Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 766 posts

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#411

Post by patrickthebold »

sschueller wrote: post #353
jakozaur wrote: post #19

In terms of rollout. UK is the ideal country to be the first: 1. Heavily impacted by Covid-19. 2. Centralised health care system makes it easier to compare results and efficiency. E.g. it's UK which figured out that dexamethasone is efficient against Covid https://www.who.int/news/item/16-06-2020-who-welcomes-prelim... 3. Developed country with great logistics.

4. Is an island that can be cut off incase of a zombie apocalypse...

If you read the science, it's much more likely that the vaccine is simply ineffective than would cause any kind of zombie apocalypse.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#412

Post by amanaplanacanal »

tinus_hn wrote: post #215
bojan wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am fine with the thoroughness being applied. If they get it wrong the consequences may be much worse.

Good to hear you’re fine with 100000 people dying because we need to adhere to procedure. There is absolutely 0% chance at the end the vaccine will not be approved. But 100% chance 20 days will have been wasted.

If you are actually familiar with their processes, you could critique them and tell us where they could be improved. It doesn’t sound like you are, though.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#413

Post by jason0597 »

thu2111 wrote: post #243
DanBC wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had excellent Public Health test and trace departments who had a wealth of experience of tracing people for sexual health purposes. But we still chose to give the contract to Dido Harding despite her poor record at NHS Improvement. And I saw what happened to NHS Logistics, which was one bit of the NHS that wasn't losing money. It was running well. It was privatised to DHL in 2006 for purely ideological reasons, an…

That story can easily be told in reverse. NHS Logistics didn't run well. As is consistently true of government run organisations it was run so badly that most of the NHS didn't even try to use its services. At the time of the privatisation the NHS sourced around half a million products but only acquired 50,000 of them via NHS Logistics. The entire purpose of privatising it was to try and make it work better and thus…

What's your alternative to an NHS style system?

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#414

Post by [deleted] »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #175
SubiculumCode wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-da...

We don't need the super-high efficacy numbers (>90%) that the other vaccines are reporting for this to stop the virus. Typical flu vaccines are ~ 50%, I think the Oxford vaccine's results show that they've achieved this.

[deleted]

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#415

Post by jMyles »

fabian2k wrote: post #57
waihtis wrote: post #20

Not sure why the posts asking for vaccine risks are getting downvoted. Pandemrix, the vaccine for swine flu, caused a notable amount of narcolepsy cases in recipients here in FIN (notable here meaning the amount of yearly cases spiked by 3-4x) and as with anything that's taken quick to market there has to be some risk of overlooking some tail events somewhere. It's not an anti-vaccine attitude, just healthy skepticis…

You have to compare the risks to the risks of the disease and the likelyhood of contracting that disease. And for COVID-19 the risks are very high. It doesn't make much sense to me to trade the very high known risks of COVID-19 against the relatively low risk of rare side effects in a vaccine. These vaccines have been tested in ~40,000 people each, so we do know quite a bit about their safety. The fatality rate of CO…

> And for COVID-19 the risks are very high.

If this is indeed the point of contention - balancing the risk of adverse outcomes from a rushed vaccine vs those from a virus, I think it's inaccurate to say that the risks from this virus, understood generally across the population, are "very high". The likelihood of contracting it is of course very high, but the risk of adverse effects are only high for a relatively small stratum of the population.

It makes sense to reserve "very high" for pathogens like HIV or Ebola, not SARS-CoV-2. For a very large majority of the population, SARS-CoV-2 has approximately equal risk to the four seasonally circulating coronaviruses, so even a small risk from an overlooked data point might be significant.

We need to reach herd immunity one way or another, so I'm not sure the discussion of individual risk is the right one. With no data being available for patients to examine ourselves, it's hard to even know how to make these decisions.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#417

Post by jonplackett »

patrickthebold wrote: post #411
sschueller wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. Is an island that can be cut off incase of a zombie apocalypse...

If you read the science , it's much more likely that the vaccine is simply ineffective than would cause any kind of zombie apocalypse.

any kind

So not even a mild case of the zombs?

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#419

Post by tweetle_beetle »

Wintamute wrote: post #241
ksec wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a high level overview and global perspective, what the OP is saying, or meant , is that comparatively speaking UK is much better than possibly 80% of developed countries. Not to say NHS is without flaws, far from it. But if you step outside and look around the world many are surprised how awful public health services and logistics can be. So to put it another way, It is not that NHS is good, it is just the other…

What you're missing is that amongst a certain class of Brit, and across much of the West, relentless and savage cultural self-criticism has become the norm, and a currency used for in-group signalling. Even when people in the UK should be celebrating, as literally the first country in the world to develop an approved C19 vaccine in record breaking time, and enjoy the privilege of a free health system that can roll it…

A certain amount of self-criticism and cynicism is healthy and stops society from becoming complacent and sliding backwards. The more developed a country is, the higher the need for it is to maintain its status. As the US has shown in recent years, complacency erodes democracy, national status and personal quality of life.

To take the example of the NHS - it is constantly under attack by budget cuts, fragmentation and privatisation. Would it still be something to be proud of in a few decades if everyone stopped holding leaders to account?

I think you are arguing that some people are not genuine. If the price of progress is hearing people you don't care for virtue signalling, that's fine by me. I'd much rather have too much, and risk some of it not being genuine or warranted, than too little.

And I would argue that the people who genuinely want better demonstrate more national pride and a better understanding of their own culture than those sitting back and patting themselves on the back.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#420

Post by cian »

moneywoes wrote: post #392
stuartbman wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: point 2 While the healthcare is centralised, the data is not, and often poorly federated between a multitude of organisations. Scotland has unified this much more and is far better placed to monitor for efficacy and side effects.

Didn't an agency store data and loss data due to using an old format of excel file

Yes, they hit the legacy 65,000 row limit for .XLS files: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988
Post reply on HN