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

591–600 of 712 posts

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

#591

Post by ilyagr »

sjg007 wrote: post #537
ilyagr wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised they don't seem to do frequent and regular COVID testing of participants to catch asymptomatic infections. Naively, it would seem worthwhile in order to predict how well the vaccine would slow down the spread. I guess the reason is that the study is narrowly tailored to vaccine approval requirements?

It’s a pipe dream. We don’t have enough capacity. People won’t get tested either. This issue would be mute if people wore masks and stayed apart.

More than 300000 people a day get tested for coronavirus in the UK according to [1], and the testing capacity is even greater than that. This is enough to cover study participants.

I would imagine that volunteers would also be willing to get tested, though perhaps the worry is that such a requirement might cause more of them to drop out of the study.

[1]: https://interactive.news.sky.com/2020/covid-19-coronavirus/t...

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

#592

Post by anoncake »

Bud wrote: post #589
Devils-Avocado wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you vaccinate children for something which is less deadly than the flu? This is the case even up to 60 years old.

Because it's substantially more deadly than the flu. (That's not counting the survivors who suffer permanent organ damage.) Please update your facts before posting in public on this topic again. I suggest sources other than Fox News. If you're about repost right-wing canards about how it's less deadly for children, please review salient facts about infectious diseases, such as the fact that they are infectious . The…

> That's not counting the survivors who suffer permanent organ damage.

That's extremely rare, if it happens at all.

> The goal of vaccinating younger people is to protect those whom they might infect.

You want to subject children to a medical procedure that they won't even benefit from?

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

#593

Post by tim333 »

qwerty1234599 wrote: post #244
covid-69 wrote: post #242

So who will actually get the vaccine? Not me.

Admit it, you're just subconciously afraid of needles as most people. Noticed it with Trump. No way he'd take an experimental COVID vaccine, but an experimental antibody drug cocktail through the mouth was more than ok to him. Pro tip: it all ends up in the bloodstream in the end.

I don't much like needles. I'm thinking the Bharat Biotech nasal vaccine is the way to go. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/bharat-biotech-to-ma...

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

#595

Post by ilyagr »

raverbashing wrote: post #543
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you tell people whether they're now vaccinated, they're going to take a lot more risks. You may still have increased risk taking behavior if you don't tell them whether they got the real vaccine or placebo, but it will be equally increased across the experiment and control groups.

And? Having them expose themselves more to the virus is a "good thing" (though tell them how long should they wait for the immunity to set in) Yes, with the control group you would have a base for how many people you would have expected to be infected, so there's that, but you "could" get that from other observations

> Yes, with the control group you would have a base for how many people you would have expected to be infected, so there's that, but you "could" get that from other observations.

Getting this number for a distribution of people as similar as possible to the people in the experimental group is, in fact, the primary purpose of having a control group. There is no better way to predict this number, as you can't predict how likely a particular person is to catch coronavirus at a particular time, in a particular location.

You also need a control group to get the number of various medical problems expected in the experimental group, even if the vaccine doesn't cause them. This also depends on time, place, and behavior.

So, if you create a reason for people in the control group to behave differently from experimental group, for instance by letting people find out which group they are in, you defeat the purpose of having a control group.

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

#596

Post by anoncake »

mssundaram wrote: post #383
skocznymroczny wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'd gladly give this company a couple of billion if it means they can get us back to normal." Sounds like the media panic is working.

Indeed, people willing to give up anything. I don't see any return to'normal' anytime soon

I mean, I would gladly give companies a couple of billions if it means people stop panicking and we all can start living again. The vaccine doesn't even have to actually work.

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

#597

Post by nshepperd »

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.

To add to the other comments: because giving a placebo is essential for the experimental results to have any validity, not giving a placebo would be imo way more unethical, since it would mean you are exposing people to a medical risk (experimental vaccine) for no scientific benefit.

(Needless to say, running an invalid vaccine trial also has very bad consequences: it would delay the actual deployment of a working vaccine to the general public, resulting in millions of unnecessary person-hours of potential virus exposure.)

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

#598

Post by wbl »

krona wrote: post #563
krona wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a summary of at least 6 articles on pre existing t-cell immunity. https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3563 Furthermore, I know of at least 3 leading statisticians that hypothesized (very early on) that the variance of infection trends pointed to pre-existing immunity in various populations. The evidence supporting this is mounting.

For the lazy (cited 556 times as of now): https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30610-3.pdf

That paper looks at 40 people and has no idea what the clinical correlates of the non-spike responses are because no one has any idea. You cannot take that paper and say that a substantial factor of people are protected due to preexisting responses.

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

#599

Post by chrisrogers »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #504
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.

If you tell people whether they're now vaccinated, they're going to take a lot more risks. You may still have increased risk taking behavior if you don't tell them whether they got the real vaccine or placebo, but it will be equally increased across the experiment and control groups.

It's rudimentary to figure out if you got a vaccine or placebo. Live vaccines tend to produce the type of temporary localized soreness you experience with a flue shot. Placebos do not.

Really it's about measuring how likely vaccinated participants are to contracting the virus than those that received the placebo.

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

#600

Post by chrisrogers »

Izkata wrote: post #463
cwhiz wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Psychosomatic, or the result of administering an IV shot, or environmental.
Post reply on HN