Official Covid Vaccine thread

fisky wrote:

Link:www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/...

This morning, I saw the reference to this study and looked it up. Frankly, most of it is over my head, but I have some questions about it.

1. Study size was 20 unvaxxed and 7 vaxxed. Isn't that too small to provide reliable results? I didn't see any prominently mentioned P values, but maybe I missed them... no coffee yet his morning.

2. The scatter chart of the vaxxed showed two outliers at the top. Obviously, they skewed the outcome a little.

3. As mentioned in the limitations, blood tests were done early in treatment and antibody levels might not have peaked.

4. Antibody levels at early infection aren't necessarily predictive of what they will be six months from now.

4. We know the vaccines work, greatly reducing the risk of getting Covid, but it didn't work for these 7 breakthrough. Thus, they are a nonrandom selection of the vaccinated population. For some reason, they got Covid again while the majority of their vaccinated peers did not.

tl;dr

It appears that low responders to the vaccine who get Omicron will have higher resistance to future Covid than nonvaxxed who get Omicron.

It would be nice to see a followup study in six months or so, assuming those 7 don't get boosted again in the interim period.

Harambe wrote:

fisky wrote:

Link:www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/...

This morning, I saw the reference to this study and looked it up. Frankly, most of it is over my head, but I have some questions about it.

1. Study size was 20 unvaxxed and 7 vaxxed. Isn't that too small to provide reliable results? I didn't see any prominently mentioned P values, but maybe I missed them... no coffee yet his morning.

2. The scatter chart of the vaxxed showed two outliers at the top. Obviously, they skewed the outcome a little.

3. As mentioned in the limitations, blood tests were done early in treatment and antibody levels might not have peaked.

4. Antibody levels at early infection aren't necessarily predictive of what they will be six months from now.

4. We know the vaccines work, greatly reducing the risk of getting Covid, but it didn't work for these 7 breakthrough. Thus, they are a nonrandom selection of the vaccinated population. For some reason, they got Covid again while the majority of their vaccinated peers did not.

tl;dr

It appears that low responders to the vaccine who get Omicron will have higher resistance to future Covid than nonvaxxed who get Omicron.

It would be nice to see a followup study in six months or so, assuming those 7 don't get boosted again in the interim period.

1) sample size is fine for an academic study involving human samples. They do list p values as stars above the graphs. What the stars mean is in the figure legend before the references

2) vaxxed data in Fig 1 B,E,H show fairly consistent grouping. The unvaxxed response varies wildly. There are plenty of unvaxxed who got a decent immune response but more who did not. Hence the average response is much lower.

3) there’s always the chance that a single sampling misses the absolute peak. The fact that the trend is clear and strong AND corroborated by two other studies in the tweet I posted shows this is likely real. It’s also fits perfectly with what we know about the immune system: a second challenge (like infecting after vaccination) basically ALWAYS produces a wider ranger of response than a single challenge (infection alone).

4. antibody levels against COVID are generally on the downswing after 6 months. Again, we’ve seen this trend in multiple studies and we’d expect antibody levels to get worse after 6 months so betting on this trend magically reversing in 6 months seems unlikely.

5. Vaccines are decent against omicron mild disease. 2 doses alone offer no protection against mild infection. South Africa had a low boosted rate when Omicron hit so I’d think the population didn’t actually have that much protection against mild infection — thus this isn’t really a non-representative sample. As far as I can tell the study didn’t even used boosted people so we’d expect everyone to have roughly equal protection against mild omicron infection.

We’ve seen this trend in multiple studies, it fits with immune mechanisms, it’s safe to assume that omicron infection alone is a rather poor immune stimulant for broad COVID protection. Get the vax. Natural immunity goes home devastated.

fisky wrote:

Harambe wrote:

1) sample size is fine for an academic study involving human samples. They do list p values as stars above the graphs. What the stars mean is in the figure legend before the references

2) vaxxed data in Fig 1 B,E,H show fairly consistent grouping. The unvaxxed response varies wildly. There are plenty of unvaxxed who got a decent immune response but more who did not. Hence the average response is much lower.

3) there’s always the chance that a single sampling misses the absolute peak. The fact that the trend is clear and strong AND corroborated by two other studies in the tweet I posted shows this is likely real. It’s also fits perfectly with what we know about the immune system: a second challenge (like infecting after vaccination) basically ALWAYS produces a wider ranger of response than a single challenge (infection alone).

4. antibody levels against COVID are generally on the downswing after 6 months. Again, we’ve seen this trend in multiple studies and we’d expect antibody levels to get worse after 6 months so betting on this trend magically reversing in 6 months seems unlikely.

5. Vaccines are decent against omicron mild disease. 2 doses alone offer no protection against mild infection. South Africa had a low boosted rate when Omicron hit so I’d think the population didn’t actually have that much protection against mild infection — thus this isn’t really a non-representative sample. As far as I can tell the study didn’t even used boosted people so we’d expect everyone to have roughly equal protection against mild omicron infection.

We’ve seen this trend in multiple studies, it fits with immune mechanisms, it’s safe to assume that omicron infection alone is a rather poor immune stimulant for broad COVID protection. Get the vax. Natural immunity goes home devastated.

Thanks for such a detailed response.