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Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

reuters.com

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Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#51

Post by regularfry »

cheph wrote: post #34
celticninja wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that immunity from infection is currently questionable your suggestion doesn't make sense. The reason the findings mentioned in this article are important is because the immune response seems to be stronger than that seen in people that have been infected and recovered. So this vaccine would be better at creating herd immunity than just allowing everyone to get infected. At the same time vaccinations will have…

> Given that immunity from infection is currently questionable your suggestion doesn't make sense. If you can't get immunity from the infection, how will the vaccine work?

We don't know if it does yet. We know it causes an immune response. We don't know if that stops you from catching it, and we don't know if it stops you from being infectious. It tips the scales in that direction, and all we really need is for it to be effective enough to drop R0 low enough that coupling it with reasonable restrictions makes the virus go away, which is why it's worth pursuing, but that's a different goal to ensuring you can't catch it at all.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#53

Post by graeme »

cheph wrote: post #31
henearkr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a virus with bad long-term effects on the body. Not a good idea to catch it just to get immune.

> This is a virus with bad long-term effects on the body. In what percentage of people who get COVID-19 are there bad long-term effects? What other conditions did the people get bad long term effects have? How does these numbers compare with other diseases? Would appreciate citations.

We don’t know yet. It’s a gamble.

A uk study suggests 12% have symptoms longer than 30 days. Beyond that, hard to say. We also don’t havea good measure of invisible damage: do survivors have reduced lung function from pneumonia? Damage to endothelium predisposing to pneumonia? Too soon to tell.

About 20% of people are hospitalized.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54296223

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#54

Post by threeseed »

sanketskasar wrote: post #42
godelmachine wrote: post #16

Is this not the one they will launch in India first? Edit1: Just to throw in more info, Oxford plans to scale this up for mass production with Serum Institute of India and AstraZeneca.

It is the same. But you cannot expect a vaccine to work similarly in people of two different regions having major differences in their diet, climate and lifestyles. That's why many vaccine candidates are being tested in multiple countries( read potential markets). Also, I think the UK has preferential rights at least on the initial yield of the vaccine.

AstraZeneca is licensing the "recipe" for the vaccine to other countries so yield won't be an issue.

Australia is part of this group that will be manufacturing all the dosages locally and independently.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#55

Post by The_rationalist »

hannob wrote: post #49
dbetteridge wrote: post #3

OK, someone tell me why this isn't the good news it sounds like

It's a surrogate outcome. "Prompts immune response" means "we hope it prevents infections". It doesn't necessarily mean it will. This is still good news. But it should be put in perspective, this does not automatically translate to "this vaccine will work fine in both young and old". It just means we can have some higher hopes that it will. Only RCT results of the real infections will show if it really works. (RCT fo…

What's RCT? You mean voluntarily injecting the covid on vaccined very young humans (so negligible risk of death) ?

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#56

Post by School-Cotton »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #38
School-Cotton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source on how common severe long-term effects from Covid are? All I’ve seen are anecdotes.

There are some stats here for the UK, based on a symptom tracking app that's been active since about March. https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-long-covid-warning-as... > One in 20 people with coronavirus are likely to have symptoms for eight weeks or more, according to a new study by King's College London. > The research, which uses data from the COVID Symptom Study App, suggested so-called "long COVID" affects a…

From your first link: 10% had any symptoms lasting longer than four weeks. That’s not “severe long-term effects”.

The actual study seems to say 1 in 20 have symptoms for eight weeks, which might be closer to what you could fairly describe as “long-term”, but says nothing about the severity (though I haven’t waded through the whole article).

Anyway, the drop-off from 10% having symptoms at 4 weeks to 5% at 8 weeks is encouraging - it intuitively suggests that the negative symptoms aren’t permanent, even if they take a long time to go away.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#57

Post by jedimastert »

glotgizmo wrote: post #10
marketingPro wrote: post #2

This article reinforces that herd immunity between young healthy people would have been the best solution. Our old are going to get sick from vaccines, so the young are going to get it anyway. Next year under 50 year olds will line up for their vaccine. Meanwhile 1.5 years worth of old, obese, and sick people will have died from coronavirus. Wouldn't it have been better if healthy kids and adults caught it in q2 2020…

(In the UK) Young healthy adults and kids live with old/unhealthy/frail parents due to the enormous financial difficulty of leaving home.

And in the US too

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#58

Post by toolz »

LatteLazy wrote: post #24
marketingPro wrote: post #2

This article reinforces that herd immunity between young healthy people would have been the best solution. Our old are going to get sick from vaccines, so the young are going to get it anyway. Next year under 50 year olds will line up for their vaccine. Meanwhile 1.5 years worth of old, obese, and sick people will have died from coronavirus. Wouldn't it have been better if healthy kids and adults caught it in q2 2020…

Why would old people get sick from the vaccine? If we let everyone get it in Q2 2020, millions would have died when we ran out of ventilators.

The implication that we even slowed the trajectory isn't well established. It's likely, but not proven. Let's not get ahead of ourselves by pretending there's evidence millions would have died when there's not even a strong correlation between mandates (as defined by the Oxford stringency index database) and reduced death.

and nowhere that I'm aware of came close to running out of ventilators. New York, one of the hardest hit places in the world may have used a third of their available ventilators. They used around 1/2 of the ventilators they reported available to them in 2015 so it wasn't even close to being the limiting factor in healthcare.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#59

Post by ourcat »

mav3rick wrote: post #36
LatteLazy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would old people get sick from the vaccine? If we let everyone get it in Q2 2020, millions would have died when we ran out of ventilators.

Not supporting the OP's assertions, but vaccines have some timid / less potent form of the virus.

A certain amount of 'reactogenicity' is expected with most vaccines. ie: "expected" adverse reactions.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#60

Post by jlokier »

dbetteridge wrote: post #3

OK, someone tell me why this isn't the good news it sounds like

It's definitely good news.

Though, sometimes people think vaccines just prevent someone getting a disease. Stop it completely in its tracks. That's true for some, but it's not that simple for others.

Unfortunately a measured immune response does not ensure:

- That the virus can't be transmitted to others

- That you are less likely to catch and replicate the virus

- That you can't get ill from the virus

- That you can't get "long covid" symptoms

- That you can't die from covid

- That the immune response lasts for more than a few months (this is why we keep getting some of the same cold viruses; our immunity to them doesn't last)

- That the R number goes down (if it doesn't prevent transmission)

- That the R number doesn't go up (if people change behaviour in response to knowing they or other are vaccinated)

- That the virus won't evolve a workaround in response, like the rapidly mutating flu viruses

An immune response certainly suggests those things. But we can't be certain from immune response alone. Consequences need to be measured as well. We'll have a real solution when those sorts of things can be demonstrated, but it will take much longer to find out unfortunately. Probably we have to deploy a vaccine on a large scale somewhere before we can even find out how effective it is in the ways that ultimately matter.

Still, if a vaccine combined with uptake and people's behaviour reduces R below 1.0 at scale, that's enough to be a breakthrough. The greater the reduction the better, but 1.0 is the magic number.

Even if there's one good vaccine, having multiple good vaccine types in the world will be better. The virus is less likely to evolve a defence against multiple vaccines than against a single type deployed everywhere.

The fact this vaccine targets the spike protein is also good news, because even if the virus evolves, there's evidence that the spike protein is key to its harmfulness, so any evolved strains that keep it will likely trigger an immune response, and evolved strains that change the spike protein seem likely to be less harmful too.

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