The Covid-19 pandemic is getting worse
cnn.com
cnn.com
From that perspective it's not really desirable to get "people" vaccinated as quickly as possible.
PS.: Was the validation somehow 4 years? You can't cope with facts.
"For most people, Covid-19 is a brief and mild disease but some are left struggling with symptoms including lasting fatigue, persistent pain and breathlessness for months.
The condition known as "long Covid" is having a debilitating effect on people's lives, and stories of being left exhausted after even a short walk are now common.
So far, the focus has been on saving lives during the pandemic, but there is now a growing recognition that people are facing long-term consequences of a Covid infection.
Yet even basic questions - such as why people get long Covid or whether everyone will fully recover - are riddled with uncertainty."
In addition to this, vaccine side effects can be way more severe than that especially for otherwise healthy people. Given the lethality is <0.1% for people under 60 and sterile immunity (with the vaccine) is neither proven nor targeted, there doesn't seem to be a hurry to get the vaccine really.
The vaccine trials indeed did not collect data about it, but the starting assumption (based on the mechanism of action of the vaccines) is that they are likely to result in sterilizing immunity. They may not! But the lack of data doesn't mean we should expect there to not be sterilizing immunity.
Btw: What was not tested at all was if this leads to sterile immunity. So vaccinated ppl could still be transmitting COVID.
What are you proposing as an alternative? Transmission to people without vaccination so everyone gets COVID and millions more die?
Testing the vaccine and the new approaches properly. The average age of COVID deaths is around 82 years (at least in Germany), so I'd say many of these people would have died in the next few months anyway.
Also COVID is not the only cause of death and act in panic might cause more deaths than not acting at all. With a lethality of around 0.4% and the average age of death, COVID is no reason to hurry a vaccine that might have abysmal side effects. You could maybe argue that the spanish flu was (at that time), but COVID is really several orders of magnitude less lethal and also not with as prevalent and severe side effects as the measles (especially among the young and otherwise healthy).
We learned nothing of the Pandemrix fiasco.
> vaccine which is tested exclusively on young men
is COMPLETELY wrong.
1. The trials have been performed on both men and women
2. Age groups <65 AND >= 65
3. Also included chronically ill
From Moderna:
> As of today, the COVE study includes more than 7,000 Americans over the age of 65. It also includes more than 5,000 Americans who are under the age of 65 but have high-risk chronic diseases that put them at increased risk of severe COVID-19, such as diabetes, severe obesity and cardiac disease. These medically high-risk groups represent 42% of the total participants in the Phase 3 COVE study.
https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
It seems that would be a very acceptable risk compared to 1% of people dying and 5 years of lockdown...
Is it still worth the risk then for these groups?
And that's without adding "Long Covid" damage or the lockdown or anything else.
I want the vaccine now, but can't get it. Shoot me up with it and if I die from it, I will let you know.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine...
Wtf? How have they lost 3.5m doses? They can't all be "delivered to site but not used yet" can they?
Thanks BTW, I'm shocked by this news.
The companies running the vaccinations for those facilities have visited ~10% of the facilities so far. I suppose they have a large allocation despite that rate because the populations in the facilities tend to be high risk.
The easier to handle vaccines can't come soon enough at this point. Hopefully the production issue with the J&J vaccine doesn't impact later batches (hopefully having them producing tens of millions of doses by April and May).
(giving a dose to a vulnerable person in a few days is pretty clearly more beneficial than giving it to a low risk person today; if the administration wasn't performing well vs the rest of the state or the interval were longer it'd be a more difficult consideration)
I suppose we'd need a lot more data to confirm whether this understandably part of a ramp up or if its evidence of incompetent management...
(It's not clear if is really 40 million, but slow administration is a broad issue. And now there's a question of how much is going to be available each week; if the supply is X/week, it's going to be hard to convince people to build the capability to administer 2x/week)
That's not entirely clear to me, if the "low risk" person is in a position to be a superspreader. Vaccinating a supermarket checkout worker now, vs an elderly person (who gets delivery food and never meets anyone) in a few days, could easily save many more lives.
Low paid staff stealing them and selling them on the private market. Single dose was going for over $5000 a few weeks ago.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/01/15/trump-vacci...
Or if you want to be extremely charitable, it took them 2 weeks to communicate the policy change.