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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

#431

Post by chimprich »

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.

Deaths are not an entirely useful measure to see how the pandemic is progressing because they are a lagging indicator.

Positive test rates measure what was happening about a week ago. Hospital admissions reflect activity a week or two before that, and deaths often get reported a month or more after the events that caused people to get infected.

You have to look at all the data to get an idea of what is happening.

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

#432

Post by gadders »

majewsky wrote: post #365
gadders wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying don't give it to them as well, just do the vulnerable people first. At least then we stand a chance of getting the economy back on its feet.

"Just do the vulnerable people first" has the significant advantage of being easy to explain and implement, but it does not maximize the speed of economic recovery. For instance, I'm a vulnerable person because of preexisting conditions, so I'll likely be offered a vaccine relatively soon after approval. But that won't have a large impact on economic recovery: I'm in the home office in a single-person household and d…

My thoughts in treating the vulnerable first wasn't because I thought the vulnerable would then be able to go back out to work, but because the vulnerable would be relatively safe the people with no pre-exisiting conditions wouldn't have to stay home to stop the spread.

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

#433

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

cwhiz wrote: post #418

Can someone explain to me why double blind is necessary or useful for a vaccine trial such as this? It seems obvious to me on something like a pain medicine, but on a vaccine it seem a pointless. Is placebo an actual issue with a vaccine? It honestly seems borderline unethical to give people a placebo vaccine.

People who know they've been vaccinated will behave more recklessly than people who haven't been vaccinated. You need to have a control group, in order to assess the efficacy (and safety) of the vaccine. If the control group is wearing masks and socially distancing, but the vaccinated group is going partying at bars and clubs every night, then comparisons of how often each group gets infected won't have much meaning.

It's only unethical to withhold the vaccine if you know that it's safe and effective. The whole point of the study is to figure out if that's the case. It's possible for vaccine candidates to be ineffective, or even harmful (e.g., antibody-dependent enhancement).

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

#434

Post by tcoff91 »

cwhiz wrote: post #428
keyme wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Placebo can have an effect on side effects.

Are they testing for side effects in all three stages? I thought the first two trials were for safety and the third was for efficacy. Is that incorrect?

They're absolutely monitoring side effects during phase 3. some safety effects can be rare enough that they don't show up in phase 1/2.

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

#435

Post by Izkata »

acdha wrote: post #190
Izkata wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’ll be the same cycle of open-spike-close and businesses not having enough customers to be viable. That's the part I'm referring to by "not caring" - just ignoring the close orders, especially since "two weeks to slow the spread" has been so completely abandoned.

Ignoring the law doesn’t lead to normal: just more preventable deaths and bankruptcies when businesses burn capital trying to stay open without enough customers to be profitable, even assuming they avoid legal repercussions.

A few things here:

* What law? In the US, the lockdowns were under emergency powers of the executive branch, which are supposed to only last a limited time (30 days where I am, for example). Several of these were challenged and found to be unlawful.

* The US lockdowns were originally only mean to prevent hospitals from being overloaded. We are way way past that point where that was an issue - all the emergency capacity has been dismantled for months.

* As sibling comment implies, something like half the states in the US aren't under any lockdown now, businesses there aren't having issues staying open, and their stats are no worse than the locked-down states.

* Speaking of preventable deaths, suicide and overdose are climbing where lockdowns are still in place.

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

#436

Post by cwhiz »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #433
cwhiz wrote: post #418

Can someone explain to me why double blind is necessary or useful for a vaccine trial such as this? It seems obvious to me on something like a pain medicine, but on a vaccine it seem a pointless. Is placebo an actual issue with a vaccine? It honestly seems borderline unethical to give people a placebo vaccine.

People who know they've been vaccinated will behave more recklessly than people who haven't been vaccinated. You need to have a control group, in order to assess the efficacy (and safety) of the vaccine. If the control group is wearing masks and socially distancing, but the vaccinated group is going partying at bars and clubs every night, then comparisons of how often each group gets infected won't have much meaning.…

What you’re describing as “reckless behavior” is just normal behavior in a non-covid world. If vaccine candidates are social distancing, wearing masks, and staying home how will the researchers get the data they need? If you are following “covid best practices” it is extremely unlikely that you will contract covid. Would the researchers not want people to go out and live their normal lives?

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

#437

Post by kortilla »

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.

It’s a vaccine, not a cure once you have it. So the people you would be testing it on wouldn’t be infected yet. Therefore you don’t first test it on unhealthy people when the vaccine might have unrelated nasty side effects.

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

#438

Post by cwhiz »

tcoff91 wrote: post #434
cwhiz wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they testing for side effects in all three stages? I thought the first two trials were for safety and the third was for efficacy. Is that incorrect?

They're absolutely monitoring side effects during phase 3. some safety effects can be rare enough that they don't show up in phase 1/2.

Okay. I’m still having a hard time understanding how placebo helps them test for side effects.

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

#439

Post by Izkata »

wang_li wrote: post #111
input_sh wrote: post #62

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…

80% or so is accurate if there was no cross-reactivity and if asymptomatic is included in the case count. It's what was being reported in March or so when we didn't yet have evidence of cross-reactivity.

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

#440

Post by TheKarateKid »

xnyan wrote: post #401
SamBam wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 characteristi…

Exactly my thoughts. Hardly anyone from these groups is doing it “for science.” It’s for money.

Thinking otherwise is willful ignorance, and this is clearly exploitation of lower income groups.

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