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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

#801

Post by tachyonbeam »

_ph_ wrote: post #505
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?

Fortunately, it isn't the only vaccine in the pipeline. Curevac, another German company located pretty close to BioNTech, is also working on a similar vaccine which can be cooled in normal fridges, so is easier to roll out. They supposedly are only a few months behind. The -80c storage should be no showstopper for all densely populated regions and these are where the vaccine is most urgently needed. Over time, there…

There's many vaccines in development, even some to be available as nasal sprays and oral vaccines. I'm hopeful that by the end of this year, we'll get 1 or 2 more vaccines successfully completing Phase 3, and then several more in 2021.

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

#802

Post by f311a »

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…

It worked in a few countries that now have close to zero cases.

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

#804

Post by djsumdog »

sph wrote: post #549
mlindner wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Previous polling in the US showed only 70% of people would want a vaccine as soon as it comes available. And it keeps going down as time goes on. https://news.gallup.com/poll/321839/readiness-covid-vaccine-...

Thankfully, the US antivax movement is not as strong in the rest of the world, and thankfully not everyone needs to be vaccinated for the R0 figure to drop considerably. If cretins don't want to be vaccinated, it's their loss.

This isn't "antivax" ... Are all drugs that have been approve effective and safe? Including Viox?

We have had bad vaccines before (The 1960s Swing Flu) that lead to serious complications.

I got most of my shots (MMR, Polio, Meningitis, Hep B, Tetanus booster, etc.), but I would NOT take this one. It's been rushed through the process, and vaccine safety takes years. This is a brand new type of vaccine (mRNA), a type that has never been successfully deployed before, for a virus family that's never had a successful vaccine before.

Stop dismissing legitimate concerns as "antivax". Each vaccine is very different.

I'm not at high risk (I'll wait until I turn 48~49 and watch what happens with all the volunteers first before making my assessment based on all the available data.

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

#805

Post by abeppu »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #742
abeppu wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can control it well with a vaccine and contact tracing. But though this is not my area, I've heard experts say that "eradication" is unlikely, in that we've still only actually eradicated one human viral disease. But if covid-19 was well enough controlled that most of us wouldn't come across an infected person in normal life, or need to think about it for months or years at a time ... I think that's good e…

>we've still only actually eradicated one human viral disease SARS-CoV-1 was eradicated.

It seems that this is a subject of debate among experts. From what I understand, the disagreement is over when we can say that a reduction in cases to zero is "permanent" if animal reservoirs still exist.

> To date, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared only 2 diseases officially eradicated: smallpox caused by variola virus (VARV) and rinderpest caused by the rinderpest virus (RPV).

> Although successful containment strategies eliminated transmission of SARS among people, the continued presence of an animal reservoir means that SARS is not yet an eradicated disease.

https://asm.org/Articles/2020/March/Disease-Eradication-What...

> ... the 2003 SARS epidemic was permanently reduced to zero as a result of deliberate efforts, requiring no further intervention methods. This is precisely the definition of eradication.

https://biomedgrid.com/pdf/AJBSR.MS.ID.001017.pdf

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

#806

Post by djsumdog »

jason0597 wrote: post #218
anoncake wrote: post #50

I wonder if the people scared of permanent damage caused by Covid (for which there is no evidence) will be equally scared of the permanent damage caused by this experimental vaccine (for which there is no evidence either).

Experimental vaccine? I disagree. Nearly 45,000 people have taken this vaccine, and they have been monitored for months to make sure no adverse reactions have happened. Combine that with the fact that we live in 2020, and that our knowledge of vaccine science is much better than it was just a couple of decades ago, and it's hard to believe that this is an "experimental" vaccine.

45,000 is an incredibly small sample set and this is an incredibly short amount of time. Look at 1976 and the Swing Flu vaccine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bOHYZhL0WQ

45,000 doesn't scale up to 100 million or a few billions. The Swing Flu vaccine left major neurological problems in over 4,000 people, many of which were paid out in law suits. We still have vaccine courts.

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

#808

Post by hervature »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #752
scottlamb wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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…

Same experience for Hep A vaccine. Got the first dose, then there was a global shortage when it was time to get the second dose - not available. If there are 7 billion people and 1 billion doses in the next year, it's going to be awkward.

People are going to discover where they sit on the global privilege scale. 1.3 billion doses next year and 50 million this year. Let's call it 1.4 billion by the end of 2021. The USA + Canada will get half (USA gets 100M guaranteed and the option of an extra 500M). I assume Europe gets the other half based on the numbers I'm seeing that UK has ordered. Africa, Asia, and South America will probably not see meaningful levels of this vaccine until 2022.

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

#809

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

Animats wrote: post #788
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?

-80C is dry ice (frozen CO2) temperature. So you can carry vaccine vials around in a cooler with a block of dry ice. Pfizer has a dry ice shipping container good for 10 days. FedEx can ship that. Then the vaccine can be stored at refrigerator temperature for maybe 5 days. Dry Ice costs maybe $3/Kg. The SF bay area has dry ice delivery.[1] Lagos, Nigeria has dry ice delivery.[2] Bismark, North Dakota has a dry ice pla…

It's still more difficult and expensive than the alternative.

It's not a big deal for the first world, but poorer nations may hold out for future vaccines that remain stable at higher temperatures and only require a single dose.

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

#810

Post by bluGill »

bloak wrote: post #394

According to Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccine#Clinical_tria... ) there are 8 COVID-19 vaccines in phase 3 trials. A week or so ago I read about an experiment in Brazil that compared 5 of them. So this Pfizer press release doesn't seem terribly exciting to me. I already knew it was very likely that at least one vaccine will be available to some people in a month or so. I know a couple of peop…

Everyone expected/hoped that there would be a vaccination within a month. However until now it was just hope: there was always the risk when all 8 of those ran their data they discover they don't work at all.
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