EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry

> It's what happens when you stay at home too much and don't get enough exercise and have a poor diet

While both are risk factors for a wide range of illnesses, last time I checked, neither of those cause lung damage visible on a chest x-ray.

Yesterday I met a woman whose husband has lost his sense of smell for 4+ months and still has not regained it. My lungs still hurt sometimes on deep breaths 6 months later.

Secondly, the only thing that has helped was my first dose of pfizer, which made me very sick for a week but since then helped with my symptoms significantly. Its very, very clearly linked to the actual virus and how our immune system reacts to it and I'm guessing things like the vaccine may help our immune system recalibrate itself or help our bodies fight off resident infections we just can't beat.

Thirdly, post-viral effects are well studied. We see them in all sorts of infections like Lyme, SARS, or EBV. This isn't necessarily new, its just different per virus family. Doctors usually can't help because there's no real treatment, and write people up like me as CFS/ME and hope it goes away (which so far thankfully there are a lot of reports of lc going away after a 2nd dose of the vaccine). Lesser so, people without lc still have chronic issues with their lungs, heart, sense of smell, tinitus, etc. Its really all a matter of degree. This isn't the common cold where you just beat it and go back to normal. For many people normal doesnt come back for a long time and how bad it is in the meantime is the big question.

Lastly, I think calling people hysterical from your comfy armchair where you're enjoying good health is tasteless, rude, and ignorant. I hope you never get lc or have to help a loved one with it. I hope you also stay out of the medical field if you have such an ungenerous and anti-compassionate attitude towards sick people.

[0] unfortunately I only have a French source on this https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2021/03/22/epuisemen...

My friend described to me how hard it was for him to make a grilled chese sandwich and how it required him to take breaks in between taking the things out of the fridge and beginning the grilling. He also described to me how he couldn't even listen to music until recently because he couldn't focus on it.

It is only recently that he can talk to me on the phone for 30 minutes without getting completely exhausted from the mental energy of it.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....

So far no statistically significant adverse events have occured for either pfizer or moderna vaccines. I follow them closely.

The big problems with the EU's AZ purchase is that they bought less of it relative to their population than the UK (so had a commensurately reduced amount of production capacity allocated to them), signed the contract later (meaning less time to fix yield issues), and completely failed to grasp that signing a "best effort" contract for X units of a never-mass-produced vaccine on timescale Y didn't guarantee they'd be delivered on time. Like, the UK apparently only got something like a third the amount of AZ vaccine as expected by now in the initial contract and is more dependent on it than the EU, but you wouldn't even know there was a problem because the publicly-announced schedule was based on actual production numbers - and the UK contract had clauses with teeth to make sure AZ provided the information needed to make that possible. Not only that, the initial plans were ambitious enough that even after the main vaccine supplier underperformed hugely, the UK still ended up ahead of the EU despite most of their vaccines coming from suppliers who did perform as expected.

I got my first AZ shot it and I'm thankful it exists and really hope it works against the new variants. Maybe this is a chance for poorer countries like Ukraine, Moldova, the former Yugoslav republics and Albania to get their citizens vaccinated. Western Europe should probably donate part of their stocks to these countries through the Covax mechanism instead of letting it go to waste.

If you're giving a chemotherapy drug to patients with advanced cancer, 1 in 10⁶ is perfectly acceptable. But it's acceptable because the do-nothing course is probably worse. Even serious, chronic pain relief I'd consider 1 in 10⁶ to be a good tradeoff.

With vaccines, you're taking healthy people with no acute condition and exposing them so the do-nothing course is much better than the cancer case.

Those differences of course drive the "do we give it to 3 people or 2 Billion people?" decision, but it's not directly the breadth but the underlying reason for the breadth that make me think differently about the acceptable risk level. If 2 Billion people had cancer or serious, chronic pain, I'd be in favor of giving them a drug which would cure 999,999 of them for every 1 that it killed.

At those low %s what are the chances the actual clot rate say doubles, quadruples as we keep getting larger audiences.

With such low numbers random chance would not likely show up in small studies.

So what are for instance the statistical chances of seeing a 10x increase in clotting going to 250mm population?

Hopefully, as more people get vaccinated, it will become somewhat normalised (in communities that aren't actively against it). If all your mates did it, it's probably fine. (no sarcasm)

Someone in the world is going to have a use for these vaccines, buy them and then give them away if you don't need them in the end but in the meantime just book more supply. 18 months from now if the world is flushing COVID-19 vaccines down toilets due to surpluses every dollar will have been worth spending, the downsides are too great.

> Entsprechende Berichte seien falsch, sagte ein EU-Beamter. Es sei viel zu früh, darüber jetzt zu entscheiden.

> Berichte, wonach Verträge mit AstraZeneca und Johnson & Johnson ausliefen, dementierte die Kommission aber.

translated: However, the commission denied reports that contracts with AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson were expiring.

Also, let's be realistic here - there's more to vaccine distribution than just dropping refrigerated containers of perishable vaccines off. I get the intention of the sentence, but just giving away doses is not in itself a recipe for success or helping people. Helping implementing/building medical infrastructure and expertise out is a gift that will keep on giving.

Incredible from common sense perspective, but totally expected if you know how American academia operates these days.

Is the criticism that the university mistreated Karikó or set unrealistic expectations?

IS the criticism that the university lacked the foresight to know how valuable her contributions would be 30 years later and didn't adequately support or compensate her?

I don’t know where this idea that untenured university faculty should should not be expected to meet the objectives and and milestones of the university comes from. They took the risk and employed her for 16 years (1989-2005) before she published a groundbreaking study, then another 8 years, before leaving to be a VP at BioNTech. 7 years later, the technology was demonstrated to be incredibly valuable.

Does U Penn deserve no credit for the 24 years of work done by university faculty and researchers in university labs?

Politicians aren't incentivized to optimize for doing what's right for their constituencies or the greater good but instead they say whatever gets them (re)elected then do whatever their lobby friends who contribute to the party's fund tell them to do, while putting a positive spin on this for the great unwashed.

We have no system in place that holds politicians accountable for the damage they do throughout their careers.

Even when they are forced to resign due to various scandals, they often end up as "consultants" at the businesses they helped get rich with tax-payer money.

The EU is disputing the report in question. And even if it were true, they'd probably have some reason than what you're coming up with in the absence of all information, which is basically "let's kill some people".

Why not? Funding vaccine research seems a worthy endeavor even if some of the research doesn’t pan out. The end result doesn’t need to be an immediately usable vaccine in order for the time & money spent to be worthwhile. Even a completely failed vaccine project could yield a piece of information that helps ensure the next project doesn’t fail.

Both AZ and J&J have been proven effective. They clearly work. It might not be politically expedient for the EU Commission to emphasize that fact, but it is true nevertheless.

Pfizer is predicting that they will be able to produce 250 million doses month by the end of the year, so I guess they are getting there (depending on how long a period is acceptable).

EDIT: To clarify, vaccines are not sold without a prescription. At least not that I am aware of and where I life. So for me, a sale to a private party was understood as "you walk in and order it". Obviously you can do that with a prescription. That being said, doctors practices are already administering the Covid shots in the EU. Not as unbeaurocratic as the US so.

The economic damage to their mistake to do that is will be way larger than any small savings on doses.