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Labor Day tourists have started to arrive in town. The beach was a bit more crowded this morning.
And just when our counts were going down. Between colleges opening and students having huge parties and Labor Day tourists I expect our counts to spike yet again. K-12 hasn't started yet here and that will just add even more.
We’ve been mobbed by out-of-state tourists during the entire pandemic, particularly badly starting in mid-May and never abating. Hot spot states and ones which normally we don’t see here (SW CO). TX, AZ, FL, NY, SD, ND...
The county commissioners here are antimask and have held large events in defiance of state and health dept recommendations. They are doing their best to downplay the number of infections and the deaths. As you might guess, they are big supporters of the denier party.
No, I actually DO want them to rush it out as soon as possible. I would take it right away if it were available, but I meant that it was probably not going to be available to me in Nov (if it gets approved in Oct) because the first batches will go to people who are at higher risk than I am. I would certainly get it in Nov if I could, but if I can't get it until Jan, I'd still be okay with that, it is still reasonably soon. I want to travel abroad in May, so I'd be okay as long as I can start making reservations in Feb (which I wouldn't be able to do until I am vaccinated -> not required to quarantine on arrival).
Unless there is an early vaccine approval, trials are scheduled to be completed in about 2 years (the usual length of vaccine trials), not just a few months longer. I hope NOT to have to wait til then.
FYI: Moderna just announced that it is slowing down its trial in order to recruit more subjects that are Black, Latinx, etc. Frankly, I'm glad they did. Fauci had stated earlier that the trial should slow down until they had achieved a diversity that reflected up to (ideally)twice the percentage of select populations that were most at risk. I think 33% was the total percentage of Blacks, Latinx, Indigenous and ?Native Alaskans? as reflected in the 2019 Census.
I haven't read anything that suggests Pfizer is slowing down its study and their percentages aren't that great, either. They have one study going on in South Africa, but I doubt that's going to offset the reduced percentage of "at risk" minorities in the U.S. Based on the underlying stats, it is possible the FDA could deny Pfizer an EUA. But who the hell knows anymore...
Well I haven't read every post on here. Probably not going to but I think I can give a unique perspective on Covid since I just returned from a trip to South Korea. It was a long one in that I left 3 July and returned on 2 September. It was a scheduled trip in that I got my tickets pre-covid and actually had my flight moved from departure of Boston to departure out of JFK. I mean the direct flight to Incheon from the airport. We waited to see how South Korea handled the virus and well they reported very few cases as compared to even our state Massachusetts. So in light of the change of departure we rented a car one-way to drop off at the airport rather than travel through two airports. It cost us a bit and took a longer drive to get to the flight we felt that this was our best and safest Covid option. Limiting our exposure to just one airplane. The flight was not full. In fact they only had a 50% estimate of people on the flight. Arriving in South Korea was a pain in the ass as they require everyone to quarantine for 14 days even if you have a negative test. They test everyone coming in and so we were given a test and result the following day upon arriving. They forced us to stay in a hotel of their choosing to keep people isolated at our expense for which we were also able to shorten because we did have other resources. We had immediate family members in Incheon where we were allowed to eventually serve out our 14 day quarantine. The 14 days made us add to our original trip since the reason we were going was to finish up dental implants. The procedure did require time as there was a lot of implants involved especially for me.
So while there news reports from the US on covid cases made the reporters scratch their heads since it seemed that the majority of the US seemed to not take this serious. It was in the middle of our trip that Korea got hit with a new outbreak that concerned them enough to issue out new guidance to mask up and social distance. They even started to limit activities. Their outbreak stemmed from a church assembly that resulted in at least on person arrested for having the activity. Hundreds became infected and caused a big stir. But Koreans for the most part follow guidelines and that is why their cases are so much lower than many other countries. While we were there it was a funny incident where some people that were in the hotel we were staying at escaped and were eventually found a few hours later. Their excuse was that they were bored. My excuse would have been because the food they fed us really sucked even for Koreans.
Anyway our trip went well in spite of the virus though it was limited because we didn't really want to take a lot of public transportation. Taxis were readily available but were too expensive to go back and forth to and from Seoul where the best souvenir shopping is. We were staying mainly in Incheon because that is where the DDS we were using was. It just made sense. Especially since the dentist we were using is the head of the dental school system and leader in implants in the country.
But as things finally end we did arrive back home to have to provide a negative covid test or face a quarantine of 14 days. Our state of MA has that requirement and we were instructed to provide that. So with our arrival on a Tuesday we would not have been assured of getting a test result of 72 hours within arrival so we opted to take a test when we arrive and quarantine until results were determined. We live in a rural community well outside of the big city lights so quarantine is not so onerous.
So that is my story. I hope that it gives a different perspective and helps people.
Bad news today. AstraZeneca paused their vaccine trial due to a study participant developing transverse myelitis. That is serious (it is a type of inflammation in the spinal cord that causes paralysis - it resolves more often than not, but still in too many cases it does not). Although transverse myelitis can have other causes, it is rare enough that I think it is almost certainly from the vaccine. It is reminiscent of GBS which occurs in 1 or 2 per million people after certain types of flu vaccine (a similar syndrome, also autoimmune attack on myelin sheaths of nerve fibers, only in slightly different location than where they are attacked in transverse myelitis - similar type of symptoms, ie, paralysis which resolves more often than not, but often it may not).
Wow. A possibility of this was in the back of my mind, but I really hoped it would not happen (since flu vaccine is the only one so far that has this rare association with myelin damage). Now the risk of covid will have to be weighed against the risk of this complication. Do I want some % chance of respiratory failure from covid, or do I want some % chance of paralysis from autoimmune transverse myelitis following the vaccine?
Just want to add something to my previous post. My guess is that the AstraZeneca vaccine will be out, scrapped & discarded. Hope there are no further cases of transverse myelitis in other people who received it, and this one person recovers.
But there are all the other vaccines being trialed (see why it is good that so many of them were funded). AstraZeneca vaccine used a "harmless" inactivated adenovirus vector to deliver the relevant antigen, and it is possible that this adenovirus wasn't harmless. For what it's worth, it may shed light on the mechanism of why some flu vaccines can also trigger a reaction against myelin that rarely causes GBS (ie, paralysis).
The Pfizer vaccine, which was the closest one to approval, remains equally close to approval. It does not use an adenovirus or any virus as a vector, but lipid nanoparticles. I remain shocked with what happened with the AstraZeneca vaccine, and for a moment thought that I would have to weigh risks of coronavirus pulmonary death vs. postvaccinal paralysis... but in the next hour I sobered up from the shock, and remembered that a viral vector was involved in that vaccine... so, in the absence of further bad news, I still remain determined to get the Pfizer vaccine (assuming that it will be the first one approved) as soon as I can.
Presuming the trial participant's transverse myelitis is due to the vaccine, the question would be how frequently it would happen. Is it one in tens of thousands of doses or one in hundreds of thousands? Would the vaccine cause more cases than infection with the coronavirus? There is no way to know yet.
Presuming the trial participant's transverse myelitis is due to the vaccine, the question would be how frequently it would happen. Is it one in tens of thousands of doses or one in hundreds of thousands? Would the vaccine cause more cases than infection with the coronavirus? There is no way to know yet.
With flu vaccine (which does not use an adenovirus vector, but is usually just the inactivated influenza virus itself), GBS happens in 1 to 2 people per million vaccinated. The only one already existing vaccine I know of that uses an adenovirus vector is the vaccine against rabies, and demyelination (ie, the same general type of problem as GBS or transverse myelitis) HAS indeed been reported following rabies vaccine. Since not that many people get that vaccine, it would be hard to estimate how frequent that complication might be.
With AstraZeneca covid vaccine, transverse myelotis happened in one person out of less than 15,000 (I think that is about the number of people they vaccinated so far). Considering there are multiple other vaccines being trialed, I doubt they will go any further with the AstraZeneca trial. If there weren't any other potential covid vaccines, I think they would probably proceed cautiously despite the myelitis case, but considering that there are other options, I don't think they will. I'd be very surprised if they did. So, we'll probably never know how frequently this particular vaccine would cause transverse myelitis.
Pfizer and Moderna vaccines both deliver the antigen in lipid nanoparticles, no biologic vectors used. I don't know details about other vaccines, but I do know that some other than AstraZeneca also use viral or plasmid vectors to deliver their antigens.
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