Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

To the smart types who know much more than I do: if we keep getting boosters, will that lower their efficacy? Especially if there is no change in the formula. At least with the flu shot, the mix changes yearly.

 

I had my boost so recently, that I have to wait until after Memorial Day to get El Cuatro.

My last one timed perfectly with Omicron, so I expect my next one will time perfectly with Pi.

 

Research continues on altering covid vaccine formulas to match with variants. But it's way early in the experimental stages.

 

Basically we never had a vaccine for the "common cold" until now. Mainly because this "common cold" can kill you and we mobilized against it.

The way I look at it, any one of the other 739 cold viruses out there circulating could mutate and wipe out humanity.

But surprise, they haven't.

It doesn't violate common sense that Darwinism is alive and well in the virus world as well. The virus that doesn't kill its host has the best and longest chance to propagate itself.

 

Shanghai, not great.

A clumsy lockdown of Shanghai is testing the “zero-covid” strategy

 

I don’t see why it would. The mRNA vaccines just deliver instructions (as opposed to the flu shot, which targets individual strains of the virus itself). And no vaccine decreases in effectiveness based on the number of doses you get.

If anything, a highly vaccinated public could hasten a mutation that evades the vaccine, but that will happen anyway, as we saw with Omicron.

 

Thank you to those who explained it to me like a third-grader.

 

First, only the nasal spray vaccine is attenuated. Flu shots are not — they’re dead (inactivated).

What I mean by “individual strains” is literally that — the flu vaccines include the four predominant, circulating strains, and those four can change in any given year. And protection against, say, California H1N1 would provide NO protection against other strains, not even against severe illness and hospitalization.

The exact opposite is true of the mRNA COVID vaccines so far. They have been damn-near equally effective at preventing hospitalization and death against all the strains we’ve seen so far.

That’s not to say we won’t need yearly or bi-yearly shots going forward. I’ll bet we will. It only makes sense to be that vigilant.

 

Shanghai has been a mess for a week. Shutdowns. Supply issues. Truck drivers trying to get supplies in bring tested, slowing down an already-too-slow supply line. People upset about being locked down.

The panic factor is climbing quickly among both citizens and government employees. Children and parents suddenly being allowed to quarantine together after the government backed down after being pressured.

Xi trying to give himself another five-year at the helm. Hmm … sounds like some place many of us know two years ago.

 

I read on Twitter yesterday a thread from a woman in Shanghai who said that the one thing that could break the contract between the Communist Party (and Xi, obviously) was if people couldn't get food.