seriously?

Are you immune to the coronavirus disease after recovering from it?

The immune response, including duration of immunity, to SARS-CoV-2 infection is not yet understood.

6 days ago

At a Glance

The immune systems of more than 95% of people who recovered from COVID-19 had durable memories of the virus up to eight months after infection.

The results provide hope that people receiving SARS-CoV-2 vaccines will develop similar lasting immune memories after vaccination.

https://www.verywellhealth.com/antibodies-from-vaccines-and-from-natural-infection-5092564

Antibodies to the new coronavirus do seem to decrease in the months after infection. However, that happens for all infectious diseases. It doesn’t necessarily mean that immune protection is decreasing.

The B cells actively releasing the relevant antibody may decrease their production in the months after an infection. But memory B cells can continue to circulate in the bloodstream for years in other types of infections. Presumably, these B cells could again start releasing the relevant antibody if they were again exposed to the virus.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243

Nucleic acid therapeutics have emerged as promising alternatives to conventional vaccine approaches. The first report of the successful use of in vitro transcribed (IVT) mRNA in animals was published in 1990, when reporter gene mRNAs were injected into mice and protein production was detected. A subsequent study in 1992 demonstrated that administration of vasopressin-encoding mRNA in the hypothalamus could elicit a physiological response in rats. However, these early promising results did not lead to substantial investment in developing mRNA therapeutics, largely owing to concerns associated with mRNA instability, high innate immunogenicity and inefficient in vivo delivery.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906052/

Current genomic therapy trials herald a new era in medicine. In the short term, cellular medicines that can be easily modified ex vivo by CRISPR genome therapeutics and then transplanted back into the body will robustly and rapidly enter the clinic. Examples of such modified cellular therapeutics include hematopoietic stem cell therapies, immune cell therapies and regenerative medicines derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. Genome therapeutics applied systemically or locally to intact tissues will inevitably produce enormous clinical benefit but delivery of such genome therapeutics is challenging. It is possible that none of the three delivery platforms described above can surmount the many challenges to in vivo genome editing and some more elaborate form of protein engineering will be needed to create a delivery platform capable of efficiently and specifically delivering a gene editing reagent to any desired tissue in the body. One can imagine construction of an engineered artificial virus that would have all of the desirable properties of a virus without limits to the delivery cargo or safety concerns. Our ability to construct or manipulate complex biological systems is rapidly advancing for biological discovery and bioengineering but application to medicine has lagged behind. With heightened interest garnered by the potential of CRISPR-based genome therapeutics, this may not be true for much longer.

New Data Confirms Old Data?

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-01-29/as-coronavirus-variants-threaten-immunity-the-race-to-vaccinate-shows-pitfalls

…The U.S. company Novavax reported this week that although its vaccine was nearly 90% effective in clinical trials conducted in Britain, the figure fell to 49% in South Africa — and that nearly all the infections the company analyzed in South Africa involved the B.1.351 variant that emerged there late last year and has spread to the United States and at least 30 other countries.

Johnson & Johnson announced Friday that its new shot was 72% effective against preventing moderate or severe illness in the United States, compared with 66% in Latin America and 57% in South Africa.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/vaccineeffect.htm#studies

…CDC conducts studies each year to determine how well the influenza (flu) vaccine protects against flu illness. While vaccine effectiveness (VE) can vary, recent studies show that flu vaccination reduces the risk of flu illness by between 40% and 60% among the overall population during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are well-matched to the flu vaccine. In general, current flu vaccines tend to work better against influenza B and influenza A(H1N1) viruses and offer lower protection against influenza A(H3N2) viruses.

Evaluation of Intervention Measures for Respiratory Disease Transmission on Cruise Ships

…This study simulated a seven-day cruise with 2,000 passengers and 800 crew members, and each day was assumed to be a port day. When there was an index passenger on the cruise ship, people in restaurants and crew cabins had a higher infection risk than those in other locations. Increasing the ventilation rate of HVAC systems in the restaurants and crew cabins was effective. Installing UVGI devices in all HVAC systems reduced the attack rate by 87.8%. When HEPA filters were installed in the HVAC systems, the efficacy was only slightly lower than that of UVGI devices. The use of surgical masks by crew members serving in restaurants, bars, lounges, or small public places resulted in only a moderate reduction in the attack rate. Quarantining the index passenger and his/her roommate at Day 2 and succeeding days did not greatly reduce the attack rate.

The infection risk from an index crew member was higher than that from an index passenger, because the crew member had potential contact with all the cohorts on the ship.

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is a concept for a form of government or political system that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism. In totalitarian states, political power has often been held by autocrats who employ all-encompassing campaigns in which propaganda is broadcast by state-controlled mass media.

Totalitarian regimes are often characterized by extensive political repression, a complete lack of democracy, widespread personality cultism, absolute control over the economy, massive censorship, mass surveillance, limited freedom of movement…

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the year that never was

the passage of time
marked by poorly conceived rules
and many losses