so, because it it only protects people from dying... its not good enough?
What fresh hell in standards is this? If we could turn Covid into "common cold" level illness through vaccines THEN DO IT!
What fresh hell in standards is this? If we could turn Covid into "common cold" level illness through vaccines THEN DO IT!
> Nineteen of the 748 people in the group that was given the vaccine were infected with the new variant, compared with 20 out of 714 people in the group that was given a placebo.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/02/07/world/covid-19-coron...
The sample sizes here are small and the results have not been published, so it's too early to draw any major conclusions, but it certainly doesn't look great.
https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2021/0202/1194681-oxford...
The data suggests it is unlikely that the vaccine reduces infection by >=50% (<5% probability) and a probability close to zero it reduces infection by >=70%.
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
# number of infections, and obs
infect_ctrl,obs_ctrl=714, 20
infect_test, obs_test=748, 19
sample_C=np.random.beta(infect_ctrl+1, obs_ctrl-infect_ctrl+1, 100_000) # sample 100k times from posterior Beta distributions
sample_T=np.random.beta(infect_test+1,obs_test-infect_test+1, 100_000)
# percentage reduction in each sample
perc_reduce = (val_C-val_T) /val_C
# histogram of % reduction in infection
pd.Series(perc_reduce).plot.hist(bins=20)
# how likely, given this data, is > 50% reduction in infection from vaccine
(perc_reduce >= 0.5).mean()
# c. 3%
(perc_reduce >= 0.7).mean()
# <0.1%Is there any evidence in South Africa that it actually does protect people from dying? If there are only 2,000 people in the study, it might be too small to conclusively say whether it's protecting from severe and lethal cases.
All I've done is skim the article, so I'd love to be corrected by someone with more information. Given that about 1/1,250 of the South African population has died of coronavirus, I'd guess that a 2,000 person random sample over the course of a couple months wouldn't be large enough to expect much in the way of deaths, even with a placebo.
If there were conclusive evidence that the vaccine eliminated deaths from the South African variant while still allowing mild cases, I think the situation would be different. But it sounds like there are still a lot of mild cases without much evidence re deaths.
South Africa has limited health resources and spending them rolling out an ineffective vaccine when they have orders for the Johnson and Johnson one coming next month doesn't make sense.
The vaccine doesn’t seem to protect the people in the study (young people). Young people don’t tend to die from covid. They don’t know if it would work on older people but I would think it wouldn’t either. This doesn’t look like it actually saves lives.
The study may be early to really tell but so far there is no evidence that the vaccine works at all against the variant that is widespread in South Africa.
Just how stupid are we, really? We're all locked up due to a virus that went around the world in months. If there's a variant anywhere that the vaccines don't work on, then this is just a selective breeding program we're setting up. We'll all get the vaccine and then go out and catch the new one because we stopped the quarantine.
In this case, yes, as people are vaccinated, variants that evade vaccines will spread more easily than others. From what we've seen so far, these same variants tend to be more contagious regardless, so that likely would have been the case anyway. By vaccinating though, you achieve a few things. First, you protect people from the variants that are susceptible, saving a lot of lives in the short term. Second, you massively cut down transmissions of the virus, each of which gives it an opportunity to mutate and produce new variants. Third, in most cases, you do provide some protection even against resistant variants.
And finally, just as the virus is not static, neither will be the vaccines. Work is already underway to update all the major vaccines to cover the new variants, and that process should be much faster than creating the initial vaccines (in design, trials, and roll-out). So it will be possible to vaccinate against variants that evade current vaccines.
Yes, it will take a while, and it would be nice if the virus would just sit still and not mutate. But we're still far, far better off with vaccines than without them. You are correct though that other measures will need to remain in place for some time as well.
Any introductory textbook on virology will explain that we can’t cure influenza, rhinovirus or coronavirus for exactly the reasons Hinkley outlined.
In related news, the press doesn’t do interviews with virologists. Instead, they talk to epidemiologists, sociologists and psychiatrists.
That’s strange, since those people aren’t experts on viruses, and they certainly aren’t experts on coronavirus. Where are the articles that consult coronavirus experts? It’s been a field of study for decades.
It may be the case for B 1.1.7 (but around 30%, not the 70% originally flaunted by the UK government and the media), but at this time there are no data on transmissibility of B 1.351 (the variant discussed here).
I think perhaps there's a tendency to make a mental analogy to antibiotics, where it is dangerous to expose pathogens (bacteria in that case) to antibiotics without wiping them out completely, because you encourage resistance. There are a couple differences here though. First of all, we have a limited number of viable antibiotics, but these vaccines can be continually adapted to target changes in the virus.
More importantly though, the interaction between the two is different. It's not that the virus is being exposed to the vaccine and selecting for mutations that avoid it within a host, as bacteria might do in response to an insufficient round of antibiotics. It's simply that the vaccine will protect against the strands it can, which will leave us with the ones that resist vaccines. That situation is better than the one where we're being infected by all strains!
An exception would be if there were vaccine resistant strains that caused more severe illness than non-resistant ones, and that infection with a non-resistant strain also protected against these resistant strains, whereas the vaccine didn't. That isn't the case now though, and such a strain is unlikely to develop, because immunity from vaccines tends to be stronger than natural immunity. (So if anything, the opposite is true - even against resistant strains people are likely to be better off with vaccine-based than natural immunity.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-wo...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-03/uk-begins-testing-tho...
Also in a scary development a large portion of trial participants in South Africa were actually reinfected with the new strain because it's so different. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/05/virus-varia...
There's been only a handful of cases with that variation in the UK, it is not the dominant strain which the AstraZeneca results you referred to came from.
Only Johnson&Johnson data may say something about it for real. Novavax's investigation was underpowered (4000 people, wide confidence intervals), and this one is even more so.
The rest of the evidence comes from antibody neutralization assays in vitro, which although very useful they are not representative of the whole immune response.