What if there's something physiologically unique about the majority of Israelis that doesn't apply to most other ethnicities, that greatly reduces the effectiveness of the specific vaccine they are using.

I heard that in terms of effectiveness and least side effects, they rank roughly as

Phizer

Moderna

Johnson and Johnson

AstraZenica

(and then there's a whole bunch of vaccines developed overseas that aren't even being used in the US, and many countries have such a low roll-out that it's comparing oranges to cucumbers)

Showtalk said:

If everyone had antibodies there would not be any disease left to spread

Yep.

But there's going to be plenty of Covid Karens who refuse to get vaccinated, who refuse to maintain any distance or wear masks or anything to take a few decibels off of the droplet exchange rate, who is right behind you running into you with her cart while you try to get paid out, and is fuming to speak to someone's manager for the inconvenience.

$1,661.87 in cats (ROCKETMAN_S) said...

What if there's something physiologically unique about the majority of Israelis that doesn't apply to most other ethnicities, that greatly reduces the effectiveness of the specific vaccine they are using.

That's a big if... but IF that's true... then the same traits of Israelis all over the world would show similar results... even if they've changed their citizenship.

FWIW

WALTER784 said:

IF that's true... then the same traits of Israelis all over the world would show similar results... even if they've changed their citizenship.

Thing is, has anyone actually done the study and compiled statistics yet?

$1,661.87 in cats (ROCKETMAN_S) said...

Thing is, has anyone actually done the study and compiled statistics yet?

Nope... thus the entire IF story is just hyperbole!

FWIW

WALTER784 said:

perhaps mixing and matching brands creates a more toxic cocktail that has adverse affects which have yet to be discovered.

Because vaccines generally stimulate the immune system and then break down and are eliminated fairly quickly, the stuff doesn't cause those kinds of effects. A toxicity or adverse reaction is going to happen very quickly - usually within minutes - with other adverse reactions that might take up to 48 hours. Beyond that interval, if one hasn't had an adverse reaction, ,the odds continue to drop and asymptotically approach zero.

good visualization is the voltage decay across a resistor - capacitor network over time. There is a sharp spike of voltage across the resistor as it is initially connected, and then it drops very steeply, and the overall voltage decays in a logarithmic curve. 63% of it happens in the very first interval, then the residual effect peters out over the next 5 intervals or so.

It never truly reaches zero - that's what asymptotic means - it approaches a value but never reaches it completely. However, in electronic design, generally after about 2*pi time constants, you can effectively round the residue to zero.

And that number makes a lot more sense when you dig into the instantaneous and average voltage and circulating current in a bandpass filter, beyond the simple shortcuts used to find the corner roll-off frequency straight line approximations that exploit the relationship between reactance and resistance to produce vector impedance.

But vaccine effects tend to follow this same curve, as do a lot of other phenomena seen in nature.

So in a nutshell, if you're gonna have a bad reaction or some kind of serious problem, it won't be months or years down the road. It will be pretty quick and generally the more severe, the faster it will appear

This is why when they had the mass vaccinations in March, after you got your shot, you parked in a designated area in the parking lot for about 15 minutes. If you were going to have a bad reaction, you' have it in that time interval. Beyond that, milder adverse effects would present and linger over about 3 days, mostly expected effects that are supposed to happen and indicate there was a good immune response and it really did its job.

So far there aren't any reports of adverse effects from a 3rd shot or mix / match. And many virologists say that it may provide a bit more immune response to the virus than the single brand because the troops get more target practice with slightly different mock invader and thus may end up better prepared for the real invaders even if their uniform style has changed slightly more than expected.

The people I know who should have had antibodies through vaccines and got covid anyway or got it twice were not distancing or wearing masks.  I don’t think masks actually stop the virus, I think they remind people to distance. People in masks who are face to face are not distancing.

Showtalk said:

I don’t think masks actually stop the virus, I think they remind people to distance. People in masks who are face to face are not distancing.

There's definitely a behavioral reinforcement mechanism going on by wearing masks. I notice that wearing a mask keeps all sorts of people and their cooties away from me.

While they don't truly stop naked viruses, the particles in which they ride are going to be wet, and they are much larger than the viruses, larger than the fiber spacing on a good non-woven mask or a microfiber cloth insert.

The droplets are grabbed by capillary action when they touch a properly designed mask, which also catches the viruses within.

Evidently a dry virus begins to deteriorate surprisingly fast even though it may remain suspended for hours due to Brownian molecular motion, since at such a tiny scale these forces are much more prominent than the effects of gravity.

But the real effect of masks is they stop outgoing particles quite nicely. Not all of them. It is like radio signal strength or audio levels - you measure the attenuation in decibels, which is a logarithmic scale.

So 3 decibels are a 50% reduction, and 6 decibels are a 75% reduction, and 10 decibels are a 90% reduction.

So if there's a 10 dB particle attenuation with the mask, that has gotten rid of 90% of the particles.

20 dB is 99% reduction. 30 dB is only 1 in 1,000. 40 dB lets through 1 in 10,000.

generally, somewhere between 30 and 40 dB is close to the practical limit of any affordable filtering / mask technique until you get to some truly exotic systems that really have finer sieve channels than the virus particles, which involves the kind of manufacturing techniques you see in the semiconductor industry.

Speaking of sieves, I got to see a molecular sieve at an industrial show a few years back that is used to separate oxygen and nitrogen from the air. It also isn't 100% effective, but you get something like 98% nitrogen and argon instead of 78% with 21% oxygen from unprocessed air

For most industrial processes, 98% nitrogen and less than 2% oxygen is sufficient to prevent unwanted oxidation in the process, although not as inert of an atmosphere as, say, a pure helium purged environment. So you can handle a lot of things that would otherwise have serious corrosion problems.

Well, if you wear masks... it keeps the mask gestapo out of your face!

Besides that... they aren't really that effective.

FWIW

The masks we are wearing don’t stop covid.  There is no full consensus on that.