Pfizer’s Covid-19 Pill is 89% Effective in Phase 2/3 Study
fdanews.com
fdanews.com
.. and that it also would not cost a fortune in 3rd world where we really need easily accessible and storable countermeasures against the bugger.
To be fair, this is the best effort we have ever had to develop a vaccine. So I don't think it's fair to blame these companies if their vaccine wasn't effective on new variants as they initially promised. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't thoroughly scrutinize them.
It depends. On example: If they hid data that propped up their number, then we should blame. Otherwise we should not blame them. Either way, there needs to be scrutiny so that they don’t feel they can easily hide things that matter to public health
The virus changes, so the end conditions change. It's frustrating but it is what it is.
82%
> Hospitals on the verge of being overwhelmed
There's 191 people in the hospital in BC for covid right now[1]. Current preparations are for if omicron has exponential growth over the next several weeks.
[1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/a6f23959a8b14bfa989...
The goalposts move because the experts were wrong.
Today is your lucky day, it’s your chance to enlighten me: what were the experts wrong about?
- driving R-value below 1 will cause Covid to extinguish itself
- vaccine will prevent infection
- vaccinated can get infected but don’t really infect others
A simple google search about those points also reveal optimistic opinions by various people and not one instance where experts claim so.
The CDC said that the vaccinated can only “rarely” infect others.
And before you say “but Delta!”, Delta was already dominant around the time of the statement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/health/cdc-vaccinated-del...
You seem to be trying to squirm out of your earlier statement.
As for the rest, you’re taking ideas that have some truth to them, and probably misinterpreting what these things actually mean and taking them unreasonably far or to the extreme:
- Herd immunity is a thing, but I'm not sure how you imagine it in your head, or what you think that means.
- Vaccines do prevent infections, but not perfectly well. This (or the contrary) has been communicated to the public in very confusing ways.
- It is true that vaccinated people have a lower likelihood of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to others. I'm not sure if you think that means it should be perfect, but biology is messy.
Yes, those things are infectious disease concepts and they were touted as to how COVID will be dealt with.
Lots of talk of “once we get to 80% vaccination rate we’ll hit here immunity”. You don’t hear that any more huh?
“If we drive R below 1 we can extinguish Covid”. Now it’s “Covid is endemic, it’s not going away”.
“Once everyone is vaccinated, Covid goes away”, then “It really rare for the vaccinated to get Covid” to “holy shit, most new cases are in fully vaccinated”.
You can honestly look at that narrative and NOT completely understand why people are not listening any more?
No, the problem is that this was communicated in imperfect ways to the public (as you said yourself), who then filled in the gaps themselves. Risk communication is complicated and the govt, the experts, and the media all failed the public here.
It literally does not matter how right you are or well you communicate something: there will always be groups of people who misinterpret what you say, don't understand what you say, or weaponize what you say for political purposes.
Rt is a measure of the real-life infectivity of a pathogen at a specific point in time, under no assumption of “normal life”, and possibly within some arbitrary geographical bounds. The purpose of Rt is not to measure the inherent infectivity of a pathogen, but rather its infectivity in a specific environment and set of circumstances: it’s the high-level metric that informs you of the combined impact of public health measures, social behaviour changes, immunity, etc, on the pathogen’s infectivity.
You can see Rt as being equal to R0 times some correction factor that accounts for everything else.
We know there are many viruses we can manage with mass vaccination and herd immunity, such as smallpox and measles. But the important difference is those diseases don't mutate as quickly as covid. Therefore it's not a given that covid is something that can be snuffed out with the same methods. We're clearly in a position of playing catch-up and fire-fighting.
Your post implies a sentiment like: "if only we didn't half ass things, we could've beaten this virus. The problems aren't with the measures themselves, just that we didn't go far enough."
Ok, how much further should we go compared to countries that have the strictest measures? Take Australia for example, they have quarantine camps, lockdowns for the unvaccinated, advanced tracing and databases, etc.
For a while this worked pretty well. But their cases have been skyrocketing as of July this year, and it's likely a delta wave. What will omicron look like once it gets there? Would you say their measures were half-baked?
You express indignation but don't say what we should have done differently or what we should do now.
Those who share your mindset come off as having a kind of denial-ism, and an urge to point the finger.
The fact is we're not as "in-control" as we like to think. Nature is inevitable. Our technology and ability to organize is bad.
Let's recognize that an endless state of emergency also has consequences, health measures should be proportional, and for the most part we've done our best. If we can't snuff out the disease and the variants are getting milder anyway, then it's time to start thinking about moving past covid.
I would take New Zealand, Greenland, Taiwan and even China as models of most of what needed to be done. None of them did things perfectly, but they all had some of the right ideas.
In my world, everyone that could segregate from vulnerable populations already has and vice versa. They moved, and go out with everyone else that wont go home to an immunocompromised or prediabetic or elderly person.
Multiday 300,000+ attendee music festivals have occurred in major US markets without making the news as reckless and welcomed by all levels of government at the time.
Commonwealth countries and major markets in Europe seem to be less tolerant to the idea of governing, I mean a lower threshold to infection to justify continued restrictions.
Many of their citizens are coming to the US if they can, as well.
US is still doing way worse with infections, deaths, ICU capacity, but its a two tiered reality. And as long as emergency services remain available for everyone else I think thats a good enough bar for people to make their own decisions - which is an opinion matched by even the most restrictive major municipalities in the US, for some time. Remote work has been normalized enough for enough people/office jobs to not require a compromise to stay home.
When I took my first jab, the local clinic handed out a flier explaining in no uncertain terms that:
a) the current batch of vaccines work by giving our immune system a workout to be able to experience a COVID infection as either totally unnoticed or at most a mild case,
b) the current batch of vaccines does not nor did ever guaranteed you won't contract and spread COVID,
c) even with all shots we still need to practice basic higiene and health precautions like wearing a mask, wash hands, and social distance.
We're talking about pre-Delta times. This has been widely known from the start.
How come antivaxxers are the only ones repeating cynical comments on how the initial batch of vaccines, which we all are lucky to have but are still at the level of being better than nothing, would be a silver bullet?
Guarantee, no. But the thought was that it would greatly reduce the risk of spreading the disease, such that once a sufficient number of people were vaccinated herd immunity would kill off the virus and end the pandemic. We're now two years in with a 73% vaccination rate in the US (not counting those with natural immunity), with even higher rates elsewhere; still no end in sight.
If vaccines aren't going to end the pandemic, then something else needs to. Will a pill that reduces the lethality of the disease by 89% be enough that we can finally put this to rest and go back to normal? If not that, then what?
This was very clearly and openly discussed when the vaccines first came out: vaccines would help reduce spread and with a high enough rate that would end the pandemic but that we’d need relatively high vaccination rates to stop something which can spread this easily.
This was correct and the data suggests that it could have worked but we never seriously tried it. As of today, 61% of Americans have been vaccinated. That is far, far below the 90+% threshold used in those first messages — and that was before Delta and the Omicron delivered both higher spread and reduced effectiveness to make the problem harder.
The other thing to remember is that the pandemic ending doesn’t necessarily mean complete eradication. If, as appears to be the case, vaccination and medications significantly reduce the risk of serious illness and/or long COVID, that will probably be enough to get it down to the level of, say, influenza.
And if vaccines wouldnt “end” Covid why so much discussion on R values and “herd immunity”. The messaging around that went silent pretty quickly when it was clear that wasn’t happening with Covid.
And the only reason the narrative changed is because it was plainly obvious to the general public things weren’t going as planned.
But I get it, you cant predict how a new infectious disease will pan out, but holy shit has the PR messaging ever been terrible.
But then I wonder if that was intentional? Would the public ever have gone along with all this if the government was honest and said “we’ll continue to have restrictions for the next 5 years”?
And please, Delta was starting to circulate before the vaccine was widely available outside the US and Europe.
But that’s exactly what I’m talking about. The unvaccinated make a good scapegoat for the failure to properly message.
It’s classic PR rule #1 - don’t lie because the lie will eventually catch up to you. It’s better to say you don’t know.
The President publicly denied the seriousness of the situation. The CDC didn't want to use a foreign test and made their own but they were all contaminated and always read positive. There was minimal contract tracing of travelers. The Surgeon General told Americans not to wear masks saying using masks incorrectly would harm them.
How many people are willing to admit that they were so wrong for the better part of two years and many thousands of people died who wouldn’t have? That’s very close to admitting that those same people weren’t just lying about one thing.
Not sure how you can force people to stay at home, kids out of school, then hand out billions in relief (or not in one country) and not have it be political?
Different countries matter less in the internet era, too. In the English-speaking world, the Murdoch media set the message in the US & UK, of course, but these days that spreads quickly outside of national borders and it was easy to see those messages jump to other language communities on social media. This was especially accelerated by the early recognition of certain risk factors which were compatible with the strong man posturing common to a lot of right-wing ideology.
There's a world of difference between criticizing a government for imposing a lockdown at 10pm instead of 11pm or enforcing a 80% occupancy limit instead of 50%, and attacking basic public health measures like taking a vaccine based on sheer lunacy and conspiracy theories.
That's a CNNesque statement right there.
I'm ready to change my mind tho if you back your statement with facts.
Measles is an example of another highly infectious moderately deadly disease. Wherever we don’t have 97%+ vaccine coverage we have outbreaks.
Even today with the questions about Omicron’s degree of immune escape there’s theoretically a solution available to use. If 95% of people masked we could get spread under control in 6-10 weeks. But masks are a dirty word and public health campaigns have ceilings to adoption.
And since it’s clearly the fully vaccinated have only a reduced, not eliminated risk of infection and transmission, we could still get another variant.
Covid isn’t the measles.
Check this data in a few weeks. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
Omicron is going to make it worse, but even unboosted folks in South Africa seem to enjoy about 30% efficacy against infection and much higher efficacy against hospitalization and death. But your gossip trumps the data, I guess...
But you say "has proven less than 10% effective" ... because you are making stuff up.
Further, it may be a mistake to assume South Africa predicts exactly what will happen here (30% fully vaccinated, nearly 0 boosted, 20% HIV incidence, vs. 60% fully vaccinated, 25% boosted, 0.3% HIV incidence).
Note also that this data is as of October 2021, so it's primarily looking at the efficacy against the Delta, whereas the original 90-whatever % claims were obviously the original virus.
Pfizer et al certainly weren't saying in March 2021 that "Pfizer provide 90-100% protection against COVID and all future variants" and I've never heard anyone suggest they thought that's what the claim was.
> Anecdotal. You do not need to be a meteorologist to know when it's raining. Look outside.
I'll raise you this... where I am 100% of ICU cases are unvaccinated. Read that again 100%. And over 85% of hospitalizations. And before you say "see, 15% of them were breakthrough cases," please learn about base rates. 65% of the people here are vaccinated so to have only 15% of the hospital cases be vaccinated is even more conclusive.
Please, get out of your bubble. If you think it is 10%... or even 50%... or even 70% you need to do some serious introspection.
Please, actually "look outside"! Because if you spent more than 10 seconds actually looking outside, the efficacy is obvious.
What I am saying here is that the vaccines were marketed as 90% effective for preventing infection. Was I misunderstanding what was being marketed to me all along?
We had some early data that looked like they were probably about ~70% effective for preventing infection, ~90% effective at preventing symptoms, and >95% effective at preventing severe illness.
These numbers are interesting, because they mean you have less of a chance of becoming infected, but a larger chance, if infected, of being an asymptomatic carrier. So it's difficult to predict the net effect on transmission (probably a benefit, but..)
Now for 2 doses of mRNA vaccine, our best guesses for omicron are more like ~??%, ~30%, and ~70% respectively. Offsetting it slightly is that it looks like omicron may be a bit less likely to cause severe illness at baseline. But, no matter what, this is a big setback.
Edit: another https://twitter.com/ElnordicoBk/status/1471158531394998273
Note that these quotes are in context of the US and Fauci’s publicly announced plan to approve, as part of Operation Warp Speed, vaccines that were at least 50% effective.[1]
The vaccines proving to be 80-90% effective in that context certainly makes it reasonable to call them highly effective.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/12/9119879...
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Also that press release is not by any possible definition from “early days” nor is it issued by Dr Fauci.
Now, I invite you to make google searches with a date range and you will see that such studies claiming 100% efficacy on the product on kids started to appear in the early days actually:
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Since 100% is a pretty awesome figure, my theory is that there must have been quite a bit of press coverage at the time and I have no doubt a lot of people got confused.
1: 100% efficacy against COVID-19 disease for 12-15 year olds in phase 3
2: 100% efficacy against severe COVID-19 as defined by CDC
3: 100% efficacy in preventing COVID-19 cases in South Africa
[1] https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1377227340011483136
[2] https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1377586182519947264
[3] https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1377618480527257606
[4] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
It highlights quite clearly what I'd mentioned in my first comment, that time and reproducibility matter. I genuinely don't know why it was flagged.
https://news.grabien.com/story-twitter-user-video-showing-sh...
Maybe there was a narrative shift, but I don't recall ever seeing those 100% claims back in February.
People get their information from the newsmedia, and this is what it was reporting. So either our newsmedia isn't truthful or our scientists aren't, or - as my original (flagged) comment was saying - time and reproducibility matter, and may affect the efficacy ultimately reported.