Covid – The Virus and the Vaccine
Whether we avoid getting the disease, find a vaccine for the disease or most of us get the disease and immunity takes over, some form of a cure from infection which creates early death is what this world needs. But should we be avoiding infection or avoiding severe infection.
The bottom line is the financial world is burning which affects suicide rates, depression, quality of life, ability of businesses, health, governments and every other institutions to grow thrive and get stronger are now all getting weaker. This adds extra stress and generates paranoia, anger which leads to knee jerk reactions that are not rational, riots, gun crimes rates rising, lack of empathy until there is a general collapse of society as a whole. Imagine the world if COVID never affected anyone. What would it be like? How has the 2020 election changed, would there not have been riots? What else would have been different? What if we could avoid infection.
Learn How Infection Happens
Grim view yes, but there could be a an alternative, but it involves being brave, engagement, losing the “I hope someone comes up with a cure” attitude. In a world where more and more of just about everything is done for us, and we as citizens of this planet know less and less about how to actually live self sustaining but become simple consumers. This concept of “Its Me who has to be part of the solution” is not first hand nature to us anymore. And No “wearing a mask” is not the solution, thats avoidance. I am not saying you should not wear a mask, but we should not take the approach of wear a mask, watch Netflix and hope the government gives us money they don’t have, and someone else comes up with a free cure is beyond crazy. Logic tells you where that will go. We have to get engaged, learn, think and actively be a part of the solution.
So why the rant, what do I have to offer, who made me an expert? Well I am not an expert. I do have something to offer though. And I rant because I am exhausted from where we are an our heard ignorance and acceptance of this planets status quo. I saved myself from an early death once, and maybe I can help someone else do the same.
Let me start with Contact Tracing; This must be done. And the word “privacy” is not a valid excuse to not contact trace. Contact tracing is letting people who can contract a contractable disease know they have been by someone who contracted the disease. Many people state they don’t want to be on that team because of “My privacy….”. First understand what is shared. Location and times the person who is infected. If you don’t want other people to know where you have gone and who you bumped into because of privacy, you could being ending someones life early. Then you need to see a shrink or a prison. That is not a privacy concern that is a psychotic or criminal concern.
To develop a Cure, we need way more useful data points that are relative to the subject as well as a baseline. Meaning we need data on people who are infected and died, infected with mild symptoms and infected with no symptoms as well as that same set of data on people never infected. We need to pick up on those patterns that make this virus not a big deal versus lethal. Since it is easily contracted, thinking we can live the rest of our lives with a mask on an half the businesses shutdown is a pretty dumb cowardly option. And without good data we are guessing like Jekyll and Mr Hyde testing. Im thinking there is a better way. Good Data.
What is good data? Well right now we don’t know the Vitamin D, PH,
We are collecting almost nothing as if we don’t want to find a cure. We need to know hundreds if not thousands of data points about people who exposed not infected, A symptomatic, infected severely and not severely. Things like what was their PH level, do they sleep well, drink, smoke, what foods do they eat, genetic heritage(what kind of mutt are they), there are hundreds more. We need this data because for most almost all people who contract the virus don’t have any or very mild symptoms, but a few get severely sick and some of those people die earlier than they would without covid. And there is a reaction to every action, your T cells and B Cells and other immune tools of your body will recognized and kill proteins like NSP1 faster or slower than that protein can do its job. We need to know what enterprise factor causes this, or what genetic trait allows it. Hospitals and government is not asking for this, and there is no mechanism to take the data, transform and present it for analytics. From a data persons point of view this is either insanity or intent on not understanding this virus.
Finally, the shutdown. This one gets me also. First I don’t want to wear a mask, but who does. The fact is a mask will slow down transmission to a degree and buy us more time to do the things we should be doing but are not(see above). But shutting down businesses is NOT the answer. Most people do not get severely sick from Covid-19, those who do get severely sick a small percentage die earlier than they normally would. If I have a choice between burning the world down or being one of those who die early, I will always choose dying earlier. I don’t want my life to cost the world living. From the beginning we should have protocol that states you must wear a mask, contact tracing is in place, data points must be collected or risk losing medical license, don’t furlough RN’s but instead repurpose them for things like data collection and contact tracing; a hospitals bottom line is not that important. And Separating highly contagious patients by a floor with the same HVAC system, lunch rooms and other shared systems is wont work. You need a separate facility. Seeing empty ships and medical tents with overcrowded hospitals confused me. I know it is not as simple as what I am stating and am not saying it is easy to separate contagious and non contagious but that does not mean it shouldn’t happen. And Don’t shutdown the world.
Bullet Points
- Covid 2 is the virus that caused Covid-19
- Virus is protein with bad stuff inside
- Virus hijack living cells to spread
- When corona virus finds a suitable cell, it injects a strand of RNA that contains the entire corona virus RNA
- The Corona virus suppresses the immune system and copies itself NSP1
- NSP1 Covid 19 protein slows down the infected cells making of its own protein. This causes the infected cell to make more Covid proteins and stops the infected cells ability to assemble antiviral proteins that could stop the virus.
- CoronaVirus is named after the crown of protein spikes covering their outer membrane
- Virus’s are dead. They need to attach to something that makes proteins. Human cells make proteins all the time.
- B Cells make and release antibodies, these antibodies attach to the corona virus protein spikes, and make it no longer sticky. The big eater Macrophage (White blood cells) patrol around and look for things with antibodies on, and eat them up.
- T cells are the feet on the street looking for broken human cells, and eats those. Normally broken cells are dead, or dying or infected Non normal human cells.
- T and B cells stick around after a battle for days, weeks even years in cause this enemy which it has learned about and defeated ever returns.
- Vaccines gets the T and B cells ready ahead of time to know this enemy before you have it. That way if you contract the virus’s have have a prepared army waiting, and the battle is easily won.
- RNA is a virus’s equivalent to human DNA.
- RNA Vaccines are supposed to be faster and cheaper to produce than Whole and Part virus vaccines as the human is the growing vessel, and you don’t actually have a deadly virus being put in you.
Vaccine Types
- Using the whole live or dead virus and injecting that into the body to activate the T and B cells to start fighting. Things that can go wrong are the virus going rouge and completely taking down the human. West Africa is having this issue with Polio vaccines right now 2020.
- Using part of the virus, for example NSP1 and let the body know it and build up T and B Cells. Since it’s not the whole virus, there is no danger of it taking hold. By itself NSP1 is pretty useless. But NSP1 is also the key for the virus to start to work. So if the body can destroy NSP1 on contact, theoretically the whole virus would never have a chance if treated before hand with a NSP1 vaccine. And possible in the beginning of contraction.
- Genetic Vaccines is injecting the RNA of a protein of the virus into the body so your body makes disease fighting antigens of it. I don’t understand this one much, but seems like you are sending the design of part of a virus so the body can see its bad, and build defenses against the virus. Making you immune to it. To me it almost sounds like your body could start to think the virus is safe and no longer fight it.
India is testing out COVAXIN right now with 1500 volunteers in 15 cities. The vaccines is what is called an indigenous Inactivated vaccine. My tiny little brain believes this means they have taken some proteans out of a strain(but could be the whole virus), and grown and killed the virus, injected them into people. But really I have not been able to figure out what it means and am just guessing. My biology has been high school and the internet(back to me not being an expert) Here is Wiki’s definition on Inactivated Vaccine . The pre-trails where shown to be safe and immunogenic. Which means it did not significantly harm anyone and created an immune response to the COVID 19 virus which was stronger than expected natural response.
RdRp inhibitors also seem like a very good possibility but there are no trials as far as I can tell. RNA is different than DNA as it is single stranded. The way this one works is I think is it has some thing that stops the enzyme that allows for RNA Synthesizing. RNA Synthesizing is what the virus needs to copy. Take away the ability to copy the virus dies. The catch, what if the Virus finds a way to survive. Meaning mutates into something that is more lethal and does not need that particular enzyme to synthesize. Thats called chasing your tail. But there is always a danger of a virus mutating. Covid has 29 proteans right now, each with a different role. If we use partial vaccine say to remove or block the NSP1 protean, I could see the virus possibly adapting to a different protean to start copying and blocking good cell replication.
Coroflu being developed by the University of Wisconsin Madison and Vaccine maker FluGen is in beginning trials. This one injects gene sequences with the hopes that the bodies T and B cells see and kill, with the T Cell remembering this pattern, and killing any future matching patterns. The delivery is intranasally meaning up your nose. Thats right Shove up your nose buddy. The Idea is delivering up the nose instead of a shot is a shortcut to immune response faster directly to the sources. Kinda like a road block at the border instead of a general BOLO(be on the look out).
ZyCoV-D, its plasmid DNA vaccine, was found to be safe, immunogenic and well-tolerated in the pre-clinical toxicity studies, Zydus said. Trials are also being done in India. I see a pattern here.
Moderna was the first vaccine to start human trials which started on March 16. Moderna is a shot, and there are two doses. Interesting things is Moderna has never had a licensed product, so this would be their first. I think they are in phase II trials right now as of July 2020.
So what is this Trial thing?
PhaseI – Find out if it is safe(wont kill you) and push the dosage until the get to a point where it will kill your or there is no reason to increase dosage.
PhaseII – is all about does it actually do anything that it is intended too. Meaning does it work. So plasebo’s effect is tested and other stuff.
PhaseIII – if we get this far, that means the vaccine is safe, and works. We need to now find out specifically how well it works and figure out the side effects. Once we know side effects we can product market and sell.
Normally this is great, controlled, assures things work and you know for the most part what risk you are getting into. But I am thinking form someones point of view, if they are told you are going on a respirator, and not sure if you will come out of it, to not give them a choice of a PhaseI drug is cruel and selfish. They person should be allowed trial I or II drugs, and especially II drugs. To hold back because of packaging and liability to someone who has a high percentage of dying is cold. Now if the drug is not available at that location that is one thing. But to not because you can watch them and collect results that is a whole other thing. Tell the family that because you could not collect results you felt it was better their family member died. I think if our norm is on critical patients liability is removed, a system of data collection can be setup and rolled out.
Your Blood
What is in your Blood
Blood has red blood cells made in your bone marrow, white blood cells which aid in creating antibody’s and fighting disease, plasma which is the liquid that carries everything made up of all sorts of stuff like water, proteins, sugar, fats, vitamins. Finally there are platelets which stick to stuff and does things like stop bleeding.
Antigens and Antibodies
- Antigens are on your red blood cells
- Antibodies (protective protein) are in your plasma
https://www.britannica.com/science/blood-group/The-importance-of-antigens-and-antibodies
Odds with COVID-19
First off this data is July 18 2020 data and is much like a survey or poll. The truth about polls, surveys and these numbers are this. Never do you hear the news state poll numbers like this: “A recent poll of people who decided to respond to the poll of people we choose to ask stated xyz”. It is the same with the odds of things happening regarding Covid. You have to take a test to be counted as a test. Example: a Tyson chicken plant had 199 positive cases, with one person feeling symptoms. If Tyson did not require the staff to be tested, how many people do you think would have gotten tested, probably 1, maybe. Odds were derived form this source
- Odds of Dying if tested positive: 3.6%
- Odds of Testing Positive if Tested: 8.2%
- Odds of contracting the disease if you are not by anyone who has the disease or touch anything someone may have touched who has the disease 0%
And the other things I hear from people is some say the counted COVID deaths are understated, some say they are over stated. Understated I think would be tougher to do than overstate, but still possible. Most people have some kind of autopsy if dying earlier than natural so really tough to not be tested for COVID. Overstated from what I have been hearing, a suicide from depression because of COVID is counted as a COVID death, but I have not had a 100% confirmation on this, but you could see how the deaths could be overstated. Here is a good read on counting COVID deaths.
Reference and Further Reading
https://www.phgfoundation.org/briefing/rna-vaccines
https://www.news-medical.net/health/How-Do-RdRp-Inhibitors-Combat-SARS-CoV-2.aspx
