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Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials

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Re: Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the people who refuse to wear masks take a vaccine? They think the virus is a hoax.

Not OP, and don’t feel strongly, but I’ll give my opinion on what might make that happen: Mask is visible - sign of compliance. You can get a flu shot and not tell your ultra-right-wing friends. Even on the right there is a spectrum of course, and folks march to the beat with certain signals, masks seem to be one of them thanks to behavioral modeling from leadership.

Right wingers who don't wear a mask are not motivated by their friends seeing them without a mask. They are individualists. They do it because they see it as resisting being controlled by anyone or subjugated. They are also heavily anti-vax for the same reason. The amount of pressure there is in public to wear a mask is enough that it selects for individualists as the people not wearing masks.

Re: Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this comment is correct and is something that is being missed in the present conversation. For those who disagree -- isn't it better to take realistic steps to help people instead of just crossing our fingers and waiting for a vaccine?

It just seems terribly dismissive of all the people who want and demand a return to business as usual. A plan for handling the coronavirus that doesn't include "here's when we'll open the bars" is missing a huge piece of the problem.

Everyone wants to return to normal, but there’s still a pandemic. “We’ll open the bars when it’s safe” isn’t a satisfying answer but what good would lying about a timeline be?

Re: Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, the effective reproduction number (what I think the GP is referring to?) varies not just with the prevalence of immunity, but also with the contact network of the population in question. Currently the effective reproduction number is not 3, in most places, because we're avoiding large gatherings and, depending on the region, wearing masks and avoiding indoor gatherings. If many more people were immune…

> Despite this marked difference in virus replication in the lungs, reduction in viral shedding from the nose was not observed. So vaccinated people will not get too sick, not self-isolate, but will still shed the virus? That sounds concerning for the non-vaccinated. [] ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination prevents SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia in rhesus macaques

It seems to me that right now, it is easier to identify people who are at high risk of serious infection than it is to identify people who are spreaders.

Re: Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials

#334
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ruling that out is the point of a phase 3 trial.

Exactly. Realistically vaccines are very safe, very occasionally they aren't. So you start small and increase the sample size gradually to manage that risk until you have enough data to show both efficacy and safety. To be fair: it's also a global pandemic, and one very poorly controlled in the US. So there is real and quantifiable risk to being "too slow", also. Balancing between the two extremes isn't well-served b…

> Realistically vaccines are very safe, very occasionally they aren't

Tell that to all the people bill gates fucked up with his third world vaccine program

Re: Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials

#335
post #2

"82% of Democrats and 72% of Republicans expressed concern that the Covid-19 vaccine approval process would be driven more by politics than by science. More than 80% of independents, Republicans, and Democrats said they would worry about the safety of a vaccine that was approved quickly." Wow. And lest you think this is a Trump thing, the figures are similar in European countries. A bad COVID vaccine (one that doesn'…

Do you really believe polls like this are accurate?

No. It's all propaganda

Re: Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials

#336
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Yeah, the worst vaccine mortality rate ever was still not remotely as bad as that" Citation required.

40 million people got it, only 25 died: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-apr-27-sci-swin... I'll leave the math as an exercise for the reader, but that's a really low mortality rate, orders of magnitude less than even young healthy people who've gotten COVID-19.

25 people that we know about for sure. There were hundreds of cases of Guillain Barré, and many more that weren't definitively linked to the virus. Now scale that to billions of people.

And despite your comment on other subthreads, we don't make these decisions by directly comparing naïve mortality counts. It's not like it's acceptable to hurt N-1 people, just because the virus hurt N people. If a vaccine kills / cripples hundreds of young people, nobody is going to take the vaccine. It's pointless to debate this.

Re: Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just seems terribly dismissive of all the people who want and demand a return to business as usual. A plan for handling the coronavirus that doesn't include "here's when we'll open the bars" is missing a huge piece of the problem.

Everyone wants to return to normal, but there’s still a pandemic. “We’ll open the bars when it’s safe” isn’t a satisfying answer but what good would lying about a timeline be?

It establishes a standard for when we need to start looking at alternate plans. The virus isn't going to completely disappear, so there's a very serious risk that "we'll open bars when it's safe" will end up meaning "we'll never open bars". Just look at Australia, where Victoria has been under strict curfew for something like 5 months this year because the only standard they set for leaving is "safe". If our plan is going to end up meaning bars stay closed for a decade, we need to throw it out and come up with an alternate plan, or we're just going to end up with no plan as people and politicians lose their tolerance for further restrictions.

Re: Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who's been getting flu vaccines surely has a pretty good idea how ineffective they can be.

Flu vaccines are effective — but the government has to try to predict which specific strains of flu will be active that season. If they mispredict, you might get the flu despite having the vaccine since you got a different strain. For COVID-19, there is a known set of strains that hopefully won't change. So a vaccine targeted towards that set should work, at least temporarily. The following is just me speculating: fr…

My point was not that Covid vaccines will be ineffective, just that people have relatively little faith in flu vaccines right now (although I still get one every year, because better than nothing).

And I think people will see a covid vaccine as more like a flu vaccine than an MMR vaccine.

Re: Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have some broad idea if a mask is having some effect (e.g. if your mouth and nose are tightly covered). With a vaccine, the protection or lack thereof is invisible to you and others.

Anyone who's been getting flu vaccines surely has a pretty good idea how ineffective they can be.

It's invisible to you until you actually realize it's (partly or fully) ineffective by getting sick. With a mask, you have some general idea well before you'd actually get sick. You can see if someone's wearing a mask properly, but you can't analyze their immune cells and the specific pathogen strains they might be exposed to.

Re: Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials

#340

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but a) current hypothesis is people with prior exposure to common-cold non-COVID-19 coronaviruses are by and large either asymptomatic or have milder symptoms than those without such exposure b) presumably it should be possible to test people for these antibodies much as we can test people for COVID antibodies If people would volunteer for the b) anti-body test in reasonable numbers, and…

What’s your source for (a)? I think virtually every human being on the planet has been infected with some coronavirus common cold strain in the past.

Sorry, forgot to check back here after posting... not 100% sure I have one source but here's one from a quick search: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/08/08/asymptomati...

Specifically this line: > Or, as a paper published Tuesday in Science suggested, it could trace back to previous encounters with other coronaviruses, such as those that cause the common cold.

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