141–150 of 712 posts
OK, someone tell me why this isn't the good news it sounds like
“The programme is progressing well, (but) we’re not there yet,” Hancock said. Looking good, but still months away from rolling out.
Okay good so just lets get it shipped!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're vastly overestimating our capacity to build enough vaccines and distribute them over the world, as well as dealing with those who will refuse to vaccinate. Even if we had a vaccine ready for the roll-out today, I don't see us going back to normalish until late 2021 at earliest. As with any vaccine, you'd need about 80% of the population to vaccinate in order for herd immunity to kick in. I feel like we…
Given the low fatality rate for COVID, wouldn't you just want to concentrate vaccination on those most at risk? i.e. the elderly, people with underlying conditions etc. You don't need to eradicate the virus, just stop it affecting the most vulnerable. Everybody else can then carry on as normal (albeit with a slight chance of getting a nasty flu-like illness).
Because of this high dispersion rate, it may make sense to earmark a certain amount of vaccine doses for people who are not themselves at risk of complications when contracting Covid, but who are at risk of becoming a superspreader.
(Disclaimer: I'm not an epidemiologist.)
Good news for US BigPharma Merck holding the Oxford patents, while public funding has paid for its research: https://archive.is/aGUJd
Who cares. I'd gladly give this company a couple of billion if it means they can get us back to normal. Oxford develops the vaccine with public money. We also, god willing, need to manufacture billions of them and transport them around the globe. For that manufacturing, give me a solid existing multinational with a proven manufacturing record and base please, not some non-profit startup.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The statistics are in the making, and researchers discover more illness mechanisms each day. As I said, we are in the presence of a huge risk and there is no "reassuring numbers" anywhere to counterbalance that. As one reference on the risks I'm speaking of, here is an article about the action of the virus on the nerve cells: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-we-know-so-f... By the way, between "relying…
Suicide, abuse/trauma, avoided medical treatments, drug and alcohol addictions, and depression have all been seen to increase since we first had lockdowns. There is no safe solution, it's a decision between protecting the 0.5% old, obese, and sick or the 99.5%
(To avoid misunderstandings, evidence does not mean your unverified opinions).
I'm particularly interested in your methodology for arriving at 0.5%, so a detailed data dump on that from you would be very useful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dont think any expert is predicting normalish by next spring, maybe in a years time if we're lucky. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/the-who-says-health...
Meanwhile the general populace cares less and less, so we may be back to normal in the spring regardless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who cares. I'd gladly give this company a couple of billion if it means they can get us back to normal. Oxford develops the vaccine with public money. We also, god willing, need to manufacture billions of them and transport them around the globe. For that manufacturing, give me a solid existing multinational with a proven manufacturing record and base please, not some non-profit startup.
Is it needed to hold the patent to be profitable as a manufacturer ? If the research has been already paid out, I'd prefer healthy competition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If we let everyone get it in Q2 2020, millions would have died when we ran out of ventilators. How do you explain countries like Belarus, Serbia and Sweden, or parts of the US like South Dakota, where no or very lax measures were taken but what you describe didn’t happen? In fact, is there any evidence that this happened anywhere, or is it all just conjecture based on modeling?
Last I checked Sweden had 110k cases and 5.5k dead. That's an almost exactly 5% fatality rate. Compare that to neighbouring Denmark with 40k cases and 700 dead gives you a 1.75% fatality rate. Seems to me that there is good basic evidence right there for Sweden's approach being much more deadly. We can argue back and forth about the relative value of freedom vs lives or whether Denmark will ultimately have as many de…
Also, the CFR is likely intrinsic to the virus, modified slightly by patient population and type of medical care available (both of the latter are probably very similar between the two countries). So any differences in CFR between the two countries mostly reflects the testing issue.
If you do want to compare the two countries, then compare the per capita death rate from covid (assuming everyone who dies in both countries actually gets a covid test - that might not be the case for old people who die at home, where even in developed countries, their primary doctor will just issue a death certificate saying “old age” or “heart attack” in the absence of any information to the contrary. )
OK, someone tell me why this isn't the good news it sounds like
Because a vaccine that provokes an immune response isn't the hard part. It's making sure it doesn't make people sick, and then scaling it to producing and distributing hundreds of millions of doses. I mean, its better news than the alternative, but I think "Oxford vaccine produces zero immune response" would be a far less likely outcome.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who cares. I'd gladly give this company a couple of billion if it means they can get us back to normal. Oxford develops the vaccine with public money. We also, god willing, need to manufacture billions of them and transport them around the globe. For that manufacturing, give me a solid existing multinational with a proven manufacturing record and base please, not some non-profit startup.
Is it needed to hold the patent to be profitable as a manufacturer ? If the research has been already paid out, I'd prefer healthy competition.
I know a lot of people, Americans in particular, are weary of 'big pharma' and for-profit healthcare. And Americans have good reason for that mistrust. But this isn't just an American issue.
Other governments such as the EU and India will force their hand if needed for the public good. As they've done countless times in the past. We just need to get this developed and manufactured as fast as possible.
And the linked article said the clash was between this pharmaceutical behemoth or a startup from the university. I'll take the behemoth now.
"The scientists’ small biotech company—a spinout partially funded by Oxford—was refusing to hand over intellectual-property rights. To outflank their bosses, the scientists asked a London investment banker to help explore other potential deals."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it needed to hold the patent to be profitable as a manufacturer ? If the research has been already paid out, I'd prefer healthy competition.
The patent protects from somebody simply copying the formula. Which is many orders of magnitude cheaper than doing research and development, especially on human subjects.