[Tsundoku]

Huh, what are you allergic to Obdi?

[Maark Abbott]

TheRetiredBridgeburner, on 18 June 2021 - 07:31 AM, said:

Gorefest, on 11 June 2021 - 12:21 PM, said:

Maark Abbott, on 11 June 2021 - 07:25 AM, said:

Had my first jab. Except the place doing it dropped one.

Whilst Pfizer doesn't have penicillin in it, I am told by my sister who is a vaccinator at a hospital near London that they should have refused me on the grounds of my penicillin allergy and referred me to a high risk clinic instead.

Hrm, not sure if that is true....? I guess local guidance may differ from location to location, but to the best of my knowledge, a penicillin allergy is not grounds for ineligibility to take Pfizer, Moderna or AZ. Only if you would have a history of severe allergic reactions to multiple types of drugs or other unexplained/unidentified substances, that's when you should get a referral. There was a short period of time in December when penicillin allergy was flagged as a potential adverse effect, but that has since been amended and is not considered a contraindication anymore.

Mr Not A Blacksmith has a nut allergy, and carries an epi-pen. The advice he was given was that because he's never had anaphylaxis he was fine to have the jab (Pfizer in his case). Apparently had he had anaphylaxis in the past he would have needed a referral. They spoke to a head nurse when he went for his appointment to check and kept him under observation for longer afterwards, but he was fine. Hope you didn't have any further bother Maark.

Also had first jab - knocked me out the following day and had a dead arm for three or four (suspect that was the Fibromyalgia getting involved) but fine otherwise.

I've had it as a kid to the point where my medical record is quite explicit about never letting me have penicillin, so there was definitely negligence on part of the administering venue as my GP said straight away I should have been at the high risk site just in case I did go into anaphylaxis. Rash is mostly gone now so that's nice. GP said it's the chance of something setting me off that means I should have been at high risk, what with having trained responders with stuff like adrenaline on hand etc.

[RACHEL]

I had my first shot Saturday, slightly sore arm and really mild "medicine head" feeling for awhile in the evening but otherwise good to go.

[Morgoth]

My girlfriend got her second shot last week. Had a day of flue like symptoms and a sore arm, but it passed quickly.

[QuickTidal]

My second jab is lined up for Jul 3rd, and it's Pfizer this go. I had AZ as my first dose. So I'll let you lot know what superpowers I get from the mix and match!

I'll just be happy that both the wife and I will be fully vaccinated in a few weeks. Will be a nice feeling.

[Gorefest]

My 2nd one is on the 15th. quite a long wait between my first one (April) and this one, but I'll be glad to get it all sorted.

[Cyphon]

QuickTidal, on 22 June 2021 - 01:07 PM, said:

My second jab is lined up for Jul 3rd, and it's Pfizer this go. I had AZ as my first dose. So I'll let you lot know what superpowers I get from the mix and match!

I'll just be happy that both the wife and I will be fully vaccinated in a few weeks. Will be a nice feeling.

Interesting that they're taking that approach. Some trials now in the UK on the impact of mix and matching for the winter booster they're going to do. So we could submit your third arm as clinical evidence QT

[QuickTidal]

Cyphon, on 22 June 2021 - 01:13 PM, said:

QuickTidal, on 22 June 2021 - 01:07 PM, said:

My second jab is lined up for Jul 3rd, and it's Pfizer this go. I had AZ as my first dose. So I'll let you lot know what superpowers I get from the mix and match!

I'll just be happy that both the wife and I will be fully vaccinated in a few weeks. Will be a nice feeling.

Interesting that they're taking that approach. Some trials now in the UK on the impact of mix and matching for the winter booster they're going to do. So we could submit your third arm as clinical evidence QT

I dunno, maybe I want to keep my third arm for...activities.

[Gorefest]

Cyphon, on 22 June 2021 - 01:13 PM, said:

Interesting that they're taking that approach. Some trials now in the UK on the impact of mix and matching for the winter booster they're going to do. So we could submit your third arm as clinical evidence QT

Yeah, we're supposed to be involved with those. Starting next week I believe, although we are still awaiting MHRA approval for the study.

[Cyphon]

For second I read that as if you were going to be involved with QT's activities...

That definitely would need MHRA approval.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Tempted to get the Johnson and Johnson vaccine as my third dose, since it's been conjectured that mixing mRNA with conventional vaccination may confer more protection... especially after reading:

'Millions of [US] J&J COVID-19 shots expire soon. States are struggling to use them.
The shots can’t be sent abroad, and states are having trouble finding takers.

[...] providers can’t simply donate the doses to be used by countries who need the vaccine; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told states they can’t be distributed internationally. [...]

The prospect of throwing away millions of shots is a staggering turnaround for the “one and done” vaccine, which was hailed at the height of U.S. vaccine demand as a key tool for speeding up immunization efforts and reaching vulnerable, isolated, or disadvantaged populations.

Instead, public perception of the vaccine never recovered after the pause.

[...]

The impending issue with the J&J supply has been clear for weeks, as demand slowed and expiration dates loomed. Nationwide, some 9.7 million J&J doses have been delivered to states but not used, and could go to waste if they aren’t administered within the coming weeks.

That would be “a really bad picture for the United States,”

It would be “a total shame when much of the country still needs to get vaccinated,” he said, “and it looks terrible to the rest of the world, much of which would love to have access to those doses.”

The White House is sending 580 million new doses abroad, with shipments arriving this week in Mexico and Canada.

Sending states’ doses to other countries, however, would present major logistical and legal obstacles for the federal government, largely because regulators would need to ensure the doses hadn’t been tampered with, damaged, or left unrefrigerated. [...]

Because they are property of the U.S. government, they are currently only authorized for use by domestic vaccine providers enrolled through the CDC.

“I know local health officials would like to just say, ‘Oh, we can ship ours to Canada because they need doses,’ but that would not meet a product quality standard,”'

https://www.inquirer...e-20210619.html

... if only the research were further along. Oh well. Risk of blood clot from J&J for me seems astronomically low, and I really don't want to get long Covid. Odds of side effects from combining seem very low (or at least I haven't seen potential risks being mentioned iirc), but IDK....

[Gorefest]

Cyphon, on 22 June 2021 - 02:55 PM, said:

For second I read that as if you were going to be involved with QT's activities...

That definitely would need MHRA approval.

Heh, no, yes, the UK study 😅

[Macros]

Morgoth, on 22 June 2021 - 06:43 AM, said:

My girlfriend got her second shot last week. Had a day of flue like symptoms and a sore arm, but it passed quickly.

this means wife and I can invade yes?

[Morgoth]

Macros, on 24 June 2021 - 12:33 AM, said:

Morgoth, on 22 June 2021 - 06:43 AM, said:

My girlfriend got her second shot last week. Had a day of flue like symptoms and a sore arm, but it passed quickly.

this means wife and I can invade yes?

I don't have mine yet, though that wouldn't necessarily be a problem. But right now there's still mandatory quarantine for all visitors, so I'd hold off until they soften those restrictions.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Wondering whether this is excessively optimistic and fundamentally misleading:

'plenty of researchers [...] were [...] concerned [...] the more the virus mutates, the less effective a vaccine might be. So why don't you have that fear?

Because of immunology. [...] T cells go across the entire spike protein so that you can't evade T cell immunity from the variants. [...] a virus can't keep on mutating forever. HIV, the virus, mutates a lot to evade our antiretroviral medications, and it becomes less fit by mutating, there's actually a fitness cost. It compromises itself to mutate to become more transmissible. So I knew it couldn't become more transmissible, more virulent, and evade the vaccines at the same time.

[...] when you [...] get a vaccine, you produce memory B cells, and they go into these hidden places like your lymph nodes and bone marrow.[...] a paper just last week that showed us that these memory B cells, if they see a variant in the future, they'll make the perfect antibody for that variant.'

https://slate.com/te...ica-gandhi.html

The 'perfect' antibody? Hyperbole just makes them seem non-credible. Same goes for apparent misstatements like 'a virus can't keep on mutating forever' which seems false---they do keep mutating forever---though their argument is clearly that mutating to evade the vaccines is likely (but by no means certain?) to decrease 'fitness' in other ways.

Worse, they don't at all address reported cases of vaccine escape. Charitable interpretation would be that they're only referring to the vaccines that have been most effective so far, and only to hospitalizations and deaths. Doesn't seem at all like a remotely rigorous argument.

Same news site, same day:

'Did you hear about the big new study on vaping and COVID-19? If you didn't, that's not surprising. The study didn't find any association between the two—that is, it found no evidence suggesting that people who vape are more likely to be diagnosed with the disease. Research that leads to null results rarely gets much coverage in the media. In this instance, however, it upends the flood of stories throughout the pandemic that reported that vapers are at greater risk. [...]

The new study is from a reputable source (the Mayo Clinic) and boasts a large sample of patients (nearly 70,000). Unlike much previous research on tobacco use and COVID, it also sorted patients by their current or former use of tobacco products, as well as the specific products they used (smoking, vaping, or both). In other words, the study had a near-ideal design for detecting whether and what kinds of nicotine consumption may lead to elevated risk of a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

In addition to finding no association between use of e-cigarettes and COVID diagnosis, the study reports that current smokers were found to be at lower risk of infection of COVID than nonsmokers. [...]

[...]The internet has democratized access to scientific papers, so when news stories go beyond the evidence or ignore contradictory research, online communities will figure it out. [...]

[...] An ongoing evidence review of smoking and COVID [...] including more than 400 studies [...] finds that for reasons that are still unclear (although there are theories), current smokers appear less likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2. It's unknown whether this is due to an actual causal effect or some other factor. At the very least it's an intriguing result that curious science journalists might want to investigate—but it's rarely mentioned in stories about tobacco use and the pandemic.

[...] for current smokers [...] "no important associations with hospitalisation and mortality" but "a small but important association with disease severity." It's difficult to pull a coherent story about smoking from these results, and one should be more wary still of extrapolating from them to make declarations about vaping.

This is all fascinating, in the sense that it reveals that even seemingly obvious questions can prove difficult to answer in the midst of a pandemic wrought by a novel virus. Here goes a constant refrain of science: More research is needed. [...] This tangle of evidence is a reminder that science is provisional and that in lieu of simple narratives, sometimes all we can confidently say is that "it's complicated."

As with many issues during the pandemic, coverage of its alleged link to vaping would have benefited from greater acknowledgment of uncertainty.'

https://slate.com/te...king-lungs.html

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 25 June 2021 - 06:24 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Mutations are already negatively affecting T cell response, so the claim that the T cell response can't be negatively impacted by mutations (because it targets the entire spike protein) has already been proven wrong:

'the N501Y mutation can result in ablation of this part of the T cell response, demonstrating that HLA polymorphisms are likely to be significant determinants of responder and nonresponder status with respect to vaccine escape.'

https://science.scie...t/372/6549/1418

If I'm reading this correctly, T cells and B cells might not even play a significant role in fighting Covid-19 infections in certain parts of the body:

'[Covid-19] is unique in the effect it has on the heart, especially in the immune cells that respond to the infection.

For most other viruses that affect the heart, they said the immune system's T cells and B cells are on the site of infection, however in Covid-19, the study found that the body's immune cells called macrophages, monocytes, and dendritic cells dominate the counter response.

"Covid-19 is causing a different immune response in the heart compared with other viruses, and we don't know what that means yet," [...]

[...] these immune cells are associated with a chronic condition that can have long-term consequences.'

https://health.econo...ecoded/81309241

If last week's study on B cells really had changed the consensus among immunologists from variants eventually (if the pandemic is allowed to continue in large populations) achieving vaccine escape being (almost) 'inevitable' to being (almost) impossible, I haven't found anything about that yet by googling....

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 25 June 2021 - 10:14 PM

[amphibian]

In NY, I was asked to show a form of ID (which was my driver's license) to check into the appointments. I think it might be similar. The whole thing took my partner and I about an hour to go through, but the walk in thing probably will take even less time than that now.

[QuickTidal]

2nd dose, this time Moderna, done! Feels great to be double vaxxed. That’s everyone in my family and friend circle (barring my idiot anti-vaxx sister and brother-in-law and younger niece) done and double dosed.

[Tiste Simeon]

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2021 - 06:34 PM, said:

2nd dose, this time Moderna, done! Feels great to be double vaxxed. That’s everyone in my family and friend circle (barring my idiot anti-vaxx sister and brother-in-law and younger niece) done and double dosed.

Yikes, she's still holding out on that idiocy is she?

[QuickTidal]

Tiste Simeon, on 04 July 2021 - 11:41 AM, said:

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2021 - 06:34 PM, said:

2nd dose, this time Moderna, done! Feels great to be double vaxxed. That’s everyone in my family and friend circle (barring my idiot anti-vaxx sister and brother-in-law and younger niece) done and double dosed.

Yikes, she's still holding out on that idiocy is she?

Sadly, from what my mom reports, yes.