COVID Transmissions for 11-22-2021
US expands vaccine eligibility and moves to supply more vaccine worldwide
Greetings from an undisclosed location in my apartment. Welcome to COVID Transmissions.
It has been 736 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19. In 736, the Franks, under Charles Martel, the Merovingian mayor of the palace (de facto ruler of the Franks at this point), had a number of conflicts with the Umayyad Caliphate, who had invaded Southern France through Iberia. In the full swing of the Middle Ages, a Caliphate based in Damascus fought battles against the Germanic tribe that would eventually become the nation of France. Wild, right?
Today we’ll discuss the expansion of booster recommendations in the US, as well as an exploratory effort by the US government to supply more mRNA vaccines around the world.
Bolded terms are linked to the running newsletter glossary.
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Now, let’s talk COVID.
CDC advisors vote to expand US booster eligibility
The CDC’s ACIP has voted to make every adult in the US eligible for additional doses of COVID-19 vaccines, as appropriate for whatever their original vaccination course was. Story at STAT News: https://www.statnews.com/2021/11/19/covid19-vaccine-boosters-cdc-vote-pfizer/
Something particularly interesting here is that the panel also recommended that the age at which people are encouraged to seek booster vaccination be lowered from 65 to 50. I’ve gotten a number of people asking questions about whether their age, being slightly under 65, matters for the recommendation to get boosted. I can confidently say now that a panel of experts at the CDC thinks it didn’t matter that much.
The nature of this recommendation says to me that the line for this encouragement is pretty arbitrary even now, since all US adults are now eligible. If you’re 49, talk to your doctor, but I don’t think your age is going to be the big make or break thing here.
A lot of this has to do with the upcoming holidays and the fact that COVID-19 is now trending higher in many states in the US. Thanksgiving, when people get together to share food and indoor spaces, is also a great opportunity to share viruses. The same goes for Christmas and New Year’s.
At this point it’s clear that the virus has changed the rules and that some additional defense is needed. Realistically it does not appear we can expect people to forgo seeing their families for the holidays. In light of that, booster vaccination is our best defense option.
If you’re planning to see family for these holidays, please look into getting a booster.
US to invest billions in supplying COVID-19 vaccines to the world
Leveraging funding allocated in the stimulus bill earlier in 2021, the US government has put out a request for information to companies with mRNA vaccine technology experience, in the interest of manufacturing large numbers of doses for countries that currently lack the means to make or acquire them on their own. The Washington Post has a full story on this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/11/17/biden-covid-vaccine-manufacturing/
The US is late to the party on this. Mechanisms for providing vaccines cheaply, like marching in on mRNA vaccine patents that were made with US government assistance, or simply buying the intellectual property from the companies which invented it for offers they couldn’t refuse, were not really explored. Buying enough doses to supply to other countries also was only weakly examined—partly for legal reasons relating to vaccine export law and liabilities. As it currently stands, low numbers of doses (relatively speaking) are exported from the US for use in countries that desperately need them.
In the meantime, relatively lackluster vaccines from Russia and China are being exported all over the world. These two countries are using vaccine diplomacy for influence and profit, and the US has been somewhat left behind.
The geopolitics of this are not really my arena. It’s not that I don’t care, but what this newsletter is for is not that. What’s important to me here is that mRNA vaccines are an incredible technology, and I believe based on available data that they are superior to other technologies that have been deployed for COVID-19 vaccination.
We’re not going to stabilize the global situation with respect to COVID-19 without vaccinating a lot more people in a lot more places. Using the best technologies available will without a doubt help in that goal, and more vaccine available to the world is better than less. Still, I lament that the country where I live has been so behind on this. I hope to see the US step things up. This is, I suppose, the first effort towards doing so.
What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:
Still working on that reverse seared steak
It’s been some time since I talked about cooking here!
A little while back I talked about how I was working on using a technique called a reverse sear for steaks. This is where you season the raw steak and put it into a low-temperature oven until its internal temperature is just shy of where you’ll want it to be, then get it out of the oven and sear it on a screaming-hot pan as quickly as possible.
This means the steak spends less time exposed to extreme heat on its exterior surface, so less moisture and flavor are lost. It works really well with thick restaurant-style steaks, something I don’t have ready access to. However, it also works well with the steaks that I do have.
I’ve been working on this technique for a little while now and I’m starting to feel as though I’ve gotten pretty good at it:
I tend to use a cast iron pan for the searing part, and that’s been doing a fantastic job.
There were a LOT of comments on the last issue. So many that I think copying them all here might lose some of the value of seeing the conversations in context. If you want to read them, I recommend that you go back and check them out here:
https://covidtransmissions.substack.com/p/covid-transmissions-for-11-19-2021/comments
We had a lot of good contributions from regular commenters and readers Carl, Sam, and Noah—most of it centering on the problems with predatory scientific publishing.
I was surprised that none of the comments were about SARS-CoV-2 origins, since that has been a pretty controversial topic. I usually lose at least one subscriber whenever I discuss it, but of course I write to inform accurately, not to please everyone. On that topic, I’ll continue to try and provide the most sober, scientific, and data-driven stories that I can—as I do on all topics.
You might have some questions or comments! Join the conversation, and what you say will impact what I talk about in the next issue. You can also email me if you have a comment that you don’t want to share with the whole group.
Part of science is identifying and correcting errors. If you find a mistake, please tell me about it.
Though I can’t correct the emailed version after it has been sent, I do update the online post of the newsletter every time a mistake is brought to my attention.
No corrections since last issue.
See you all next time. And don’t forget to share the newsletter if you liked it.
Always,
JS
" What’s important to me here is that mRNA vaccines are an incredible technology, and I believe based on available data that they are superior to other technologies that have been deployed for COVID-19 vaccination."
The preliminary data from two widely-separated doses of the J&J vaccine shows efficacy comparable to the Pfizer product, does it not? Who knows what the efficacy after a third year-later booster (as with Pfizer & Moderna) would do? I mean, it's doing essentially the same thing: introducing nucleic acids into human cells causing them to manufacture spike protein.