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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

#521

Good: + ~90% of individuals achieve immunity. + no significant side-effects. Not so good: - two doses needed, 3 weeks apart, immunity after one month from first dose. Slow rollout. - -80C storage and transport needed. Challenging, but doable in developed countries, but still may slow down mass rollout. Not feasible in many developing countries. I still wonder about long-term immunity. Anyone can share any insight?

Another good point: not developed using fetal stem cells.

That makes no scientific difference, but there are a fair number of people in the US who will not use a vaccine if it is developed that way.

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

#522
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are also people with millions at stake who are metagaming that other people will think this is important enough to increase the future outlook of top companies and thus changing their strategies to profit off them. The market is a weighted function of an insane number of variables, and we know none of the weights. Any attempt at reading the market to understand those variables is going to be about as useful…

The meta-strategies help market prices be accurate, faster, by beginning to move prices towards the “right” number in advance of information that would do the same thing. In the long run they don’t misinform. This obviously excludes strategies based on fraud, misinforming the public, etc.

Accurate or right here means economically efficient, not correct according to the prediction of some simplified model. Such strategies very much obfuscate any attempt to find and measure causal links between particular events and stock price movements.

I could say the markets are up due to the vaccine news, or because the US election was called and people are seeking stability, or because the US election was called and the market prefers biden, or because investors are pricing in a Trump 2024 run, or because people just expected it to go up after any of those things, or because a collection of automated trading bots saw some arcane pattern in the data which has no real-world relevancy but they nevertheless have been trained to buy. None of those predictions are falsifiable.

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

#524
post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We manage to get $1M cruise missiles anywhere on the globe quite quickly. If the world can mobilize for WWII - the US alone built 1,200 warships in a four year period, 2,700 Liberty ships, 300k aircraft, etc. - we can mobilize for a global pandemic... if we choose to.

The world didn't mobilized for ww2. One country mobilized and started to threaten the existence of all.its neighboring states, and those who managed to leverage geographical and climate barriers managed to prepare themselves to intervene. This is by far not the challenge covid19 poses to the world. It wasn't when it was China's local and regional problem, and it is not after it spread out of China and became a pandem…

I do not believe herd immunity is a thing when every 6 months the herd has to become re-immune

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

#525

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…

Yes, this is an incredible scientific achievement. Before calling all humans awesome, I have to point out though, that there are a lot of countries which managed the pandemic really well, especially in Asia, but most western industrial nations quite badly failed at this. A faster and better reaction to the outbreak would have helped a lot. Both with all the casualties which sadly were the consequence and with the ability to eradicate the virus via vaccinations.

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

#526

Good: + ~90% of individuals achieve immunity. + no significant side-effects. Not so good: - two doses needed, 3 weeks apart, immunity after one month from first dose. Slow rollout. - -80C storage and transport needed. Challenging, but doable in developed countries, but still may slow down mass rollout. Not feasible in many developing countries. I still wonder about long-term immunity. Anyone can share any insight?

Given the unbelievably aggressive timeframe that this vaccine was developed under, it'a still a huge achievement

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

#527
post #5

At the time of writing (2020-11-09 12:04 UTC) the article uses "90% of people" and "90% protection" interchangeably. I assume it means "90% of individuals achieve immunity", rather than "individuals achieve 90% immunity". EDIT: See child comment re: Pfizer press release. EDIT 2: See [1] for said press release, which has more detailed information than the BBC article. [1] https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/pre…

Pretty confident it's the former, which if the case, essentially ends the pandemic in a month after it's distributed, given that the R0 would drop precipitously. The challenge will be reconciling this with the antivax crowd given that as the vaccine rolls out the rate of infection will come down correspondingly among the whole population (including the unvaccinated). They'll immediately claim that the virus is "going…

We should be clear about the goalposts. Reducing the transmission rate to a manageable level will be very easy with even just some fraction of the population being vaccinated. What exact percentage is unclear, but it's a lot less than 100%. No realistic number of anti-vaxxers can change that.

Eradicating the virus is a whole different goal, and there could be lots of different impediments to that. After all, we still get vaccinated for a large numbers of illnesses that we haven't eradicated but are just very rare. That's not a terrible endgame for COVID.

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

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>We'll be seeing the first EUA's by December, and shots in the arm before the end of the year What makes you say that? That's quite fast, no?

They're already manufacturing millions of doses of the drug and have been for months. The military already has an action plan for distributing it nation wide. Realistically they're ready to go right now they are just waiting for FDA approval.
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