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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

#461

Post by artursapek »

SECProto wrote: post #119
breakfastduck wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overly cautious about the herd immunity stuff here. We're not going to eliminate the virus completely. That's a given, we should stop aiming for that. If we get to a point where there's a stable number of daily deaths then we're good. (like we have for literally every single fatal illness.)

> (like we have for literally every single fatal illness) Smallpox. And if you consider within the borders of a given country, a dozen others (polio, measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox).

COVID-19 is a slice of apple pie compared to Smallpox

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

#462

Post by artursapek »

logicchains wrote: post #288
acdha wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A disease isn’t something you can solve by pretending really hard that it doesn’t exist. People getting their news from irresponsible politicians get sick like everyone else, and that’s why it won’t get back to normal before there’s a vaccine or very effective treatment: it’ll be the same cycle of open-spike-close and businesses not having enough customers to be viable.

>A disease isn’t something you can solve by pretending really hard that it doesn’t exist. This is demonstrably false. Some places are already back to life as normal, like Florida and Sweden, with no business closures. And in spite of this they still have lower deaths per capita than some places with heavy lockdowns like New York, Peru, Belgium and Spain.

Not to mention the economic crater, and suicides!

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

#463

Post by Izkata »

cwhiz wrote: post #438
tcoff91 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I imagine: If a given side-effect occurs at the same rate in both groups, it's unlikely to be caused by the vaccine and is more likely to be psychosomatic.

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

#464

Post by nradov »

vaughnegut wrote: post #277
nradov wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moving average of daily deaths in the US has been stable or declining for the past two months. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

A friend of mine in public health mentioned to me that it's not uncommon for second waves of epidemics to be less deadly, since many of the people most vulnerable to the disease would have already passed away during the first wave.

Technically this is know as "mortality displacement" or the "harvesting effect".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_displacement

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

#465

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Bobblebobble wrote: post #303

I'm in the trial. Here's the participant information sheet, in case anyone's curious: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WB5QPmECchlThnem9wcX0PDaKQW...

I think this is the apex of the HN effect - usually it's finding a world expert answering your question ... but we can beat that :-)

And thank you for volunteering.

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

#466

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#467

Post by learc83 »

dougweltman wrote: post #306
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…

>Early on, one person got symptoms consistent with typical vaccine side effects, but it was determined that the person had a previously undiagnosed, unrelated disease. Second, there was the highly publicized case where a patient suffered temporary spinal inflammation and recovered shortly. It is unclear if this event is related to the vaccine, ... This seems rather worrying as these Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials are pre…

It’s in phase 3 now. I believe all of the above poster is mentioning happened in phase 3 as well.

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

#468

Post by EpicEng »

lostlogin wrote: post #452
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…

> I'm also unaware of any disease that isn't more threatening to people in relatively poor health. I had to think a while - sickle cell anaemia and malaria. I’m sure there will be others.

Ha, fair enough! I made sure to word that carefully...

But in general, good health leads to better outcomes, and we know that's the case with covid.

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

#469

Post by kortilla »

Retric wrote: post #291
_Microft wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a good argument. We are talking about a company providing a service. They might not have invented the vaccine but they are providing the means to bring it from proof of concept into mass production. The commenter seemed to think that this isn't worth money. I argue that you get quite a bang for the buck.

The question is not if it’s valuable, the question is if it’s subsided. Farmers producing corn add some value to the process, but in western countries ~100% of their profits are from government subsidies. This does incentivize them to be more efficient, but it also means their constantly looking for a larger handout. In the case of farm subsidies it’s grown to the point of being actively unhealthy both in economic te…

> Without sufficient calories you can’t have an obese population due to physics.

Sure you can, you just have starving poor people too.

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

#470

Post by Zenbit_UX »

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 obvious because you don't test risky shit on people already at risk of _everything_.

I've got a 90yr grandma, she shouldn't be the first to try new stuff injected I to her body. Is that not obvious?

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