CBD for COVID-19: Marijuana ingredient may prevent virus from causing lung damage
My current hypothesis is that the current vaccines lose about 15% efficacy each month after the final injection.
But Haas believes that even when controlling for age and other factors, the main reason for the renewed outbreak is that the vaccine’s protection fades over time, not that the Delta strain bypasses it.
While this article doesn't support my hypothesis, it seems reasonable in real life to anticipate the worst-case scenario, and be happily surprised if proven wrong. The assumption they are making is that people arriving at the hospital presenting with the infection after six months means the vaccines are sufficient to activate the immune system for that long.
My understanding of the topic is as follows. If a single virus infects a person, it is a race between how long it takes for the virus to replicate and for the body to develop the resources to fight the viruses. We know that with the first strain, it generally took a week before the infected tended to require going to the hospital. We also know that a person was able to transmit the virus within two days of initial infection.
If the virus is able to double itself every day in the body (to simplify the math), on day seven an infected person would have reached 100% necessary to present at a hospital. This means day six it would be 50%, day 5 it would be 25%, day 4 12.5 %, day 3 6.25 % and day two only 3.13%. While my numbers are probably wrong, because of the doubling time, we can see that a "carrier" would not need to be symptomatic to transmit the virus. The assumption is that the vaccine is lessening the severity of the infections.
Some people are using this graph to support the contention. Correlation doesn't mean causation. Is it the vaccine that is reducing the severity or is the Delta variant sufficiently different from the initial strain that it lacks the ability to achieve the same level of severity. The only way to properly analyze this question is to examine the underlying data, especially with a breakdown by age. The main reason that the first waves with the original virus had worse outcomes was that more older people became infected. Is the reason that the severity is less because infected younger people are skewing the results?
The measure of the efficacy of the vaccines is to compare it with people who were infected with the initial virus.
The people who are not testing positive in the current outbreak are those who have had COVID-19 previously and recovered.
Based on this observation, I have low confidence in the long-term potency of the vaccines. If a person is able to do so, it would be better to avoid getting infected, to begin with. The other day, I was on Twitter and a person there was bragging about not being vaccinated. I responded that at this stage if he continued doing what he was doing - wearing masks and socially distancing himself - he should continue to remain safe - an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Surprisingly he gave me an interesting response.
I have been doing none of that. I share joints with anyone, shake hands with anyone, anyone can come close to me without masks, I have travelled to three countries and attended rallies, festivals, political events, cannabis marches; all of it never masked nor socially distanced.
Most people might have dropped out of the conversation at that point. However, I reverted to my childlike nature and asked the question "Why?". Within seconds a quick search revealed the following:
In the new study, researchers treated A549 human lung carcinoma cells which express the ACE-2 gene with CBD. This is the gene receptor that the SARS-CoV-2 spike attaches to in patients.
Once treated, scientists exposed these cells to the virus. After 48 hours, the team discovered that CBD-treated A549 cells blocked the virus’s ability to multiply. Further study revealed that CBD helped to reverse nearly all of the gene expression changes SARS-CoV-2 causes in the host cells.
If you are in a jurisdiction that it is illegal to possess the derivatives of Cannabis, please forget about this post. If this is not a problem, I suggest that you at least draw this paper to the attention of your medical professional. This is a pre-print, which means it hasn't been peer-reviewed. However, any additional tool that the professionals have cannot be all bad.
Please do me a favour. If this post is readable, please resteem. If it isn't please create your own post reporting this paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7987002/.