That’s interesting. Could you share the CNN link and the notice you’ve seen? I can read Malay so Indonesian shouldn’t be difficult to understand.
Here is the notice:
Struggling to find the news story again - this wasn’t the main focus of it - but will keep looking.
jpinard
1771
I desperately hope this turns out as good as they claim. This could be huge for other respiratory exacerbations. However I’m not sure if this could amplify the bodies awful cytokine storm, which in the case of the flu is more deadly than the flu itself.
Thanks for the notice. I did a Google check and found their vaccination program document from their Ministry of Health. It does confirm that anyone who has blood pressure 140/90 or higher shouldn’t be taking Sinovac’s vaccine.
Thanks, that extract looks like what was in the article.
So is this only a guideline for the Sinovac vaccine?
Yup. Strictly for Sinovac only, as recommended by the specialist doctors association of Indonesia. If I have to take a wild guess it’s probably Sinovac has the least data available for scrutiny?
Probably.
There’s a buttload of people with hypertension here, and probably another buttload too poor to afford the medication/get diagnosed.
This news along with the news from Brazil about low efficacy is kind of depressing.
Just to confirm, this is NOT a thing with the vaccines being used in the UK & USA?
CraigM
1776
I have not seen anything to suggest this is the case.
I know, this is why I didn’t believe it when my wife starting talking about it 10 days or so ago.
Time to eat humble pie…
I reread the notice and the vaccination program again. They all say that people who are found to have elevated blood pressure at vaccine administration site will not be given the vaccine. However, they never said anything about hypertension under medication control with good reading is also disqualified. Huge difference and would need further clarification from them.
Thanks a lot. That’s really helpful.
In all honesty I did wonder about that and as usual here, things are not always explained well.
And that makes sense because as I say, surely it would be huge news otherwise.
Sorry if posted already, this is fascinating to read as a layperson:
This is a pretty long conversation, but I found it incredibly interesting, perhaps you will as well.
The two guest scientists on TWiV this week are virologists that have been studying the antigens in SARS-COV2, and how changes impact how well our neutralizing antibodies are able to cope with infection. In particular, the 50+ minutes before where I link to is a discussion of their work, and their experiments to try and determine how many mutations would be necessary for the virus to undergo in order to completely evade our current vaccine derived antibody response, as measured by neutralizing antibody assays. In short, they find that the virus would need 20 mutations, and in their hands this also leads to a large [detrimental] change in fitness of the virus. All very cool work that is worth listening to if you have the time.
However, what was even more interesting (and a bit more general audience appropriate) was a discussion of how well our current vaccines work as compared to natural immunity (they have some evidence that the most broad immune responses come from a combination of 2 shots PLUS natural infection.) They then get into a longer discussion of the pluses and minuses of giving a 3rd vaccine dose. What’s remarkable about this conversation is that it’s far more like what I’m used to in science - people are incredibly cordial, but don’t all necessarily agree on interpretations of the data, and it leads to a really great conversation where all the scientists try to come to a more full understanding.
If you stick around long enough, they get into a discussion of how many times we’re going to have to go through waves of coronavirus infections in the US if a sizable portion of the population continues to not get vaccinated.
This should be pretty easy to listen to, and by far a much more nuanced conversation than most people get to see in the media.
As always, thanks for posting this, curating it, and contextualizing it. I’ll give it a watch later today, since that sounds like an extremely interesting conversation.
Also, thanks for resurrecting what I will unambiguously call the good COVID thread. Politics and memes are fine and all but my primary interest in all this is trying to keep up with the non-stop firehose of COVID information, misinformation, and disinformation and telling the one from the other. I gave serious thought to going into biochem instead of physics and right at the moment I kind of wish I had!
Speaking of which, a pre-print today on the subject of transmission among vaxxed/unvaxxed folks that seems to address the “how much of it is viable virus?” question we were discussing awhile back. Would love to have your take on this:
That appears to be the paper triggercut posted in the main thread earlier today (that I commented on there.) Yes, definitely an interesting paper, I appreciate that the twitter post you relayed puts it in the context of the singapore study.
The data release for the Provincetown released by the CDC was reasonable, but the interpretations of that release were a bit over the top. My favorite being “There’s 1000x the infectious virus, so you can get infected 1000x as fast. Even a single second next to someone with delta will get you infected!”
The science part of the science + public health is definitely starting to get a handle on things, but we’re always going to be lagging behind.
PS: I figured you’d like a post here.
Sorry, totally missed that. There’s the other problem with that thread, it moves too damn fast and the good stuff disappears too quickly. I appreciate the recap.
Hopefully I’m not the only one!
Alstein
1785
Nope. my mom has critically high blood pressure, and she got the vaccine.
Ditto. While listening to this I was thinking of Carl Sagan’s, wonderful love letter to science. The Demon-Haunted world: Science as candle in the dark
It was a very illuminating discussion, and definitely how I think science and engineering are supposed to work. On the other hand, it can be more than a little frustrating, when Vincent and the guest disagree on the transmittal rates of vaccinated individuals and then they all agree a lot more research is needed. If the subject is pulsars, black-holes or the language of Orcas, “more research is needed” is a benign phrase. But when 10,000 people a day are dying around the world, part of me is screaming, “No, what we really need is more answers”
So I can partly understand why people gravitate to charlatans on Facebook, who claim they have all the answers.
If it’s any consolation, when you hear “more research is needed” often there are multiple groups doing the work. The CDC Provincetown report was released July 30th (finalized August 6th). We’ve since had a number of studies that have provided tons of additional research that have greatly clarified the interpretation of that initial data set.
Science normally doesn’t work that fast, but like…everyone is on it. It’s never going to be fast enough for public health, but it’s really fast compared to most science.
I have multiple manuscripts in preparation for over a year. The work is basically done, but we’ve responding to reviewers, clarifying the manuscripts, etc. It’s normally an incredibly slow, painstaking process to publish papers. Much of that extreme care has been put to the side to push for speed for many coronavirus papers (and then you receive the much lamented “it’s not peer reviewed!” comments), but even with the tradeoffs, it’s still not enough.
I appreciate that Covid research is literally at warp speed compared to normal science. Science during WWII, (radar, aerodynamic, computers, biology and physics) is probably is the only comparison in human history.
But if we figure out how a Pulsar works,it doesn’t matter much to humanity if it’s done in 5 year or 20 years… I’m sure it’s both a blessing and curse to know how high the stakes are in this research.
If we could go to be parties, I’m sure you’d have a lot more people asking about your work than a few years ago!
