Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 712 posts

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

#401

Post by xnyan »

SamBam wrote: post #377
eznzt wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From TFPDF: >You will be compensated for your time, the inconvenience of having blood tests and procedures, and your travel expenses. The total amount compensated will be approximately £235 - £625 depending on the exact number of visits and whether any repeat or additional visits are necessary.

To add some context to this, medical trials generally only compensate time (at a low hourly rate) and expenses, occasionally increased slightly to compensate for hardship. They deliberately do not pay large amounts, because the money is not supposed to overly-incentivize the participation, to avoid ethical issues where someone might choose to participate in something very unsafe only because the reward seems so large…

I did various medial trials in college for money and have mixed feelings about this. When sitting in the various waiting rooms, it was very clear that was only one kind of person that did "open" (not targeting people with a disorder but rather recruiting healthy volunteers) medical trials: the poor. I got to know lots of of people well (we were frequent flyers in the medical trial world), and our common characteristic was that we really needed the money.

It's kind of like non-pay electoral offices. You only get candidates that can afford not to work. In medical trials, you get the kind of people that are willing to, for example, get infected with the common cold and have you blood drawn 6x a day for 4 days for about 80 bucks a day. It was not horrible, but often uncomfortable. Study recruiters still call me, and now that I have a decent paying job there is no way I would ever consider doing those kinds of studies again. Simply not worth it.

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

#402

Post by cookingrobot »

EpicEng wrote: post #391
ponker wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But for this disease that's particularly bad because Covid has shown to be worst in 55+, obese, comorbidities, etc... which means that the trials on healthy groups are proving very little, since the virus itself is so much weaker on healthy groups.

>But for this disease that's particularly bad because... Doesn't change the fact that, when you're developing a new drug, you want to test it in a way which will cause the least harm. You don't begin trials with those most at risk for obvious reasons. The primary goal of this phase it to asses the safety of the vaccine candidate. I'm also unaware of any disease that isn't more threatening to people in relatively poor…

You say it’s “obvious” but it’s the opposite of my intuition. Can you explain the logic a bit more? I would have thought you’d give a risky new drug to the least healthy, most likely to die without it population, to raise the chance of survival from low to unknown.

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

#403

Post by ffdjjjffjj »

breakfastduck wrote: post #339
ffdjjjffjj wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was true until last week. Deaths are now rising again, and daily new cases are approaching the level of the summer peak.

Daily new cases means nothing - it's a completely artificial figure that can be inflated or deflated by simply changing how many tests are conducted. Deaths is the only relevant measure.

It doesn’t “mean nothing”, it’s another data point. If you see test positivity rate remaining low but cases increasing - which we do in many areas with sufficient testing - then it does suggest more people are getting the virus.

You can also corroborate this by comparing it to new hospitalizations, which are also up.

“Deaths is the only relevant measure” - not sure where to start with this except to say that this is not at all what epidemiologists seem to think and I won’t address it further without some very dramatic reasoning and evidence.

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

#404

Post by nabla9 »

thebruce87m wrote: post #356
fcsp wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering all the excluded groups on the trial (page 3, kids, 55+, obese, weak immune system, a lot more), it's a lot of exclusions, how does one get from results on a study like this to declaring the vaccine safe for general use?

Maybe a stupid question, but do we need to vaccinate everyone? I remember reading that heard immunity is 70% or something - so could we get away with leaving the people out that it wasn’t tested on?

THEORY: Assuming 100% efficacy vaccine. In completely homogeneous population if people are randomly vaccinated the threshold where the diseases effective R drops below 1.0 is 1 - 1/R. For example if R = 3.0 you need to vaccinate 66% population until infections start to decline.

REALITY: Assuming 75-90% efficacy vaccine, vaccination is non-random and population is heterogeneous. You want to vaccinate everyone who agrees to take it. Just like with children diseases, there will be clusters of anti-vaxxers, or people just don't bother and they are often clumped together, travel around the world and spread the disease.

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

#405

Post by amyjess »

apexalpha wrote: post #134
zoobab wrote: 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.

The United States Military has the best logistics system in the world. I'd rather have them handle manufacturing and rollout than either a multinational or a startup.

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

#406

Post by bentcorner »

cookingrobot wrote: post #402
EpicEng wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But for this disease that's particularly bad because... Doesn't change the fact that, when you're developing a new drug, you want to test it in a way which will cause the least harm. You don't begin trials with those most at risk for obvious reasons. The primary goal of this phase it to asses the safety of the vaccine candidate. I'm also unaware of any disease that isn't more threatening to people in relatively poor…

You say it’s “obvious” but it’s the opposite of my intuition. Can you explain the logic a bit more? I would have thought you’d give a risky new drug to the least healthy, most likely to die without it population, to raise the chance of survival from low to unknown.

Later on you'd want to give the determined-to-be-safe new drug to the least healthy (if possible), or those that come in close contact to them.

At this stage they still need to ensure the drug is safe, so they test it on healthy people first.

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

#407

Post by OJFord »

ponker wrote: post #387
nate510 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, experimental drug trials are run first on healthy groups and then in at-risk groups (old, young, those with co-morbidities). From the article, my guess is that they are expediting the sensitive groups trials, but unfortunately there's a lack of technical detail. Source: My partner is an infectious disease specialist and we talk about this pretty much daily because I'm so curious.

But for this disease that's particularly bad because Covid has shown to be worst in 55+, obese, comorbidities, etc... which means that the trials on healthy groups are proving very little, since the virus itself is so much weaker on healthy groups.

Age and comorbidities (!!) always make a disease worse, obesity is a bit less common perhaps, but there's always something that's a risk factor, and the point is not to do something highly experimental and unknown starting with people who are already at increased risk.

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

#408

Post by jedberg »

ageitgey wrote: post #69

A quick summary of were the Oxford vaccine stands since it's hard to follow: - When will the vaccine be ready? After the Phase 3 efficacy data is reported, assuming that the data shows that the vaccine prevents COVID or reduces COVID severity. This happens after enough people in the trial get sick with COVID. Then they unblind the groups and see if the people who got sick were in the control group or the vaccinated g…

The most interesting part to me is that we require some people to get sick. Which totally makes sense. But what if the vaccine happens to be 100% effective? Do we ever get to end the trial?

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

#409

Post by hsitz »

24gttghh wrote: post #375
thebruce87m wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a stupid question, but do we need to vaccinate everyone? I remember reading that heard immunity is 70% or something - so could we get away with leaving the people out that it wasn’t tested on?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#Mechanics It varies by disease. Can anyone really say what the % is/would be for covid-19?

You should be able to see that Covid-19 is in fact a disease listed in the table on the wikipedia page you reference. You should also be able to see that the percentage required for herd immunity effect to begin (the 'herd immunity threshold') is a function of the R0 level for each disease.

In addition, to question of "can anyone really say for covid-19", I suppose the answer is 'No, but I would trust that the consensus of the scientific community of infectious disease experts is the best estimation we can get.'

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

#410

Post by graeme »

rimliu wrote: post #113
graeme wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So studies of other coronaviruses show immunity lasted 6-12 months. We’re a but early to see mass reinfections. That said, my guess would be normal reinfections would be less severe, more like a cold. There have been some severe reinfections but any reinfection under six months suggests something atypical in the immune response. Also SARS-Cov-1 produced a longer immune response so that may happen here. But lifelong s…

Studies also show that the immunity for original SARS (the close relative) lasts many years.

Yeah that’s what I meant by SARS-Cov-1. But I prob should have gone with the clearer term
Post reply on HN