New laboratory findings from OHSU confirm that two variants of concern reduce protection against COVID-19 in blood serum drawn from people previously vaccinated or infected. The findings underscore the importance of vaccinations combined with public health measures to stop the spread of the virus.
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Study confirms virus variants reduce protection against COVID-19 | OHSU News
A clutch of reports in the last few days have shown just how much effort Creationism's beloved malevolence is putting into keeping ahead of medical science in its battle to kill and make sick as many people as possible whilst medical scientists have the audacity to try to limit its success - if we subscribe for the moment to the childish notion of intelligent [sic] design, that is.
The first, conducted by researchers from the University of Utah, reports that the protection given against the virus by the vaccines has fallen to about 80% from about 91% in a large group of frontline healthcare workers between December 2020 and August 2021. This was measured using COVID-19 RT-PCR testing rather than measuring the effectiveness at preventing serious illness, including hospitalisations and deaths.
The suggestion is that this may be due to one or both of:
- Waning immunity, a decrease in the strength of the body’s vaccine-activated defences against the virus.
- Greater virulence of the δ variant, which has become the predominant form of the virus since June 2021.
The vaccines are still helping save lives and keep people from getting sick despite a slight diminishing return over many months. These data, combined with other data, demonstrate that vaccinated people are much less likely to get COVID-19 and are much less likely to be hospitalized.
The results of the study were published in the Morbidity Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) on 24the August. From the University of Utah Healthcare news release:
Matthew Thiese, Ph.D.,
Associate professor
Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (RMCOEH) University of Utah, Utah, USA
Associate professor
Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (RMCOEH) University of Utah, Utah, USA
The study published on August 24 in the Morbidity Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Additional study sites in the HEROES-RECOVER network are Phoenix, Tucson, and other areas in Arizona; Miami, Florida; Portland, Oregon; Duluth, Minnesota; and Temple, Texas.In this context, person-days is calculated by number of people in the study times the number of days over which they were monitored. So, we can arrive at an effectiveness index for the vaccinated and non-vaccinated groups by dividing the number of people becoming infected by the number of person-days in the group. This gives us an effectiveness index of 1:5334 for the unvaccinated group and 1:13,377 in the vaccinated group.
The network followed 4,136 health care personnel, first responders, and essential workers who had not previously had COVID-19. Study participants submitted samples for RT-PCR testing on a weekly basis and 2,976 participants were fully vaccinated within the study period, receiving either the Pfizer-BioNtech (65%), Moderna (33%), or Johnson & Johnson (2%) vaccines. Test results from these groups between December 14, 2020, to August 14, 2021, show that:
- Among unvaccinated study participants, 194 infections occurred in 181,357 person-days (combined total of number of days of testing for this group).
- Among fully vaccinated participants, 34 infections occurred in 454,832 person-days.
These data show that the vaccine is still quite effective against the different strains of COVID-19, including the Delta variant. The protection people get from the vaccine is keeping people from getting COVID-19 at a ratio of 14 to 1. As these data continue to come in, they are going to help chart recommendations for masking, social distancing, and booster shots.
This is the level of protection that the fundamentalist, covidiot Christian evangelical anti-vaxxers are campaigning against!
Matthew Thiese, Ph.D.
During that time period, the vaccines were 80% effective for all fully vaccinated study participants, but preliminary data indicate that vaccines may wane in intensity over time with lower effectiveness after five or more months following full vaccination. In addition, the vaccines appeared to be less effective during the last 43 days of the study period when Delta became the predominant virus variant. However, because sample sizes were small, these results were not statistically significant. These trends will be investigated further in future studies.So, no doubt to the bafflement of intelligent [sic] design advocates, the immune system their divine malevolence gave us tends to become less effective over time and is less effective against the δ variant it made to overcome the vaccines. However, medical science's solution to the harm it is trying to do to us is still very highly effective.
The second study from Oregon Health & Science University also found that the effectiveness of the vaccines diminishes over time, whether acquired from infection or by vaccination.
We know that the virus continues to evolve for its own advantage.
In particular, and of special interest to admirers of Creationism's beloved malevolence, the study found a reduced effectiveness against two of the variants they believe their genocidal god created to keep killing us. They found:
Fikadu Tafesse, Ph.D, Co-senior author
Assistant professor of molecular microbiology and immunology
OHSU School of Medicine.
Assistant professor of molecular microbiology and immunology
OHSU School of Medicine.
…two variants of concern – B.1.1.7 [α] originating in the U.K., and B.1.351 [β] originating in South Africa – show reduced neutralization by antibodies in the blood of almost 100 people who were vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine or previously infected by the virus. In the case of the B.1.351 variant, researchers measured a nine-fold reduction in effectiveness compared to the original SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The people who surround our older and more vulnerable populations need to get vaccinated and minimize exposure to the virus. You can’t just walk into a nursing home because they’re all vaccinated. If you’re not vaccinated, that’s still a problem.
Significantly, the researchers found that the effectiveness of the vaccines diminishes more quickly in people over the age of 50, so there is continuing need to protect the elderly.Bill Messer, M.D., Ph.D., Co-senior author
Assistant professor of molecular microbiology and immunology and medicine (infectious diseases)
OHSU School of Medicine.
Assistant professor of molecular microbiology and immunology and medicine (infectious diseases)
OHSU School of Medicine.
Their findings were published, open access, in Nature Communications a couple of days ago:
AbstractTo followers of Creationism's divine malevolence, it must look for all the world as though it is working hard to come up with a variant that is more infections, more lethal and capable of surviving an attack from the antibodies of people vaccinated against it. At the moment though, the vaccines are continuing to mitigate this genocidal attack, albeit hampered in this by the Covidiot victims of Christian evangelical fundamentalist and Trumpanzee cult loyalists who are using lies and disinformation to fool their marks into staying unvaccinated and so falling sick. They then act as a resource in which the virus can try out new variations, in a process scientists call evolution but which Creationists call intelligent [sic] design.
SARS-CoV-2 and its variants continue to infect hundreds of thousands every day despite the rollout of effective vaccines. Therefore, it is essential to understand the levels of protection that these vaccines provide in the face of emerging variants. Here, we report two demographically balanced cohorts of BNT162b2 vaccine recipients and COVID-19 patients, from which we evaluate neutralizing antibody titers against SARS-CoV-2 as well as the B.1.1.7 (alpha) and B.1.351 (beta) variants. We show that both B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 are less well neutralized by serum from vaccinated individuals, and that B.1.351, but not B.1.1.7, is less well neutralized by convalescent serum. We also find that the levels of variant-specific anti-spike antibodies are proportional to neutralizing activities. Together, our results demonstrate the escape of the emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants from neutralization by serum antibodies, which may lead to reduced protection from re-infection or increased risk of vaccine breakthrough.
Bates, Timothy A.; Leier, Hans C.; Lyski, Zoe L.; McBride, Savannah K.; Coulter, Felicity J.; Weinstein, Jules B.; Goodman, James R.; Lu, Zhengchun; Siegel, Sarah A. R.; Sullivan, Peter; Strnad, Matt; Brunton, Amanda E.; Lee, David X.; Adey, Andrew C.; Bimber, Benjamin N.; O’Roak, Brian J.; Curlin, Marcel E.; Messer, William B.; Tafesse, Fikadu G.
Neutralization of SARS-CoV-2 variants by convalescent and BNT162b2 vaccinated serum
Nat Commun 12, 5135 (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25479-6
Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by Springer Nature Ltd.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)
The message however, is very clear: we need to improve the vaccine take-up rate, especially amongst the younger adults, and we need to continue to wear masks and maintain social distancing measures until the new cases are reduced to very low levels, or we will never be free from this plague.
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