I'm no meteorologist, but might these be asperitas clouds? (A "supplementary feature" rather than a distinct cloud type of its own, asperitas was added to the International Cloud Atlas in 2017, the first cloud formation to be added since 1951.)
Love this--ER husband was speculating on exactly this over the last few weeks. A non-medical colleague of mine asked this pertinent question: " I would have thought it might have been the other way around since the person had seen the virus before and their body knew what to do with it. Does that mean that every time we come in contact with the virus going forward, reactions could get worse? " Can you comment on this?
Interesting question! A little outside of my wheelhouse, but here's what I think:
I don't think that it would get worse every time, though. I think in this case the strength of the reaction is based on the rapid expansion of the immune memory cells involved. At some point after repeated exposures, the immune system responds so quickly that the response doesn't last very long at all. Otherwise we would have more and more extreme reactions each time we get a common cold coronavirus, and we don't. I think there's an upper limit. I am not 100% sure of the exact reason for that upper limit though.
What a good question, really! Probably you could get a more detailed answer from an immunologist who studies viruses (like Akiko Iwasaki at Yale) than a virologist who studied innate immune activation by viruses (such as me).
Do you have any easy to understand resources I can share with some vaccine skeptical family? They have said things like "its so new" as a reason to hold off getting vaccinated.
Good question, Pete. I've been meaning to either look for, or write myself, a resource of the type you're asking for. I haven't seen one yet that I find very satisfying. Perhaps I will have time to write one myself next week after I've moved.
That said, I want to myth-bust one thing here. "It's so new" isn't really true of any of these vaccines. The basic designs of these vaccines were in development for years before this pandemic. I think that it really did a disservice to the vaccines that the name "Operation Warp Speed" was chosen for the vaccine manufacturing program under the prior administration, because it has given people the sense that the trials were rushed in some way.
In reality, clinical trials often take a long time because enrollment is very slow and because the resources don't exist to speed up the conduct of the trial. If you think about it, this makes sense--they had to vaccinate tens of thousands of people for each trial. Under normal circumstances, this would be done in the course of usual business for the trial investigators, who are just normal physicians who happen to also do research. So it can be very slow to enroll, randomize, and vaccinate everyone for a trial. And then you have to do that for all three trial phases.
With a big boost in money, you can do things a lot faster, though. To bring a vaccine to market typically costs between hundreds of millions and just over a billion dollars. To bring these vaccines to market, around 20+ billion dollars were invested by both private entities and the government. That cash influx provided a lot of capacity for running the trials. The actual follow-up was not much shorter than I would expect for the conduct of a clinical trial in an acute infectious disease.
The safety follow-up might have been about 6 months under normal conditions, however, whereas here it was only 2 months. But this is not a matter of major concern, because safety monitoring continued in the trials after the initial results were released. We are now reaching that 6 month point and no remarkable or unusual safety signals have appeared. It looks like these vaccines cause short-term and minor reactions in most people.
However, data and logic are not always the best ways to make a vaccine-supporting argument. The best approach is often personal stories. People who are concerned about a medical treatment are often reassured by knowing that someone they respect received it, and that that person had a good experience. If you've been vaccinated, it might help to talk with your family about how it went and how easy it was. That really helps a lot.
You can also mention other people you know who have been vaccinated and the experience that they had. These anecdotes tend to be more reassuring than tables of numbers.
I'm no meteorologist, but might these be asperitas clouds? (A "supplementary feature" rather than a distinct cloud type of its own, asperitas was added to the International Cloud Atlas in 2017, the first cloud formation to be added since 1951.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperitas_(cloud)
https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/en/clouds-supplementary-features-asperitas.html
http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/69830/1/AsperitasPaper_revised2.pdf (figures start on page 13)
Yes! This is very much like what I saw!
Love this--ER husband was speculating on exactly this over the last few weeks. A non-medical colleague of mine asked this pertinent question: " I would have thought it might have been the other way around since the person had seen the virus before and their body knew what to do with it. Does that mean that every time we come in contact with the virus going forward, reactions could get worse? " Can you comment on this?
Interesting question! A little outside of my wheelhouse, but here's what I think:
I don't think that it would get worse every time, though. I think in this case the strength of the reaction is based on the rapid expansion of the immune memory cells involved. At some point after repeated exposures, the immune system responds so quickly that the response doesn't last very long at all. Otherwise we would have more and more extreme reactions each time we get a common cold coronavirus, and we don't. I think there's an upper limit. I am not 100% sure of the exact reason for that upper limit though.
What a good question, really! Probably you could get a more detailed answer from an immunologist who studies viruses (like Akiko Iwasaki at Yale) than a virologist who studied innate immune activation by viruses (such as me).
Do you have any easy to understand resources I can share with some vaccine skeptical family? They have said things like "its so new" as a reason to hold off getting vaccinated.
Good question, Pete. I've been meaning to either look for, or write myself, a resource of the type you're asking for. I haven't seen one yet that I find very satisfying. Perhaps I will have time to write one myself next week after I've moved.
That said, I want to myth-bust one thing here. "It's so new" isn't really true of any of these vaccines. The basic designs of these vaccines were in development for years before this pandemic. I think that it really did a disservice to the vaccines that the name "Operation Warp Speed" was chosen for the vaccine manufacturing program under the prior administration, because it has given people the sense that the trials were rushed in some way.
In reality, clinical trials often take a long time because enrollment is very slow and because the resources don't exist to speed up the conduct of the trial. If you think about it, this makes sense--they had to vaccinate tens of thousands of people for each trial. Under normal circumstances, this would be done in the course of usual business for the trial investigators, who are just normal physicians who happen to also do research. So it can be very slow to enroll, randomize, and vaccinate everyone for a trial. And then you have to do that for all three trial phases.
With a big boost in money, you can do things a lot faster, though. To bring a vaccine to market typically costs between hundreds of millions and just over a billion dollars. To bring these vaccines to market, around 20+ billion dollars were invested by both private entities and the government. That cash influx provided a lot of capacity for running the trials. The actual follow-up was not much shorter than I would expect for the conduct of a clinical trial in an acute infectious disease.
The safety follow-up might have been about 6 months under normal conditions, however, whereas here it was only 2 months. But this is not a matter of major concern, because safety monitoring continued in the trials after the initial results were released. We are now reaching that 6 month point and no remarkable or unusual safety signals have appeared. It looks like these vaccines cause short-term and minor reactions in most people.
However, data and logic are not always the best ways to make a vaccine-supporting argument. The best approach is often personal stories. People who are concerned about a medical treatment are often reassured by knowing that someone they respect received it, and that that person had a good experience. If you've been vaccinated, it might help to talk with your family about how it went and how easy it was. That really helps a lot.
You can also mention other people you know who have been vaccinated and the experience that they had. These anecdotes tend to be more reassuring than tables of numbers.