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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

#691

Post by topbanana »

jakozaur wrote: post #214

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?

My understanding is that the -80C storage is most likely simply because they haven't tested at higher temperatures yet.

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

#692

Post by happyopossum »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #425
bufferoverflow wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can eradicate it by contact tracing. With 90% efficiency it will be extremely tough for the virus to spread. For any new cases you simply test everyone in the vicinity of the infected person. But I don't think even that will be necessary. 90% efficiency reduces R so much, it will probably die out on its own. The real problem is mutations that are not covered by the vaccine. If it mutates as efficiently as…

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…

> Importantly, this means that even with this vaccine, the virus may still be able to spread, and only vaccinated people will be protected (i.e., no herd immunity).

Can't we still hit herd immunity as a byproduct of this though? If everyone can pass it along without symptoms, then eventually everyone will have it...

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

#693

Post by alexfromapex »

topbanana wrote: post #691
jakozaur wrote: post #214

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?

My understanding is that the -80C storage is most likely simply because they haven't tested at higher temperatures yet.

Probably due to DNA storage because I used to work with genomics and we had the same temps

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

#694

Post by nwallin »

chinathrow wrote: post #315
sekai wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ebola was localized. COVID-19 is not You could easily localize COVID-19, just make a vaccination passport. No entry to a country if you're not vaccinated. > How many locations globally have this level of refrigeration Almost all developer countries, urban centres, where majority of people live anyway.

> Almost all developer countries, urban centres, where majority of people live anyway. At -80C? Edit: There are hardly storage places right now for these temperatures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byW1GExQB84

> > Almost all developer countries, urban centres, where majority of people live anyway.

> At -80C?

Absolutely. This is a solved problem.

You can buy dry ice at your local supermarket. I buy meat from a ethical farming operation that ships their product in insulated packages packed with dry ice. There's almost always dry ice left over. I made a bottle bomb out of the remainder once.

Every major medicine manufacturing company will already have had supply chains in place to deal with this for other medicines.

Storage is a red herring. It won't last more than a day in any given medical facility.

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

#695

Post by hm10 »

justforyou wrote: post #211
praveenperera wrote: post #181

Super neat timing

Pfizer stated it's intention to delay release of findings until after the election. This is not a surprise.

And rightfully so. Don't forget that Biden winning wasn't a sure thing - so it's not like they were waiting until Biden won to announce it. The CEO specifically mentioned in September that they refused R&D money from the US Government in order to protect themselves from being politicized. In that vein, it was the right thing that the announcement was made (intentionally or not) after the election was concluded to minimize this news being politicized.

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

#696

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

lostlogin wrote: post #681
gizmo wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contract tracing hasn't worked at scale anywhere. It's a nice idea conceptually, but the problem is psychological. People stop caring about tracing when 98% of all trace connections are false positives. If a person is infectious for a week and the r0 is around 1 then only 1 person of all the people they've been in contact with will actually contract the virus on average. The other 50+ people, assuming they can even b…

> Contract tracing hasn't worked at scale anywhere. Could you go a little deeper in this? It seems to have worked in Australia, South Korea and NZ as far as I’m aware, what am I missing?

And Japan. To be fair, Aus and NZ caught their epidemics very early, and are islands.

Korea and Japan appear to have contained theirs through the use of reverse contact tracing.

The big problem in the "West" (i.e. Europe and US) is that lots of people don't engage with the contact tracing system, which makes the epidemic almost impossible to control.

Any amount of community transmission will eventually lead to an out of control epidemic, unfortunately.

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

#697

Post by yreg »

scottlamb wrote: post #626
jakozaur wrote: post #214

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?

> - two doses needed, 3 weeks apart, immunity after one month from first dose. Slow rollout. Yeah, this alone is bad news. Last year my parents got a two-dose shingles vaccine. The two doses are supposed to be separated by two to six months. My parents struggled to find their second doses in the window. Apparently there was limited supply and no one had the foresight to reserve second doses when people received their…

It will be an incredible challenge, but there is at least some economy of scale on our side.

Wendover did a nice video[0] on this topic month ago, explaining how UPS/FedEx/DHL/… are already massively upscaling their cold chain infrastructure. Retrofitting planes, building giant freezers in transport hubs.

[0] The Greatest Logistics Challenge Ever - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byW1GExQB84

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

#698

Post by blago »

gizmo wrote: post #372
bufferoverflow wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can eradicate it by contact tracing. With 90% efficiency it will be extremely tough for the virus to spread. For any new cases you simply test everyone in the vicinity of the infected person. But I don't think even that will be necessary. 90% efficiency reduces R so much, it will probably die out on its own. The real problem is mutations that are not covered by the vaccine. If it mutates as efficiently as…

Contract tracing hasn't worked at scale anywhere. It's a nice idea conceptually, but the problem is psychological. People stop caring about tracing when 98% of all trace connections are false positives. If a person is infectious for a week and the r0 is around 1 then only 1 person of all the people they've been in contact with will actually contract the virus on average. The other 50+ people, assuming they can even b…

> Contract tracing hasn't worked at scale anywhere.

It's worked pretty well all over Asia.

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

#699

Post by cpmsmith »

aphextron wrote: post #286
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.

>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

Emergency Use Authorization, for anyone else who hadn't encountered the term yet

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

#700

Post by zebrafish »

m4eta wrote: post #611
try-perforate wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This vaccine is against the entire spike glycoprotein. Some in production vaccines are only against the RBD (the protein that actually latches onto ACE2). There are variants out there that have been shown to escape RBD antibodies. However, since this vaccine encodes the entire spike, there are other areas that antibodies can bind to. They stated in their press release that the vaccine elicits a Th1, CD4+, and CD8+ T-…

Can you tell me why I shouldn't worry that vaccines which are made to flood the body with fake ACE2 proteins won't affect blood pressure, body water and sodium content? What happens to all the angiotensin II that connects to dummy ACE2 connectors?

I haven’t seen what you’re describing. I’ve seen hrsACE2 which is recombinant ACE2. That will both provide a target for the virus to latch onto as well as supplement the body’s actual ACE2 to complete the cycle which seemed to be more of the focus.
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