Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young
reuters.com
reuters.com
And thank you for volunteering.
Source: My partner is an infectious disease specialist and we talk about this pretty much daily because I'm so curious.
And the smallpox one can leave an even bigger scar. I suppose they don't want the liability for that which could impact the model's income
REALITY: Assuming 75-90% efficacy vaccine, vaccination is non-random and population is heterogeneous. You want to vaccinate everyone who agrees to take it. Just like with children diseases, there will be clusters of anti-vaxxers, or people just don't bother and they are often clumped together, travel around the world and spread the disease.
Obviously "herd immunity" is more of a gradient than a cut-off, and it's much easier to approach it if we can vaccinate everyone, but we can definitely speed up the process (including the months-long process to even get the vaccines to everyone) if we can start vaccinating some people early.
It varies by disease. Can anyone really say what the % is/would be for covid-19?
Look up “swiss cheese model covid-19”
Each extra person getting vaccinated adds protection, both for that person and the larger society.
i suspect you may already know the answer to your question; of course not everyone needs to be vaccinated - that's the job of any reasonably healthy immune system and this virus, which has not been properly isolated by the way, and that comes directly from the CDC, is not particularly dangerous, and that comes directly from the WHO
any thinking human being knows that masks are, at best, largely ineffective at preventing transmission, as is "social distancing" - the way governments are handling this "pandemic", which by definition is not a pandemic, is killing far more people and ruining far more lives that the virus ever will
the question then becomes, why? why are we being asked, and compelled in many case, to wear ineffective masks? why are being threatened and arrested in some cases for not distancing when there is no creditable scientific evidence to support that distancing works?
furthermore, the rt-PCR "test" that is used by many labs to diagnose COVID-19 is not a test - it is a procedure designed to amplify a tiny amount of RNA or DNA - it was never designed to test for this or any other virus and it does not produce a binary result, so in the end , we have NO idea how many cases there are, and it gets worse than that because apparently PCR is looking for any corona virus, alive or dead! that means that anyone that's ever had a cold can test positive (along with people that died in motorcycle accidents, fallen down stairs, or got shot in the face apparently)
the number of 'cases' is meaningless and the survival rate is exceedingly high, and if we make an adjustment for the radically inflated number of deaths, it becomes very questionable whether there even is a "novel" corona virus or whether it's the flu
lastly, even if one is not reasonably healthy, or just doesn't wish to spend a lot of time being sick, all that required is high-dose vitamin C along with D3 (and zinc wouldn't hurt) - what's a high dosage? 4 grams+ / hr. for an adult, not that it's critical because no one has ever died from vitamins (minerals is a different story)
READ: Coronavirus (COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2) news and resources – index – 12Bytes.org https://12bytes.org/articles/health/covid-19-coronavirus-inf...
So I am assuming this is the control group.
Clinical trials are phased. Typically you start with a very small group of people to evaluate toxicity (e.g. below treatment levels of a drug), then a slightly larger group looking for side effect, then a significantly larger group looking for desired effects, and finally a broad group looking for safety and efficacy.
After that a phase 3 study is done on tens of thousands of people from all possible demographics.
I guess the reason is that the study is narrowly tailored to vaccine approval requirements?
Kind of difficult to prove efficacy if you don't know how many people in your trial were infected with the disease you're trying to vaccinate against though. But do bear in mind as mentioned in other comments this participant was not in the phase 3 trial, and phase 3 is where the immunity given by a vaccine is tested. Phase 1 and phase 2 are much more constrained studies intended to determine if it's safe to give the vaccine to enough people to evaluate immunity.
I am unsure if they will have some lower bound for acceleration for this vaccine, since the downsides might not be apparent for a long time.
I would imagine that volunteers would also be willing to get tested, though perhaps the worry is that such a requirement might cause more of them to drop out of the study.
[1]: https://interactive.news.sky.com/2020/covid-19-coronavirus/t...
>You will be compensated for your time, the inconvenience of having blood tests and procedures, and your travel expenses. The total amount compensated will be approximately £235 - £625 depending on the exact number of visits and whether any repeat or additional visits are necessary.
>Until now, this vaccine has only been tested on laboratory mice and other animal species and this is the first time that the vaccine will be given to humans.
Is it possible to know which species those are?
Something is probably going to work. The big question is how well. A 50% effective vaccine might be an overall lose - only half are protected but more than that abandon masks and social distancing.
The Johnson and Johnson vaccine, if it works, is the easiest to use of the early leaders. One dose, and it doesn't need to be refrigerated to dry-ice temperatures like some of the others. The Merck/IAVI vaccine is only in phase I, but it's a pill. If that works and is highly effective, it will be possible to wipe the virus out worldwide in a second round of immunizations.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus... (or https://archive.is/D6C68)
I remember a similar argument being used against face masks. (That they are not perfect, and may cause harm by giving false sense of security.) Perhaps we should be more careful about perfect being the enemy of good.
That isn't enough for herd immunity (at around 60%) and real vaccination rate will be even lower.
There is also no chance in hell that Germans will allow a government-mandated vaccine. It's unconstitutional and there is heavy opposition to government-mandated anything throughout all of society.
So we will be stuck with this virus. But you're free to get the vaccine yourself for your own protection.
Once a vaccine is available and a large share of the population either has been vaccinated or has the opportunity to be vaccinated maintaining the current measures can't be justified anymore.
The same is true for other vaccines. See for example [the figure on this page](https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/qa-ola-rosling-gapminder): in this survey, in Germany, 13% said they believe vaccines are not safe in general, but only 3% of babies are not getting the measles vaccination.
So let's hope many of the people that currently are not planning to get the vaccine, will change their mind and actually do so in the end. I think good information campaigns in the media and testimonies of friends that have received the vaccine will do a lot to mitigate this problem.
At a considerable cost. There's a large number of people for whom the vaccine won't work when it has been taken correctly or who cannot take the vaccine because it will react very badly with their chemotherapy or whatever.
This "let Darwin deal with the anti-vaxers" solution, though initially attractive, ends up being sociopathic when you dig into it.
No bars, no restaurants, no concerts or sporting events, no public transport, no airports, no religious gatherings, no hospitals, etcetera.
It honestly seems borderline unethical to give people a placebo vaccine.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/03/placebos-arent-needed-ch...
Also, there is a very strong risk, given the global situation, that the longer placebo-controlled trials go on, the less reliable the data will be, because control-group subjects will ignore the rules of the study and go get vaccinated as soon as it's broadly available just in case. So even just looking at data quality and excluding other considerations, placebos have major risks that probably outweigh the benefits of administering them for months or years like a usual vaccine trial would.
It's only unethical to withhold the vaccine if you know that it's safe and effective. The whole point of the study is to figure out if that's the case. It's possible for vaccine candidates to be ineffective, or even harmful (e.g., antibody-dependent enhancement).
> Would the researchers not want people to go out and live their normal lives?
That would be great for the trials (assuming both the vaccinated and placebo groups behaved identically). But most people would consider it unethical for researchers to encourage the trial participants to increase their likelihood of exposure to the virus. People who sign up for vaccine trials are not signing up to get CoVID-19.
It’s spreading like wildfire to people following best practices too all over the world. It only takes a small subset not following these practices to spread it all over.
You may still have increased risk taking behavior if you don't tell them whether they got the real vaccine or placebo, but it will be equally increased across the experiment and control groups.
Really it's about measuring how likely vaccinated participants are to contracting the virus than those that received the placebo.
A real vaccine, with side effects that are similar to what is expected of the covid-19 vaccine. It is a well tested and safe vaccine and it will protect you from meningitis but not from covid-19.
They are doing that exactly for the reason you are mentioning. Of course, participants are aware of the nature of the placebo they might receive.
Having them expose themselves more to the virus is a "good thing" (though tell them how long should they wait for the immunity to set in)
Yes, with the control group you would have a base for how many people you would have expected to be infected, so there's that, but you "could" get that from other observations
Getting this number for a distribution of people as similar as possible to the people in the experimental group is, in fact, the primary purpose of having a control group. There is no better way to predict this number, as you can't predict how likely a particular person is to catch coronavirus at a particular time, in a particular location.
You also need a control group to get the number of various medical problems expected in the experimental group, even if the vaccine doesn't cause them. This also depends on time, place, and behavior.
So, if you create a reason for people in the control group to behave differently from experimental group, for instance by letting people find out which group they are in, you defeat the purpose of having a control group.
No, if they change their behavior, you couldn't.
Why are so many people commenting when they clearly don't understand knowledge-creation/statistics/methodology?
(Needless to say, running an invalid vaccine trial also has very bad consequences: it would delay the actual deployment of a working vaccine to the general public, resulting in millions of unnecessary person-hours of potential virus exposure.)
AMA?
Have you experienced any side effects, even mild like injection pain or fatigue? I'm in the Moderna study and feel pretty disappointed that I may have gotten the placebo.
Double blinded placebo controls are critical to clinical trials so you shouldn’t be disappointed one way or the other. Even if you are in the control group you’ll have the opportunity to get the vaccine after you’ve helped prove its efficacy and safety.
But what happens if a vaccine gets approved while you’re in a trial and not sure if you got the placebo? Well, you can drop out and just get the approved vaccine.
Of course that will trash the original trial you were in.
After the second jab, I had no side-effects.
It's been quite a few months now since my first jab and I have no long-term effects whatsoever.
The control for Moderna is just saline, which is why I'm fairly certain I got it. No side effects whatsoever, not even soreness.
That's currently due for March 2021, but things change quickly.
How often are your follow-ups?
Mild fever for 48 hours that meant I was too tired to exercise, but I was more than fine to work. (I'm a software engineer. I think if I had a more manual job, I would've struggled!)
My follow-ups are every 2 months at a local hospital. They take general observations, ask about side effects and take a small blood sample (presumably to test for antibodies)
I guess I'm risking it because someone has to. Vaccine trials are incredibly safe and highly regulated. In reality, the worst-case was that it didn't work rather than my head exploding.
It's worth pointing out that during a pandemic, while participating in a trial does carry a risk, so does not participating. A participant has some substantially greater probability* than the general population of avoiding an infection which apparently carries a risk of death or long term debilitating effects.
* You'll have to incorporate the probability of being in the control group, of course, but the overall probability is still significant.
Participating also carries risks beyond simply that of the vaccine. Being exposed to any kind of healthcare setting is extremely dangerous right now. I'm taking part in the Moderna trial, and honestly I'm considering dropping out before the second injection. The risk of going into a clinic multiple times where I hear people coughing all over the place is starting to seem unacceptable to me given that I'm fairly certain I've been given the placebo.
My life can begin to go back to normal potentially months before it otherwise would.
It's a risk tradeoff, different between the phases. I'd probably volunteer for a phase 3 trial if one was available in my area. Phase 1 would be a bit too hot for me.
I wasn't interested in Phase I. My trial is Phase II/III. I was by no means the first to be vaccinated. Any major, common, reactions had already been pretty safely discounted.
- When will the vaccine be ready?
After the Phase 3 efficacy data is reported, assuming that the data shows that the vaccine prevents COVID or reduces COVID severity. This happens after enough people in the trial get sick with COVID. Then they unblind the groups and see if the people who got sick were in the control group or the vaccinated group. Essentially we are all waiting for a few 10s of people to get COVID. You can guess that the UK, South Africa and Brazil trials are getting very close to this since those trials have been running for months, but the US trial has recently started and is being run separately and wouldn't be very close yet. So the UK would probably have the first chance of approving this vaccine.
- What do we know about vaccine effectiveness so far?
So far, they've published initial safety data and immune response data in both healthy young adults and now in older adults. That all looks good - basically, the vaccine generates a lot of antibodies in everyone who takes it. So in theory, it should work. Separately, other groups have done testing to verify that the vaccine is operating the way it should at a biological level. There were also very early animal tests to show that the vaccine reduced the severity of COVID and prevented serve lung symptoms. In those tests, the vaccine didn't totally prevent transmission, but the animals were injected with a large amount of virus and it's not clear how humans will react in the real world (hence the wait for Phase 3 trail results).
- If it works, how long would immunity last?
No one knows until we wait and find out. But people vaccinated with the experimental SARS-1 vaccine still show antibodies over 10 years later, so the hope is that it could be long lasting.
- Didn't they have to stop this trial at one point because someone got sick?
Actually, at least 3 adverse events have occurred. Early on, one person got symptoms consistent with typical vaccine side effects, but it was determined that the person had a previously undiagnosed, unrelated disease. Second, there was the highly publicized case where a patient suffered temporary spinal inflammation and recovered shortly. It is unclear if this event is related to the vaccine, but trials in all countries have resumed so the various government agencies seem satisfied. Third, a patient in Brazil died of COVID but it was reported that the patient was in the control group and hadn't received the vaccine. Very little information from these cases is reported because of health privacy laws, so some of this information comes from media reports as opposed to official announcements. None of it seems inconsistent with a normal vaccine trial.
- Would you feel comfortable taking it yourself?
Yes, I did (I'm in the trial). No side effects worse than a flu shot personally.
I'm assuming you also don't know if you got the active substance or a placebo?
Yep. In the UK, they used an existing, unrelated vaccine with similar side effects as the control so it wasn't obvious which one you got. In some countries and for some of the other vaccine trials, they are just using saline as the control so it seems like a lot of those people would know.
You can tell the difference in getting a vaccine shot and a shot of saline?
You don't want to bias the study by revealing that information. People who knew whether they'd gotten the real thing might behave differently.
This seems rather worrying as these Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials are pretty small, no? What are the odds these patients got this from the vaccine vs whatever else they had going on?
I just can't shake the fact that this particular vaccine seems to have some safety issues. We'll see in Phase 3 if this shakes out, but I would like to understand why governments feel safe about these developments.
Keep in mind they pause anytime anything serious happens to anyone in the trial to give them time to make sure the vaccine didn't cause it. Pauses are a good thing - they are a sign they are following the protocols and not just pushing something through.
> Without a strong mucosal response, injected vaccines may be less likely to produce so-called sterilizing immunity, a phenomenon in which a pathogen is purged from the body before it’s able to infect cells, Dr. Durbin said. Vaccinated people might be protected from severe disease, but could still be infected, experience mild symptoms and occasionally pass small quantities of the germ onto others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/health/coronavirus-nasal-...
Though, sometimes people think vaccines just prevent someone getting a disease. Stop it completely in its tracks. That's true for some, but it's not that simple for others.
Unfortunately a measured immune response does not ensure:
- That the virus can't be transmitted to others
- That you are less likely to catch and replicate the virus
- That you can't get ill from the virus
- That you can't get "long covid" symptoms
- That you can't die from covid
- That the immune response lasts for more than a few months (this is why we keep getting some of the same cold viruses; our immunity to them doesn't last)
- That the R number goes down (if it doesn't prevent transmission)
- That the R number doesn't go up (if people change behaviour in response to knowing they or other are vaccinated)
- That the virus won't evolve a workaround in response, like the rapidly mutating flu viruses
An immune response certainly suggests those things. But we can't be certain from immune response alone. Consequences need to be measured as well. We'll have a real solution when those sorts of things can be demonstrated, but it will take much longer to find out unfortunately. Probably we have to deploy a vaccine on a large scale somewhere before we can even find out how effective it is in the ways that ultimately matter.
Still, if a vaccine combined with uptake and people's behaviour reduces R below 1.0 at scale, that's enough to be a breakthrough. The greater the reduction the better, but 1.0 is the magic number.
Even if there's one good vaccine, having multiple good vaccine types in the world will be better. The virus is less likely to evolve a defence against multiple vaccines than against a single type deployed everywhere.
The fact this vaccine targets the spike protein is also good news, because even if the virus evolves, there's evidence that the spike protein is key to its harmfulness, so any evolved strains that keep it will likely trigger an immune response, and evolved strains that change the spike protein seem likely to be less harmful too.
To make the virus for the vaccine you need to use a different virus that when it replicates it creates copies of the actual virus used in the vaccine.
Think about it as a self extracting archive that creates copies of an uncompressed file (the actual vaccine) the file that it outputs doesn't have the information to reconstruct the self extracting archive itself.
Looking good, but still months away from rolling out.
A: Quite data driven (and frustrated when data's not there)
B: Former work history in monetary policy a fan of fan-charts (i.e. central projection isn't the only thing, there is a spread from the central projection).
C: Not willing to over-speculate on either side.
D: Perhaps not a super people person, but not negative either, see A. Quite nuanced if others listen, and would listen to those advising him keenly. And starkly aware of causes of death that are not Covid-19, but linked and accelerated due to it - avoiding hospitals, mental distress, etc.
All in all, not a bad choice for a health secretary. Reading between the lines, I'd give it 2-3 months until this is rolled out.
Okay good so just lets get it shipped!
The AstraZeneca vaccine is based on an adenovirus vector, which has never been approved for use in humans. It uses a weakened live virus that can (and apparently has, in the case of the J&J vaccine, which is using very similar tech) cause serious adverse systemic reactions. From what we've seen so far, the safety profile for these vaccines is far worse than the mRNA/lipid nanoparticle based vaccines coming from Moderna and Pfizer/Biontech.
It's also not really news. We know that a vaccine will prompt an immune response. Dozens of others in progress have already shown this with phase 1 and phase 2 data. The question is how strong, how long lasting, and how safe is it, along with the question of real world efficacy data from placebo controlled trials.
There is no evidence to prove the vaccine has caused any serious adverse effects so far. If that were the case, it is unlikely the Data Safety and Monitoring Board (DSMB) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would recommend resuming the trial.
> After a thorough evaluation of a serious medical event experienced by one study participant, no clear cause has been identified. There are many possible factors that could have caused the event. Based on the information gathered to date and the input of independent experts, the Company has found no evidence that the vaccine candidate caused the event.
https://www.jnj.com/our-company/johnson-johnson-prepares-to-...
The worrying trend is the ,,signed contracts with governments'' part even though the clinical trial results are not out yet. It seems that vaccination gets highly political, just like how EU made a mistake of paying for Remdesivir even though we knew that it's not worth it at that point.
Glass half empty: We don't know how the immune response measured relates to protection from or lessening of the infection. This is what the ongoing trial is trying to find out.
This is, IIRC, the second report of successful immunogenicity in older people. There was a (small) cohort of > 65 year old people tested with Pfizer / BioNTech's vaccine in the Phase 1 trial, and even there immune responses were found and measured.
There are tests that can be run to show an immune response.
One thing I’ve learned is it’s extremely hard to get doctors to run the tests. AND there are a whole lot of them. AND I’ve run into many doctors that are 10-20 years out of date with treatment and diagnosis protocols.
As in, current recommendations are that test X isn’t reliable. Use test Y. Doctor refuses to run any test because you’re the wrong gender. AND The moment you see someone in a practice your banned from seeing anyone else in the practice. So second opinion means going to 20 miles to another center.
Oh, and it’s 3 months+ to get a single appointment. You may need two dozen appointments until they narrow in on the issue.
That something is possible still leaves a massive gap of getting it done.
[nature.com] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02633-6
On a separate note - the voting on this thread at the moment seems pretty wild with some seemingly innocuous comments being downvoted. I don't get it.
Now (soon, hopefully) people can acquire immunity through a vaccine, instead of through a virus that leaves long-lasting damage to the body (in particular, but not limited to, the brain).
In what percentage of people who get COVID-19 is there long-lasting damage to the body? What other conditions did the people who get long-lasting damage to the body have? How does these numbers compare with other diseases?
Would appreciate citations.
However, the efficacy of this vaccine (and all the other candidates) still needs to be clarified - ie is it like a measles vaccination (~90% efficacy) or the flu vaccines (~ 25% - 50% I believe).
Judging from our response to Covid-19, if this had actually been the collectively-feared zombie virus, the pandemic would have been far worse than any fictional account has manage to capture so far.
This is still good news. But it should be put in perspective, this does not automatically translate to "this vaccine will work fine in both young and old". It just means we can have some higher hopes that it will.
Only RCT results of the real infections will show if it really works. (RCT for the vaccine is running and first results are expected soon.)
Personally I would argue that the standards should be kept to even when the world is on fire, I mean they do exist for a reason.
I mean, its better news than the alternative, but I think "Oxford vaccine produces zero immune response" would be a far less likely outcome.
s/year/month/gEdit1: Just to throw in more info, Oxford plans to scale this up for mass production with Serum Institute of India and AstraZeneca.
Can you? Do you have any examples of successful vaccines that are only given in one region because they have been proven ineffective in a different region?
This is because the distribution of certain alleles, fundamental for the immune system, is heavily biased geographically [1].
Australia is part of this group that will be manufacturing all the dosages locally and independently.
I work in an area where we make agreements with university’s. It’s often shared IP or publicity. Alternatively, one can publish, once the other makes profits. Or it could be something in between.
In this case, I bet everyone is doing this pro-Bono from a future profit perspective, because the government is paying for all of it.
I’m expecting that once this thing is ready there’ll be a logistical effort for the history books to roll it out. See what they can do with the military involved, like the nightingales.
I heard a lot of bluster about testing here in Ontario in the spring, but here we are in the fall with rationing of tests again.
Or at least I hope so.
There's no way (AFAICT) to link to it directly, but try charting "Total tests completed in the last day" and "Under Investigation": https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/status-of-covid-19-cases-in-...
I think the "military involved" piece is key, especially if you're talking about the US. It's maybe a bit trite at this point, but a lot of comparisons were made about the stark contrast in how quickly a national response mobilized in response to BLM protests vs the pandemic. The basic takeaway being: executive priorities matter, and even Trump has made it clear on a number of occasions that getting the vaccine out is important to him.
History isn't always happy and positive, you know.
Oh, they are. Just don't ask too many questions about money disappearing in the darker corners of such effort.
Because GPs (in England, I don't know about the other nations) should have enough stock. They are prioritising higher need first, and then the expanded programme later in the year, and then anyone else who wants one after that.
If you're not priority need you can try a pharmacist.
Aside: It was, for the NHS, an exceptionally efficient process. I was given an exact time slot and was in and out in less than three minutes.
It's actually an "indeterminate way to go". Assuming it is "long" has no factual basis. Phase 3 results could be released literally any day now, and good results would lead to government approvals in the following weeks.
They have massively expanded the flu jab programme in the UK this year (to try and avoid hospital overloading) so thats one of the reasons flu jab is in short supply. Apparently its mainly a logistics problem, the doses are there, somewhere, see: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/oct/04/gp-surgeries...
If this was rolled out properly people would be actively contacted by phone, etc. with assistance on how to get it. That's the kind of aggressive roll-out I'm hoping we see if/when a COVID19 vaccine becomes available.
I think if you are unlucky it can be hard to get, but it is rolling out fast and many people are thankfully able to get it.
Other vaccines can be stored at -20C, usually.
The flu vaccine is generally about 50% effective, and only about 50% of (Americans) say they will definitely or probably get a vaccine. If that holds, then combined, that would only cover 25% of the population. Well below herd immunity.
Yes, it would be an improvement, but we should really be embarking on a heavy public awareness campaign that, once available (and assuming a low risk profile) that vaccination is the responsible and safe thing to do.
Nature has a good article that goes into depth a bit here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02948-4
Basically, there are reasonable estimates that the range could be anywhere from 20% - 70%.
The effect also greatly depends on which portion of the population gets vaccinated. If (in an imaginary world) the most at-risk 50% of the population got vaccinated, we could reasonably expect Covid to actually become something like the flu.
Finally, I expect this is something that'll gain acceptance over time. There are some not unreasonable factors that could cause people to be nervous about a Covid vaccine initially, that will be softened over time. Things like it being developed under the supervision of politicians who could be motivated to rush it out, or just being developed faster than any vaccine ever.
Or, on the flipside, continued travel restrictions for individuals who haven't been vaccinated. Americans traveling to certain tropical countries have been required to get specific vaccines for years, I wouldn't be surprised if over the next few, travel to Europe or even Canada requires a Covid vaccine.
The basic principle of a vaccine is that it contains proteins that are the same as (or similar to) some of the protein building blocks of the actual virus. Your body learns an immune response to these proteins, which it can reactivate when it encounters the real thing.
Many potential vaccines target the same spike proteins on the outside of the virus. I guess you could say those produce "the same immune response" in that sense.
The nature of the response varies. Some candidates are more efficient at eliciting the production of antibodies, while others also activate cellular immunity (T cells).
At least, that's how I understand it from what I've heard. Others should please correct me if I'm wrong.
I think the British media goes for the colloquial version a bit more, but it's hard to say for sure.
I sympathize with your pain of learning a new language (or system or whatever): It's hard to tell if it's a mistake on their part, a mistake on your part, some kind of regionalism, some kind poetry...
Oxford develops the vaccine with public money. We also, god willing, need to manufacture billions of them and transport them around the globe.
For that manufacturing, give me a solid existing multinational with a proven manufacturing record and base please, not some non-profit startup.
I suggest that we should give merek the for profit monopoly, but allow for non profit manufacturing. If another organization wants to make the vaccine but not derive profit from the process, let them.
Manufacturing takes time and money to develop. Revenue should pay for those costs. The non-profit gains experience, but no profit. The for-profit gains profit. If the for-profit decides to raise prices too high, there will be a willing and capable competitor waiting in the wings.
This kind of thinking is worrisome to me. It sets a horrible precedent. Previously in times of war private business would be forced into helping the people fight a common enemy. These days a war on a virus has zero help from business and they essentially have a position of power to sit on their hands taking billions of public subsidy and then take the people's money and effort for their own.
Why do we take this with such apathy? Why is it that a country run by the people for the people has no power in the populace hands? We are doing everything we can to help, committing billions of dollars which represents millions of hours of public production to solve a problem that CEOs only want to assist in if they can up their share price.
Since we care so much about our health and the health of loved ones why have we not used these unprecedented times to reform the healthcare industry?
We are paying twice for this. Once to fund the research, which we then give away, and then again for the manufacture and distribution which is priced as if the pharma did all the research. These vaccines are going to cost anywhere between $15 and $37 a shot. You cannot tell me that's how much these vaccines cost to make in quantity. Why is there any profit at all? Let's get ourselves out of this shit without encumbering any more debt on top of an economy that is already falling into a black hole.
This stuff is morally corrupt, and to say 'who cares' makes me sad. We should care, maybe we accept the shit we have, but we should care about it. This stuff should be criticized, we should use our agency to change what is wrong, not to support it.
Every day I fear we are all fucked. This sort of thinking is why we deserve the likes of Trump and Boris. We bring this crap on ourselves and then moan about it.
You talk about getting back to 'normal', well we slowly sold normal. These decisions do not have zero impact on the future, they affirm a shitty attitude and set the path for future generations who won't know any better.
/rant
There's no(t necessarily a) question of any non-profit startup there. The problem is that the people who paid for the development of the product should also hold rights over the product. If the vaccine was developed with public money, it should be publicly available -- not necessarily (but yes, also to) non-profit startups, but also to any other manufacturer in the pharmaceutical industry, since they (allegedly, in any case...) pay taxes, too, and have therefore invested in this product.
If Merck wants to use their proven manufacturing base with an excellent delivery track record (which nobody is denying, after all), that's great. They can:
1. Put their money into the development of said vaccine, or
2. Acquire the license to manufacture it, at a reasonable price, like they do with any technology that wasn't developed using public money, or
3. If we don't want stuff that's already been paid for with public money to be sold to manufacturers, which I don't disagree with at all, then, sure, they should get it for free -- but in that case they shouldn't be the sole owner of the rights towards that product, either.
(Edit: FWIW, I'm all for 3. I've worked in the medical industry and I know full well that there's a great deal of work that goes between first-stage research and final production, and that it's incredibly hard and expensive to take the result of a publicly-funded research program and turn it into a product. That doesn't change the fact that said research programs are publicly-funded -- their results should be available to anyone who paid for them. If someone wants exclusive rights to the result of some research program, then they're welcome to pay for it themselves.)
As it stands now, they own the rights (including licensing rights!) to a bunch of products that they haven't paid for at all.
All the suits blabber on and on and on about how the government should keep its nose out of their business. How about they tell the government where to stick it when it's about paying for their research, too?
Sounds like the media panic is working.
The government did this. They are the ones who put the restrictions in place. They are the ones who choose not to remove them.
The government pulled a fast one on most people: They broke our leg, they handed us a crutch, and we thank them.
Don't pretend the vaccine is our savior. The government has the power to end the restrictions at any time but they choose not to.
Is would seem “US BigParma” are not involved, as AstraZeneca is a British/Swedish company.
This is very disappointing. A lot of people are posting on this thread based on this misinformation.
"Merck proposed giving Oxford around 1% of royalties, according to people familiar with the negotiations, with a sliver of that going to Vaccitech."
https://innovation.ox.ac.uk/technologies-available/technolog...
the public sector doesnt have the agility or flexibility to do such a thing but they definitely have the money and incentives to make it happen.
the two combine to create a big, powerful, fast-moving machine that solves a problem.
Governments will pay a lot to get their economies going again. That burden will in turn fall on taxpayers one way or another; whether it's directly via taxes or budget cuts or indirectly via inflation or debt service.
I've only been following the market for about a year, but its a weird thing.
It's good news, but is this really news at this point?
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/volunteer-astraze...
They don't release more details officially due to patient confidentiality, but the unofficial word was that a young doctor treating COVID patients died of COVID during the trial, but was in the control group and did not receive the vaccine. It is very sad whenever a doctor dies trying to save others, but especially because they may still be alive if they had been randomized to the vaccination group (of course we don't know that for sure though, since the vaccine may still prove to be effective or ineffective).
Does this comment really read as flamebait? The article is about vaccines. A vaccine has to be administered to everyone to work. But I’m very skeptical that it’s actually going to happen given the way our medical system works here. So, I predict that there’s a good chance we won’t get herd immunity. I just don’t see how that’s flamebait. It’s more, known facts and extrapolation.
eagle screeches
are we there yet?
Our old are going to get sick from vaccines, so the young are going to get it anyway. Next year under 50 year olds will line up for their vaccine.
Meanwhile 1.5 years worth of old, obese, and sick people will have died from coronavirus.
Wouldn't it have been better if healthy kids and adults caught it in q2 2020?
(Please no ancedotes of a sick 5 year old child dying from "coronavirus", statistics are necessary when discussing billions)
There is a difference between the level of illness experienced by those who are vaccinated Vs those who get infected, so more old people will die as a result of infection than would die as a result of vaccination.
So no, it would not be better for healthy adults and kids to get it in Q2 2020. Also how do you propose that you only infect the healthy adults and kids?
If you can't get immunity from the infection, how will the vaccine work?
No.
We have one population. There's no way to segment it to allow people at low risk to catch the virus without also allowing people at high risk to get it.
How do you think it could work otherwise?
As an abstract mathematical problem if somehow herd immunity could be achieved without a vaccine then it sounds like a fine idea. The fact is that immunity after infection does not last long enough to achieve significant enough immunity to get to a useful herd immunity. This of course is what all the medical experts understand which is why Europe is going through lockdowns and Putin has been hiding in a bunker. There have been strict lockdowns in China and most other major governments have taken some sort of similar response, even Sweden eventually. There is almost nothing all of these governments have ever agreed on so universally.
Don’t expect a reply justifying my comment on HN with robust data, I have better things to do with my time like play in a park.
If we let everyone get it in Q2 2020, millions would have died when we ran out of ventilators.
and nowhere that I'm aware of came close to running out of ventilators. New York, one of the hardest hit places in the world may have used a third of their available ventilators. They used around 1/2 of the ventilators they reported available to them in 2015 so it wasn't even close to being the limiting factor in healthcare.
How do you explain countries like Belarus, Serbia and Sweden, or parts of the US like South Dakota, where no or very lax measures were taken but what you describe didn’t happen?
In fact, is there any evidence that this happened anywhere, or is it all just conjecture based on modeling?
Not a good idea to catch it just to get immune.
In what percentage of people who get COVID-19 are there bad long-term effects? What other conditions did the people get bad long term effects have? How does these numbers compare with other diseases?
Would appreciate citations.