Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25033844&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25033844&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25033844&p=4
(Once we've rolled out some long-suffering performance improvements, all of this should blissfully disappear, including this sort of comment. Thanks for your patience.)
+ ~90% of individuals achieve immunity.
+ no significant side-effects.
Not so good:
- two doses needed, 3 weeks apart, immunity after one month from first dose. Slow rollout.
- -80C storage and transport needed. Challenging, but doable in developed countries, but still may slow down mass rollout. Not feasible in many developing countries.
I still wonder about long-term immunity. Anyone can share any insight?
It’s a difficult problem, but a solved one.
This maybe _was_ the problem in the beginning of the pandemic. Now, it's in the general population and will spread even if you ban all airplanes and repurpose airports into petting zoos.
Sure some places will find total vaccination the best option, but places with out the infrastructure and money can simply do one lockdown that isn't compromised again by air travel.
China is an example that would have left the pandemic if not for the need to resume Air travel.
"Once a provider receives that vaccine, it really starts the clock that the vaccine needs to be administered within five days of when it's put in the refrigerator"
Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-vaccine-distributio...
Any you get a week after thawing it to use is anyway, so you don't need the cold storage where the end user is. I don't know what the thawing protocols are of course.
Those I don't think the doc even needs a fancy cooler, if I understand correctly they need to thaw this first, by the time the individual doc gets it they need to be thawing it and then using it quick. (I don't know what thaw procedures are though)
But I think you're overlooking something rather important: Storing liquid nitrogen in a vacuum flask only keeps the liquid nitrogen cold for hours or days. It doesn't keep the thing cold that you're cooling with liquid nitrogen.
The week you get to use it is after the dose has been created. If it's brought below temperature for any length of time, it can presumably DESTROY the dosages affected by temperature.
See the current flu vaccine storage protocols, for example: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/vac-sto...
"Regular temperature monitoring is key to proper cold chain management. Store frozen vaccines (Varicella, MMRV, and Zoster) in a freezer between -58°F and +5°F (-50°C and -15°C). Store all other routinely recommended vaccines in a refrigerator between 35°F and 46°F (2°C and 8°C). The desired average refrigerator vaccine storage temperature is 40°F (5°C). Exposure to temperatures outside these ranges may result in reduced vaccine potency and increased risk of vaccine-preventable diseases."
I like your optimism, and what you said isn't incorrect about Ebola at the time, but I don't think it's correct about our current situation. How many locations globally have this level of refrigeration? Given that there would be high demand for it, wouldn't prices on any available refrigerators exceed what even the most altruistic companies and organizations could pay?
This still needs to be solved. We have a lot of entrepreneurs, investors, and engineers reading this, so let's not be hasty in hand-waving over something serious.
You could easily localize COVID-19, just make a vaccination passport. No entry to a country if you're not vaccinated.
> How many locations globally have this level of refrigeration
Almost all developer countries, urban centres, where majority of people live anyway.
At -80C?
Edit: There are hardly storage places right now for these temperatures.
A breakdown scenario in a rural area could mean 1000s of wasted doses
Don't you think Western countries are ordering many thousands more doses than they actually need?
Breakdowns happen - places don't need to have perfect infrastructure in order to warrant treatment.
Once the world is open the US and UK will be happy to say that they were able to cancel some unused vaccine supply if it turns out not needed. (which will be easy - between focusing on poor countries and moving production to something else (or winding down) as they recognize the need is gone they will be willing to end those contracts not completely filled. Politically it is a money saving move.
Of course the above assumes best (or at least) case. There are many ways things can go wrong. If all approved vaccines need a booster every 6 months things will be very different. (this is an unlikely but still possible very worst case)
They should be able to put out a general announcement and get thousands to get the vaccine if they need to. A lot of people who can get off work on short notice if there is an emergency. Obviously not everyone, but thousands can be redirected to someone else on short notice. Of course this requires emergency shipments to those who should have got the original, but the breakdown would require that anyway.
I don't know what the thawing protocol is though - this is a real concern that needs to be handled. I assume those who deal with the logistics have plans and backup plans that account for all of the above.
Well, as long as the temperature is under zero, all is fine - otherwise the 4 kilometers of ice under your station might pose a problem.
> At -80C?
Absolutely. This is a solved problem.
You can buy dry ice at your local supermarket. I buy meat from a ethical farming operation that ships their product in insulated packages packed with dry ice. There's almost always dry ice left over. I made a bottle bomb out of the remainder once.
Every major medicine manufacturing company will already have had supply chains in place to deal with this for other medicines.
Storage is a red herring. It won't last more than a day in any given medical facility.
This is by far not the challenge covid19 poses to the world. It wasn't when it was China's local and regional problem, and it is not after it spread out of China and became a pandemic.
Objectively, at most Covid19 causes a slight increase in the global death rate, and this is only observed during the initial spread before herd immunity kicks in. Ww2 killed about 90 million people in 6 years, while covid is bound to have killed about 1.3 million in one year.
It should be substantially less difficult than winning WWII, which again - we were capable of scaling up industrially to accomplish.
> this is only observed during the initial spread before herd immunity kicks in
When will that be? NYC's new spike is demonstrating even their enormous outbreak didn't generate enough of it.
It's a global pandemic. Order them from anyone who can make them at scale. Coordinate with the WHO to avoid silly bidding wars.
- https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/cold-supply-hot-demand
I don't have much more on that front, but it's worth a look to see what well developed agencies are aiming at.
Even dry ice in coolers is low tech but gets you a lot of time considering storage for the second booster dose will be centralized.
The risk is real though. Breaks in cold chain storage have inactivated vaccines have been documented to leading to outbreaks in other disease states. Still, at this point, from my boots on the ground perspective -- so far, so good.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/business/coronavirus-covi...
Surely there's got to be some existing shipping indicator to track if a shipment has exceeded the temperature limits during transit. Even just a vial filled with a liquid that freezes at e.g. -70C would work just by tipping it upside down when frozen.
* The largest chilled supply chains, for things like frozen food, don't get anywhere near -80°C
* The question of what to do in poor countries is very much unsolved
On the other hand:
* Developed countries have at least some cryogenic supply chain in place, for things like fertility medicine.
* You can get a surprisingly long way with couriers transporting insulated boxes full of dry ice (or liquid nitrogen).
* The prize on offer here is absolutely huge, because lockdown is so expensive. $10 billion a day buys a heck of a lot of couriers.
Source: I work in vaccines, and our company works on thermostable formulations, among other things.
But I don't think even that will be necessary. 90% efficiency reduces R so much, it will probably die out on its own.
The real problem is mutations that are not covered by the vaccine. If it mutates as efficiently as flu, it will be a challenge.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-denmar...
We keep using words like "cull" instead of "kill" or "mass murder", as though it's not killing if the animal doesn't look like us. Just because you're more intelligent or more capable than a different kind of animal, that doesn't mean that your life is worth more than theirs. And it definitely doesn't mean your life is worth millions of times more than theirs.
The woke police would like a word with you lmao...
>Just because you're more intelligent or more capable than a different kind of animal, that doesn't mean that your life is worth more than theirs
What kind of rinky dink PETA argument is this? If you have kids I hope you explain to them that in an emergency you are likely going to save the dog and not your child because "your life isn't worth more than the dog's."
Sweden already has around ten detected SARS2 outbreaks on mink farms and is planning not to cull the entire population for the above harvest cycle related reason; the survivors will have ‘more space to socially distance’ and a ‘resultantly lower herd immunity threshold’.
Dense factory farming of all kinds is a biohazard nightmare.
My belief is that contact tracing is a cultural non-starter here. There are people who protest with large, semi-automatic rifles because they don't want to wear masks inside private businesses.
There's absolutely no way they're going to trust a contact-tracing process championed by the government, even if there's no way for the government to access the data.
I suspect much of the population will continue to ignore the virus and winter weather will cause a spike that will cripple hospitals.
Maybe they should compare your throwaway account Ip with the rest of the account ips and see if this is a sock puppet account.
Select ip_addy as source_ip from account_log where account_name=throwaway4220 join account_log on ip_addy=source_ip
Ban you.
Please stop pushing your fantasy narratives and puppet accounts here please.
I'll be responding to you early to mid 2021 with a link to an article about Bidens executive order for a mask mandate.
So the Citizen App has contact tracing. But you have to check into the app, and furthermore, do you trust some private company with the information? About you? Your location and all this ? And contact tracing via government calling you - do you trust random numbers calling you and asking you questions? No one knows when Silicon Valley (in the case of the app) wants to steal some more of your private data, and no one knows when some phisher is phishing as opposed to some volunteer calling you up for contact tracing.
There's a breakdown of trust.
Oh, and saying, 'maybe this administration' is further evidence of that. I live in a blue state, and your perceptions are, I believe, wrong, about the magic around that or the cooperation of the citizenry.
If I'm sick, I'll stay home. I wear a mask where I'm required to. That's the limit of my participation in this hysteria.
It's Silicon Valley and its entire "you signed an agreement, you belong to us" morality and "get your attention span" business model that I distrust. Well, that and phishing phone calls/texts (I seem to get those regularly, after all this time).
And I'm really not sure what there isn't to trust about the testing companies.
The injectable vaccine for polio stops the symptoms, but it doesn't stop the propagation of the virus from person to person.
The oral vaccine for polio also stops the propagation (that is better) but it is a live virus that can escape and produce polio in other unvaccinated persons (that is bad).
[So the current recommendation is to use oral version when polio is endemic, the injectable version when there has been no cases for a few years, and a mix of them in between.]
Normally when you get infected you get small number of viral particles in your system. Those then hijack your system to create more, and those new particles spread to other people through sneezing etc. In time your immune system learns how to recognise and kill the virus and eventually removes it from your system.
Now let's say you get vaccinated and you get that same small number of viral particles in your system. Your immune system will already know how to recognise and kill the virus, and immediately starts doing this. It doesn't multiply in your body, so it can't spread to others either.
But even if we all need to get vaccinated once a year, for a 90% immunity, that sounds manageable. So good news, if it all holds up.
Covid19 would also be over if people with symptoms would just stay home. But that's clearly not happening either. We've got to be realistic about how people behave in the real world.
Mutations aren't a serious concern. Because when viruses mutate it's the strains that are more infectious and less lethal that win out.
But yes, it does require having few enough infected people to make it feasible, and places like the US and most of Europe are waaaaay beyond that point now.
If we could get high compliance with isolation of positives, the US/Europe could use mass testing to "reset" without lockdowns. Test all of Michigan across a couple days and you will identify a significant portion of the infected. Then do Wisconsin. Encourage people to limit travel during those periods and so on.
You wouldn't get to 0 in one cycle, but it would hammer the transmission rate.
https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/slovakias-second-r...
For better or worse [1], complying with mass government orders is simply not part of the collective American psyche.
1. it still remains to be seen if this individualism and distrust of government is one of America’s greatest strengths, or its future downfall
I'd prefer not to get Covid19, but the real worrying thing about it is the potential for a worse disease. Say it's almost as transmissible but much more deadly. How will we respond?
I'm sure many people would do more to protect themselves, but I wonder how deadly it would have to be for some people, and how deadly would it have to be to make community minded cooperation the obvious path (this is a reasonable description of mask wearing…).
> Covid19 would also be over if people with symptoms would just stay home.
No it wouldn't. One of the things that makes SARS-CoV-2 such a problem is that people get contagious long before they show symptoms. Similarly to for influenza and the common cold, many people get contagious without ever developing symptoms.
More than anything I suspect this is a result of allowing so much unfiltered spam calls. If you only get one unexpected, unknown call a month you will almost always answer it. If you get three a day you will almost never answer it.
We are allowing private businesses and scammers to steal the “commons” of our societal attention. We are doing a very poor job of keeping useful communications channels open: almost every communication medium people rely on for important information gets cluttered with must-ignore spam, making it decreasingly likely an important message is actually received.
I actively turned my voicemail off completely.
There is simply no-one who I want to talk to who would choose to leave me a voicemail if I don't answer.
I can, of course, listen to every voicemail, but that's not much better than just picking up the phone when I get a spam call.
So basically the only reason I check my voicemail is to get rid of the notification on my phone
I'm sure there are bills in the works, but those same bills are likely bundled along with completely unrelated nonsense.
Of course, you may not be comfortable with giving Google access to this data...
No clue how widespread this is, but I can't exactly blame people for assuming any call or voicemail they get is a scam, there are so many out there.
But it would be a good idea nonetheless, it only requires to be accompanied by a serious information campaign preparing first time receivers for the surprise.
I'm now wondering if it was an attempt at contact tracing. Had they simply stated what they wanted in the message I would have been pretty likely to call them back myself or answer a later call.
I have no idea where they got my cell phone number from, but the whole thing seems poorly handled at best. Anyone with legitimate business will state the nature of that business and allow for a return call. There's just so many solutions to this problem but nearly zero aligned with incentives.
Your doctor's office can do it because you probably have an existing patient relationship, and you already filled out that paperwork on your first visit.
But in the situation of a cold-calling contact tracer, you haven't signed anything at all, so all they can say is "This is the health department and we want to talk to you."
Yep. That was probably about COVID. Health privacy laws prohibit even the vague mention of a condition. The caller has no way of knowing if they have the right phone number, and the last thing you want is "Attention, Rando McUltrarunner at 42 Crustacean Crest Drive, Cleveland, Ohio! You have been infected with COVID! Run, don't walk to your nearest testing facility!" on some stranger's voicemail. Or worse, "We are following up to see if you're doing well after your abortion" ending up on the voicemail or texting app of a 15-year-old girl whose parents might have access to her phone.
Source: Recently completed my company's mandatory annual HIPAA training.
It's not IT-grade authentication, but for wetware it works.
Yep. I never answer unrecognized numbers anymore, and nobody I've talked to about it does, either.
Welcome to what society looks like when social trust declines. It will keep getting worse unless and until people discover that the commons actually matters and is more than something to scam and find some way to parasitically monetize.
Viral Load Peaks before symptom offset.
> Available evidence from contact tracing reported by countries suggests that asymptomatically infected individuals are much less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms. A subset of studies and data shared by some countries on detailed cluster investigations and contact tracing activities have reported that asymptomatically-infected individuals are much less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms.
http://www.emro.who.int/health-topics/corona-virus/transmiss...
Agree with the main thrust of the point but if everyone did stay home for 14 days you may well eradicate the virus. Problem of course that its economically/socially/medically impossible to facilitate a complete 14 day lockdown.
This would not be possible. There are at least several species of animals (mikes, civets, and bats) than can transmit this virus. We would need to quarantine and test, or kill, each and every one of these animals to be sure we eliminate this virus, or else it will eventually make its way back to humans.
My opinion, based on what I read, is that this will be a bit of a scourge until such time as enough people have immunity from either catching it or getting vaccinated.
Over time, as this new coronavirus makes its way through the human population, the experts it to become less virulent in general and/or appear less often. [0]
[0] https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-cor...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...
I don't think that's correct. Pre-symptomatic phase is supposed to be about 2-3 days. I wouldn't describe that as 'long' before they show symptoms.
In the US, people are going to work (or other events) WITH positive test results. Some because they won't get paid otherwise, others because they want to make a political statement, and some because they're ... well, I dunno why...
So, yes, even having people stay home after a positive test would be helpful, because currently, they aren't even doing that.
1) When I did try to install it said I need to update to a new OS, meaning my five year old phone likely wasn't good enough. 2) My local app doesn't provide alerts to me rather it alerts government contact tracers who today stated that they are only responding to alerts regarding medical/care home workers. I am neither. 3) My phone is not with me at work, the place where I interact with the most people by far, rendering the entire scheme basically useless.
But yes, I would get a vaccine in a heartbeat.
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/less-than-half-in-singapore-wi...
Some health departments have taken it upon themselves to arrest people that won’t sign documents.
It’s like HOA battles, except now you can be put in jail on a whim.
Even being an common case, and will likely be overturned in courts, it’s just too risky.
Which health departments, what documents, and how many people?
And how did they get arrest powers?
http://www.wvih.com/wp1/index.php/2020/07/19/couple-on-house...
"Some health departments have taken it upon themselves to enforce quarantine on people that just tested positive." doesn't really inspire the same kind of outrage.
[citation needed]
I also wonder how effective the vaccine is at preventing its receivers from even reaching that asymptomatic but already contagious stage. If "90%" is just "90% less reach symptomatic stage" then the percentage of receivers that are prevented from reaching contagiousness could be much lower.
This would basically mean that the virus is almost guaranteed to become endemic despite vaccination (unless another vaccine also removes the contagious stage quite well) and that everyone who doesn't get a vaccine will eventually test their immune system against the virus.
Natural immunity often follows a similar pattern. After a while you become susceptible to a light reinfection but the immune system will be in a very good position for a quick - but not instantaneous - victory on its second encounter with the virus. Under those circumstances, herd immunity effects fail to realize unless the first wave is so lightning fast that it fizzles out before the immune systems of early survivors (or the similarly vaccinated) fall back into standby mode.
Because contact tracing seems to work very well at scale in Asia.
It's a cultural thing. Asian cultures vary dramatically between each other (don't mistake Koreans, Chinese, or Japanese for each other -it won't end well), but they have one thing in common: They have a real sense of every person is part of a collective. Maybe it's because most Asian societies are quite crowded.
The US, on the other hand, has a real sense of everyone is an individual, to the point of actually considering people that follow rules and norms to be "sheeple" (see "antimaskers").
Europeans seem to be in the middle.
The 5-HTR1A gene affects whether we more easily make relative versus absolute judgments. And this seems to be true for everything from the length of lines, to quality of life. The allele that is most common in East Asia makes relative judgements easier, in America it is absolute judgements that are easier.
Politically, having the relative form of the gene encourages more community thinking while the absolute encourages more individualism. This leaning holds within whatever society you're in. But when a culture is dominated by one form of the gene, it will naturally shift the entire society.
I learned this from pages 183-186 of https://www.amazon.com/Whos-Charge-Free-Science-Brain/dp/006... and I've wondered ever since how many of my opinions are reason (as it feels) versus genetics.
And yet, just like China, they have also beaten the virus. Meanwhile, Russia has failed on all counts.
The West has the laws on the books, and the legal precedent necessary to enforce them, when it comes to epidemics. What it lacks is the political will.
It doesn't matter how effective these measures are, or how bad an idea it is to let the virus run unchecked - under it's current leadership, states like Kentucky will never do what is necessary to get the virus under control, because these measures are anathema to it's current regime. And states like Washington won't either, because while those measures are not anathema to them, their governments are afraid of a backlash that will replace them.
This wasn't an inevitable outcome - nothing fundamentally stopped bipartisan cooperation on this point. Political expedience and the desire to own the libs did. Had the right not used the pandemic as an opportunity to grab power, and start a culture war, we wouldn't be where we are today.
And you can't blame the Democrats for choosing to make resistance to following best practices in disease control a wedge issue.
Don't equate the damage caused by 'a relief bill didn't pass because two parties couldn't agree on which pork could be added to it' and 'one of the parties is not following basic epidemic control practices'.
Sweden squashed their cases down from a massive peak without any lockdowns or masks, but with a social welfare system that supported anyone who felt even slightly sick to stay home
I am not sure this is true. At least some articles I read attribute the successes in many Asian countries to aggressive contact tracing and quarantining. You don't ask people kindly to self-isolate, you move them to hotels and quarantine them. You don't ask them to remember their contacts, you aggressively investigate them using every source of data available.
I think an argument can be made that Europe simply got it wrong in the details. In order to find less invasive means of controlling covid that respect privacy we ended up limiting freedoms much more and for longer.
There is limited freedom during a lockdown, but a short sharp one can lead to almost complete normality soon after. Short and sharp or long and drawn out?
The drawn out option would seem a dubious freedom. My perspective is heavily skewed by being in NZ and reading US and UK news.
Could you go a little deeper in this? It seems to have worked in Australia, South Korea and NZ as far as I’m aware, what am I missing?
Korea and Japan appear to have contained theirs through the use of reverse contact tracing.
The big problem in the "West" (i.e. Europe and US) is that lots of people don't engage with the contact tracing system, which makes the epidemic almost impossible to control.
Any amount of community transmission will eventually lead to an out of control epidemic, unfortunately.
The countries mentioned have had community transmission, but they use contact tracing, testing, and shutdowns to stop it.
Does the size of the island matter? Does the location of the island matter? What if there are multiple islands?
Look into covid numbers and you'll notice cities even in the same country that are on an island of some sort have significantly less covid numbers, such as Hawaii or Vancouver Island in Canada.
I don't see why the same strategy wasn't used in Europe or the US. Its hard to control a virus when there's a constant stream of new cases coming over the border. I suppose its way too late for that now.
The travel times quoted by that article: "London to Paris taking 2 hours 15 minutes, to Brussels 1 hour 51 minutes."
That's faster than some people's daily commutes into NYC.
A primary landmass on its tectonic plate.
Plus it's connected to South America.
Australia and NZ were able to control their outbreaks (even then with great difficulty in the case of my state of Victoria AU) because the populations are much smaller and the virus was not widespread when the severity of the threat became apparent.
It was pretty bad in Victoria and it was an impressive effort to get it back down. Not many places have achieved success like that. To me the key was the population and its leaders having the will to fight.
I'm talking relative terms; our numbers were 50-100/day when they realised the problem was getting bad, and up to 700/day when we hit crisis point, but that's still lower than the figures that some U.S. and European cities had even back in March/April when the world was still yet to understand what was really going on.
And yep, I think what's happened here has been impressive, but we've had some factors in our favour that other parts of the world don't have.
if you say Mexico is in your definition of North America then it should include all of central america, almost all these countries have a lot of land-based trade.
In Canada we have not had any cases related to truckers, but there's a lot of them who have to do the cross-border route, as well as people who commute daily across the border. heck in Canada and the US there are a few spots where crossing the border is necessity -- the only school is in the other country, nearest hospital, the local library, a popular golf course, etc.
or places like point roberts, extremely small but extremely isolated, or Hyder, Alaska.
Many people are not going to say they cheated on their SOs, or went to a swing bar, or a gay pub.
> I think we can eradicate it by contact tracing.
It’s working fine again now that case numbers are negligible.
It's worked pretty well all over Asia.
That is unlikely to be true. There are asymptomatic super spreaders. The fact that R0 is currently hovering around 1 is that society has greatly reduced contacts. Even in areas where social distancing is a mere suggestion, most people are not behaving completely normally (a good thing). Flights are super low, movie theater visits are super low, hotel occupancy is super low. Social distancing and contact tracing work. Better social distancing and contact tracing work better.
What if it has the contagiousness of covid but the long term lethality of hiv? The long term lethality would have low evolutionary pressure to be less harsh to its host as the implications only follow after many infectious years.
Is there anything fundamentally prohibiting the emergence of such a virus, or are we just lucky?
What if we get hit by a comet?
If only it worked that way! It doesn't, of course.
A random walk can lead anywhere in the adjacent landscape. That includes moving up in lethality without moving down in infectiousness. What you have written here is plausible-sounding nonsense; if it were true, the 1918 flu would never have occurred.
The good news is that influenza is almost pathologically mutation-prone, and coronaviruses are not.
Of course it helps to get the actual rate so close to 0 that the contact tracers are not overloaded
I stayed at home even before symptoms, I infected 3 adults and my daughter in my house.
It was only luck that the adults showed symptoms like myself on day 3 and day 3 was a Sunday and my test results came back that day.
Otherwise, they woul have infected others just like I infected them, before I showed any symptoms.
AND gave up all human interaction. It is absurd to suggest that we should sacrifice civilisation for a virus
Also, we _are_ sacrificing civilization for a virus. Or at least 1.2 million people's worth of civilization…
> Or at least 1.2 million people's worth of civilization…
1.x million natural deaths with an average age of 82 years old, in the UK.
So once you're down to low levels of incidence in the community, given a robust well organised system, efficient contact tracing does prevent the virus from spreading in the community unchecked.
They have done very good at tracking and locking down the few cases that get out, even with very low mask use in the general community based on what I've seen. People were sensible when it mattered most.
It works 'at scale' in Taiwan/Korea if by 'scale' you mean 'large country' but yes, it does not work when there are many infected, it's best suited for when there only small numbers and the government can keep a lid on that.
But that's entirely possible. Remember that countries have local agencies and national numbers are not everything.
Ontario is only 12M people, British Coloumbia 5M people and they have active contact tracing of literally every patient.
So with 90% effectiveness, the numbers will be brought way down, and in many areas, the threshold of cases will be low enough that contact tracing can be enacted.
So about the 50 people - we have to basically still maintain a degree of isolation, and that's entirely possible.
We don't need to tell the grocery store workers to 'self isolate' because someone came into the store with COVID that's already happening, those are low-risk events.
During social isolation, people should absolutely not be contacting 50 people.
So masks, basic social isolation at very least (no unnecessary contact) can remain in place.
It's worked in South Korea
Also, "hasn't worked at scale anywhere is false" - AFAIK it worked fairly well in South Korea, Japan, New Zeeland, China.
In South Korea it did. They now have very few cases and deaths in single digits per day.
SARS-CoV-1 was eradicated.
> To date, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared only 2 diseases officially eradicated: smallpox caused by variola virus (VARV) and rinderpest caused by the rinderpest virus (RPV).
> Although successful containment strategies eliminated transmission of SARS among people, the continued presence of an animal reservoir means that SARS is not yet an eradicated disease.
https://asm.org/Articles/2020/March/Disease-Eradication-What...
> ... the 2003 SARS epidemic was permanently reduced to zero as a result of deliberate efforts, requiring no further intervention methods. This is precisely the definition of eradication.
[1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/27/eabb9153 [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141104111408.h...
> In fact, there is evidence of at least seven potential regions of recombination in the SARS-CoV genome in the replicase- and Spike-coding regions, with possible recombination partners that include porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV), transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV), bovine coronavirus (BCoV), HCoV-229E, MHV, and IBV [1]
> Unlike other viruses that have emerged in the past two decades, coronaviruses are highly recombinogenic. ... For coronaviruses, however, recombination means that small genomic subregions can have independent origins, identifiable if sufficient sampling has been done in the animal reservoirs that support the endemic circulation, co-infection and recombination that appear to be common. [2]
> Recombination seems to be rampant in HCoV-OC43 viruses and contributed to originate the A to E viral genotypes, as well as viruses that do not belong to these major genotypes. [3]
Unfortunately, nature doesn't "design" anything, it's just the consequence of natural selection and fitness of new generations. While the mutation rate might low compared to influenza, the mutation rate is very high compared to something like a prokaryote, enough so that there's an article entitled "Why are RNA virus mutation rates so damn high?" We've already seen a gain of function mutation creating enhanced infectivity and a recombination event involving ferrets, so it's not a stretch that we might see a new more of this in the future. Whether or not it will impact the toxicity of the virus or whether or not its susceptible to a vaccine is up in the air, but once an effective vaccine exists strong selective pressure will be placed on versions of the viruses that evade it.
[1] https://jvi.asm.org/content/84/7/3134 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111218/
A perfect example of why we won’t be able to eradicate Coronavirus. Polio was an easier target with stronger reasons to wish it gone, and we have failed.
* Protection against disease means that you don't get sick. You may still contract the virus and spread it to others (the Salk vaccine against Polio works this way).
* Sterilizing immunity means that you can't even get infected, so that you can't pass the virus on to other people. It does not look like there's any information about sterilizing immunity in this press release.
Importantly, this means that even with this vaccine, the virus may still be able to spread, and only vaccinated people will be protected (i.e., no herd immunity).
The Salk polio vaccine does not prevent infection in the digestive tract, so you can still spread the virus, but it does prevent the virus from spreading beyond the digestive tract and causing paralysis. You could imagine something similar happening with a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: that it would block infection in the lower respiratory tract but not the upper respiratory tract, allowing you to spread it by coughing and sneezing while never getting severe respiratory issues.
Can't we still hit herd immunity as a byproduct of this though? If everyone can pass it along without symptoms, then eventually everyone will have it...
If enough other people have sterilizing immunity, the virus doesn't spread, and the susceptible people are safe.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/priority-groups-f...
We're still months away from all 20M (of a >60M population) people that vaccines have been ordered for being administered with them, (BBC reports 'up to' 10M doses 'may' be 'delivered' this year, i.e. 5M people max) so I suppose they still have plenty of time to decide the most effective pecking order.
We will get vaccines and we will come up with better treatments negating its effects, but this coronavirus is here to stay. It will be a fifth endemic human coronavirus.
This means we'll probably have to receive Covid vaccination on a regular basis along with the flu vaccine in order to maintain a permanent broad-scale immunity. At least until we have a radical new treatment for this family of viruses that can confer a "permanent" immunity - something that for now is in the realm of science fiction.
Coronaviruses also have plagued humanity in the same way, for instance look up “bovine coronavirus”
"Denmark to cull millions of minks after mutated coronavirus spreads to people"
- https://www.euronews.com/2020/11/05/denmark-to-cull-millions...
What if we can? How would we do that?
So, you don't really have to find every animal. Most should be enough.
[0]https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_streicker_what_vaccinating_...
People (rightly, or wrongly) don't trust technology enough, after the reputation Silicon Valley has built and can't shed, around privacy.
I'm on an Android phone, and sure, Citizen and a local State app can do the contact tracing. But what's Citizen doing with that data? It also requires interactivity (another Silicon Valley favorite thing to do - call out for people to perform actions via alerts and notifications).
It's a lower bar for people to wear masks than to accept to use an app for contact tracing, if you were to compare the policy actions. Now, you can have the contact tracers call people, but how many spam calls do you get that you ignore? And phishing attempts? I received numerous texts from "the Democrats" with a person's name, urging me to vote, from all sorts of US numbers, and asking for a reply. To this day I don't know how real that is.
There are too many people to blame for this state of affairs, but the greed and competition for eyeballs are the definite drivers.
You’re assuming 100pct of the population takes the vaccine. I’d be surprised if it’s more than 50% the first year
Less than 10% can get it I the first year.
Aren't you assuming 100% coverage at 90% effectiveness?
What if it's - say - only 50% coverage, at 90% effectiveness. That's not looking so good.
I'm still trying to understand why an otherwise young and healthy person would want to get take one, or more likely multiple, shots of a C19 vaccine, given the risk from C19 is so low. What's the benefit to them?
In HN-speak: how well does a C19 vaccine deployment scale?
It doesn't. Coronaviruses have a proofreading protein which prevents significant RNA changes: https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/fulltext/S1097-2765(20)3...
Said another way: I don't think voluntary contact tracing will work in the U.S. And I don't think you can implement involuntary contact tracing in the U.S.
If I’m wrong, PLEASE provide a .gov link and I will personally make sure that our large academic org pulls out of reverse, and into first gear!
There is no such thing as a vaccine that floods the body with fake ACE2 proteins.
We'll almost certainly need an annual covid vaccination for the same reasons we get annual flu vaccinations - with our current medical technology we can neither rid the planet of the virus nor obtain permanent immunity.
I didn't get flu shots in the past mostly because the shot hurts more than the flu, but COVID is another animal and pretty scary. Maybe they could be combined into a single poke.
In fact we have no idea how long this vaccine or any other [of the experimental covid-19 vaccines] will last for. They've got projections out to at least a year, but uncertainty becomes too great after that. It may last quite a long time, we don't really know.
for the same reasons we get annual flu vaccinations
No. We get annual flu vaccinations because flu viruses mutate significantly and quickly, so we're always getting vaccinated against new threats. Not against threats that we've forgot how to defend against.
[edited to clarify that the uncertainty is around the experimental vaccines; for old standards, we do have a very good idea]
You're right - I should have said "periodic vaccination", not annual.
Also yeah, there's a subtle difference between why we'd need periodic covid vaccinations vs flu vaccinations. But in the end the result is the same, we'll probably need to be re-vaccinated against covid over time.
Covid isn't going away because it has a non-human animal reservoir, so it's all about a strategy to prevent it's re-emergence into the sapiens reservoir. It's possible that periodic vaccinations of the population as a whole would be overkill and we could reactively immunize smaller populations as re-infection occurs.
It could also refer to 90% reduced severity.
A 60% vaccine can reduce the severity of the illness by 40% so only 40% of the expected number end up in hospital.
"The first effective coronavirus vaccine can prevent more than 90% of people from getting Covid-19, a preliminary analysis shows."
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/misconceptions.htm
and this
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/vaccine-benefits.htm
you'll see that that's not how it always works.
> Flu vaccination can reduce the risk of flu-associated hospitalization for children, working age adults, and older adults.
[citation needed]
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/business/coronavirus-covi...
I guess you should invest in dry ice manufacturing companies!
Do You mean the Co2 supply chain? We make a lot of carbonated beverages; there will likely be no shortage.
edit: See https://www.wsj.com/articles/pfizer-sets-up-its-biggest-ever...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/denmark-plans-kill-15-mil...
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/05/spread-of-mutated-corona...
A more aggressive take: https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/13240857614493040...
I am yet to be reassured.
> There are still questions - how long does immunity last, does the vaccine work as well in high-risk elderly people, does it stop you spreading the virus or just from developing symptoms?
I'd rate the news as "vibing" on a scale of clickbait to party for the world
The trial will be complete from an effectiveness perspective once there are ~150-200 cases.
Safety is a different story and may take more time to wait for side effects.
Thanks! Misread the 94, but the n=43.5k is also misleading since they have not analyzed all of the results and duration of the study vs exposure risk is still tbd. If the 94 participants that got COVID also abided by all the other precautions, such as masks, etc, then it stands to reason that the actual infection rate in the population approximating pre-covid behaviors may also be higher.
I'm not suggesting Pfizer is up to something nefarious, just that the biomedical literature is littered with studies with N < 100 for the outcomes of interest and they don't replicate. The N > 40k in some ways is irrelevant if none of those participants have the processes in play. It's more like recruiting N >40k to get N=94 to study.
I'm also not suggesting with 90% effectiveness that there's probably no effect, just that my guess is a true value of 60% isn't outside the realm of possibility once you consider all the factors that could be in play besides the random sampling variation that's assumed by their tests.
What you're saying is the 9 is pretty close to 34 (60% effectiveness). No, it isn't. You'd need to quadruple the number of vaccinated cases to get there. Even if you double them, you're still at 80% so I'd take that as the realistic worst case.
Edit: Also, this is BioNTech's vaccine, not Pfizer's. They partnered with Pfizer as they have the facilities and scale for a massive rollout, but it was developed by BioNTech. I wish they were getting more credit in the US & UK coverage.
That's how clinical trials are done.
It's already in use around the world[1], but I haven't heard of how many people gain immunity thanks to it in percentage, nor if that one also requires multiple jabs.
1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/3/uae-pm-and-dubai-ru...
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/sinopharm-shares-phase...
"unlike other COVID-19 vaccine trials, the study lacked a comparison arm featuring serum samples from patients previously infected with the coronavirus, complicating the task of interpreting whether the response is likely to confer immunity."
It seems that a vaccine needing a 2nd booster jab is also something that is quite common.
Anyhow, good news all around... The more viable vaccines we have, the more likely that the pandemic will be controlled sooner.
That makes no scientific difference, but there are a fair number of people in the US who will not use a vaccine if it is developed that way.
There are numerous companies which specialize in -80C transport and shipping. These containers can be used as temporary (3-7 day) storage at destinations where they do not have infrastructure.
So this vaccine can be distributed to regions with the infrastructure to store it and we can preserve vaccines with less stringent requirement for developing countries, etc.
But what kind of capacity can they handle? I imagine the scale of a Covid vaccine rollout would overhelm prior existing infrastructure
Of course larger institutions already have everything in place and will get shipments with less warning (but they will also get smaller shipments since they don't have to get everyone done at once)
(That's -112 F, for anyone else wondering.)
They do stability studies on these molecules, holding samples at different temperatures and measuring how much "is left" after a period of time.
This particular RNA sequence and carrier might be particularly unstable, so it require -80C if you want it to last longer than a few weeks.
In a biological context, the vast majority of RNA use falls within the 'central dogma' of DNA -> RNA -> Protein. It is merely an intermediate, albeit one with important and complex regulatory processes.
In RNA viruses and other contexts where stability is required, the RNA is stabilized by its environment, namely by associating with special proteins.
If that temperature could be obtained with dry ice, that would simplify things a bit. But AFAICT dry ice sublimates at -78.5C.
What did they use to stabilize the mRNA?
If they’re managing to do it with just temperature and maybe glycerol, that’s great.
If it’s RNAlater, then that’s going to have safety issues. If it’s something else, how was the additive tested for long term safety? (Vaccines like this have been in the works for a long time. There has been time for safety studies.)
Edit: RNAlater MSDS sheet: https://tools.thermofisher.com/content/sfs/msds/2012/AM7020_...
Section 2 states it is non-hazardous.
Section 4 states it is not expected to present a significant ingestion/inhalation hazard under anticipated conditions of normal use.
Finally, Section 11 indicates that the Ammonium compounds present in RNALater may be harmful, but only when they are administered at LD50 concentrations.
Yeah, this alone is bad news.
Last year my parents got a two-dose shingles vaccine. The two doses are supposed to be separated by two to six months. My parents struggled to find their second doses in the window. Apparently there was limited supply and no one had the foresight to reserve second doses when people received their first, or even to prioritize second doses over first.
The covid vaccine will have much more demand and apparently a tighter window, and our health system isn't exactly well-coordinated right now, so I anticipate a lot of people will be unable to get the second dose with the proper timing.
In the UK, the NHS are generally on top of things like this, so it should not happen in most cases.
Wendover did a nice video[0] on this topic month ago, explaining how UPS/FedEx/DHL/… are already massively upscaling their cold chain infrastructure. Retrofitting planes, building giant freezers in transport hubs.
[0] The Greatest Logistics Challenge Ever - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byW1GExQB84
One thing that I found interesting was how they identified today's announcement of the BNT162b2 vaccine candidate (back in September) as one that would require the massive investment in cold chain infrastructure. They also highlight Pfizer's engineering of a separate series of cold boxes that would keep the vaccine at temperature for up to 10 days, thereby enabling it to be shipped through standard logistics networks. Great stuff.
If there are 7 billion people and 1 billion doses in the next year, it's going to be awkward.
The fact it's -80C means they can't prove it stable at higher temperatures.
Some links that might be relevant:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/27/health/russia-coronavirus... Moderna vaccine requires storage at -20 °C Sputnik V at -18 °C; so that would be easier to handle.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/after-pfizer-russia-says-its... 90% effectiveness says the Russian vaccine Sputnik V
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1206008.shtml "No infections among 56,000 people who traveled abroad after receiving Sinopharm-developed COVID-19 vaccine"
https://www.jpost.com/health-science/hadassah-bringing-15-mi... Israel is bying Russian vaccine shots, the head of Hadassah hospital says there is quite a lot of power politics involved in the discourse (Hadassah is one of the major hospitals in Israel)
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/wirtschaft-verantwortung/cor... (in German) for the EU some producers of COVID vaccines got an exemption clause for liabilities, they say because of very tight development schedules (says an unnamed speaker of the European Comission)
So there are many reasons to think otherwise, but the simplest one is - Every single medication and vaccine that we've ever made has known side-effects. Not all side-effects are known right off the bat, and many take years to detect.
I work in vaccines, but I can't think of a vaccine that was completely recalled due to long-term safety issues of the top of my head. Most recalls happen because one lot or the other had some production issues. Certainly, vaccines are extremely safe by the time they get approved - because the approval process is careful, methodical and takes years.
However, in this case, if a COVID vaccine is approved by the end of this year or in the near-term, we won't have any long-term data, and so I do worry about those aspects, about the compounds used in the final formulation as well as the untested nature of RNA/DNA based vaccines.
A few places to do research for those interested:
https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/datasets.html?
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/safety-availabi...
- Trial is only halfway complete.
- Preliminary results have not been peer-reviewed.
The current understanding is that there will be likely no long-term immunity, just like the flu virus (as it mutates).
> -80 Degree Celsius storage and transport needed.
This is actually typical for vaccines storage/transportation needs. Unfortunately this will also means that it cannot be easily distributed into developing countries where supply chain requirements are largely unmet.
From what I've read it is the first large scale adoption of mRNA vaccines so the really long term risks are less known. That said, theoretically mRNA vaccines should have a lot of advantages. Later in 2021 there may be a few other options for vaccines to take as well, so I'd do some research at least.
As far as I recall, the high R0 of COVID-19 meant that >90% was needed for herd immunity. You then also have to factor anti-vaxxers into the equation.
It's a good stop-gap for the 90% who develop immunity, but we need a better vaccine even in developed countries.
The SF bay area has dry ice delivery.[1] Lagos, Nigeria has dry ice delivery.[2] Bismark, North Dakota has a dry ice plant.[3] It's not hard to get.
Coolers for holding items in dry ice are about $100 on Alibaba.[4]
This doesn't look like a big problem.
[2] https://www.businesslist.com.ng/company/256889/greatsmith-re...
[3] http://www.dryiceweb.com/Praxair/Bismarck_ND.htm
[4] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Vaccine-Carrier-Biome...
It's not a big deal for the first world, but poorer nations may hold out for future vaccines that remain stable at higher temperatures and only require a single dose.
Merck is working on a one-dose pill, but that's not expected before mid-2021.
There's micro encapsulation for vaccines.[1][2] The vulnerable active molecule can be put inside a coating that is stable in storage but dissolves after injection.
[1] https://www.academia.edu/33376119/Microencapsulation_of_Vacc...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbio...
Valid point, but I feel there's never been a better time for massively pushing this vaccine (after proper testing and regulatory approval, of course) to medium/low income countries.
Winter should make it much easier in managing the temperature range stability required for storing/shipping the vaccine, especially in countries around the equatorial region.
Doing it in late spring/summer will not be a good idea (assuming a better vaccine doesn't come out by then).
That's a big issue. The N95 mask shortage demonstrates that the US manufacturing industry has far less surge capacity for simple items than previously thought.
Tldr: i have a team in a top institution. There are gaps and the news is TGTBT.
Why am I being down-voted? Is it really of no concern?
Personally, I doubt I will get it at all. The authorities have a very long way to go to win back my trust, after the chain of screwups over the last year.
We've seen that they will lie to us, we've seen that they apply rules to us that they themselves don't follow, and we've seen them take advantage of the situation for their own benefit.
It is a huge shame that so many people are not going to take it solely because they've betrayed our trust so many times that now that they might be doing something good, we won't cooperate.
You know how you could turn this against them to make them think twice about it? Get the Russian vaccines, or the Chinese. Yeah, do it! Suddenly they are not so keen... Now imagine if their beloved State made it mandatory to get Russian vaccines inside them. They would most likely be against it, and our votes would not be down... It is not even the votes I give a damn about, but the fact that we do not know THAT much of COVID-19 but people seem to believe the claims that we have extremely safe vaccines ready just within a few months. Yeah, they say that of the Russian vaccines, too, are you going to take it, down-voter? Would you like the State to make it mandatory for your kid to get vaccinated? I am curious.
My entire family tested positive for COVID-19, and my grandma most likely has it. None of us has/had symptoms. I do not want to get vaccinated. If you (not you, the down-voters) really care, go get vaccinated by the Russian vaccines.
My country plans to vaccinate the elderly, kids, and people with chronic diseases first, then the rest of the population. I really, really wonder how many people are going to have FORESEEABLE side-effects. I think they are also planning to make it mandatory.
P.S. I am not an anti-vaxxer, but these claims by pharmaceutical companies sound shady as heck. If they said they found the vaccine after 5 days and they claim it is super safe because 5 people did not die from it within 10 days, would it make you OK the vaccine? Come on. My problem is that. It is too quick, and too many promises of lack of side-effects, and lots of financial interest. For that I do not believe them. We (medical workers) even have to lie about people dying from COVID-19 so we (the hospital) get more funding. How about that? Governments put price control on the tests, which resulted in zero competition as it was not worth it for private businesses to continue testing. How about that?
This is of concern. The medical industry has a history of covering up the direct know effects of their medicine, AKA poisons. That system has been know for a very long time to lead with arrogance and it sometimes takes them a very long time to pull things they know are killing people. Its just too much $$$.
See vioxx and merck, for just one example.
Better answer: the vaccines are new but the individual systems used to develop them are not, and we have historical trials of a lot of the same techniques which show no long term risks. The biggest unknown has always been the risk of triggering a short-term, unexpected primary immune response that causes harm to the recipient. In the vaccines being developed, that has generally not been found to be the case, and since they're based on the virus currently infecting people we would not expect a response worse then that (which is to say: the components of vaccine use are all well studied, these are understood and safe materials).
The other issue is when we talk about "rushing" vaccine research, this does not involve shirking safety research - i.e. consider the influenza vaccine which year over year is basically a new vaccine we develop quite quickly. What it does mean is that you overlap the stages of vaccine development: normally if you have a P3-trial vaccine, you'd wait till that trial was successful before building the factory to make it. Instead, companies are being paid (or paying themselves) to build facilities and scale up production as soon as they get to the P3 trial stage - financially it's a huge risk, since what they have might not work, or might have an unacceptable risk profile in those trials - which means all the investment is a dead-loss.
This is where government steps in (and has stepped in in places): by guaranteeing the investment on getting those facilities out, it means if your vaccine works then you're ready to go and it's in production right away - as opposed to being another year to 2 years down the line while you work on manufacturing.
True but it's also a bit more complicated than that. The YouTube channel Wendover Productions has a great video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byW1GExQB84 (skip to 5:01 for the talk about the cold chain).
TL;DW, there are other factors:
- Whether the hospital is able to maintain the vaccine at the required temperature (many, especially the smaller ones, don't have the equipment)
- This is medical technology and unproven options (like buying a random box off Alibaba like someone suggested) are unlikely to be used
- Pfizer (vaccine in TFA) has developed a shipment container that uses dry ice and lasts 10 days but it can only be opened twice a day, for less than a minute at a time, so facilities administering vaccines need to be able to accurately predict how many they'll administer in a given day
- Pfizer's box is only built for multiples of a thousand doses and only lasts 10 days so isn't well-suited to smaller areas that can't administer 1000 vaccines in 10 days
Since the transport cases are reusable, and don't need to be completely populated, what will likely happen in rural areas is that they'll have a case for shipment, refill it with dry ice on site, and use a second case to transport a small number of doses to the point of use. Repeat until used up, refilling with dry ice every few days at a central location (less than a week's travel from administration sites). I don't think it's going to be a major problem in practice.
There will be no eradication of the virus, certainly not world-wide, short of multiple waves of vaccinations. Not even with one type of vaccine, but more likely more than one.
Some of the developing world might get vaccinated with a cheaper, more traditional vaccine, but later. But there is no good vreason why you can't have huge vaccination campaigns with cooling trucks at least in their bigger cities.
EDIT: See child comment re: Pfizer press release.
EDIT 2: See [1] for said press release, which has more detailed information than the BBC article.
[1] https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-det...
"Vaccine efficacy is the percentage reduction of disease in a vaccinated group of people compared to an unvaccinated group"
So basically a 90% reduction in Covid infection.
https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson3/section6.html
So "disease" is probably an infection there, not relatively milder infection.
90% still crushes the transmission rate.
Unfortunately, there's yet another property of vaccine performance: some prevent the virus from reaching any level of footing in the host, others only make the body's eventual response stronger, preventing initial footing to cause heavy illness. SARS2-COV is rather peculiar in how its transmission performance is particularly strong in early, mostly presymptomatic stages, so it's perfectly possible to end up with a vaccine that reliably protects carriers from disease, but does not remove them from the spread equations at all, or only very little.
Pfizer is saying that their vaccine is effective at protecting against CoVID-19 disease. They haven't said anything about preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection yet, as far as I can see. The difference is important, because there are vaccines (such as the Salk polio vaccine) that only protect against disease, but not against infection. People get infected and pass on the virus without ever getting sick, so there's no herd immunity.
I'm just saying how you can have a single person that's 90% immune to something vs. Having 90% of people immune against one strain of a virus.
I admit I know very little on how immunity to diseases work, but I imagine that with viruses there is a chance it'll progress to a full blown infection even if you are vaccinated in some cases.
Hasn't this virus already mutated to a bunch of different strands? Could it mean you're immune to 90% of the known variations of the virus?
What are you basing that on, when there are known cases of people getting coronavirus and then still contracting the other strain of it?
A patient must present a infection and the particular virus must be sequenced, and then present with an infection later on where the virus is again sequenced and identified as sufficiently different from the first sample. Otherwise it cannot be deemed a re-infection.
If these small differences in the genomic sequence are already a different strand, I don't know, not an expert. But all 5 (?) cases known so far had a different sequence identified the second time.
> The genomes of the patient’s virus samples from April and June displayed significant genetic differences between them, suggesting that the patient was infected twice by 2 distinct COVID-19 infections.
I’d read of known second infections that are from different strains, but scientists also question lasting immunity from COVID-19 infection because other coronaviruses are seasonal.
It was possible to positively identify a reinfection because the two infections were due to different strains. That was just the means of positively and objectively identify a reinfection. However, nothing was asserted regarding if the patient was immune to the first strain the first time around. In fact, it seems that the hallmark of reinfections is that they are far more critical than first infections. This also means that the first infections is far milder than the second one. Well, the thing about the immune system is that it is able to fight mild infections without developing immunity if they are too mild to trigger a full response from the immune system.
OK. The longevity of the immunity is also an issue perhaps; at least they have written articles about people becoming re-infected; so even the people who do become immune may not stay that way forever...
In my country there have been hundreds of thousands of confirmed Covid infections. There have been <100 confirmed re-infections.
It's very early to draw the conclusion that people in general don't build up lasting immunity, and there is more than enough data to support that most people do build up immunity of several months at least. If the latter wasn't true you'd see much more re-infections.
OK, some (needed) good news..
Because the reports from Denmarks Mink fiasco indicated that antibodies were not as effective on the mutation that appeared there short time ago. This would contradict the one-fits-all immunity argument.
I don't think that argument is being made at all.
In fact, you only need to consider that the max efficiency that's advertised is 90% to acknowledge that this vaccine is not a silver bullet.
For the "danish mink mutation" - even if the exception to the rule - some of the above statements might not be true.
It's the same as 'herd immunity', where each member is '90% immune' and as a result the herd is 'more immune' than if only 10% of its members were 100% immune.
"One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective against rubella.
Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps."
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html#:~:te....
I didn't see the case numbers but I've inferred to arrive at 90% that there were 9 cases in vaccinated group vs 85 in controls. (95% C.I. 80-99%)
Very interested to see forthcoming results from competitors that don't face the -80 degrees issue.
Those are the numbers that matter, statistically. If the total number of people in the study were 2 thousand or 2 billion doesn't enter into the math.
It affects confidence, and potentially the result of the test entirely. I won't be more specific because stats was never a strong suit and my memory's hazy, but I remember enough to know it matters!
It does seem low for the US where you have 3% of the population had disease already in 2020. Perhaps more data came from Germany? Or it could be they measure not just PCR +ve results, but antibody levels and/or severe symptoms?
Looking at the phase 1/2 results, the booster shot seems to help a lot in getting the antibody levels up. See Figure 4 of their paper, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2027906
The FDA is not known for its improvisational disposition :)
The challenge will be reconciling this with the antivax crowd given that as the vaccine rolls out the rate of infection will come down correspondingly among the whole population (including the unvaccinated). They'll immediately claim that the virus is "going away on it's own" as opposed to the truth, which is that potential spreaders are being steadily removed from the susceptible population due to the vaccine.
It's going to be a very slow roll out.
There's no need to completely eliminate COVID - we don't aim for the same for regular influenza. We should aim to reopen economies as soon as possible instead.
For the most part the same answer as to why you aren't making it yourself also apply to most factories in the world. Only a few have the equipment, supplies, and experience to make it.
Not withstanding the rather enormous caveat of antivaxxers. They have grown significantly in number during this pandemic what with all the wild conspiracy theories. It’s worth checking that out.
Eradicating the virus is a whole different goal, and there could be lots of different impediments to that. After all, we still get vaccinated for a large numbers of illnesses that we haven't eradicated but are just very rare. That's not a terrible endgame for COVID.
Letting this thing circulate seems dangerous given it introduces the possibility of a vaccine-resistant mutation. If anything it drives the evolution of the virus towards vaccine resistance similar to what happened with MRSA bacteria and antibiotics.
A vaccine that only prevents disease, but which does not prevent infection, does not necessarily create herd immunity.
as their primary outcome in their study registration
EDIT: I upvoted you because you make a valid point. Things will not recover overnight. But at the same time, we can still celebrate the hope of a promising solution.
Of course there are other vaccines in development. If any other them pass trails that changes things too. we can only speculate as to how.
No matter what though, there is now a real light at the end of the tunnel.
Science has done its job; now we need to push for coordination between infrastructure, government, and business to finish it.
I'm sure they have no incentives to say that right. The reality is that the UK and many others are in the middle of a massive surge of cases. The idea that life will be "normal" a few months from now in Spring seems farcical.
Congratulations and thanks to everybody who worked so hard on this.
So grandma might need to wait, and the grandkids going to school might get it first, then healthy 20/30-somethings working in public facing jobs etc.
While you’re being inconvenienced remember that you’re better off than most people who’ve ever lived. Isolation and fear of early death were a pervasive part of life until the 20th century brought vaccination and antibiotics, and we’re getting only a small reminder of what used to be normal.
That matters because there are things that you have to do, and you don’t have a way to control other people’s decisions. Closing high-risk recreational activities means that someone can go shopping with less risk because the people near them weren’t hanging out at the bar the night before.
The value of a lockdown isn't in changing the behavior of those who are already voluntarily avoiding exposure -- its value is in changing the behavior of those who inconsiderately spread it to others during their essential travels outside of their house.
1. We have no idea what a null hypothesis scenario would be in Argentina or Peru.
2. Regardless, "flattening the curve" is more of a statement about the first or second derivative of case numbers.
2. Do you have data showing how effective the lockdowns were? Did they have a problem with compliance?
Here’s a recent publication which could inform your opinion - note especially the part about employment forcing people to leave their houses to work:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
“ Latin American countries have long had some of the most scarring income inequalities in the world, and they are predicted to worsen. The informal labour market is huge, making up 54% of all work across the region (up to 70% in some countries, such as Peru). Informal workers have little access to social protection and have no choice but to continue to work daily to earn a living. The result is that their capability to follow quarantine and social distancing measures is limited. Informal workers also have less access to health care.”
…
“The increases in obesity and diabetes in Latin America are surely major contributors to the high mortality rates. In Mexico and Chile, more than 75% of the female population is overweight. Nutrient-poor and energy-dense processed foods are often the only type of food readily affordable to the most disadvantaged people. Although some countries, including Brazil and Costa Rica, have a universal health-care system, most Latin American countries have large gaps in accessibility caused mainly by out-of-pocket health expenditure, which is 34% of total health spending.”
"Sweden had more deaths than Norway and Finland" yes they screwed up sending people to care homes when it first hit - over half of their deaths occurred there. like most of the countries that got hit early. Plus a lot of dark skinned immigrants (vitamin D levels have been shown to be a big factor). Those alone account for a lot of the difference. There is little reason to believe that lockdown had a very positive effect.
https://twitter.com/gummibear737/status/1298956333941743616?...
The other mistake is assuming that this is endless. Countries which have strict safety measures are able to reopen after having controlled spread - Australia had a hard lockdown and has now gone without any cases for a while. In contrast, the United States’ leaders chose to squander the sacrifice of the spring lockdown by not making it effective and then relaxing restrictions before the viral spread was controlled, ensuring the maximal cost for minimal benefit.
The US government is paying like $20 for each dose. I'd pay 100x that without batting an eye.
Thank you thank you thank you to everyone working on this vaccine and related Covid treatments.
Can't wait to get the needle in the arm!
Moderna is also only weeks behind Pfizer/Biontech here with a very similar technology and manufacturing capability of hundreds of millions of doses. We'll be seeing the first EUA's by December, and shots in the arm before the end of the year. Pretty incredible that we can just science our way out of things like this. Humans are awesome.
Am I the only one here who doesn't want to get inoculated in basically the first batch?
I've never heard of such a thing, but then again I have only a surface understanding of vaccines.
I vaguely remember this story (from years ago) about a drug or vaccine during the 70s, where apparently everything was fine but then kids (or kids of kids, can't remember) ended up with birth defects.
The name of the drug was "Contergan" in german which german-speaking readers might recognize more easily.
A more relevant example is Pandemrix, a flu vaccine launched in the EU in 2009. A year later it was discovered that it seems to increase the risk of narcolepsy in teenagers sixfold. The vaccine was produced and licensed in an expedited fashion because of a "pandemic" (of swine flu), which used a then-new and slightly experimental technique (adjuvants) which interestingly, German doctors flagged up as a risk and suggested the German government use a different H1N1 vaccine that was less experimental.
If you are a doctor/nurse working in a covid ward we know for sure that the risk whatever happens long term is a lot less than the risk of getting covid. For someone like me who has no reason to go anywhere (I'm not even allowed in the office until this pandemic passes) I can afford to wait until there is more data - and I also have to because I'm low on the list of those who will be vaccinated because I'm relatively low risk of getting it.
Given that viral genome sequencing didn't even exist in 1976, I don't think it's a meaningful comparison.
Sure we do. mRNA vaccines have been under development for over a decade now. And while none have been approved for human use yet, it's not for lack of safety data. There have been zero serious adverse events reported in the Moderna or Pfizer phase 1, 2, and 3 trials. The only side effects are mild fatigue, headache, and soreness that you would associate with an immune response. Furthermore there is no possible way that the vaccine can even cause long term effects; the mRNA breaks down naturally in the body almost immediately. Any side effects will be immediately present and related to acute immune response. Worrying about some vague long term "what if" problems that have no mechanism for action is just non-scientific magical thinking.
Again, apples and oranges. This is a completely different class of drugs compared to SARS vaccines from a decade ago. Those were based on live viruses, which the mRNA vaccines are not.
Is getting COVID safe long term? There are plenty of viruses that cause issues in the long term. HIV causes AIDS, HPV and Hepatitis cause cancers years later. We have no clue on the long term effects of SARS-Cov-2, other than that it causes COVID-19 in the short term.
It's a choice between the pest and the cholera at this point.
For most people yes
edit: so the whole world is studying this virus 24/7 for almost a year and nobody detected anything, yet you think it might give us aids v2 ? Feel free to link any study that hints to anything remotely going in that direction because I couldn't find anything at all.
People have been getting infected with coronaviruses of various kinds for millennia. Nobody has ever linked a low severity cold-like infection with long term severe consequences, and given the sort of longitudinal study that would be required to establish such a link, any such claims would need to be treated very carefully.
Nonetheless, the original SARS-1 (which is way closer to SARS-2 than say OC43), is known to be causing long term, debilitating health complication among significant number of survivors.
Nonetheless, the original SARS-1 (which is way closer to SARS-2 than say OC43), is known to be causing long term, debilitating health complication among significant number of survivors
And yet it didn't turn into a worldwide outbreak, so one must ask how much value this classification scheme actually has, given that SARS-2 is really nothing like SARS-1 in either infectiousness nor severity.
We already know there is a strong possibility the virus has a negative effect on cognitive ability even in people who don't get any serious symptoms [0]
Those might go away. They might not. There could be other effects we're unware of. What we do know is that you're unlikely to find any expert on this who will unequivocally say "no longer term effects".
[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.20.20215863v...
Pre-print or published or not, it presents evidence that shows it's incorrect to assert there are no longer term effects of COVID. Even if peer review shows flaws that invalidate this particular study, research into the full effects of COVID are still underway, and we simply don't have the data required to assert "no longer term effects for most people"
I think you might overestimate what we can detect, when it comes to how viruses interact with a living human body. Yes, the whole world is studying it 24/7, and we really do not have a clue on long term effects. Science is pretty good, but some problems are pretty difficult too.
30 years ago, we could not have this ubiquitous testing capability and probably could not develop these tests at all. 10 years ago, we would definitely not have this vaccine one year after patient zero. Today, we really have no clue on long term effects until they happen on a statistical scale. Science and biotech progress rapidly, but there are still a lot of things we can't do.
It's kind of annoying to have to be fearful on public transport, having to avoid infecting older family members and therefore not seeing them, and much else. Then there's the risk to yourself with COVID, which varies based on your lifestyle, age, and good/bad genes. Clearly some percentage of the population die, and a bigger have long-term very unpleasant effects.
On the other hand, the vaccine can be discovered, 12 months from now, to cause an autoimmune reaction in some people and their immune systems attack their joints or something.
I think this pandemic teaches us all one thing - almost the entire world of understanding can be boiled down to probability.
id get this today if i could
There is no shortcut for that, and there is an obviously huge pressure to cut corners.
It's fair to be concerned, not anti-Vax.
What makes you say that? That's quite fast, no?
What makes you say this, other than a knee-jerk 'US-bad'?
They have the manpower and logistics in place yes, but you still need special equipment keep it at temperature.
I'm sure my company will do everything they can to ensure factory and retail workers will be next. Factory because shutting down our factory would be a disaster to our finances. Retail because all employees who are supposed to not go anywhere still get groceries, so protecting those workers reduces are contact. The the CEO is next, probably only slightly above the rest of us office workers who can stay home.
If we can vaccinate hospital workers and high-risk individuals, that will already make fatalities go down very quickly. That will help us get out of confinement faster.
If this is the only vaccine that passes trails - well they can't make it fast enough for a late 2021 opener. If some of the others also pass trails then early 2021 is a possibility (so long as you don't have some reason to prefer a specific vaccine as opposed to whatever you can get first)
Any update on this figure? I'm seeing a lotta different stances
https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/a-framework-for-e...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/09/no-pfizer...
Emergency Use Authorization, for anyone else who hadn't encountered the term yet
It's hard enough to see loved ones die or to suffer life long side effects if lockdowns only delay it. But to have it happen just a couple months before a vaccine was available would be incredibly hard.
The prospect of a vaccine should make isolation much more bearable mentally. We're past halfway, folks!
But each new person who gets it is a potential spreader, which increases the likelihood of an at-risk person getting it. Someone who may be elderly or immunocompromised, who can be seriously hurt or killed by it.
0-19 years: 0.00003 20-49 years: 0.0002 50-69 years: 0.005 70+ years: 0.054
I wouldn't consider it high at all.
I'm not againts vaccine, I'm againts lockdown.
At least for me I consider the cost/risk from lockdown is greater than the cost/risk from covid.
This is really exciting news. How did you find out? Shouldn't we alert the public?
>It has not affected me so it probably doesnt affect anyone
I didn't say it won't affect me or it won't affect anyone.
God also gave us this virus, if we stick to the religious logic.
How do I use God's wisdom to decide if if a certain pig is "safe" to eat or not?
Correction - if you go by the Old Testament, pork is forbidden.
Deuteronomy 14:3-20
3 “You shall not eat any abomination. 4 These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, 5 the deer, the gazelle, the roebuck, the wild goat, the ibex,[a] the antelope, and the mountain sheep. 6 Every animal that parts the hoof and has the hoof cloven in two and chews the cud, among the animals, you may eat. 7 Yet of those that chew the cud or have the hoof cloven you shall not eat these: the camel, the hare, and the rock badger, because they chew the cud but do not part the hoof, are unclean for you. 8 And the pig, because it parts the hoof but does not chew the cud, is unclean for you. Their flesh you shall not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch.
9 “Of all that are in the waters you may eat these: whatever has fins and scales you may eat. 10 And whatever does not have fins and scales you shall not eat; it is unclean for you.
11 “You may eat all clean birds. 12 But these are the ones that you shall not eat: the eagle,[b] the bearded vulture, the black vulture, 13 the kite, the falcon of any kind; 14 every raven of any kind; 15 the ostrich, the nighthawk, the sea gull, the hawk of any kind; 16 the little owl and the short-eared owl, the barn owl 17 and the tawny owl, the carrion vulture and the cormorant, 18 the stork, the heron of any kind; the hoopoe and the bat. 19 And all winged insects are unclean for you; they shall not be eaten. 20 All clean winged things you may eat.
The 'God will smite thee' beliefs largely came about as a form of control over people, and do not line up with New Testament biblical teaching.
For amen I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot, or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled.
Part of the power of the Bible is its contradictions. Like in math, you can use one contradiction to prove any statement true.
Where do you get that it will take "months" between emergency approval and actual vaccinations? The communications out of the leading vaccine teams clearly state otherwise.
Because this is a press release from a corporation with a vested interest in being "first" and not an approval by the FDA.
https://news.yahoo.com/hhs-secretary-coronavirus-general-vac...
HHS expecting availability for the public in March. Let me see 1..2..3... ah yes that appears to be MONTHS away.
I have built up in my head the idea of all the things I'm going to do 'once I get vaccinated', but at 90% that gets pushed off to "once most people get vaccinated". If it were by myself, I might push my luck. But I want to do those things with friends, or family. .9^n is pretty shitty odds once n gets to around 5.
There's a sort of rhetoric that's pointed out by 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' as a warning sign for agendas, and I've seen a bunch of them used by both sides this election cycle. But at the same time one of the defenses against these rhetorical devices is reframing: rephrase the bargain from another context and see if you'd still accept it. They don't seem to reconcile that in public discourse this reframing happens in public.
"If I go out for steak, I'm probably okay at 90%," versus, "If we have our family reunion at Disney World, there's a 50% chance we're all going to be attending a funeral in a month, even if everybody got the vaccine." You could call the latter shrill, sure, but "there's a 50% chance everything will work out fine," is self-deception. You're trying really hard not to look at all of the potential, statistically significant outcomes.
How in the heck do you arrive at a 50% chance of someone dying? You might argue that there's a 50% chance of someone getting the virus (that's really debatable, it's not highly contagious), but even if someone did, their chance of survival is several orders of magnitude higher than 50% unless they are in a high-risk group...
> but at 90% that gets pushed off to "once most people get vaccinated"
Wait who developed this vaccine again?
- The Whirlpool Corporation - Electrolux AB - LG Electronics Inc.
problem is these companies have a lot of exposure to other sectors as well of course.
https://www.fishersci.com/us/en/browse/90106033/ultra-low-te...
As someone in life science research who uses plenty of -80 freezers, I've always been curious about Stirling Ultracold. Maybe they're on to something after all.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/business/coronavirus-covi...
He's mocking people who are making obvious short sighted covid-based stock plays.
Zoom -15%, Nasdaq flat, Norwegian Cruise Line +28%
Better to invest in companies that make and lease refrigerated semi-trailers, I'd think.
By putting a fixed point vs the appropriate wide ranging distribution as the prior, the model scores the results far higher than otherwise.
This is a non-result and it was wildly inappropriate to publish this as proof of any finding.
[1] https://pfe-pfizercom-d8-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/2020-11/C4591... Page 15
It seems to me exact prior is unspecified in protocol. The usual choice is uniform prior.
"This is the power of science. Step aside celebrities- these people are who should be famous."
Edit: I should also point out that I am, of course, in complete agreement
We have seen mutations due to minks recently which could make the vaccinations ineffective. These mutations might have been controlled but similar situations may arise in the next years.
For these reasons I am not entirely sure this is the beginning of the end.
So I think it's somewhat likely that we'll see mutations emerge all over the world.
Whether this vaccine works depends on how early we get most people vaccinated. It may only be a short term patch, which we will see once it's rolled out, you can't really predict the long term without any measurements.
Regardless of whether the mutations are significant enough to affect vaccine efficacy, it won't likely be a problem. These new mRNA vaccines have a development/production time measured in weeks and months, not years. It changes vaccines from a hardware problem to a software problem. Once the underlying delivery technology is proven safe and effective, reacting to new strains will be as swift as patching a codebase. It's hard to overstate what a massive advance in vaccine tech is happening here.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243
The basic idea is that now rather than needing to culture live viruses in chicken eggs, we can literally just encode the RNA for a specific antigen into a synthetic substrate and produce vaccines through a chemical process like any other drug. The RNA is then absorbed into your cells, and your own body creates the proteins which stimulate an immune response.
What's more, any new strains we do see spreading more widely will do so because their mutations confer a competitive advantage. In practice that usually means more drift towards higher infectiousness but less severe symptoms - the same mechanisms that have left us with 4 other endemic but mild common cold coroanviruses.
The new SARS-COV-2 vaccines may be a useful tool to get us over this hump where the virus is still novel to a large proportion of the population, but are unlikely to be required indefinitely.
This is why OP is asking and mentioning the minks in Denmark.
My point is that the market overreacts to every piece of good or bad news, then settles down as the full implications become clear. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the vaccine, how we handle rollout, etc etc etc. That’s not really considered in immediate reactions like this, it’s all gut feeling.
Really puts the nails in coffin of the whole "we're gonna work more remotely after the pandemic" narrative.
^ check the pre-trading price
Zoom was 500 at close yesterday, in premarket trading it's dropped 13% to 435.
Nasdaq open at 1430 GMT
Because of day traders and HFT, it's hard to say how long your average investor holds a stock, but it's fair to say that some hold it for a long time and others "speculate" most of the time. The speculators probably have a greater impact on the movement of a stock, but over time it must move in line with the performance of the company.
The price of a stock is thought to be a "risk adjusted present value" of the underlying company. Even if you could be 100% sure a company would make X dollars per year in perpetuity, the price would not be infinite. Instead each year of earnings is "discounted" by risk, inflation rate, the cost of borrowing money, the value of competing investments, and other factors.
If it was assumed by investors that Zoom would make lots of money for the next 5 years, and then make very little money, and this news meant they would only make lots of money for the next 3 years, then that will have an impact of 2 years worth of discounted earnings immediately.
(of course it's not like Zoom pays or is planning to pay a dividends but there's still an underlying value, for instance they could be purchased by a larger company that does pay dividends.)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-short-...
Thanks for putting it so succinctly. I really hope someone who knows a thing or two about the efficient market hypothesis can elighten us a bit.
I really appreciate the guidance as I'm quite new to it. Especially so because you're enthusiastic about this book :D
When the defining event actually occurs, it will either move from $125 to $50, or $125 to $200.
So the news event in this example is priced in at $125, but there is still scope for big moves when certainty is realised.
Obviously in real life the values are never as certain. In the above example if the stocks ever trades < $125 before the event, you would make money in the long run.
EMH shouldn't be taken seriously as the market actors are compromised of irrational humans.
The same thing happened to Hertz, which even after declaring bankruptcy and almost certainly being worthless continued to trade at a healthy volume. In fact, Hertz tried to get approval to dilute and sell more shares to capitalize off the fact that people were buying their worthless stock.
When will one be developed?
How effective will it be?
Will it have any negative side effects?
How hard will it be to manufacture and distribute?
All of these are important questions that were hard to predict. Today's announcement sheds some light on possible answers to these questions, so this new information is being priced into the market.
Zoom has been doing up ~500% this year. The large fluctuations are expected. Online learning/work will continue to grow regardless of a vaccine. It's not going to be in a crazy rate like it has been this year because of covid. I'm not even talking about companies, cause that's a no brainer. I'm talking about education and hospitals. For example, the convenience of having a virtual appointment is great for both doctors and patients and it's not going away no matter what.
My opinion about Zoom. Selling because of a vaccine is pretty stupid. You should sell if you think they are over valued and not be able to compete with the big companies long term. One thing to pay attention to is their future plans. If they don't have plans to expand their product line I would worry long term. There's no problem for a company to pay for Zoom for video calls and for another company for things like slack/docs etc. But when you have companies like Google/Microsoft who package and integrate everything together, and can give you a good price for it too, then it's a concern. Google/Microsoft make many subpar products, and this year zoom showed it nicely. But they keep copying the important features and will eventually close the gap.
All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades.
Not trying to diminish the accomplishments achieved, great effort nontheless. Just saying nobody started from zero here, that would have been insane and frankly impossible.
Yes, I first heard about intramuscular nucleic acid injection around the year 2000. At the time it was naked DNA and not RNA in a lipid nanoparticle suspension, but the principle was the same.
They might be working on this particular vaccine since 2020, but AFAIK they have been working on the specific principle the vaccine uses since 2008.
If we could somehow develop rapid testing in some way, it's shocking to me that the vaccine could have entered mass production by the Summer.
There was a time where the only true way to test a new model Aircraft was to build one, but nowadays pretty much every characteristic is well understood by the time it enters service. To reach a similar point with vaccine testing will be important when the next pandemic hits.
I'm not yet but hoping to be...
> They are neither wise nor competent
That's me again, but doesn't preclude my success...
However this 1995 paper (1) indicates that the S&P 500 behavior does "Granger Cause" changes in USA GDP. i.e changes in S&P 500 does predict changes in GDP from 1 to 3 quarters out. So that's the one legitimate reason to be encouraged by rising markets. Perhaps the woman who cuts my hair will be able to get off food stamps by spring.
1. https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?redir=1&a...
There has been other vaccine news in the past which my friends/family talk about excitedly but the broader market didn't budge much.
I don't see any problem in using it a general barometer for this sort of news.
Or are you lamenting that much attention is given to something that is primarily driven by wealthy organizations? I guess I might sympathize with you there.
Glad you asked. No, "the markets" are not simply a handful of rich people, banks and large corporations. The markets are also more than just "stocks."
In fact, the majority of "the markets" is actually bonds, and most of those bonds are debt issued by nearly all the countries of the world (sovereign bonds). I think roughly 80 Trillion dollars, but don't quote me.
If you live in a country with roads, infrastructure, buildings, etc.--then the markets are responsible for everything around you.
But you seem to be complaining about stocks since they get the most media attention, so let's look at those.
You may not realize it, but the future of every single country with a socialized pension system, sovereign wealth fund, etc. depends on the returns of global stocks. They make up only a portion of most pension portfolios, but deliver nearly all of the returns. Everybody has a stake in them even if they don't realize it.
Are the markets all-knowing or perfectly efficient? Of course not. But it's literally the only place where you can measure how a global herd of humans are feeling about the state of the world at any given time with a single number. This makes it a default reference for journalists to cite, ie. "thing happened, this is what the humans and their algorithms collectively think about it."
The journalists are often wrong and don't understand what's happening, but this case seems to be pretty straightforward.
See, this kind of thing really gets to me. Here's you circa 1290: "If you live in a fiefdom with wells, irrigation, castles, etc. -- then your Lord is responsible for everything around you." See how fallacious that sounds when you transpose it this way?
The central issue is that you're justifying a thing from the context of the thing itself. You're explaining modern capitalism from the framework of modern capitalism. It's circular, and you get ridiculous things like "the markets built the roads". Ahm, no, workers built the roads!
>Are the markets all-knowing or perfectly efficient? Of course not. But it's literally the only place where you can measure how a global herd of humans are feeling about the state of the world at any given time with a single number.
They are a weighted way of seeing how some humans are feeling about things. A number that gives as much weight to 8 guys as it does to 3.7 billion. It's a pretty shitty indicator, I'd say.
Of course it sounds fallacious--you've constructed a straw man out of my original argument.
There's nothing circular about the concept of debt. It's a fundamental aspect of how our economy works. The way debt is raised is through markets. Again, this is not a controversial or political statement.
Of course workers built the roads. And they were paid to build those roads by debt raised via bond markets. Governments and organizations use debt to bring the future into the present and amortize large investments over long periods of time. The liquidity and demand for this debt in the global markets allows them to do this.
No marketplace for debt = no way to reliably execute big infrastructure projects for all but the richest of countries. The market (the demand for debt) is literally the enabler.
Nothing I've said here is a mischaracterization of reality.
> It's a pretty shitty indicator, I'd say.
Again, I'm not advocating that short term financial market gyrations have any explanatory power for the future. I'm simply explaining why journalists use it: because it's easy.
I'd argue that has a lot more to do with the election uncertainty being over with. This is incredibly promising news, but probably not enough to account for SP500 jumping 400 points this morning.
More generally, The DOW is way up, S&P up moderately, and NASDAQ only up a little bit. That looks like it may well be a result of vaccine news to me, which is less good for the big tech companies that make up the NASDAQ than the broader set of companies tracked by the DOW and S&P. I would expect an election related bump to have pretty equal effects on all three indices.
Also, people trust US/EU research more. They have not been very forthcoming with data. The data that has been made available has been lacking in detail or has patterns that indicate either fabrication or sloppiness.
Both countries appear to be moivated by domestic and geopolitical political purposes. The US has also being doing that, but the medical establishment and regulatory bodies in the US are seen to be more independent of government than in China or Russia. Also, this is a German result, and people trust Germany more.
Like with the diesel emissions?
What people are you talking about here? Western societies or entire world?
Not sure about the Chinese ones.
So those who claim that Russian vaccine is only on the 1/2 phase spread an outright lie. Both vaccine have approximately the same speed of development with minor differences between regulation and testing procedures.
Russian vaccine was announced back in August, when it was only on phase 1/2. In contrast phase 3 Pfizer/biontech had been well under way at that time.
Russia announced a not fully tested vaccine, proudly called it "Sputnik V". The exact words Putin used when announced it was: "As far as I know, a vaccine against a new coronavirus infection has been registered this morning, for the first time in the world". So geopolitical concerns and pride are correct assessment. No wonder it drew skepticism.
One shot is with Ad5, the other with Ad26. This is done because Ad5 is a "known" adenovirus by most population, that means that a sizable fraction has antibodies against it.
Of course, in Mother Russia it is widely believed that everyone lies more or less, and those looking to expose "the truth" generally live dangerously, often with tragic results.
Western governments are no doubt better for their own citizens than say Russia or China, but we outsiders have absolutely no reason to trust one government over the others. Russia's vaccine has only passed phase 2- now that's a good point, "Trust" absolutely isn't.
That doesn't necessarily mean it was justified, but I do think it's important to note the difference.
You think russia and china lie because of propaganda. Their citizens believe we lie because of propaganda.
Whether one views another country favorably relies entirely on propaganda.
But given how these western countries handled covid, and the fact that China has a history of fighting viruses like it- I'd rather trust a Chinese vaccine over an American one, all else being equal.
We have to stop believing that the "west" is the world. It's going to bite us in the end one day. The only thing people around the world like is wealth. As china and russia get wealthier, even that won't matter as much.
Also, this one was developed in Germany and the trial is being run in Germany and the US; people might be forgiven for trusting a combination of the EMA and FDA, who will need to approve this, somewhat more than Putin's one.
I wonder if this experience has led to developments to speed up the development process (without compromising on safety); I hope so, because this is not the first and will not be the last time we see a worldwide pandemic like this.
- Yes, you can avoid covid and potential long effects of vaccine by living in a cave for the next 10 years.
- You can "gamble" on a 0.01% chance of getting any long-term effects from the vaccine in exchange of getting 90% safe from covid.
I take this "gamble" every year with a flu shot, because to me it sounds safer than getting flu followed by pneumonia.
If everybody waits for the other 99% of people to get vaccined before them, so we can a free-ride on the herd immunity, we would never reach herd immunity.
I don't know of any drug that is 100% safe. Heck, even a tampon could send you to the grave. For this kind of vaccinations, we should have a margin of confidence that, being similar to other vaccines in composition but just changing the viral load, long term effects should be similar. The Moderna vaccine is a different animal.
I know very little about the pharmaceutical underpinnings of mRNA vaccines and how theoretically likely adverse long-term results are, but I do think caution by laymen is not unwarranted for a new type of vaccine that has been fast-tracked through trials (albeit for good reason!)
- Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis
- Analysis evaluated 94 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in trial participants
- Study enrolled 43,538 participants, with 42% having diverse backgrounds, and no serious safety concerns have been observed; Safety and additional efficacy data continue to be collected
- Submission for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) planned for soon after the required safety milestone is achieved, which is currently expected to occur in the third week of November
- Clinical trial to continue through to final analysis at 164 confirmed cases in order to collect further data and characterize the vaccine candidate’s performance against other study endpoints
What does that mean exactly? Surely a random sample of people will have diverse backgrounds.
Additional challenges in the US are that many minority communities are distrustful of the pharmaceutical industry due to historical reasons and you typically need a concentrated effort to do outreach there to actually collect enough volunteers to meet your sampling concerns.
This is significantly colder than the standard cold logistics chain. I believe Pfizer are working on a special transport box that can, unpowered, stay at the right temperature for a week as long as the box is only opened for something like 1 minute a day.
That's a good thing, but with a capacity of I believe 10k vaccine doses, anywhere with fewer than 10k people to vaccinate, or anywhere that can't keep the demand level for the vaccine at the right level each hour/day as they progress through their vaccine stock, will have a hard time. This is going to disproportionately affect small communities and developing countries.
We've got hard logistical challenges ahead regardless of these details, but they make this even harder. Given this it's probably important that we continue to develop more vaccines and diversify our strategy for immunity.
There are parts of rural US/Australia for example where despite people having cars, they may need to take a plane to get to a vaccine treatment centre with enough density to get stock. They may not be able to afford that travel even if the vaccine is free.
Much of the African population is spread over small communities where roads may not be reliable, let alone car access. If your minimum distributable unit is 10k vaccines, as it looks like it could be to begin with, that rules out a significant number of the population.
so perhaps the infrastructure requirements will relax as time goes on
Definitely a step in the right direction though
Otherwise, medical cryo storage is highly specialized and expensive equipment. Definitely not what you'd find in a doctors office or pharmacy. It might be a more convenient option if the vaccine remains viable at much colder temperatures. Somewhat cheaper (though still not cheap) LN2 transport containers ~180C could be used to deliver it to locations, provide a supply of LN2 to keep it cold, and then warm on demand.
The point is, this isn't going to be a rollout that can be done without a lot of infrastructure planning way up front. If the data here is validated and it looks like it's going to get FDA approval, we need to begin planning that stage ASAP.
Pfizer's CEO answered this question this morning on CNBC.
Pfizer has two separate manufacturing divisions- one in the US (Massachusetts, Missouri, Michigan) and one in Europe (Germany+Belgium).
They will be producing in parallel and he seemed to imply Europe manufactured->Europe distributed and US manufactured->US distributed initially (but didn't explicitly say this). But he then stated that it's important to share the vaccine across the world - "I hope that we will be able to ship to the entire world from these manufacturing sites without problems".
They have signed contracts with multiple governments in the world and in most cases have defined their monthly quantities distributed to those countries through 2021. I would guess these are public and am curious about the quantities and timelines for the various countries.
They are estimating to have 1.2 billion doses by the end of 2021 (enough for 600 million people, as each person needs two doses).
EDIT:
US: 100 million doses of this Pfizer vaccine (enough for 50 million people) by December 2020[1], but Pfizer now says they are only producting 50 million doses globally this year[2]
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/us/politics/pfizer-corona... [2]https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
A 1 year factory build is extremely fast - freely trading money for time. A more reasonable schedule would be several years (a lot cheaper)
Translated from: "Bei der Impfstoff-Entwicklung von Pfizer und Biontech mischt auch die Klosterneuburger Firma Polymun mit. Die heimischen Experten liefern wichtige Teile für die Vakzine zu. Als eines von nur wenigen Unternehmen weltweit ist Polymun auf die Herstellung von Lipid-Nanopartikeln spezialisiert. Diese werden für die Herstellung von mRNA-Impfstoffen gegen Covid-19 gebraucht, da die verwendete mRNA ein geeignetes Transportvehikel braucht, um in den Körper eingeschleust zu werden."
Source (German): https://kurier.at/wissen/gesundheit/biontech-plant-zulassung...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-one-leading-coronavirus-vacc...
>Pfizer said it will wait until after the US election to file its COVID-19 vaccine with the US regulator, as it awaits important safety data to become available.
https://pharmaphorum.com/news/pfizer-to-wait-until-after-ele...
It's like saying that I will wait to have a baby until after the holiday period. Factually correct, but that baby will arrive in January irregardless of the holiday period. The holiday period is for sure not the reason for the baby to arrive in January.
[0] https://www.pfizer.com/news/hot-topics/an_open_letter_from_p...
But because no vaccine for any coronavirus had ever been invented, this new vaccine and the new techniques used to make it must be celebrated as a technological breakthrough. Possibly the greatest medical breakthrough since the 19th century. Possibly Nobel prize winning material.
So, how rushed is this vaccine? Is there any precedent with other vaccines that were developed this quickly? Is there a known risk, or is the risk simply unknown?
I liken it to the war on drugs, which used fear-mongering and propaganda to convince people that drugs are bad and that we need to lock up people that are making decisions regarding their own bodies and minds. Instead of educating people on the unbiased pros/cons of recreational and medical drug use, so that people are actually informed about the decisions they're making. Instead, we have a war on drugs that is fueled by corruption and labels non-violent offenders as criminals.
When it comes to the pandemic, there is a similar approach of fear-mongering and forced coercion. Those that refuse to wear a mask may just be people that have everyone's interest in mind because they believe they are rebelling against government trying to get more power, which they think is worse in the long-term.
I respect the mask requirements when, for example, entering the grocery story, but I also feel uncomfortable by the forced coercion, re-goalposting, and increase in government power. I believe the best approach forward is setting a good example and informing people on all aspects of the facts without bias.
I agree that it does seem a bit irrational when just focusing on masks, but not necessarily when we take all of the response to COVID-19 that we've seen so far. The goalposts have consistently been moving, so I don't find it unreasonable that people want to rebel against more coercion.
I still hold to my principle that it is better to inform people of the facts and lead by example. Mandates will alienate people and force an underground/blackmarket of activities and ideas.
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
First, this is a line of research that began in January well before the pandemic actually got out of hand. Researchers started developing a vaccine as soon as there were indications that the transmission rate and fatality rate would be high.
Second, Operation Warp Speed was announced in early April. This was already long after the pandemic had gotten out of hand.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/09/business/pfizer-covid-vaccine...
tl;dw
- The unblinded data came in yesterday (Sunday) from an independent group. They were expecting it to come in the third week of November, so this was earlier than expected.
- They did not take money from the current administrations Operation Warp Speed for development (only for distribution), although my understanding is that the government will be buying doses to deliver for free to Americans.
- They needed to have enough people who get infected in order to have meaningful data.
- Check out the video around 6 minutes to see what they say about this point.
- Overall, it seems more like "this was the soonest the science had something meaningful to say".
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/09/business/pfizer-covid-vac...
> But Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla says the timing had nothing to do with politics. In an interview with CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta, Bourla said he first learned about the results of the trial Sunday and he has yet to see the data, throwing cold water on the idea that there was any political motivation behind releasing the news after voters in the United States chose their candidate for president. Pfizer took several interim looks at the data during its vaccine trial, but it did not have enough infections in its test group to gain any meaningful data -- until Sunday, Gupta reported. If anything, the data came earlier than expected: In October, Bourla made a comment in an open letter on Pfizer's website, saying, "Based on our current trial enrollment and dosing pace, we estimate we will reach this milestone in the third week of November."
Apologies if this is answered somewhere else in the comments!
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/09/covid-19-vaccine-from-pf...
- Statistically strong
- There are some mild side effects
- 50M doses initially - billions in 2021
Who remembers statistics well enough to reverse the calculation and find out how many people got sick in both groups? There is a definite integer answer here.
On infinitely large number of cases, the numbers will be the same. But we only have 94. I think it's about 2 to 3 cases that they actually got from the group that got vaccine, but not sure.
Serbia, where I live, has ordered this vaccine. And our medical system is far from world-class, but leaps and bounds from less developed countries, and I honestly think logistics here will not be able to match those requirements. I've seen tetanus vaccines just being kept in regular, commercial, refrigerators. There have been cases where they have been switched off because they were not on UPSs or not up to standards. Vehicles equipped for transport are an issue by itself.
What about putting it into liquid nitrogen?
-80 transport often consists of good insulation and a good chunk of dry ice instead of active measures.
I would assume that other nations will adopt similiar solutions for vaccines that have ultra-cold storage requirements.
Does anyone know how many of the other vaccine candidates have this limitation? It seems to me that a vaccine with easier logistics might still end up having a bigger impact overall, despite not being the first - although that of course needs to be combined with the ease of production too (I don't know how easy it is to mass produce these new RNA vaccines compared to more traditional ones).
I assume you aren't injecting people with something at -80C. How big of a window is there for injections?
https://www.labrepco.com/product-category/cold-storage-produ...
I get Stelara injections every three months; one milliliter is $10k, and that can't be spread out across anyone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kivu_Ebola_epidemic#Vaccinatio...
should be quite doable
No, in fact, mechanisms in cells are in places so that "heteroduplexes" (meaning one filament of RNA and one of DNA paired together) are quickly degraded.
Secondly, the RNA doesn't even need to get to the nucleus, where the DNA is. All it needs is to land in the cytoplasm, where it will get processed by the protein synthesis machinery (ribosomes in primis) to produce the antigen. RNA in the cell isn't that stable as well, so it will be ultimately get degraded.
See the section on COVID-19 near the end.
AFAICS, this is not BNT162b2, which is the one that we are talking about. There are 3 other candidates, one of them is the self-amplifying one.
The paper seems to imply maybe not? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187962572...
"It uses a completely experimental approach - that involves injecting part of the virus's genetic code - in order to train the immune system."
I did my flu (not Covid) vaccine shot about 3 weeks ago, just before catching the nastier one, and according to the doctors it works exactly that way, although this one of course doesn't contain parts of SARS-Cov2 but rather various other winter flu virii (H1N1-pdm09,CNIC1909,H3N2,IVR-208, etc).
So if the approach is the usual one, testing is likely where the most time is spent; that should speed up production a lot.
I'm fine with this vaccine being available for people who want it, but as someone who is low risk, I really hope this doesn't become mandatory. A lot of people aren't old enough to remember the Swine Flu vaccine and all the complications from that.
No one is talking about the safety here and that's disturbing. I don't see how a vaccine can be listed as safe with less than a year of testing. Traditionally it's an 8~12 year process.
Can't wait to see what happens next.
The vaccine reportedly needs to be held in storage at -94° Fahrenheit (-70°c), and will last for only 24 hours at refrigerated temps between 35.6° and 46.4°. (about 2° to 8° c)
from https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/pfizer-moderna-s-...
"BioNTech CEO expects vaccine can be fridge-stored for two weeks"
"Speaking at an online media briefing on the purchase of an additional German production site, Chief Executive Ugur Sahin said tests have recently confirmed the genetic compound remains stable at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius for five days but he expects storability at those conditions to be two weeks or longer."
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-biontech-...
Even very small cities will have liquid nitrogen facilities. Shipping from the nearest city to most of the population sounds very doable in 24 hours.
Remember you only need to get most of the population to halt the spread. If there's some tiny village 3 days hike away in the rainforest, you can skip them.
Shipping at -10C is a major logistical challenge. Mentally it doesn't sound like like much, but that's envisioning a single vial to a single patient. Multiply that by one million and deliveries to not only NYC but to Booneville, Louisiana. Temperature excursions mean spoiled product - product that gets thrown out. -80C is way harder than -20C (there are no vaccines today that require -80C).
You can’t just throw it on dry ice and say “we’re good”. Even just packing it is complicated. You have a pallet sized box with 20,000 doses. You put it in a box and surround it with dry ice. Are all the vials the same temperature after 2 hours? Are you sure? You need temperature monitoring at multiple points in the package so you know when it’s been spoiled.
Your delivery gets held up for 12 hours at customs, are all the vials still -80C? Are you sure? What do you do when you deliver to hospital and find out they don’t have -80C storage, even though they said they did? Do you have an intermediary storage facility you can bring it to until you figure out a solution?
Do you have monitoring after it’s been delivered so it doesn’t spoil before administration? Correct thawing procedures? What happens if a dose is thawed and the patient doesn’t show up and it sits at room temp for an hour? Just throw it out? Or is it still good? Are you sure?
And to add on top of all this - you (as the manufacturer) might have all this figured out, but you need to make sure everyone along the logistics chain does too. Guaranteed you'd send emails and letters in advance, and have massive yellow stickers all over the shipment that says "Must be stored at -80C" and you'll have a customer call you a week later asking if the product that's been sitting at -10C is still good.
Here is a document from WHO that will tell you way more than you’d ever want to know about cold chain distribution. There is an entire section on how to appropriately stack the vaccine vials in the freezer so they stay the right temperature. Yeah, it's that complicated.
https://www.who.int/immunization/documents/IIP2015_Module2.p...
Even cold chain for today’s products is really fucking hard.
Derek Lowe had a good quote on this:
"Pfizer has provided these details to the CDC about shipping and storage of their candidate: the vaccine can be shipped in “dry ice pack” boxes, but that dry ice will need to be replenished within 24 hours of receipt. The shipping carton needs to be closed within one minute of opening, and not opened more than twice per day. Vaccine vials, once removed, can be kept at refrigerator temperatures for up to 24 hours or at room temperature for no more than 2 hours after thawing. So this is going to take a very organized approach to make sure that the vaccine is handled properly without wastage. We’re looking at a lot of dry ice and a lot of orders for ultra-cold freezers if this is the candidate that gets heavy nationwide distribution. And mind you, I’m talking about organized distribution in Little Rock and Long Beach. What about La Paz and Lahore? What about Lubumbashi? Even back inside the US, what’s the nearest source of dry ice in Shiprock, New Mexico or Oceana, West Virginia?"
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/08/31/co...
But it's something that poor countries manage to do successfully with a reasonable reliability even on rural areas.
I am sure there will be plenty of new problems for that lower temperature. And a number of smart people will have to work really hard to solve them, a large amount of money will change hands and all that.
But I think the GP's point is that it's doable. It doesn't need any sci-fi tech or any large restructuring of humanity (and we already did some of the later for this virus).
This is definitely false - refrigerated trailers are pretty normal. A lot of goods are shipped in similar trailers.
That's why their are specialist delivery services for cold chain. And cold chain medicine is way more complex than say, cold chain food.
Developing a safe and effective vaccine -- fundamentally hard. Developing a nuclear weapon -- fundamentally hard. Developing a quantum computer -- fundamentally hard.
Shipping something cold at a large scale? Hard, but not fundamentally hard. We'll solve it. There's no fucking way the vaccine effort is stopped by refrigeration needs.
That’s what’s incorrect. Yes, it’s not “put a man on the moon hard”, but you’re really underestimating how difficult it is.
I’ve worked in drug distribution for a few years and you’d be surprised the challenges to getting a room temperature drug to a patient in a developed country. None of the steps are hard, but when you introduce humans into the mix things go poorly pretty quickly.
Getting a -80C drug transported to a 2nd tier city in sub-Saharan Africa is not “easy”. Unless you’re willing to have half (or more) of your product spoil. Based on the demand and urgency for a vaccine for Covid, we can’t spare even 1 dose to spoilage.
Yes, it’s not a “we can’t figure this out” problem, but it’s a big enough problem to really bottleneck distribution. It’s going to take some pretty smart logistics people to make sure the process works all the way from Pfizer’s distribution center to the patient’s body.
That said, all the deals are contingent on being effective. With this being 90% effective that sets a bar for the others. The FDA has previously said they need your vaccine to be 50% effective to approve it. However with this being 90% effective they are unlikely to approve one that is only 50% effective. Unlikely doesn't mean they won't: different allergic reactions; usefulness in different age groups; ability to ship to remote groups; difference in effectiveness to some minority: all are factors that may make some vaccine approved even if it is clearly the worse one to get overall.
Here’s a good layperson rundown: https://www.phgfoundation.org/briefing/rna-vaccines
It's using existing building mechanism in cells to have it build a specific protein that will bind to a specific pathogen.
And lot of clinical tests to try to detect if those proteins being built have other effects than instructing the cells to create the antibodies we want.
It's roughly the same mechanism at work when you inject disabled pathogen and hoping that the cells will produce the same antibodies, it's just a faster, safer, more precise way to induce it.
Heck, it's even the same mechanism that occurs when your cells encounters a wild, random virus, like it may be happening a lot more than you think, and, well, you're still alive :)
By the way, you may be thinking under the assumption that the 'program' is the DNA, and that mRNA vaccines is changing it some way or another, which is not, this is not genetic therapy.
That scariness is exactly why we did trials for 6 months, and why 20,000+ volunteers were closely monitored for half a year to make sure this technique is not harmful.
https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-det...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/health/covid-vaccine-pfiz...
[2] https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/07/22/us-government-enga...
[3] https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-det...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...
What is 90% 'protection'? Need to see the data, I don't think the hospitalization rate is above 10% of positive tests, vaccines often conflate 'reduction in symptoms/duration' with 'immunity'.
I've read somewhere that the vaccine uses similar tech to Pfizer, so I'm wondering how many vaccines will actually be available by end of year if both are this effective.
Oxford/Astrazeneca are the only ones who have alluded to 100M doses in 2020.
Everyone else won't get phase III results until 2021: johnson and johnson, merck, novavax, sanofi
Note, the above scenario seems very unlikely. However we don't have enough data to rule it out.
If there are several variations of coronavirus, how effective a vaccine will be ?
(edit: PFE is currently trading +13% pre-market on the NYSE)
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/pfizer-biontech-s-u-s-su...
I wouldn't be surprised if the contract was only that X doses would be provided to the US market (as opposed to shipping to the market in Mexico...). In this case the government is only buying a spot in the shipping queue, and not any doses.
It could be that the doses were bought by the government only for the government (military and politicians), and the rest of us are on our own. (this seems unlikely - doctors should be first in line, but an obvious extension is the doses are for doctors/nurses and the leftover for the above)
It could be the government is buying all doses for their country and will distribute them for no extra charge. This is probably what Europe has done/will do - because they tend to have government health care for anything considered essential.
I wouldn't be surprised if all 3 of the above were in use by different countries. There is disagreement as to which is best on a political level.
So the UK will only get 10/50 Millionen doses produced this year.
Vaccines only work if a high enough proportion of the entire population get them.
Obviously the vulnerable will get it first - but please don’t skip it just because you’re young and strong.
Why should I take the markets seriously? It's just a bunch of rich people in the end.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/economi...
In this case, no one probably bothers to dig deeper, it's the BBC and it's good enough, everyone will think the world will soon be rid of Covid, so they will buy stocks, so I should also join the up wave...
I disagree that a lot of people are invested in the stock market. Statistically, it's very few people.
Our pensions might be nothing to the top earners of the country but that doesn't mean they're nothing to each one of us individually.
There's potential for a huge gain in efficiency here. The stock market is fundamentally a long bet (if you want to short the entire market you invest in things outside it). Of course the market is exited at the long term prospects of that.
Also, you're being a little disingenuous when yo say "These are the same markets that cheer when job cuts and redundancies are announced." When one under-performing company cuts jobs it tends to go up because costs are decreased. When a well performing company announces a mass layoff it tends to be a toss up because signals are mixed. When a ton of companies announce layoffs the market tanks because the signal being sent is things are getting worse all around. You're comparing a positive reaction to a single entity event (company announces layoffs) to a positive reaction for a market wide event (potential for covid to become less of a burden on the economy as a whole). You can't cross compare as if they're 1:1 like that.
IMHO this supports the OPs point, which is that the stock market in its current incarnation does not care about the lives of human beings.
Which is unacceptable. We collectively have enough creativity and intelligence figure out how to have a stock which can not only reflect corporate profit but also human well-being.
I think it begins by acknowledging market externalities - pollution being one of them - which allow for activities which are profitable within the shared fiction of the market, but which are, in our broader shared reality, ultimately destructive.
The Happinese/Well-being GDP also seems like an interesting idea.
I do agree that using the stock market as an indicator of quality of life, general well being of human beings or anything else than the financial viability of publicly traded companies is not a very good idea. That's a frequent mistake made by financial journalists and politicians alike, however, especially during election season.
Now of course what is good for top companies may not be good for individuals, so you can't just say that a stock price increase means people's lives are going to be better. But I think you can say that a stock market increase means the news you are seeing is more likely to be important.
The market is a weighted function of an insane number of variables, and we know none of the weights. Any attempt at reading the market to understand those variables is going to be about as useful as trying to observe butterflies by looking at hurricanes.
This obviously excludes strategies based on fraud, misinforming the public, etc.
I could say the markets are up due to the vaccine news, or because the US election was called and people are seeking stability, or because the US election was called and the market prefers biden, or because investors are pricing in a Trump 2024 run, or because people just expected it to go up after any of those things, or because a collection of automated trading bots saw some arcane pattern in the data which has no real-world relevancy but they nevertheless have been trained to buy. None of those predictions are falsifiable.
The election is over. You can stop peddling bs.
Thus far in 2020, Gallup finds 55% of Americans reporting that they own stock, based on polls conducted in March and April. This is identical to the average 55% recorded in 2019 and similar to the average of 54% Gallup has measured since 2010.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
There actually used to be a lot more posts about the stock market than there are now. So I guess there’s a little more diversity now.
Is your position to never lay off anyone ever?
seriously tho, hackernews demographic is upper middle class white men. The ones who benefit most from capitalism.
All things die, including businesses. Layoffs can be a good thing if the job is terrible, the business is a zombie. Can you imagine working at Sears? It's good to let bad businesses die because the alternative is worse. That said, humans like to get settled, comfortable, get a rhythm to life, and changing jobs (because of a business failure or whatever) is a HUGE stressor. And its uncertain if you don't know where you can "plug in" to the economy and get a job, so you're in a rush, and new employers rush you through onboarding and acquire all kinds of legal leverage over you, and so on.... And the American worker is not trained to examine their options from any perspective other than "Job Title" and "Salary". Even "Benefits" often get short shrift.
Anyway, long ramble short, you don't have to admire the minds that move money, but you should take them seriously. It's worth considering, though: what would it take to have your cake and eat it too? How would you make the "markets" more admirable, which in your case seems to mean "more moral"?
The rate of spreading will depend on factors such as international travel and how much people will have learned from this period. I expect/fear that everyone will try to get life as before as soon as possible, so the extra delay after the vaccine wears off might be negligible.
In reality, a vaccine is probably going to offer a lower (but if this study is true, acceptable) level of protection. I wouldn’t be surprised if the protection drops exponentially after 2 months. Similar to the live virus
Serology reports for the Moderna vaccine (very similar technology) are showing 4-5 times higher levels of antibodies than those who actually contracted the virus.
- not released before the elections on purpose
- released right before Trump's team is about to try and change the results with their legal challenges
Market will go up like crazy. People in the known will sell their stocks.
Big crash on Thursday/Friday.
Of course just speculating, but if I was part of the NWO that what I would do :)
I don't know anything about this, but now it happened in a way he said, so what do professional here think about this?
I don't think this is accurate. A large majority of people show no or relatively mild symptoms comparable to a seasonal flu or cold, yes, but that's not the same thing as no symptoms at all for a large majority.
To be clear, these trials work by giving the vaccine to a bunch of people and seeing how many catch COVID. They're not challenge trials, where people are deliberately infected; your friend's conspiracy theory could kind of work with those (assuming that for some reason not everyone in the group was being regularly tested).
So no, they can't do what you described.
I think the way these studies are set up already accounts for that. In these trials they don't vaccinate just one group and then check how many people still got sick ('only 10% got sick so it 90% effective'), but instead they split the participants into a 'vaccinated' group and a 'placebo' group (double blind), then wait until X people in the total of all participants get sick, then compare how many of them got the vaccin and how many got the placebo. Since the total group is large, this should average out pretty much all variability in susceptibility to infection (assuming the participants are selected to include a wide range of attributes, of course).
I don't know how the maths work exactly but I think the 90% claim here means that if you take the vaccine you are 90% less likely to get sick from covid compared to someone else with comparable attributes.
how many lives did they sacrifice for that cause?
Freezer temps are only ~18 deg C.
Possibly will only be able to be administered at special sites or if they find a way to stabilize it at warmer temp.
I know a couple of people who are experimental subjects in COVID-19 vaccine trials (meaning that they may or may not have received a COVID-19 vaccine: it's double-blind, of course). It's an interesting question what happens to those people if they become elligible for real vaccination before the trial they are participating in has come to an end.
https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/explaining-operation-warp-sp...
Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to rush a vaccine to market, has promised Pfizer $1.95 billion to deliver 100 million doses to the federal government, which will be given to Americans free of charge. But Dr. Jansen sought to distance the company from Operation Warp Speed and presidential politics, noting that the company — unlike the other vaccine front-runners — did not take any federal money to help pay for research and development.
“We were never part of the Warp Speed,” she said. “We have never taken any money from the U.S. government, or from anyone.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/health/covid-vaccine-pfiz...
Bitcoin over 15k, the old Yello on its way out and now Covid vaccine.
Quite the November surprise.
The title is quite sensationalistic for such preliminary results. Especially when they have only been reviewed by an "outside panel of experts" [1] who sometimes have undisclosed conflict of interests.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/health/covid-vaccine-pfiz...
Also I might have misread the protocol, since I'm no medical scientist, but wasn't the efficacy of the vaccine measured only in a 1 month timespan? Are we even sure the effects are long lasting?
I just don't want to get the hopes too high too soon. The crash after a positivity high can be quite bad. Reuters is even live streaming Wall Street because of this announcement!
Danish are killing 17M minks because of a novel mutation that infected 12 people (reported).
If it jumps species, as we saw with mink, we may have a reservoir in nature with no control. It will mutate and periodically jump back to humans.
According to Google, 1.26M deaths and counting. If dying is not permanent damage, I'm not sure what is.
Denying such is wildly irresponsible and hostile to the community.
Stop trolling.
Good day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bOHYZhL0WQ
45,000 doesn't scale up to 100 million or a few billions. The Swing Flu vaccine left major neurological problems in over 4,000 people, many of which were paid out in law suits. We still have vaccine courts.
If cretins don't want to be vaccinated, it's their loss.
We have had bad vaccines before (The 1960s Swing Flu) that lead to serious complications.
I got most of my shots (MMR, Polio, Meningitis, Hep B, Tetanus booster, etc.), but I would NOT take this one. It's been rushed through the process, and vaccine safety takes years. This is a brand new type of vaccine (mRNA), a type that has never been successfully deployed before, for a virus family that's never had a successful vaccine before.
Stop dismissing legitimate concerns as "antivax". Each vaccine is very different.
I'm not at high risk (<40) and I'm also a software engineer who has watched millions in losses from badly designed, badly implemented, rushed software. Skipping the 8 ~ 10 year set of standard tests for this vaccine does not increase my confidence.
I'll wait until I turn 48~49 and watch what happens with all the volunteers first before making my assessment based on all the available data.
This is one of the vaccine Trump referred to in his debate, not sure how much it’s really useful or its another one like Sputnik and Coronavac.
I think the best details for Corona related vaccine efforts are from WHO. [1]
[1] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-c...