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

bbc.co.uk

361–370 of 1001 posts

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

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

=> projected cost to the customer seem to be ~ 80/100 per shot with 2 shots needed (if we go with a $20 base + $80 premium)

isn't the customer the government? are people on the street actually going to have to pay for this?

Hard to say. What is in the contract? I don't know (I assume it is public but I don't know how to look this up). Different countries may have different contracts.

I wouldn't be surprised if the contract was only that X doses would be provided to the US market (as opposed to shipping to the market in Mexico...). In this case the government is only buying a spot in the shipping queue, and not any doses.

It could be that the doses were bought by the government only for the government (military and politicians), and the rest of us are on our own. (this seems unlikely - doctors should be first in line, but an obvious extension is the doses are for doctors/nurses and the leftover for the above)

It could be the government is buying all doses for their country and will distribute them for no extra charge. This is probably what Europe has done/will do - because they tend to have government health care for anything considered essential.

I wouldn't be surprised if all 3 of the above were in use by different countries. There is disagreement as to which is best on a political level.

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

#362
post #355

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Who said I was afraid? I'm literally locked in my house in England, and all of the pubs are shut, and I'm banned from hanging out with my friends or my family. I want all that to end. I want to get back to seeing the world and going to festivals and for everyone to be able to do the same. I want my elderly grandmother to be able to see us again without worry. It's nothing to do with me being afraid.

Then either do it anyway or go protest. See grandma regardless, its not like grandma will surely die if you meet them. Grandma, due to old age has high chance to die anyway regardless of the covid or not, better meet them and spend quality time with them with the time they have now.

Oh bugger off, I'm not getting into the ins and outs of the safety protocols I've been observing my for seeing my grandmother on hacker news. I'm relieved about the vaccine. You do you.

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

#363
post #335
post #200

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Screw the media for pushing this and lockdown as the only possible solution. This will still take ages to be rolled out.

Look, I get that you find lockdowns an inconvenience but the real world isn’t a TV show where a cheap and easily distributed cure will be invented 10 minutes before the end of the episode. People will reliably die until a vaccine or highly effective treatment is widely available, and the only way to slow that is to rely on proven public health techniques. While you’re being inconvenienced remember that you’re better…

You criticized the commenter for objecting to lockdown. Why are the people you refer to dying? Is it possible it is because they aren't quarantining and staying at home?

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

#364

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

>I'm feeling a deep-seated wave of relief that I never thought possible. Like waking up from a year-long nightmare. Thank God. Moderna is also only weeks behind Pfizer/Biontech here with a very similar technology and manufacturing capability of hundreds of millions of doses. We'll be seeing the first EUA's by December, and shots in the arm before the end of the year. Pretty incredible that we can just science our way…

This is great and all, and I'm not against vaccinations, but is this safe long term?

Am I the only one here who doesn't want to get inoculated in basically the first batch?

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

#365
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three of my dead family members (edit for clarity: not my immediate nuclear family, but people I'm still close to) don't feel the same way (nor do those who were impacted by the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths in the US), but I'm glad you've found this whole thing to be overblown.

I didn't say there won't be any people dead due to virus. Many people too die due to flu virus.

That's such an excessively tired, debunked, and often (but not always, and not necessarily in your case) bad-faith contrarian talking point that this far into the pandemic I can't be bothered to get worked up about it any more.

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

#366
post #29

Great news, but I think the importance of the -80 degrees centigrade storage requirement is underestimated. Serbia, where I live, has ordered this vaccine. And our medical system is far from world-class, but leaps and bounds from less developed countries, and I honestly think logistics here will not be able to match those requirements. I've seen tetanus vaccines just being kept in regular, commercial, refrigerators.…

Germany is planning to establish centers for vaccination exactly to avoid problems with the continous cold chain. (People travel without issue at ambient temperature. They even prefer that to other temperatures;) I would assume that other nations will adopt similiar solutions for vaccines that have ultra-cold storage requirements.

Haha, I find it easier to traverse Germany side-to-side than Serbia.

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

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not share the knowledge make the vaccine in all three countries? AFAIK for the last 2-3 days EU and US are partners again, not enemies.

I would assume that the countries are the only ones with a factory that is capable of making this. Give me a few billion dollars and a year and I can set up another factory, but it would have been too risky an investment 1 year ago (before COVID), or even 3 months ago . Even now it is too risky an investment as the current factories can produce a lot of vaccine, and there are other candidates that also have factories…

Didn't Bill Gates' foundation invest 6-7 billion dollars in manufactoring capabilities for vaccines this spring?

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

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it won't. they are projecting 50 million doses to be ready in 2020 and 1.1 billion next year. That means that mom and dad and grandma are likely to get it within the next few months and that by mid next year, you'll probably have access to it if you are a healthy thirty year old.

Those 1.1 billion doses are not for the US alone. The vaccine was actually developed by Biontech in Germany before Pfizer was involved. Pfizer is the partner to scale up the studies and production. But you can assume that those doses are not US only. And then I'd doubt that a healthy 30 year old will get it in summer of 2021.

I believe 300M of them are accounted for by the EU vaccine purchase program. That said, it looks like those doses will be made in Europe; Pfizer seems set up to make it this in multiple facilities, which is a good sign.

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

#369
post #26

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So which company benefits the most here? From a cursory googling the following seem decent: - The Whirlpool Corporation - Electrolux AB - LG Electronics Inc. problem is these companies have a lot of exposure to other sectors as well of course.

Based on this NYT article [1], some logistics companies planning to store and transport the vaccine are using freezers from Stirling Ultracold. It may just be a curiosity, but their freezers (as the name would suggest) use bona fide Stirling engines rather than the typical two-stage compressors used in most ULT freezers. As someone in life science research who uses plenty of -80 freezers, I've always been curious abo…

Nit: Stirling cryocoolers, not Stirling engines. Thermodynamically, it's just reversed. You're driving mechanical/electrical power in to get a thermal difference, not dissipating a thermal difference to get mechanical work/electrical power out.

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

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corona viruses cannot mutate as efficiently as flu. They are very different beasts.

17 million mink culled in Denmark for mutated Covid which was passed on to humans. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-denmar...

"as efficiently"
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