Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection • Hacker News Board

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#151

Post by bipson » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #135

TomGullen wrote: post #2

Great news and the markets are reacting very positively to the news as well which indicates to me this could be the beginning of the end!

Yeah, setting aside all the politics and silliness, the science going on around this pandemic is remarkable. Going from nearly zero (yes, there was a bunch of research from SARS-Cov-1, MERS, and similar to build off of but nothing like this) to a functioning, tested, and mass manufactured vaccine in a year is absolutely jaw dropping. Even if it takes two years to distribute widely, three years to stomp out a pandemic…

Although I want to agree, none of the companies started from zero.

All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades.

Not trying to diminish the accomplishments achieved, great effort nontheless. Just saying nobody started from zero here, that would have been insane and frankly impossible.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#152

Post by nicoburns » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

ByteJockey wrote: post #131

grumple wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that several of the vaccine candidates require similarly cold storage for their entire distribution cycle until they are being used. Disclaimer: I work for big pharma.

How long, exactly, are they good for once they warm up? I assume you aren't injecting people with something at -80C. How big of a window is there for injections?

Other comments here are saying something between 24 hours and a week at standard refrigerator temperatures.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#153

Post by tuna-piano » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

For those wondering how their vaccines will be distributed among countries during the next year when supply is constrained... it seems complicated. Pfizer is a US company, but has at least one key ingredient from Austria, is made with technology from Germany, has manufacturing in US+Europe, etc.

Pfizer's CEO answered this question this morning on CNBC.

Pfizer has two separate manufacturing divisions- one in the US (Massachusetts, Missouri, Michigan) and one in Europe (Germany+Belgium).

They will be producing in parallel and he seemed to imply Europe manufactured->Europe distributed and US manufactured->US distributed initially (but didn't explicitly say this). But he then stated that it's important to share the vaccine across the world - "I hope that we will be able to ship to the entire world from these manufacturing sites without problems".

They have signed contracts with multiple governments in the world and in most cases have defined their monthly quantities distributed to those countries through 2021. I would guess these are public and am curious about the quantities and timelines for the various countries.

They are estimating to have 1.2 billion doses by the end of 2021 (enough for 600 million people, as each person needs two doses).

EDIT:

US: 100 million doses of this Pfizer vaccine (enough for 50 million people) by December 2020[1], but Pfizer now says they are only producting 50 million doses globally this year[2]

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/us/politics/pfizer-corona... [2]https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#154

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 1:07 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #51

londons_explore wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's a minor logistical challenge, it's simple enough to ship this in a liquid nitrogen dewar. Even very small cities will have liquid nitrogen facilities. Shipping from the nearest city to most of the population sounds very doable in 24 hours. Remember you only need to get most of the population to halt the spread. If there's some tiny village 3 days hike away in the rainforest, you can skip them.

Shipping hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccine at -80C is more than a “minor logistical challenge”. First, you’d never ship in a liquid nitrogen dewar. It would be a massive logistics bottleneck considering the weight of dewars and the volume you'd be shipping (Pfizer already has deals secured for hundreds of millions of doses). And plus, these are packaged vaccines - a glass vial with a label, in a paper box, wi…

Yes, it is hard. It's full of issues and details.

But it's something that poor countries manage to do successfully with a reasonable reliability even on rural areas.

I am sure there will be plenty of new problems for that lower temperature. And a number of smart people will have to work really hard to solve them, a large amount of money will change hands and all that.

But I think the GP's point is that it's doable. It doesn't need any sci-fi tech or any large restructuring of humanity (and we already did some of the later for this virus).

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#155

Post by andrepd » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 1:07 PM UTC

TomGullen wrote: post #2

Great news and the markets are reacting very positively to the news as well which indicates to me this could be the beginning of the end!

The markets? Spare me. What are the markets, a handful of rich in banks and large corporations? They are neither wise nor competent, why should every news story be suffixed by how "the markets" (swt) react?

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#156

Post by woofie11 » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 1:07 PM UTC

Upvoter33 wrote: post #121

camhart wrote: post #39

Interesting timing here with regards to the US election. Edit/Update: "She said she learned of the results from the outside panel of experts shortly after 1 p.m. on Sunday, and that the timing was not influenced by the election." https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/heal... Edit2: I failed to realize that it was necessary to point out that the timing of this press release is interesting. I wasn't i…

Are you serious?

This is exactly the point of preregistered hypotheses.

Odds of conspiracy, with a clear hypothesis and confirmation of that hypothesis, go up drastically. That happened here.

It wasn't a super-unlikely hypothesis either. We're talking about announcing a result a few weeks earlier versus later. That's not an unreasonable decision for a blue-leaning businessperson or scientist to make.

What reduces odds are the number of preregistrations. There were dozens about this strong.

My own prior went from 1% odds to maybe 35% odds. Yours may be different, likely based on your prior based on where you fall on the political spectrum. Right-wingers will probably go 35% to 80%, and left-wingers from 0.01% to 1%.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#157

Post by adrianN » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

benlumen wrote: post #149

I'm feeling a deep-seated wave of relief that I never thought possible. Like waking up from a year-long nightmare. Thank God.

It will still take a long time before a sufficient number of people have been vaccinated that life can return back to normal.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#158

Post by criddell » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

benlumen wrote: post #149

I'm feeling a deep-seated wave of relief that I never thought possible. Like waking up from a year-long nightmare. Thank God.

Same here.

Congratulations and thanks to everybody who worked so hard on this.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#159

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

bjarneh wrote: post #89

jefftk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The variations are enough to have differences in infectiousness and to allow us to trace the spread a bit, but as far as we know immunity to any of them is immunity to all of them.

> but as far as we know immunity to any of them is immunity to all of them. OK. The longevity of the immunity is also an issue perhaps; at least they have written articles about people becoming re-infected; so even the people who do become immune may not stay that way forever...

The reporting on reinfection is actually a pretty positive sign. If 10% or even 1% of people could be reinfected, you’d expect to see huge numbers of reinfections, so the fact that the news is still reporting individual cases of reinfection suggests it won’t be a practical concern.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#160

Post by usrusr » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

carlmr wrote: post #20

TremendousJudge wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First phrasing makes more sense than the second one to me -- what would it even mean for somebody to be "90% immune" to a disease?

I would assume something like with the influenza vaccine, where you have immunity to i think around 70% of currently available virus mutations, if the vaccine works.

That's a percentage on a different axis. Influenza is a diverse family of related viruses and strains vary much more than those of SARS-COV-2. No surprise given the very different time since taking foot in humans, and in addition to that (I think, working on weak knowledge here) that influenza is even part of a group of viruses that is prone to create mashup versions of itself when two strains meet in the same host. Think Dangermouse, Grey Album.