Originally published at: NASCAR dogs to sniff out COVID at speedway | Boing Boing
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Interestingly, the dogs won’t be sniffing around drivers or any of the limited number of fans permitted to attend.
It makes sense that crews are the ones being targeted; they are the ones most likely to have more risky behaviour. Drivers can be physically distanced in the cars. Fans can be physically distanced while sitting. Crews will be working side by side and in the heat of the moment during a tire change they would be much more likely to not follow covid protocols.
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I feel like it is more about keeping the valuable star on the track, even if they are asymptomatic.
It’s certainly not done out of safety??
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I want to know if vaccinated individuals will trigger “false positives” with the dogs.
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Really feel sorry for the dogs, that’s a stressful environment for them.
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No. That’s not how vaccines work. They do NOT give you as small dose of Covid. They give your immune system a template for a small bit of the virus - a template that allows your immune system to make stuff that will see off the virus when it sees it.
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But it definitely gives you a dose of SARS-COV-2 proteins as well causing the production of the relevant antibodies, and byproducts of producing and breaking down both of them. I am not sure what dogs might be picking up (assuming this is a real effect not a “superhero dogs fantasy”)
However I guess the key thing is that in the case of the vaccine, nothing much is happening in the respiratory tract or the digestive tract, so that might restrict the ability of dogs to pick things up.
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The proteins in the vaccine and the virus itself are surely very much more than sufficiently different from each other not to confuse any dog trained to sniff out the virus.
Though it is not clear exactly what the dog is sniffing out. The virus? A unique scent produced by a human carrying the virus? Or shedding the virus? Is it possible to carry but not be shedding enough for a dog to sniff out?
Too many questions…
But I’d be reasonably confident that the dogs are not trained to be able to sniff out a protein that comes from the virus.
And for everyone’s info, this is what various vaccines actually consist of:
Types of Vaccines
Currently, there are three main types of COVID-19 vaccines that are authorized and recommended, or undergoing large-scale (Phase 3) clinical trials in the United States. Below is a description of how each type of vaccine prompts our bodies to recognize and protect us from the virus that causes COVID-19. None of these vaccines can give you COVID-19.
- mRNA vaccines contain material from the virus that causes COVID-19 that gives our cells instructions for how to make a harmless protein that is unique to the virus. After our cells make copies of the protein, they destroy the genetic material from the vaccine. Our bodies recognize that the protein should not be there and build T-lymphocytes and B-lymphocytes that will remember how to fight the virus that causes COVID-19 if we are infected in the future.
- Protein subunit vaccines include harmless pieces (proteins) of the virus that causes COVID-19 instead of the entire germ. Once vaccinated, our bodies recognize that the protein should not be there and build T-lymphocytes and antibodies that will remember how to fight the virus that causes COVID-19 if we are infected in the future.
- Vector vaccines contain a modified version of a different virus than the one that causes COVID-19. Inside the shell of the modified virus, there is material from the virus that causes COVID-19. This is called a “viral vector.” Once the viral vector is inside our cells, the genetic material gives cells instructions to make a protein that is unique to the virus that causes COVID-19. Using these instructions, our cells make copies of the protein. This prompts our bodies to build T-lymphocytes and B-lymphocytes that will remember how to fight that virus if we are infected in the future.
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They call it the essential footprint. I always figured that would be the sponsors.
I call shenanigans on this. They’ve been sold this service by a dog training company who claims “science has proven dogs can do this”.
I searched PubMed and all I found was two proof of concept studies on this, funded by dog training companies. They were small sample size, and done with large amounts of sweat sample in a controlled environment with improper blinding (which is fine because they were PoC studies- just means there’s promising things to study further here before firm conclusions are drawn).
Considering that using sniffer dogs generally fails at very high rates in other use cases (drugs and bombs) once proper blinding is applied, I don’t see why this would be different. At best we’ll get a Clever Hans effect where the dogs trigger on anyone whom the handler thinks looks tired or has the sniffles.
This is security theater, which with a virus is going to get people killed. Like all uses of sniffing dogs, the science proves that the dogs are probably physiologically capable of detecting the things in question. That’s very very different from “screening with them is effective in a real world setting”. Dogs are not the magic solution to all our hard security problems.
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