Coronavirus and You - Page 473

On September 19 2021 21:22 Magic Powers wrote:


People are fallible, objective reality is not. You should never trust any source, you should always check multiple independent sources.

From the CDC:

Cases of myocarditis reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)external icon have occurred:
After (not because of) mRNA COVID-19 vaccination (Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna), especially in male adolescents and young adults,
More often after the second dose
Usually within several days after vaccination
Most patients with myocarditis or pericarditis who received care responded well to medicine and rest and felt better quickly.
Patients can usually return to their normal daily activities after their symptoms improve. Those who have been diagnosed with myocarditis should consult with their cardiologist (heart doctor) about return to exercise or sports. More information will be shared as it becomes available.

Furthermore, no hospitalizations or deaths have occured as a result of myocarditis after vaccination. No chronic cases either.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/myocarditis.html

There is clearly no risk from Pfizer.

On September 20 2021 06:58 JimmiC wrote:

How many of the same number of people would come dow with both things normally?

In 323 of the reports that met the CDC definition of confirmed myocarditis/pericarditis, 96% were hospitalized, but most were discharged with a resolution of symptoms.

Temporal association does not prove causation, although the short span between vaccination and myocarditis onset and the elevated incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis in the study hospitals lend support to a possible relationship.

A lot of worry has been triggered by discoveries that variants of the pandemic-causing coronavirus can be more infectious than the original. But now scientists are starting to find some signs of hope on the human side of this microbe-host interaction. By studying the blood of COVID survivors and people who have been vaccinated, immunologists are learning that some of our immune system cells—which remember past infections and react to them—might have their own abilities to change, countering mutations in the virus. What this means, scientists think, is that the immune system might have evolved its own way of dealing with variants.

“Essentially, the immune system is trying to get ahead of the virus,” says Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at the Rockefeller University, who conducted some recent studies that tracked this phenomenon. The emerging idea is that the body maintains reserve armies of antibody-producing cells in addition to the original cells that responded to the initial invasion by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. Over time some reserve cells mutate and produce antibodies that are better able to recognize new viral versions. “It’s really elegant mechanism that that we’ve evolved, basically, to be able to handle things like variants,” says Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, who was not involved in Nussenzweig’s research. Whether there are enough of these cells, and their antibodies, to confer protection against a shape-shifting SARS-CoV-2 is still being figured out.
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What the scientists found was somewhat encouraging. Blood collected at the later date did have lower levels of circulating antibodies, but that made sense because the infection had cleared. And levels of the cells that make antibodies, called memory B cells, remained constant or even increased in some people over time. After an infection, these cells hang around in the body’s lymph nodes and maintain the ability to recognize the virus. If a person gets infected a second time, memory B cells activate, quickly produce antibodies and block the virus from creating a second serious infection.

In a follow-up test, the Rockefeller scientists cloned these reserve B cells and tested their antibodies against a version of SARS-CoV-2 designed to look like one of the new variants. (The experimental virus lacked the ability to replicate, which made it safer to use in the lab.) This virus had been genetically engineered to have specific mutations in its spike protein, the part of the coronavirus that attaches to human cells. The mutations mimicked a few of the ones currently found in the variants of concern. When researchers tested the reserve cells against this mutated virus, they saw some cells produced antibodies that glommed on to the mutated spike proteins—even though these spikes were different than those on the original virus. What this means is that the antibodies had changed over time to recognize different viral features. The research was published in Nature in January. “What the paper shows us is that, in fact, the immune response is evolving—that there’s some dynamic changes over this period of time,” Nussenzweig says.

Of people with self-reported long COVID, 817,000 (84%) first had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 at least 12 weeks previously, and 384,000 (40%) first had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 at least one year previously.