COVID Transmissions for 4-28-2021
New CDC guidance on masks for vaccinated people
Greetings from an undisclosed location in my apartment. Welcome to COVID Transmissions.
It has been 527 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19. A “527” organization is a political nonprofit in the US that gets around donation restrictions by not targeting specific candidates or parties. They’ve been used for various propaganda purposes in the past.
As it turns out, there’s propaganda in COVID-19 vaccines too. We’ll talk about that today in the headlines, as well as covering new CDC guidance.
As usual, bolded terms are linked to the running newsletter glossary.
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Now, let’s talk COVID.
CDC offers new guidance on outdoor mask use by vaccinated people
The New York Times has the story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/us/politics/coronavirus-masks-outdoors.html
The upshot is this: if you are fully vaccinated, you do not need to wear a mask outdoors when you are not in a large-crowd setting. This means that if you’re spending time at a picnic with other vaccinated friends, walking on the street, and doing many other activities exclusively outside, you are OK to keep your mask in your pocket if you have completed your full vaccination course and waited 2 weeks for your peak immune response.
Please do read the details in the link. However, I want to add some thoughts of my own:
The vaccines make you between 70% and 95% less likely to get COVID-19; please note this is not 100%
We do think that the vaccines prevent spread, but we know they’re not perfect at it, and there is a lot of SARS-CoV-2 out there to use you as a carrier so it can find its way to someone vulnerable
There are people—some of whom you may know—who have been vaccinated but did not develop a protective immune response, and you don’t want to be the reason they get sick
When I look at all of this together, there’s just one thing I want to emphasize in the context of these new recommendations: always have a mask with you, even if you only expect to be in settings where the CDC or any other agency says it’s OK not to wear a mask. You never know when the situation you’re in might change and you could find yourself inside a crowd you didn’t expect, or needing to go into a store.
I’m glad that in the US we are able to take some steps back to what life was like before, but I want us all to remember that it’s not over yet. Be vigilant, and be safe.
Sputnik V vaccine maker engaging in propagandist claims
I’ve seen a number of things today that suggest that Russia, if not specifically the maters of the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, is being intentionally misleading regarding the performance of the vaccine. What particularly concerned me was this example, which launched a Twitter thread:
This is just bad. They are being incredibly misleading here. These numbers have been totally cooked, partly by ignoring the causes of these deaths, and partly by dividing the numbers by inappropriate denominators to manipulate the final outputs. Click through to read the full thread where Dr. Bergstrom takes this nonsense completely apart.
It’s shameful to see this from a vaccine manufacturer. There are about 7 billion people in the world who need vaccination, and no one manufacturer is going to fulfill all of those needed doses. There is plenty of business to go around, and plenty of global prestige and influence to be shared among everyone. This type of disinformation undermines the cause of vaccination altogether, and there’s only one entity it really benefits: SARS-CoV-2.
I’m, frankly, livid.
What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:
Educating on vaccination
Yesterday I had to give a presentation at an all-employee meeting about how the various vaccines work. I’m glad my company is taking this seriously and that it wanted to dedicate time to employee education on these amazing technologies.
Carl Fink had some thoughts about blood clots and adenoviruses:
OK, this will get meta.
So, your answer to Sam's question reminded me of one I had. If it's the adenovirus vector that turns out to cause the rare thrombocytopenic thromboses, would that not imply that wild-form adenoviruses might be responsible for normal incidence of that very rare syndrome? Would that perhaps lead to a vaccine search for adenoviral disease prevention?
How about the use of adenovirus vectors for (actual) gene therapies, as Steve Novella wrote about here: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/viral-vectors-for-gene-therapy/ ?
Good questions, and I think there are too many unknowns to give a satisfying answer:
I think you're raising a question that is going to be a hot focus of virus engineering research for another decade, now. There's clearly something going on with these viral vector COVID-19 vaccines that leads to very rare clotting outcomes. But what? And is it the combination of the vector and spike, or just the vector alone? There's some evidence that preexists that shows a platelet-activating effect for certain adenoviruses; it's thought that the amount in the vaccine is too low for this to be impactful, but maybe there is a very small group of people in which that's not true. That's all speculative! I just don't know.
If we think about other applications of adenoviruses, I think for most gene therapies, the patient population is so small that I doubt this would ever have been detected as an issue without these vaccines coming onto the scene. There are a lot of unknowns here, and thankfully, these events are extremely rare.
But, given the unknowns, all I can say is that it seems to be an open question requiring attention from basic scientists to understand. It would be good if we could engineer applied adenovirus tools to prevent these reactions, rare though they are.
You might have some questions or comments! Send them in. As several folks have figured out, you can also email me if you have a comment that you don’t want to share with the whole group.
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No corrections since last issue.
See you all next time.
Always,
JS
On the topic of Sputnik V, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the Brazilian health authority's evaluation of it, particularly their finding that every batch contained replication-competent adenovirus. Manufacturing error and bad quality control? Or potentially just part of their vaccine as designed? I'm probably being paranoid, but I noticed that their publications and datasheet never actually say their vaccine uses replication-defective virus...
Of course, the Sputnik V Twitter account ranting in Portuguese that it was a purely political decision influenced by the US meddling doesn't inspire confidence.
My spouse and I convinced a bunch of high-risk relatives in Russia to get Sputnik V. They, like the vast majority of Russians, don't trust the vaccine. The Russian government doesn't seem to be pushing it hard within the country and it was quite difficult for them to find in their city. Since the alternatives are probably getting COVID-19 eventually or two other Russian vaccines without Phase 3 testing, I still feel like it was clearly their best option.