One shot of the Pfizer vaccine gives inadequate protection to cancer sufferers, new research suggests.
OK.
“Our data provides the first real-world evidence of immune efficacy following one dose of the Pfizer vaccine in immunocompromised patient populations.”
You don’t say. Vaccines work with the immune system, those whose immune system ain’t working well don;t respond to vaccines all that well. Or, at least, worse than those with better immune systems?
As a type two diabetic my immune system is supposed to be compromised in some way but I’m not really sure how. I have never been prone to getting colds or flu that much and this hasn’t seemed to change since I was diagnosed as diabetic in 2013.
And it’s reasons like this that the UK government is sensibly offering the vaccine as studied and (emergency) licensed – two shots four weeks (+/- not a lot) apart.
Isn’t it?
As we are in the post-scientific age, it is unknown that it is the immune system that gives immunity not a vaccine. The vaccine is just a teacher which teaches the immune system how to deal with a particular micro-organism so it has a quick-start when infection occurs, to suppress replication and prevent disease. How successful any teacher is depends on the pupil.
Self-teaching also occurs in immune systems which learn without the vaccine either from contact with the micro-organism or cross-over immunity from contact with similar pathogens.
But these days we don’t know this because we have ‘The’ science which is different from science pre-March 2020 and pre-global warming in the late 1990s.
We still don’t know if asymptomatic cases can infect others, hence the ludicrous school testing regime.
However useless the 27 billion trace and test farrago is it should still be possible to extract some data from it to settle this question.
Ummm.. There is no such thing as an “asymptomatic case”.. It’s a term coined by the scaremongers and hypochondriacs.
At best you get cases where someone’s immune system is up to the job and nips the infection in the bud with only very minor symtoms totally indistiguishable from any other onset sniffle for a day or two.
In which cases the virus titer in the lungs is so low it’s hardly distinguishable from background noise, at which point the whole “infection risk” is moot. Might as well go sniff some fresh park air with no-one around within a mile and run the same risk.
The “asymptomatic carrier” requires a high enough pathogen titer to actually be able to infect others at all, and at the same time no physical symptoms of the infection by the pathogen.
This was possible for Typhoid Mary, where the pathogen was a bacterium.
It is impossible for a virus like CoVid, which infects the lungs. You cannot have an infection of the lungs to the degree necessary to be able to infect others, and not have syptoms.
Which also rules out the possibility of the “endemic carrier” : those who have had a disease, but retain the pathogen at a low level. Just not possible with coronaviruses in general, and this one has not figured out that particular trick, like chickenpox and measles have.
Now.. Nothing is absolute in biology, so there might be a chance..
Which for asymptomatic/endemic carriers of CoVid is in the ballpark range of 10^-7. **
Contrast this to minor adverse effects to any of the vaccines of 10^-3 , with major adverse effects in the range of 10^-4, and serious/lethal effects in the 10^-5 range.
Which is the “safe for the general population” kind of odds for any vaccine.
** recently downgraded, used to be 10^-6, but even with a global pandemic going on, and people actively looking for cases, there have been found none.
And Boffins are very interested in cases where patogens have gotten to a standstill/equilibrium, because they can tell us a lot more about what’s happening than “ordinary” cases. So people have been hunting like crazy for any putative case all over the world.
Yet there are none as yet.
On the OP… Nothing in the article about whether or not the patients were already getting chemo. Although the “immunocompromised” bit suggests they are.
Nor a link to the actual article in prepub… >:( Bastards…
But other than the Bloody Obvious ( which proper Science demands gets tested anyways..) and the resultant non-news headline, it is an interesting data point.
Simply because this particular immunisation method is a major line of research when it comes to Curing Cancer. And it looks like there are some (unsurprising) niggles there when it comes to blood cancer, but some promising data for “solid cancers” ( aka. anything else ). At least when it comes to combining treatments.