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Do you prefer the extended summer thread format? This poll is closed. |
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| Yes |
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126 | 44.21% |
| No |
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39 | 13.68% |
| I'm Scottish |
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120 | 42.11% |
| Total: | 285 votes | ||
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Please please please Let delta finish what alpha started
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Jul 17, 2021 15:21
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| # ? May 27, 2024 08:34 |
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Johnson contracts all the covid variants until he become boris the deathless, eternal emperor of the british isles.
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Jul 17, 2021 15:22
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OwlFancier posted:Johnson contracts all the covid variants until he become boris the deathless, eternal emperor of the british isles. Dunno if this was posted, it's from Lichcraft, a tabletop RPG about becoming a Lich to survive long enough for the NHS transition treatment waiting list: 
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Jul 17, 2021 15:30
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Please let him have caught it again.
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Jul 17, 2021 15:30
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learnincurve posted:I’m absolutely befuddled and baffled by this conversation - I thought we’d known there is a correlation between vaccines and a lower risk of severe covid if you catch it for a while now? There is. Jiggerypokery has confused "sometimes vaccines don't work" with "if you get covid while vaccinated, it's exactly the same as not being vaccinated".
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Jul 17, 2021 15:34
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OwlFancier posted:Johnson contracts all the covid variants until he become boris the deathless, eternal emperor of the british isles. 
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Jul 17, 2021 15:36
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If it was starmer he would hide his soul inside a wet egg, presumably.
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Jul 17, 2021 15:38
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Brendan Rodgers posted:Dunno if this was posted, it's from Lichcraft, a tabletop RPG about becoming a Lich to survive long enough for the NHS transition treatment waiting list: 
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Jul 17, 2021 15:40
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learnincurve posted:I’m absolutely befuddled and baffled by this conversation - I thought we’d known there is a correlation between vaccines and a lower risk of severe covid if you catch it for a while now? We do. But this is getting muddled with what is meant by a vaccine's efficiency or efficacy, which is a different thing.
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Jul 17, 2021 15:44
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jiggerypokery posted:It's not a sliding scale, that's a super common misconception. I thought the same thing till I had this explained to me by someone who works in pharmacology. I think you might want to ask them to explain it again because you've got just about everything wrong there. In order: Vaccination doesn't break the reproductive cycle. The immune system against viruses is a pretty simple one - you have antibodies that have a "key" that binds to a specific pattern of proteins - if you're very lucky that particular key binds to part of the mechanism that lets the virus enter the cell and that's the end of it, but more commonly once bound they send out a big "INTRUDER DETECTED" signal to the rest of the body which tells other cells in the body to come along and destroy the virus (as well as kicking off all the other bits of the system to provoke fever, inflammation, etc but they're irrelevant for this particular discussion). Normally, for a virus your immune system already knows about, there are only a few antibodies hanging out so once they start firing your body has to generate billions more of them as quickly as possible. Then it's basically a race between how quickly your system can produce antibodies and how quickly the virus can infect cells to reproduce. Once your body produces enough antibodies to make it nigh-impossible for a virus to reach another cell to infect, you're cured (well not really, for reasons we'll come to). (I suppose, technically, the virus being killed in your system before it can infect a cell *is* breaking up the reproductive cycle but nobody, not even Alabamians, consider machine gun fire a contraceptive method) Prior infection, or vaccination, means that your body has antibodies on patrol for the virus and the plans to build loads more if needed. An infection without these means there's a much longer time (a week or two) for your immune system to work out what's going on. In either case, the damage that leads to serious illness happens because viruses work by turning your cells into virus factories, destroying them in the process. Each virus has what is effectively a key that unlocks a cell to let it get in and do its thing, and the type of cell it attacks is what gives infection with that virus it's particular character. Chickenpox attacks a particular type of skin cell, causing a rash, HIV attacks a particular type of immune cell, destroying your immune system, and SARS-CoV-2 - unfortunately for us - uses a key that binds to a particular protein used in the ACE-2 receptor, which turns up in all kinds of cells so it can infect all sorts of things. It's predominately a respiratory disease because of course the lungs and nasal membranes are the first things it encounters but once it infects them and gets into the bloodstream it can gently caress up all kinds of poo poo, which is (probably!) why Long Covid is a thing. The thing is of course that a virus is just a lump of genetic material, it has no way of "choosing" what to infect or work towards it, it just has to rely on bumping into the exact right spot of a cell at the exact right angle, so even though every infected cell results in millions of new viruses being produced, there's very little chance any one of them will manage to hit the right spot on another cell (antibodies work the same way, which is why your body has to make them by the billion to have an effect, although it does have some tricks up its sleeve to improve the odds a bit). Anyway all of this explains why it's a sliding scale. Even the best vaccination still results in that race between the virus infecting cells and replicating and the immune system punting out the antibodies, and while in the vast majority of cases the immune system wins the race there's lots of factors that can affect that. If you happen to get hit with a *lot* of virus in one go it can have replicated to the point that it's done enough damage to kill you before your immune reaction can mount a defence. If you have conditions (including old age) or take medications that suppress the speed that your immune system reacts at then again it can cause huge damage before the defence kicks in (and conversely if you have conditions that make you more vulnerable to the damage it causes, you could be dead even if your system does respond quickly enough). Luck is also a factor. Even with a robust immune system, a good vaccination, and otherwise good health, because it's reliant on virus hitting antibody before it hits cell, if you're really unlucky enough viruses will get into you before your immune system knows what's going on. Pox parties sort of work but subsequent infections still actually circulate through the system until all this kicks off, it just so happens that almost all of the time that's before the virus has had enough chance to build up to the point you get the spots. Also of course shingles exists and prior infection with chickenpox is the number one cause of it. Also the problem with purely natural immunity - even once you account for the chance of death - is that sometimes your immune system ends up targeting the wrong thing. The immune system doesn't do analysis or strategy, it just picks a bit of the virus to bind to ("pick" is the wrong word here but it works well enough) and the response is based on attacking that bit. The thing is that viruses mutate randomly, and if the mutation both removes the protein sequence your immune system has picked and still leaves the virus capable of infection then bang, you're gonna get reinfected. Obviously this fight is happening millions of times a day in your body while you're infected so normally the immune system ends up with a fairly wide range of targets and you're okay, but sometimes it's dumb and picks something that the virus can shed without affecting its ability to infect. This is why HIV is so dangerous - the actual infective part of it is tiny and it can mutate in billions of ways to evade your system (the fact that it also happens to infect cells that are an essential part of your immune system tip the scales even further in its favour) - this is also why HIV vaccines have all, so far, failed because until now there's been no way of training the immune system to hit just that one essential site (but fortunately mRNA vaccines hold out at least the possibility of being able to do so, not only protecting against the disease but possibly even killing it once it's infected you). Bacteria and viruses are completely different things - it's possible that that was just a brain fart on your part, so I won't labour the point.
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Jul 17, 2021 15:45
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goddamnedtwisto posted:but sometimes it's dumb and picks something that the virus can shed without affecting its ability to infect. Epstein-Barr and herpes zoster have both been implicated in a ton of autoimmune fuckery, but why some people get chicken pox and others get lupus seems to be a mix of genetics and random chance, and at least with mRNA vaccines you can tailor the immune response away from attacking your own kidneys more often than just throwing virus chunks around or exposing someone to a weakened form.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:06
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I kind of lost track of the concept of chickenpox between my childhood (quick, rub all your children on this infected one!), and the present day, where we have a vaccine. Were pox parties a good idea, being the lesser of two evils at the time, or a foolish one that's going to give us all shingles?
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Jul 17, 2021 16:09
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N=1 My mother spent weeks obsessively keeping my precious brother away from me when I had chicken pox when we were kids. There was nothing wrong with his immune system, my mother was just well, yeh. He had no memory of this, thought he had had it, caught chicken pox off his daughters and suffered as an adult. Chicken pox vaccines exist now though don’t they?
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Jul 17, 2021 16:16
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Man this mRNA stuff sounds like it could do lots of good in the future? Is it a game changing bio technology that is just being deployed on Covid because of hiw serious things have gotten or what?
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Jul 17, 2021 16:18
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Bobstar posted:I kind of lost track of the concept of chickenpox between my childhood (quick, rub all your children on this infected one!), and the present day, where we have a vaccine. it’s probably better the get the vaccine if you can afford it, firstly to protect pregnant women and their vulnerable babies and secondly to avoid skin scarring which can be pretty bad in some cases
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Jul 17, 2021 16:22
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Bobstar posted:I kind of lost track of the concept of chickenpox between my childhood (quick, rub all your children on this infected one!), and the present day, where we have a vaccine. Arguably in a world where it's endemic then yeah it's not the worst idea, because like mumps catching it as an adult is considerably more dangerous than catching it as a child. Like imagine we had no treatment and no likelihood of a vaccine for covid, we know that your chances of death scale pretty strongly with age (and then go vertical once you hit your 80s), then getting all the kids infected with it as soon as possible would definitely lower the death toll. Conversely *even if it's endemic* there's still a fair chance you won't catch a disease, so deliberately infecting a kid and putting them through a couple of weeks of pain (and the psychological torture of trying not to scratch) just to avoid something that might not happen. There's also some evidence that this sort of thing - by increasing the amount of virus in the kid's system - leads to more severe disease. (Standard disclaimer that I forgot in my last post - not a doctor, not a virologist, even my first aid cert if expired now, just a hypochondriac with access to wikipedia)
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Jul 17, 2021 16:22
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Catzilla posted:UKMT Summer 2021: Saj Vax - Tory Road UKMT Summer 2021: Saj Vax: Tory Chode
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Jul 17, 2021 16:23
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The Question IRL posted:Man this mRNA stuff sounds like it could do lots of good in the future? I think they were working on them for a while, but covid certainly gave it a kick up the bracket.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:23
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Bobstar posted:I kind of lost track of the concept of chickenpox between my childhood (quick, rub all your children on this infected one!), and the present day, where we have a vaccine. When I were a wee lassie back in the 1960s, pox parties were all the rage - as long as a kid was between 5 and 15 years old, as soon as any kid got measles or whatever, it was all round theirs for a party. Except mumps. Because mumps can make boys sterile apparently (happened to one of my cousins). I had chickenpox but haven't had shingles, but quite a lot of people I know have.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:24
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The Question IRL posted:Man this mRNA stuff sounds like it could do lots of good in the future? It's something they've wanted to try at scale for a while but there's ethical problems with giving people a vaccine of unknown effectiveness and side effect profiles when existing vaccines are good enough, so they've never had a chance.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:26
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From what I've read mRNA vaccines are potentially a, like, moon landing level technological achievement Assuming we all don't get Cronenberged in a year's time or whatever
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Jul 17, 2021 16:29
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I remember reading that if rna vaccines had come about at some other time we’d all be talking about how much of a groundbreaking step up they are and what incredible tech it is - as it is we’re all too scared to really give proper adulations.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:32
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Bobstar posted:I kind of lost track of the concept of chickenpox between my childhood (quick, rub all your children on this infected one!), and the present day, where we have a vaccine. It was meant to be a good thing as it was supposed to stop it there and then at the school who got infected. The aim was to stop it getting to the next school. Well in my area it was.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:36
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The Question IRL posted:Man this mRNA stuff sounds like it could do lots of good in the future? The real big breakthroughs were enhancements in genetics for producing mass amounts of RNA and developments in org chem that allowed for ionizable lipid nanoparticles to act as a carrier. The firehose of international spending and cooperation didn't hurt either, but yeah it could prove to be a game changer now that it's jumped the "maybe it works, maybe it's nonsense, either way your funding's run out" hurdle.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:37
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Just saw the rare "mask on nose but not on mouth" configuration 
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Jul 17, 2021 16:40
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Just saw the rare "mask on nose but not on mouth" configuration Even more baffling than the mask on chin, but covering no airways setup
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Jul 17, 2021 16:42
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Barry Foster posted:From what I've read mRNA vaccines are potentially a, like, moon landing level technological achievement I'm really, really reluctant to even mention it here or anywhere public, but the amount of adverse reactions I've seen to the Pfizer jab is no joke and I'm deeply, deeply suspicious about how little they're talked about. They're mostly relatively mild but I'd say about 1 in a hundred at the very least need more than 15 minutes before being safe to walk out, and maybe 1 in 200-300 actually lose consciousness. Now I *know* that a lot of this is just the way people react to any injections (and it's heavily dependent on the weather and the ventilation in the area) but I've seen 3 people, out of the maybe 5000 or so I've seen injected, carted away in ambulances because of anaphylaxis or some other kind of severe effect (also two needing to go because they smacked their head on the way down when fainting). It's to the point where if I'm offered a Pfizer booster (already AZed) I'd have to think very long and hard about it.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:43
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Just saw the rare "mask on nose but not on mouth" configuration Lol I've done that a few times because it takes *ages* to get the nosepiece properly fitted because of my weird schnoz, so if I want a quick drink I just lift the mask up instead of pull it down and then forget about it until someone points it out.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:44
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People also do that when they donate blood though I mean not anaphylaxis but they keel over and bonk their head on something.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:49
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Dear Jesus, please give Boris coronavirus and make him die this time inshallah.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:53
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OwlFancier posted:People also do that when they donate blood though Well yeah, but that's because they've just had a pint of fluid taken out of them, not 5ml put in.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:58
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keep punching joe posted:Dear Jesus, please give Boris coronavirus and make him die this time inshallah. I'm sure Dominic Raab, Michael Gove, or any of the other contenders will be so much better for us than Johnson. At least Boris is *lazy*.
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Jul 17, 2021 17:00
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I'm really, really reluctant to even mention it here or anywhere public, but the amount of adverse reactions I've seen to the Pfizer jab is no joke and I'm deeply, deeply suspicious about how little they're talked about. They're mostly relatively mild but I'd say about 1 in a hundred at the very least need more than 15 minutes before being safe to walk out, and maybe 1 in 200-300 actually lose consciousness. Now I *know* that a lot of this is just the way people react to any injections (and it's heavily dependent on the weather and the ventilation in the area) but I've seen 3 people, out of the maybe 5000 or so I've seen injected, carted away in ambulances because of anaphylaxis or some other kind of severe effect (also two needing to go because they smacked their head on the way down when fainting). Anecdotes aren't data. You have no idea why those people went down, it could be something innocuous and easily explainable.
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Jul 17, 2021 17:03
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Well yeah, but that's because they've just had a pint of fluid taken out of them, not 5ml put in. I think it's still more the needles honestly, I've seen people just keel over at all stages of the procedure just when I was going to donate. People are weird, and we're a lot less in control of our bodies than we like to think. goddamnedtwisto posted:I'm sure Dominic Raab, Michael Gove, or any of the other contenders will be so much better for us than Johnson. At least Boris is *lazy*. I still think him dying of his own stupidity would be very beneficial for the national psyche.
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Jul 17, 2021 17:03
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I'm sure Dominic Raab, Michael Gove, or any of the other contenders will be so much better for us than Johnson. At least Boris is *lazy*. With Bojo once again in critical condition, Starmer crosses the floor to take his rightful place as PM
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Jul 17, 2021 17:06
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:I had chickenpox but haven't had shingles, but quite a lot of people I know have.
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Jul 17, 2021 17:07
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mycomancy posted:Anecdotes aren't data. You have no idea why those people went down, it could be something innocuous and easily explainable. I know they're not data, but I also know the 15 minute post-jab wait is *extremely* rigorously enforced for Pfizer while AZ is just waved through (although we always advise both to wait). There obviously is some data about this but like I say, it's just not being talked about.
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Jul 17, 2021 17:09
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I'm a molecular biologist. The mRNA vaccines are a loving miracle and they're likely going to show up in all sorts of treatments in the future. I've seen HIV and cancer treatments being started using this tech, which of course are totally game changers. Imagine getting a tumor IDed and having a vaccine produced tailor made to kill it. Absolutely revolutionary.
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Jul 17, 2021 17:13
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I feel like that was the plot of I Am Legend but I'm sure it will, in reality be fine. I said don't worry about a thing. 'cause every little thing is gonna be all right.
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Jul 17, 2021 17:17
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| # ? May 27, 2024 08:34 |
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I'm sure Dominic Raab, Michael Gove, or any of the other contenders will be so much better for us than Johnson. At least Boris is *lazy*. Boris dying would probably still be a net benefit. The queen dying of it though... Man brains would snap all over the UK.
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Jul 17, 2021 17:18
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