane. It reads like they're using it as an excuse to justify bringing back more autocratic measures at home, the coming weeks will be very telling.
China not using their zero COVID strategy to vaccinate the population with Pfizer/Moderna/J&J vaccines is puzzling. I was under the impression the entire goal of zero COVID was to buy time to vaccinate the populous. The PRCs decisions remain a mystery to me.
This is only puzzling if you think the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are highly effective.
Personally think you’d have to believe CCP level propaganda to think Pfizer and Moderna are not highly effective for high risk groups to protect against the most serve outcomes/death.
That is quite the change in positioning relative to their initial billing. It might even be true, but it doesn't do much at all if the goal is something akin to zero COVID, particularly if the pricing would be anything like what Western nations paid.
Both unfortunately and fortunately, this is almost certainly wrong. That may be the mainstream media narrative, but it's the result of a little bit of bad science and a whole lot of bad science reporting. The science is tricky because a lot of different things are happening at once: vaccine rollout, vaccines waning, variants changing, population getting infected, etc. But despite really promising initial apparent effectiveness against infection, we have every reason to believe herd immunity against coronaviruses is impossible because the human immune system's immune protection from infection (i.e. mostly antibody based) wanes too quickly (as opposed to protection from severe disease which appears to be more driven by long-lived T cells). The original studies were misleading because they didn't have the time to look at long enough after vaccination.
The fortunately part is that it doesn't appear the virus has changed enough to noticeably evade the vaccines (by which I mean 3 doses of one of the mRNA vaccines) at all. The reduced effectiveness against Omicron appears to be due to the virus being better at evading the immune system not due to a mismatch between the vaccine and the virus. Although that's difficult to tell because it's hard to find an entirely immune naive individual to expose to Omicron (either the actual virus or a vaccine). From that perspective, China would actually be an interesting place to do some reason and get some more solid data... but that doesn't seem likely to happen.
Source: listening to a lot of TWiV. Apologies, writing in a rush, so not tracking down good specific episodes.
One approach: why not engineer a new virus that the vaccine doesn't protect against and that mimics Omicron's ability to evade the immune system? It could give us deep insights into future pandemics.
"Hey we've made cancer airborne and contagious, you're welcome! We're science - we're all about coulda, not shoulda."
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