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

reuters.com

191–200 of 712 posts

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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they can and it will make them a ton of money. The laws need to change.

But, for instance - public money is used to build roads, yet companies that build them make money in the process. There is no state-owned road building company. What's the difference here?

Is another state going to get sued for having a different company build a road of the same material? I dunno, maybe Asphalt Co should be getting license fees for every road built. Maybe even add a toll booth so drivers have to pay a license fee to Asphalt Co to drive on their roads

Noam Chomsky has quite a bone to pick about toll roads

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

#192

All these hundreds of vaccines that are being developed; are they all triggering the same immune response?

Not the "same", but according to a Nature review on vaccines from last month, most vaccines exhibit a very strong immune response (usually, for the two-dose regimen, after the second shot).

The nature of the response varies. Some candidates are more efficient at eliciting the production of antibodies, while others also activate cellular immunity (T cells).

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

#193
post #116

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.

I care. I care that we look past the end of our nose for public health to give the Saulks of the world a chance and let the billionaires grab some fucking pine.

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

#194

Good news but still a long way to go. How's it going to be rolled out? Here in the UK we have tried and failed to get a regular flu jab (our GPs have run out of a very small supply and the pharmacies don't have any to sell) and I'm not optimistic about our chances of getting this next year or whenever it arrives.

I think you might be surprised. The government knows that this is the silver bullet they need to rescue the economy from oblivion. I’m expecting that once this thing is ready there’ll be a logistical effort for the history books to roll it out. See what they can do with the military involved, like the nightingales.

Sad to say, given how testing, lockdown, etc. has proceeded, I'm losing confidence that most western governments are capable of any "logistical efforts for the history books" at this point.

I heard a lot of bluster about testing here in Ontario in the spring, but here we are in the fall with rationing of tests again.

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

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely long-term results are not known yet. We've already had one vaccine potentially causing side effects that stopped the human trials for a while. (I think it was the Russian one. Please correct me if not)

It was the UK trials of the Oxford and AstraZeneca vaccine after 1 person experienced an adverse reaction - but that's the whole point of the trials and not uncommon so no major worry there, and they were restarted soon after. [nature.com] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02633-6 On a separate note - the voting on this thread at the moment seems pretty wild with some seemingly innocuous comments being downv…

It’s just a political thing. You see the same behavior in threads about climate change. A seemingly innocuous comment to you is a firebrand political statement to someone who thinks the virus is a hoax or whatever.

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pfizer is already mass producing their vaccine and are saying they’ll have 100 million doses available this year and are targeting 1.3 billion next year. The US has five million people who tested positive and have recovered. Likely also another 30-50 million who were never tested because their symptoms were to minor. And another 66-165 million who have cross reactive T-cells. Some researchers have concluded that the…

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i... The mayo clinic suggests it could be 70%, and I have seen others suggest 80%. I have not seen anyone suggest as low as 10/20% so I think that suggestion is a huge outlier and even the paper you link says as much.

That's because 70/80% estimates assume that the population is entirely vulnerable, while instead it looks like it's partially vulnerable. Hence the estimates would need adjustment.

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

#197

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…

Pfizer is already mass producing their vaccine and are saying they’ll have 100 million doses available this year and are targeting 1.3 billion next year. The US has five million people who tested positive and have recovered. Likely also another 30-50 million who were never tested because their symptoms were to minor. And another 66-165 million who have cross reactive T-cells. Some researchers have concluded that the…

In most models, we currently assume herd immunity is 50%. We know it isn’t higher than that but we also have circumstantial evidence that it likely isn’t below 40%. A complicating factor is that we know the number of infections is much higher than the number of cases but we don’t know by how much and this is not something we can effectively measure retroactively, which makes it challenging to model precisely.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, for instance - public money is used to build roads, yet companies that build them make money in the process. There is no state-owned road building company. What's the difference here?

You don't die if you can't afford to drive on the road. That's the difference.

But most places(at least around the EU) have already announced that the vaccine will be free - so there is no question about affordability?

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

#199
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I care. Just like about the bailouts. Socializing the funding/losses and privatizing the profits is just pure corruption.

If "we" gave you $20B to move a vaccine from proof-of-concept to production, could you do it? I know I couldn't... That's a service, it's worth money, it's worth paying for. Edit: people don't seem to understand that there are several stages in pharma development... (1) research, (2) trials, (3) scaling production. It sounds to me that even if (1) and (2) are "paid for" (with public money), (3) is still non-trivial a…

> it's worth paying for

And "we" are already paying for it. Let's not let them double-dip.

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

#200
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm assuming you also don't know if you got the active substance or a placebo? Yep. In the UK, they used an existing, unrelated vaccine with similar side effects as the control so it wasn't obvious which one you got. In some countries and for some of the other vaccine trials, they are just using saline as the control so it seems like a lot of those people would know.

> so it seems like a lot of those people would know. You can tell the difference in getting a vaccine shot and a shot of saline?

Many people get an immune reaction to the flu vaccine and this vaccine - mild flu-like symptoms for a day or two.
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