Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Paperwork is pretty good here. They would know I'm lying because I'm in the system as having gotten two Pfizer shots.

 

People who were immunocompromised would get the Moderna if that was what their first two doses were.

The FDA hasn't given a recommendation regarding Moderna boosters for other people, including people who have other risk factors. They are meeting about that this week, and I'd guess they will do it similarly to what they did with the Pfizer. .. old people, comorbidities, etc. Particularly because antibody levels in people who were innoculated with the Moderna shots seem to have held up better than they have with the Pfizer vaccine.

The two mRNA vaccines are holding up pretty well against hospitalizations and deaths, probably because the memory cell responses they generate do the trick. Even if your antibody levels have waned, your T cell response kicks into gear very quickly when you get infected, if you have had the vaccine. The Moderna seems to have done better on how long the antibody levels last, probably because their shots were 100 microgram doses and the Pfizers were 30 micrograms. In their application with the FDA on the boosters, Moderna suggested a half dose for the boost to cut down on the risks such as myocarditis.

The short of it, though, is that its a free for all on the boosters, which is fine, because there are plenty of doses out there. People should be free to try to figure this out for themselves.

The one interesting thing from the dump of research data (not peer reviewed yet) that the FDA released yesterday was on the J&J vaccine. It looks like it may make sense to get a boost of one of the mRNA vaccines if you had the J&J vaccine.

 

Distinction without a difference. The second shot is essentially a booster. There is a lot we're learning. Like the boost is more effective in hindsight if you wait longer. ... Like if we had waited say 3 months instead of 3 or 4 weeks between first and second, the response may have proven more durable. It's all hindsight. At the time, people were doing the best they could with what the actual clinical trials thay had done told us. Anything else, and you were blind guessing.

Antibody levels wane with the Moderna vaccine too, but people may be too focused on that (for the Pfizer, at least). If we don't get slammed with new variants that have drastically different spike proteins, it's the memory cell response that may be what saves a lot of lives, not keeping antibodies in people's systems. Our understanding of how T cells and B cells work is pretty crude, but it appears that after the vaccines introduce the spike protein to our bodies, our immune system adapts, starts drawing up plans for how to deal with an invasion and then files it all away for later use.

Delta may have been flooding people with such big viral loads (it is highly contagious) that it was causing breathrough infections, but before it can progress you to an ICU and a ventilator, the vast majority of people's memory cells were kicking in and their bodies start producing antibodies to fight it off itself, even if it isn't without being sick first.

If that understanding of it is correct, it's pretty remarkable.

 

Because you are regurgitating nonsense.

Our government sprinkles grants all over the place, mostly to do basic research related to broad disease categories at research institutions. It doesn't then give all of us a right to something that is 50 iterations past that basic research, in which commercial enterprises have invested way more money than those grants provided, ss well as their time and expertise, in order to get it over the finish line, do clinical trials and market it as a drug.

The compound that led to that drug came out of Emory University. Government grants funded some basic bench research. 99.9 percent of those government grants never lead to anything. On the rare occasions they find something promising, those research institutions (which retain ownership) find ways to further develop it beyond their capabilities. usually licensing their technology to a biotech company, which has been funded by money from people who hope to be "profiteers" (boogity boogity). Without the expertise (and risk) those licensees provide, we don't get discoveries. They are the ones who begin to turn it into valuable intellectual property that gives all of us a drug that can be life changing. If things go well from there, those biotech companies will then turn to big pharma companies to get it through the finish line and complete phase 3 clinical trials, because it costs billions of dollars to get a drug through our FDA with marketing and manufacturing approvals. I don't know exactly how much in grants our government gave to research that then led to compounds which were not (but led to) this drug. It was probably in the tens of millions of dollars.

What that dishonest crap never explains is the hundreds of millions / billions of dollars from others that got it out of early stage research or through clinical trials. If your notion is that every $10 million dollar NIH grant should give our government rights to everything that ever flows from it in perpetuity, don't expect drugs like this. Ridgeback and then Merck would never have touched it. And THEY were the ones who developed the drug, not our government.

Also, that bullshit about the drug costing $17.74 to produce is literally a manufacturing cost. It says nothing about what was likely billions of dollars that went into getting to the manufacturing point.