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Comment by temporalparts | Hacker News Reader

For me, this really calls into question the efficacy numbers published for the Gamaleya vaccine. e.g.: The Gamaleya National Research Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology and the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) have reported that the Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine showed a 97.6% efficacy. [0]

[0]: https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/news/russia-sputni...

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Lancet seems to be a respected journal and it confirms those numbers.

The vaccine described in the paper published in The Lancet was explicitly described as using an replication deficient Ad5 vector, while the vaccine received by Brazil seems to have been replication competent.

Considering Slovakia also said that Russia did not deliver a vaccine matching the characteristics of the one in The Lancet, I think those data are basically irrelevant now.

The vaccines delivered to Brazil also have a replication deficient Ad5 vector, Anvisa says that among the vast majority of replication deficient vectors some replication-able viruses were present.

There is pretty much no chance at all that this affects efficacy.

> Anvisa says that among the vast majority of replication deficient vectors some replication-able viruses were present.

Do you have the source for this claim? Linked Anvisa slides page 6 says "todos os lotes" (all lots) had replicating virus.

I agree this is about quality control and it is extremely unlikely to affect vaccine efficacy. (If anything, it would improve vaccine efficacy.)

I will try to find the source again, however I would read todos os lotes as saying that there are detectable replicant viruses.

Replicant viruses do not carry the spike protein, they don't contribute to antigen protection.

> Replicant viruses do not carry the spike protein, they don't contribute to antigen protection.

Are you sure? Do you mean that all of them must have had recombination that added the E1 gene and dropped the spike protein?

Indeed. So if a virus is able to replicate it must have a replication-competent E1 gene which normally encodes for the spike

> I agree this is about quality control and it is extremely unlikely to affect vaccine efficacy. (If anything, it would improve vaccine efficacy.)

I don’t think you can say this with much certainty, if the viruses either regained or never lost E1, it’s also possible that the same is true with E3 which modulates immune response.

Also, either of these genes could’ve replaced the Coronavirus spike protein.

The problem in Slovakia is that the delivered vaccines are in the form of a lyophilisate (pulver), one dose per vial. The vaccine described in Lancet was in liquid form, five doses per vial.

Lancet is not "respected" after their autism fraud scandal. Re-publishing Russian state-sponsored research is not "confirming those numbers" it's just low editorial standards.

The Lancet didn't perform those tests, they only published the numbers provided by researchers overseeing the trials. The first author of the source paper is Denis Logunov [0] who works at the Gamaleya Research Institute [1].

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[1] https://g.co/kgs/u6wvJ8

Just like they do for every other vaccine. Every result was provided by researchers overseeing the trials for their own vaccines, nothing different here.

Scientific journals do not perform medical tests.

Just a reminder that the journals don't reproduce the research before publishing the article. They only check that somewhat intelligible, somewhat new, somewhat interesting. The more serious the journal, the more strict the checks.

So the numbers are not confirmed by the Lancet, they are just published in the Lancet. It's much better than reading numbers that are published in a blog, but it's not a 100% proof that they are correct.

Most scientific journals only do peer-review by sending articles to other scientists. These scientists, most of the time, only check for logical errors, and are not able to replicate the experiments.

it's important to make clear that what make the vacine being reject was not because of this number. The problem is that they remove the dna part of the virus that allow it to replicate once injected. But in all samples that they tested, in multiple batchs, they found replicant Adenovirus, that could make people who received the vacine sick.

That said, this is not a total rejection of the vacine. This is a rejection of the batches that where going to be imported. There are plan to produce this vacine in Brazil, and this batches could be approved in the future, if they did not find the same problems.

You cannot trust the Brazilian government to make this judgement. It is a policy of that government to delay the approval of vaccines as much as possible, as if there was no actual pandemic going on. Other governments around the world have analyzed the vaccine, including Argentina and Mexico, and they're using it without any problems.

article clearly states that other governments have raised similar concerns. Its not just brazil

in fact, article states brazil wasn't even the first

Argentinian government basically told it's own version of anvisa to approve the vaccine. That's it.

That's nonsense, most governments around the world are approving vaccines on an urgent basis. This is true for every vaccine. This doesn't mean that the government forcing any vaccine to be accepted.

Here it did. It didn't allow the agency in charge of that approve it.

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