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Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

3 dose, 66% efficient against symptomatic delta variant, injection free, can be kept at 25C for 3 months.Not bad!

But not particularly great compared to Covishield (Oxford-AZ) and Covaxin which are the main vaccines in use in India. The fancy needle free injector is almost certainly going to be more expensive than a normal syringe and will make logistics more difficult. While the thermal stability is great, I don't think it will be a game changer. The one thing it has going for it is that it can be given to children above 12.

Perhaps it is easier to apply than injections. Rural India may not have qualified medical personnel.

Not qualified enough for intramuscular injections and paperwork? It doesn't seem likely. Fancy injectors might have advantages: less expensive, more expensive (in a corrupt enough setup), more compact, faster to use, physically or chemically better, but novelty itself makes them less easy to use.

I couldn't find the effectiveness of Covishield against Delta but for Covaxin the claimed efficacy is in the same ballpark at 65%. So this is not bad at all.

Ref: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/covaxin-65-efficie...

Very cool if the efficacy numbers turn out to be true. No reason to doubt them, but a few of the vaccines have turned out to have wildly worse efficacy numbers in the real world compared to what was reported by the manufacturer. 28K trial pool (including children) is good, let's see if the numbers hold up over time.

is 66% good, comparing to other vaccines?

Most vaccines seem to be pretty shit versus the Delta variant. Pfizer/Moderna are about 53%: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e3.htm

The CDC website said Pfizer is 53% effective against infection while the Indian one is 66% against symptomatic delta. So it’s probably still not as good as the mRNA ones.

I believe The data from Israel was that Pfizer was 64% effective Against symptomatic delta variant.

53% "among nursing home residents"

Vaccine that's injection free?

> It is administered with a disposable needle-free injector, which uses a narrow stream of the fluid to penetrate the skin and deliver the jab to the proper tissue.

I've never heard of something like this [0],[1]. It's not injector-free, but rather needle-free.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4675000/

[1]: https://theconversation.com/a-covid-19-vaccine-may-come-with...

They've existed for quite a while now - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_injector#History

That does not sound pleasant, though it seems they're less painful than needles from a bit of searching around.

Last jab I got I was sitting and waiting and I was looking around distracted and suddenly I felt the nurse was pushing the cotton already. She had injected me and I didn't feel anything at all. How are needles painful?

It varies on person (including mental state), needle size, and nurse/operator skill. I suspect one bad experience with a needle can prime someone for a poor response in follow up experiences.

Indeed. Both covid jabs were perfectly fine, it probably doesn't get any more painless than that come to think of it, but I had a regular one in February with a cocktail of various vaccines and that one was much less pleasant.

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