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

bbc.co.uk

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

#471

Post by tatersolid »

jessaustin wrote: post #140
refurb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When we buy cattle semen it's always shipped in liquid nitrogen tanks. UPS knows how to do this. It is more expensive than other sorts of shipping.

This comment is why HN still matters.

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

#472

Post by comicjk »

squarefoot wrote: post #435

I'm currently recovering from Covid-19 and hopefully won't need it, however this line sounds a bit strange: "It uses a completely experimental approach - that involves injecting part of the virus's genetic code - in order to train the immune system." I did my flu (not Covid) vaccine shot about 3 weeks ago, just before catching the nastier one, and according to the doctors it works exactly that way, although this one…

What they mean is that instead of injecting viral proteins or deactivated virus (as in a flu vaccine), they are injecting mRNA which causes your own cells to make a section of viral protein, which then triggers a strong immune response. This COVID vaccine will be the first major mRNA vaccine.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2770485

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

#473

Post by w0utert »

hairytrog wrote: post #380

90% protection... Let's see what this really means - because I'm pretty sure we already have something on order of 80+% protection without a vaccine. I'd like to see % protection vs age.

>> because I'm pretty sure we already have something on order of 80+% protection without a vaccine

I think the way these studies are set up already accounts for that. In these trials they don't vaccinate just one group and then check how many people still got sick ('only 10% got sick so it 90% effective'), but instead they split the participants into a 'vaccinated' group and a 'placebo' group (double blind), then wait until X people in the total of all participants get sick, then compare how many of them got the vaccin and how many got the placebo. Since the total group is large, this should average out pretty much all variability in susceptibility to infection (assuming the participants are selected to include a wide range of attributes, of course).

I don't know how the maths work exactly but I think the 90% claim here means that if you take the vaccine you are 90% less likely to get sick from covid compared to someone else with comparable attributes.

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

#474

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

estomagordo wrote: post #455
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 90% protection against disease, not necessarily 90% protection against infection. There's an important distinction: * Protection against disease means that you don't get sick. You may still contract the virus and spread it to others (the Salk vaccine against Polio works this way). * Sterilizing immunity means that you can't even get infected, so that you can't pass the virus on to other people. It does not lo…

Without sterilizing immunity, will the amount of virus a vaccinated individual carries match that of a non vaccinated individual, though? I guess what I (a layman) is asking is, even if the vaccinated individual contracts the virus, won't they spread less of it than someone truly sick?

It depends on the virus and the vaccine. We'll have to wait for further data on this vaccine candidate.

The Salk polio vaccine does not prevent infection in the digestive tract, so you can still spread the virus, but it does prevent the virus from spreading beyond the digestive tract and causing paralysis. You could imagine something similar happening with a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: that it would block infection in the lower respiratory tract but not the upper respiratory tract, allowing you to spread it by coughing and sneezing while never getting severe respiratory issues.

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

#475

Post by kumarvvr »

FrancisOfAssisi wrote: post #469

So Trump was right (again), after all!

Science has nothing to do with politics.

Also, cherry picking one statement, from literally hundreds of false ones, does not make any one right.

It just shows that if you throw a lot of stuff, something will eventually stick.

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

#476

Post by blueline »

lm28469 wrote: post #450
317070 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but is this safe long term Is getting COVID safe long term? There are plenty of viruses that cause issues in the long term. HIV causes AIDS, HPV and Hepatitis cause cancers years later. We have no clue on the long term effects of SARS-Cov-2, other than that it causes COVID-19 in the short term. It's a choice between the pest and the cholera at this point.

> Is getting COVID safe long term? For most people yes edit: so the whole world is studying this virus 24/7 for almost a year and nobody detected anything, yet you think it might give us aids v2 ? Feel free to link any study that hints to anything remotely going in that direction because I couldn't find anything at all.

you literally can't possibly know that. nobody does

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

#478

Post by standardUser »

freebasenic wrote: post #354
sanp wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. But we do need the government to step in and do this (contact tracing etc.). Hopefully, with the new administration...

Our rate of transmission is too high to do a nationwide contact tracing effort I think. We need to reduce the daily number of cases before we properly implement a contact tracing program.

Perhaps a better way to say this: we need to implement a national contact tracing program immediately so that when the transmission rate declines to manageable levels it is operational.

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

#480

Post by bluGill »

chasd00 wrote: post #458
bluGill wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. Any small city (> 50,000 people) has someone who can get you liquid nitrogen in far larger quantities than will ever be needed (thus stuff is used for a lot of industrial processes). Put it in a cooler from wal-mart and you have a week. Any you get a week after thawing it to use is anyway, so you don't need the cold storage where the end user is. I don't know what the thawing protocols are of course.

i'm involved in some state government COVID vaccine projects. The issue is you can't just knock together cold storage like this, there's (naturally) a long process to get "approved" and "certified" for vaccine administration. Storage is one of these criteria, they're not going to hand over a batch of vaccine to some doc with a cooler of dry ice.

Of course not. they need to ensure the cooler is packed correctly - those standards exist.

Those I don't think the doc even needs a fancy cooler, if I understand correctly they need to thaw this first, by the time the individual doc gets it they need to be thawing it and then using it quick. (I don't know what thaw procedures are though)

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