The Russian vaccine for Covid-19
thelancet.com
thelancet.com
The Citymapper app has a “CityMapper Mobility Index” which shows what percentage of a given city is moving compared to a pre-March peg. It’s been interesting to see Moscow and St.Petersburg back to almost 100% capacity.
And what happens if the vaccine turns out to be a dud? How will that mobility then be positive, given the spread? And what about the damage to trust both in Russia and internationally for vaccine announcements after a failure there?
I've obviously no idea about whether or not the vaccine works.
The problem is - by international norms - neither do those deploying it, and yet they are.
Because it shows Moscow and St P at 79 and 88%. Around the same as Brussels but lower than Paris and Lyon.
This index won't tell you wether it's safe to move around or not, just what people are doing and what authorities are allowing.
BTW, this is a very well done indicator dashboard for the Netherlands. https://coronadashboard.government.nl/landelijk
Case numbers are massively skewed by testing capacity.
Personal anecdote, but I generally avoid doctors at pretty well all costs.
I have one, and I go for my yearly physical when they call me to schedule it. Other than that, I've found the doctor to be a great way to waste a lot of money and get an ambiguous result. Usually, "Take pain killers for a week and see if it gets better"
Since I am relatively well off, I have to imagine there is an enormous portion of the population who feels similarly to me about going to the doctor, and who also don't actually have the money to pay those bills.
It seems likely to me that coronavirus cases are probably just going undetected among the less well off in (American) society, especially for the portion where the illness is mild (which is literally every case I have heard about in my area for people under 40).
The experience of the pandemic is pretty clearly split along class lines.
We don't know what the long term effects might be. There are some reports that they are pretty bad, but nothing is confirmed.
It's been a while since I left virology so I can't comment on the veracity of the article. It does look pretty comprehensive though, and a bunch of the articles I remember to have read a decade ago are referenced.
Which disease is being cured by your body entirely and then comes back 2 years later with long term effects?
> We don't know what the long term effects might be
Isn't this true for everything though? How do you know if there are any long term effects for a new developed vaccine? Does it mean out of fear that theoretically anything in life can suddenly unexpectedly cause long term effects that you are not going to do anything which hasn't been done by other humans for at least 10-20 years? People don't know about long term effects of cellular data, yet we are using it every day.
Given that nobody has any long term effects from COVID which are different from other post viral issues seen with the flu and normal colds I think it's more pragmatic to assume that COVID will also behave very similar to other coronaviruses like the common cold.
She would be the last person you would think would get seriously ill - she eats only healthy food, is(was) a Crossfit rat, vitamins, meditation. She checks all the boxes for a healthy lifestyle and some).
We would go on 30 miles bike rides often and now she can't go up a hill mounted on the bike anymore. She was still going to a Crossfit gym that was (illegally) open during the pandemic but just for sanity. She couldn't do much of the workouts.
That was up to three weeks ago. One day she woke up with a swollen leg and has gone to three doctors already and is going to another to try to find why her leg is that way.
My suspicion is that COVID affected her circulatory system and is caused the problem that she is having on her leg. I hope that it's not the case, but this worry is enough to lose some sleep.
The general view now seems to be "it only affects over 55s", and that's mostly true -- there's lots of data to show that kids particularly are far more at risk of dying from other every day activities.
We have a rough idea of the IFR of 40 year old fit men, or 20 year old obese women, or of 7 year olds and 70 year olds. There's little long term studies for a disease that was identified less than a year ago - at least that I'm aware of.
How is this going to change when it's not so pleasant to sit or walk outside anymore? I have the feeling that either case counts are going to rise, or mental health is going to become a bigger issue (even more so than it usually is at this latitude in the winter time).
I even bought a nice down jacket to brave the winters here but it turned out not to be a good investment.
Of course finding so much as a small hill anywhere near here is a whole other problem...
Modeling positivity with mobility would be interesting.
Thanks for upgrading my thinking!
Take Unemployment - a lag indicator of economic conditions (things were better/worse last month and so people found/lost work); but also in a small way a lead indicator of economic conditions (more people in/out of work and the wider confidence arising from the news has an impact on future spending).
The latest (70%ish) is at the bottom. There has been hardly any change since the vaccine was introduced in the middle of August.
To be fair, it is not a well-designed UX (unusual for the superb CityMapper).
So I’ve said it’s interesting to see that both those cities are “back to almost 100% capacity” - almost being an operative word - from end of august to now Moscow has been @ 70-90% consistently, and St Petersburg has actually had 80-100+% in that time.
I also see people jumping to conclusions around taking this to mean it’s now safe there, I never said, nor implied, that.
I accept and know you were not saying it was safe; just commenting on the mobility (which is an interesting metric, thanks for the pointer) - but I don't agree with your interpretation of it wrt Moscow.
Russian fatality rate is probably somewhat lower in US / Europe, but it's only because our elder citizens (the most vulnerable group) have patriotically died long before reaching the age at which they become vulnerable to the virus.
https://google.com/search?q=russian+covid+vs+excess+mortalit...
That's not tin-foil-hat-y at all. Of course Western media isn't going to paint a too rosy picture of traditional "adversaries" compared to their own countries.
Look at how the situation in Belarus has all but eclipsed the protests against police brutality in the US. Even in Wikipedia's front page list of ongoing events! Apparently everything must be fine back home now.
That's just objectively worse than the shit going on in the US. But I do feel the US is getting there. This new war on crime the is planning, his sending federal agents to democratic states and basically calling parts of the population enemies is very worrying.
I know it sounds tin-foil-hat-y but I don’t trust western media coverage on Russia or China
In the meantime, other vaccines will be created that work just as well. The vaccine might be manufactured faster and be distributed more widely.
Create a vaccine isn't planting a flag or even reaching a specific destination. Creating a vaccine is travelling a known distance in similar types of cars. There's only so fast you can go.
There's some truth to it, I believe, but the mentality is seemingly applied too broadly, to areas where there aren't any advantages - other than maybe reputation (which could be considered a real advantage).
I agree with you that the apparent focus on "me first" is misplaced, when the effort to create a reliable vaccine is a global concern. The emphasis should be on its efficacy, in solving the immediate problem together.
It isn't the death that is funny, it is that the name and its relationship with killing.
"...the middle of a Pandemic is not the time to be cutting corners"
Anybody who says that this is a simple or easy calculation frankly has no idea what they're talking about.
If we 'saved' 1 million elderly people from dying of COVID, and they instead died over a period of time from vaccine side effects, those effects would be impossible to quantify via a binary PCR test and so would be ignored.
Additionally if people were vaccinated, but still died, we could at least say 'oh well, we tried'.
Rushing out a vaccine and giving it to people near the end of their natural lives is a completely legitimate decision to end this hysteria and get back to normal life.
Wartime would be such time - scarcity of resources in combination with lack of alternative measures.
As long as simple measures like wearing masks, keeping your distance and minimising risky activities are sufficient, there is no rush.
It's also not as if COVID-19 is a zombie apocalypse or some primarily airborne and highly infectious variant of Ebola that threatens to wipe out huge parts of the population within weeks or months.
First, this is not a matter of "correct", it's a matter of "allowing people to voluntarily take additional risk on a vaccine similar to a phase III trial which we let people do already".
Second, A "few months" is huge. Like a vaccine working a few months earlier would be the biggest global event of 2020. He must be in quite the nice position if the pandemic going an extra "few months" is no big deal.
My point is that in emergencies, stakes are higher, so the potential benefit from taking a risk is higher.
There are also other tools left in the Arsenal before throwing Hail Mary passes — like, everyone could wear masks.
Which is another way of saying: when there are massive consequences, is not the time to proceed on wishful thinking.
Because, as TFA pointed out: if you give people an ineffective vaccine, they will act as though they have an effective vaccine, and likely increase spread.
If you give someone a vaccine that has more antibody-mediated enhancement than protective effect (or at least, just a significant proportion of), you may do more harm than good as well.
And once you've deployed the vaccine to the general population, you've significantly impaired your ability to resolve questions about the above.
When stakes matter, and consequences are large and long-lasting, isn't the time to make blind leaps of faith.
With due respect to the many losses from Covid-19 - the numbers are not huge. 0.012% of the world's population has died from Covid over a period of about half a year. The annual death rate of all other causes in the world is 0.77%, or (normalizing to half a year) about 33 times as high.
So, Covid is a serious pandemic but not terrible enough to risk significant corner-cutting in vaxine development - as I see it.
0. https://cattiviscienziati.com/2020/09/07/note-of-concern/
Yes, it really was mostly a political gesture. General inoculation isn't planned for until Jan 1st, 2021.
I'd wait until Vector's stuff is ready if I were living in Russia.
It feels like it's "under emergency" marketing and it is still ongoing phase 3 trials. I hope they have enough sense to not mass vaccinate everyone in a month or two.
> On the other hand, it is entirely possible that Russia will hold off vaccinating its general population until it has received favourable results from the phase 3 trial. In which case, the announcement of the approval of Sputnik V might amount to a political gesture, rather than a serious attempt to circumvent the standard process of vaccine development. The FDA has stipulated that a vaccine against COVID-19 should be at least 50% effective. Sputnik V might well meet this criterion. But until the phase 3 trial is completed and the results are made available, it will not be possible to make any judgement. “It is certainly not advisable for any vaccine to be used in an uncontrolled way before it has been through proper testing to determine whether the immune response it produces is actually protective, and there are no unexpected adverse events”, stressed Openshaw.
No Russian vaccine yet I can see.
But if it is being produced in India, which this is, along with permission for the Indians to produce it for internal use, then I'd guess it'll be available on the clearnet.
Do you let your 80 year+ male family and friends risk death from Covid or buy it online... Plus of course to do it for fun.
Most of the big ones were being DOSed when I was checking.
I found this which suggested Agartha, but they do actually mention it's not ‘approved’ by Darknetlive.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3581387
I wouldn't expect the Russian vaccine yet, and I'd google around before buying it. I'm already on a trial vaccine so I'm not supposed to get any other vaccines. But I might buy a non-animal vaccine for family when it comes out.
I think it's rather easy to say.
1. The data isn't being processed on the data subject's consent alone. It's also being processed because it's necessary to perform a public task which is a legal basis for processing data under GDPR. It's also probably being processed under the "legitimate interests" of a third party (the pharmaceutical company) whose interests in the data, in this case, override the individual's interests in having the data deleted which is another legal basis for processing. So the medical trial has two (of only six) lawful bases for data processing should the patient withdraw consent. Only one lawful basis is necessary.
2. Article 17(3) specifically exempts compliance with the right to be forgotten when data processing is necessary "for reasons of public interest in the area of public health" (paragraph c) OR for record-keeping purposes "in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes" (paragraph d).
3. Article 17(1)c and Article 21(1) would allow continued processing of the data due to "compelling legitimate grounds for the processing which override the interests".
4. Article 21(6) would allow continued processing of the data for reasons of public interest.
Surely someone in the EU conducting medical research would be well aware that GDPR is not at all a barrier to medical trial data processing.
also, gdpr is about privacy - I don’t think it can be used to remove the data if it’s anonymised. That is - I can ask google to remove the history of what I clicked on their site, but they can still retain info that someone clicked this or that.
There is so much misunderstanding around GDPR, it's frightening.
That’s because the law is intentionally vague and has uneven enforcement baked into its design.
To be clear: I am a privacy advocate and agree that GDPR is not a barrier to medical trials, but it is basically a mess of a regulation. It’s almost as if the legal industry was consulted and wrote it to ensure continuing billions in legal fees from every company in the world.
There are still technical scenarios for which the law has not been tried, and no consensus exists among experts.
Much confusion, in my opinion however, comes from overinterpreting the regulation.
The EU certainly has technocratic tendencies, but I firmly believe the spirit of GDPR is at the right place.
Of course someone in a vaccine trial can't ask for all their records to be deleted. Does anyone really expect the EU law makers to be that dense ?
What's next ? You call the police and ask them to delete your criminal records ?
``` However, an organization’s right to process someone’s data might override their right to be forgotten. Here are the reasons cited in the GDPR that trump the right to erasure:
- The data is being used to perform a task that is being carried out in the public interest or when exercising an organization’s official authority.
- The data being processed is necessary for public health purposes and serves in the public interest.
- The data being processed is necessary to perform preventative or occupational medicine. This only applies when the data is being processed by a health professional who is subject to a legal obligation of professional secrecy.
- The data represents important information that serves the public interest, scientific research, historical research, or statistical purposes and where erasure of the data would likely to impair or halt progress towards the achievement that was the goal of the processing. ```
The European union included various narrow and strangely worded "exemptions" from the law, but the damage is done: "Better safe than sorry, just apply GDPR to all data collections".
How is GDPR different than the other hundred thousands laws regulating medical companies ? GDPR isn't the first law they have to worry about, it's probably not even remotely close to the most complex regulations applied to medical research. They're used to deal with very convoluted texts of law, I'm sure they can figure a list of 5 bullet points...
> but the damage is done: "Better safe than sorry, just apply GDPR to all data collections".
I don't even understand your logic to be honest, do you think any high level person working in a medical research company in Europe would have this line of thought ? If it's the case I hope everyone in charge of that specific organisation gets replaced real quick. You're telling me your "Ethics committee" is OK with injecting experimental drugs to people who can potentially ask them to delete all contact information (thus endangering them in case side effects are discovered) but they would not be OK with getting familiar with the law ? I have a hard time seeing how that works
The ethics committees of these hospitals have far less access to trained legal professionals. Especially if you factor in the amount of studies that re submitted. The combination of "little time" + "lots of studies submitted" + "no real expertise", leads to very shallow analysis of each individual study protocol. They basically run some kind of checklist that all studies have to pass before being validated. And because there is no time to review each study in depth, the tendency is to say "regardless of what the law says, we'll just cover the hospital potential liability by refusing any study that does not include strong privacy protection". No one has the time or expertise to say "I believe it's ont of those case where the law does not apply, and I am willing to undersign that study protocol".
In the hospital where my wife works, getting your study refused by the ethics committee leads to at least 3 month of delay in the study, since the commitee gathers once per quarter. PhD grants are given on a year-by-year basis, so getting 3 month of delay on your first target can sometimes be a death sentence.
Yeah but then it doesn't matter because these student wouldn't come up with a covid vaccine in the first place. The GP comment is about the fact that covid vaccines are (supposedly ?) delayed by gdpr, which is non sense
How cringe is it that Russia (of all places) has beat the U.S. in allowing their population the right to access new technology?
Literally hundreds of thousands of people have died during this pandemic, and our regulatory agencies have -- in the name of "protecting us" -- literally blocked off people from being able to experiment (on their own property) with ways to prevent the spread of more mass death. Unbelievable.
Not to mention the tail risk of bottlenecking a life-saving vaccine until a government agency deems it "safe", and then suddenly releasing it all at once to massive portions of the population. If instead you let early risk-takers experiment on their own watch, you get orders of magnitude more data to work with gradually as opposed to suddenly unleashing a single vaccine (deemed "safe" by the FDA) to tends of millions of people at once.
Ironically, it's largely due to successful Russian efforts that I no longer know who to trust for advice on vaccines.
From what we're hearing so far [1], it seems that POTUS will promise a vaccine is on its way just before the election, but then never deliver it. What I'm worried about, though, is that a vaccine will simply show up and start being rolled out by a compromised CDC, or FEMA, or Army, or whoever the administration can force to do it.
[1] https://www.axios.com/trump-cdc-redfield-vaccine-d266121c-88...
I wouldn’t put it past them to try.
Care to link? Feel I must have missed some news, as I'm not aware of any scandals around the CDC?
You could say they are to be blamed from making the default position the status quo. But the opposite is a harder default, how far do you go when nothing has been shown to be necessary or prevent anything yet? Like do you tell people to just go full on quarantine? To wash all their delivered packages and produce with soap? Like how far? And then if you tell them to do all that, and it later shows they arn't necessary and don't help prevent the spread? So in some way, the status quo does seem like a good default.
Basically, the CDC just said: Go on with your daily life, don't panic, don't buy all medical equipment that the medical professionals need, and as the data arrives and shows evidence of what measures actually help to prevent the spread we will update our guidelines.
There was this particularly transparent example by the Director of the CDC a couple of years ago, about buying tobacco stocks when put in charge of programs for reducing tobacco usage: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/30/cdc-director-tobac...
Also this story about how FDA appeared to bend to political pressure to greenlight an experimental treatment due to political pressure, bypassing the normal guidelines for demonstrating efficacy: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/why-did-fda-autho...
There's also been a general failure to respond appropriately to the pandemic. We're so many months in and PPE is still an issue: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/8-months-into-pandemic-...
And that's not even counting what the White House is doing, which is not good. Especially with the recently leaked audio tapes from Woodward from the same time POTUS was publicly downplaying it: https://youtu.be/-cfd_pJVYiM?t=179
Plus the hydroxychloroquine thing...
There's a lot of buzz lately about how the administration is trying to influence the CDC, but most of it is journalism/politics blue twitter insider type chatter:
* https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/09/politico-trum...
* https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/trump-e2-80-99s-att...
* https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/09/politico-trum...
* https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-appointees-sou...
But there is a lot of it, and that's pretty unusual for an organization like the CDC. Maybe it's all disinformation, but keep in mind it's the President's job to appoint the Director of the CDC: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/03/trumps-cdc-dire...
I'm not saying every smear against the man is true. But after the last director had to resign over the tobacco thing, and the current director is now clearly affiliated with the President, so I'm skeptical if he has the public interest at heart.
I've never had less faith in American institutions, and I think it's for good reason. There's a lot of corruption at the top, and it's clearly infiltrating the institutions.
If they say a vaccine is safe to get, I don't think I can trust it. I'm going to need to dive deeper into opinions of professionals when it becomes available before I get it.
That said, I also don't want to fall into some fallacy of nirvana, I don't believe any governement ever existed in a perfect state with zero bias and total absence of corruption, sometime all we have is good enough to go by.
And I also wouldn't want to fall in the fallacy of inflation of conflict, where because there are scientific disagreement in the medical community, especially given a very new very unknown problem such as Covid, that no conclusion can be reached or that the legitimacy of that field of knowledge is questionable.
Would any of our Russian comrades reading along care to weigh in on how they're feeling about getting the vaccine on release day?
Let's say you have a vaccine that appears effective (great, right?) You give it to 1000 willing test subjects, and most become immune (fantastic, right?). Then, three to six months later 50 of the subjects go into terminal liver failure due to their body's immune response to the vaccine (as determined by their genetics.)
It's not just whether a vaccine 'works' for you, it's whether it's effective AND safe over the huge genetic pool that is humanity (as measured over a sufficient period of time). This kind of stuff comes up all the time with drug trials, and it's why there's a process, and things can't be rushed.
What this leaves out is all those nasty consequences observed, where Covid victims survive, but encounter all sorts of health issues. From kidney - to heart damage, up to funky things it may do to your brain.
This leaves out the long timers[1], who survive it, but have massive health issues for month with no end in sight.
I, for one, are really hell bent not to catch it and as a society there seems to be number of quite simple measures to avoid spread.
Unfortunately even those, like masks, in my opinion a no brainer, get politicized.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-...
"we don't need to rush this" and put out a vaccine super-quick that might itself inadvertently kill/harm a large proportion of the population.
I'm not at all diminishing the severity of Covid19 (deaths _&_ life-changing health effects, as you remind us), but thankfully it's not killing 40% (IIRC) of the infected like Ebola. Under that pressure a vaccine would probably be advisable even if it 'only' killed 20% (!) - if you could get anyone to have such a vaccine?
All vaccination programmes cause some harm, mass inoculation in a rush has the potential to cause more harm than no vaccination.
There's some very interesting work on apparent immunity to Covid19 going on (The Lancet article recently), which I'm hoping will suggest that an endemic "common cold" coronavirus has effectively inoculated people. That would seem to give an inoculation known to already be relatively safe. But it's way out of my areas of expertise.
> Sweden is slithering into a full blown catastrophy […] the numbers are bound to explode in the next few days.
> The grim reality, however, looks very different and Sweden is on the best way to one of the greatest corona catastrophies in Europe.
Didn't happen and the curve continued to sharply decline after you made your comment. Sweden currently has one of the lowest infection rates in Europe and exactly what I said would happen is happening in other countries.
Of course incidents where 5% of the subjects of a drug test die do not happen ‘all the time’, if they happen it’s on the news. And it’s not on the news ‘all the time’.
Balancing risks does not mean attempting to avoid all the risks.
Live polio vaccine which wasn’t properly attenuated and caused polio;
A vaccine in the us that caused Gillan-Barre syndrome way more often than disease symptoms (1960s or early 1970s, don’t remember disease name)
A vaccine given to children in Sweden that dramatically increased chances for narcolepsy.
It is important to recognize that not all vaccines ever produced are safe for everyone, and there are a few which were a total net negative for society (even though most are net positive despite some bad outcomes)
Vaccines, especially if mandatory, need to be held to an extremely higH standard of Safety. It is my impression that the COVID-19 panic is leading us to approved though net negative vaccines. We will only know much later , unfortunately.
I agree even 10 over 60 years is likely worth it to society as a whole. But ignoring this reality and saying “all vaccines are always safe and no vaccine ever caused anything bad” which many supposedly science people do is not good either.
First off, there's a trust factor. If people start to hear about all these vaccines with side effects and misbehaving, it can cause people to fear and not trust the vaccines themselves, even when some that do work and are safe come out.
Second, and this I am not sure of the validity, but I've seen claims that a bad vaccine could actually make it more difficult to later make a good vaccine. For example, it seems certain type of vaccine can only be used once, so if you've got a bad vaccine, the good vaccine wouldn't work on you anymore, etc.