I'm in the trial. Here's the participant information sheet, in case anyone's curious: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WB5QPmECchlThnem9wcX0PDaKQW...
does anyone have a similar info sheet for the US trial?
Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young
321–330 of 712 posts
Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young
#322Earlier 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?
You ever gotten a flu shot? Usually your arm hurts for a day or two after, even if there are no other symptoms. This is a side effect of the immune response, as your body fights the "infection" at the point of injection.
Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young
#323OK, 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.
Observing Matt Hancock, I can discern he is:
A: Quite data driven (and frustrated when data's not there)
B: Former work history in monetary policy a fan of fan-charts (i.e. central projection isn't the only thing, there is a spread from the central projection).
C: Not willing to over-speculate on either side.
D: Perhaps not a super people person, but not negative either, see A. Quite nuanced if others listen, and would listen to those advising him keenly. And starkly aware of causes of death that are not Covid-19, but linked and accelerated due to it - avoiding hospitals, mental distress, etc.
All in all, not a bad choice for a health secretary. Reading between the lines, I'd give it 2-3 months until this is rolled out.
Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young
#324Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young
#325One interesting point that I read about the Oxford vaccine is that it only needs chilling to -5c. Whereas many of the other vaccines (I don't know if all others or just some) need chilling to -60c. It strikes me that the Oxford vaccine has a distinct advantage when it comes to global distribution.
Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that we should reconsider giving (temporary) monopolies to companies that are based public research. I suggest that we should give merek the for profit monopoly, but allow for non profit manufacturing. If another organization wants to make the vaccine but not derive profit from the process, let them. Manufacturing takes time and money to develop. Revenue should pay for those costs. The non-profit gains e…
> I suggest that we should give merek the for profit monopoly, but allow for non profit manufacturing. If another organization wants to make the vaccine but not derive profit from the process, let them. Not-for-profit manufacturing would have to be done by the government itself, wouldn't it? Otherwise, what other entity would and could actually pay to set that up?
Non-profit companies exist all over the US. Even non-profit drug manufacturing is done to some extent, but at a much smaller scale right now than we could have. The companies still charge money for services, the employees get paid, but the governance of the company is not focused solely on increasing profit margins. Most medical core science is done non-profit right now, at US universities. Many universities have on-premise small-scale manufacturing capabilities which serve their own needs, in medical labs but also others, like materials sciences and chemical science/engineering. There's no intrinsic reason why those couldn't be ramped up, or even pooled between physically close universities by creating a joint non-profit entity.
Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young
#327Earlier 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.
Then it needs to be a cost-plus model. They should absolutely be able to make a profit for manufacturing and handling logistics. They shouldn't be making a 4000% profit when "we" collectively funded all the research.
What about holders of patents funded by govt also paying royalties?
Just a notion I've been pondering. Sure, taxation could do the same job. Hypothetically. Hollywood accounting and such.
Maybe straight up royalties would be less prone to gamification.
Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young
#328Earlier 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.
There actually has been several papers posted to r/COVID19 that have suggested that the herd immunity threshold is likely overestimated. This is because vulnerability to infection isn't uniform across the population. Some people will be more likely to be infected, either due to biological reasons, like a weaker immune system, or sociological ones, like living or working in an area where transmission is far more likely. Most of the higher estimates of a herd immunity threshold of 70-80% are based on transmission dynamics from early in the pandemic, which mostly consisted of these people with higher probabilities of infection. Once this population starts to get burned out, the transmission of the virus also slows, which means that the herd immunity barrier also drops.
One of the papers hypothesized that this demonstrates why areas like NYC got hit so hard initially and have remained stable since. Seroprevalence surveys back in the early summer indicated that between 20-30% of NYC residents had contracted Covid already. The lockdowns obviously blunted the surge, but unlike other areas of the country, as NYC has opened back up, there hasn't been much of a second wave at all. With more than 2/3rds of the population still without any kind of exposure to the virus, you would expect a dense city like NYC to see a large increase. The paper concluded that this is evidence that might suggest that the herd immunity barrier is far lower than initially estimated. I've seen some papers suggest something closer to 20-50%, but nothing so low as 10%. I'll see if I can dig up some of the preprints to post here.
Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then it needs to be a cost-plus model. They should absolutely be able to make a profit for manufacturing and handling logistics. They shouldn't be making a 4000% profit when "we" collectively funded all the research.
The possibility of them 'being able to do that' is because of laws that got passed by democratically elected officials. If you don't like that, vote someone in power who regulates that more. The problem with these discussions is that nobody tells their opinions to their representative, they just blurt it out into the 'aether' on a rando internet forum. True change starts with calling your representative. If they don'…
>If you don't like that, vote someone in power who regulates that more.
That's an awful lot of assumptions on your part. I have voted out someone who didn't represent these values in exchange for someone who does. I don't need to contact my representative on this specific issue because I already know where she stands, but if we were in disagreement I would (and have).
Posting about it on the internet is to garner additional support and discussion... you know the entire reason HN exists?
Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. The idea that the public funds research, but corporations can monopolies the results of that research for profit, is just disgusting. Non-exclusive deals are fine. Exclusive ones not, at least not within the country/countries that funded it; they already paid for it, and denying them access is basically theft.
Drug companies also fund their own research, to the tune of massive expenditures. What you’re suggesting would incentive these companies to disengage from partnerships involving public funding. Whoever pays for the research, each company’s goal is to profitably sell a non-generic treatment. If the only way they can do that is to eschew public funds, they will do this and the result will be less cooperation and a far…
Honestly, this is overblown. Most of the budget for these corporations goes to marketing, and the R&D mostly goes to repatenting efforts or incremental repurposings. They rarely come out with anything new, and if you look at recent years you may as well say that they never do.