Vaccines and our Current Predicament

Everybody! Back in the masks!

In April 2021, the CDC told us that vaccines are the best protection against COVID, and that vaccines render you not only immune from infection but unable to transmit the virus. Now CDC recommends that vaccinated individuals should all mask up indoors again, and states that vaccines don’t prevent transmission.

What explains this?

How the COVID Vaccine Works

First, I’d contend that this is a massive mistake in messaging.

I believe vaccine in this context is really a misnomer. It should be thought of more as an “immune system primer”.

I’m sure you know about all this, but let’s recap. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines provide messenger RNA for the immune system to respond to. In a very simplistic way, think of them as antibody manufacturing instructions to handle a single viral protein. The vaccine recipient uses the messenger RNA to construct a spike protein — one of the components of the SARS-CoV-2 virus — and the immune system creates an antibody to this protein. The spike protein degrades, and the recipient is left with antibodies that give the immune system a leg up on mounting a challenge when encountering the virus.

So when a person who’s gotten the vaccine is subsequently infected, the body has a jump start on mounting a defense, and is then able to manufacture antibodies to ALL proteins as part of SARS-CoV-2. This will be the lasting antibody panoply that will get called back up upon reinfection (in the form of memory B-cell/T-cell antibodies), and the infected will simply have a cold that will pass.

This is the key thing to understand here — every person on the planet will be exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at some point, probably sooner rather than later. This is an endemic virus which, as more people develop immune system responses, will lose its power and eventually become part of a collection of coronaviruses known as “the common cold”.

This is why the young have so much less of a serious response to COVID, i.e. less hospitalizations and death. Young immune systems are used to encountering new coronaviruses all the time, and this one is no different. So they’re used to adapting to new-to-them viruses and adding the antibodies to their database.

• Side note: This is one of the things that drives me crazy about vaccine mandates — I haven’t yet seen one that will accept a proof of antibodies as an exception, and the naturally-acquired immunity seems more robust as per this study released just last week. I haven’t yet found any studies that show that vaccination provides protection above naturally-acquired antibodies, so vaccinations for these people would seem to have nothing but downside, even at the small percentage of side effects such as myocarditis and pericarditis. I have heard some things about a single vaccine shot being used to treat long COVID, but let’s think of that as more of a therapeutic than a vaccine.

There are one of two things we can conclude here, I think:

1) Vaccines create a primed immune response, but people will still come down with the virus, test positive, and be infectious. They will just get less sick than they would otherwise, i.e. stay out of the hospital or the graveyard. This would make sense given all of the above. But let’s go down the other road to see where it leads us.

2) Vaccine-created immunity is more short-lived than we originally thought. It’s possible that this spike protein antibody, although it’s created, isn’t added to the memory immune cell database, and these antibodies are more transient and degrade over the next several months.

Which leads us to…

Herd Immunity: It’s Complicated

The data out of Israel looks interesting in this context. Despite 58% of people fully vaccinated and 64% with at least one dose, they added 2,000 cases a day this week, and it’s ramping up. However, according to this news story, the hospitalized aren’t getting as sick as they did before, and the deaths have remained low. Indeed, even with the recent US case surges, deaths have stayed low here as well.

“But Joshua, herd immunity is closer to 85-90%, so they haven’t vaccinated nearly enough people!”

First, more than 99% of the population of Gibraltar has been vaccinated since the beginning of May. What are their case counts like?

Oops.

Second, the herd immunity rate is not only the percentage of vaccinated, but the vaccinated PLUS those who have been exposed and have naturally acquired immunity. The second population is harder to quantify, but we have antibody tests that could answer this question. Additionally, if the vaccinated antibodies do degrade over time, the number of total “immune” would be a moving target, drifting down as we get further away from people’s first injections.

This could be an argument for the necessity of a Pfizer booster shot. In order to approach this in an honest (and non-self-serving way for Big Pharma), I could see something like:

1. I got my first vaccination schedule in May 2021.

2. Nine months later, in February 2022, I get my antibodies tested to see if I’ve been exposed to the full virus and mounted a successful defense.

3. If my antibody test fails, if I haven’t been exposed, then I would get a booster.

I don’t believe this approach is appropriate for everyone — it would make sense for the elderly or in similar risk groups, but it doesn’t seem necessary for the entire population.

Of course, I suspect it will be pushed on the entire population without exception, but that’s mainly because it doesn’t seem that our current situation deals with nuance very well. And I live for nuance, which makes me an outlier.

In any event, given everything I’ve seen, I’d suggest changing the framing around the vaccine in your mind. The COVID vaccine will help, but it won’t prevent you getting it, and it won’t prevent you passing it. Whether this was true before the Delta variant or not is immaterial, because it’s what we have now.

If the above is true, then there are two logical next steps:

1. Demonization of the unvaccinated as causing the prolonging of the pandemic is wrong. The vaccinated and unvaccinated alike are causing infection to spread.

2. The case for mandating the vaccine — get vaccinated so you won’t pass on the virus — doesn’t exist any more.

So what now then? That comes in my next newsletter.