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Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

bbc.com

451–460 of 766 posts

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

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medical isn't constrained to science. Healthcare professionals are allowed to use tradition, authority, and Art in combination with science. It's mind boggling to Engineers to hear this, but Medicine is older than the scientific method and physicians used Regulatory capture to prevent competition. I'd love a science based healthcare alternative.

Science doesn't have all the answers. My partner recently got into a heated debate with a pharmaceutical company she was working for because they wanted something added to their standards of care document for a rare genetic disorder they developed a therapy for. She couldn't find a study to backup the claims that the medical team wanted to make in the document, but the lead doctor said that if this wasn't included, t…

> People are dying now

But not a lot. That's what's fascinating. At least in the US, over 95% of fatalities are people over 55. We're at 200k ~ 300k deaths for the year in the US (and I think there is reason to believe this is an overestimate, not an underestimate). That's lower than heart disease and cancer (500~600k yearly). I doubt we'll even approach those numbers by March.

Science is slow because it needs to be right. We're no longer in a time 185 years ago when Jenner could just stab people with puss he pulled off of a Horsepox infected cow. Remember that 500 years ago, the Chinese were blowing smallbox puss into people's noses (infections in the nose were typically not bad and people recovered faster) and isolated them. Many of them survived fine, but some died.

Do you want to return to that world where we just experiment on humans without regards to what that means?

This vaccine should be a choice. I'm under 40 and not in a high risk group. I'm fine with people volunteering to take this vaccine. Maybe I'll take it in 5 years. But I don't want to see this become mandatory for going to work or being able to enter a music venue.

You can quote the Jacobson decision all you want, but that SCOTUS decision only said Jacobson had to pay the $5 fine, he never was forced to take the vaccine. Furthermore Jacobson lead to the Buck decision (forced sterilization) and the SCOTUS decision that led to the WW2 Japanese internment camps. It's bad law that's bread a poisoned well of bad law.

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

#452
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is why these mRNA vaccines are here so fast; a lot of prework was done for SARS vaccine, which is also a Corona disease. But I think SARS died out before the vaccine was ready/needed.

the parent is concerned regarding the appearance of ADE (Antibody-dependent enhancement) during the creation of the SARS vaccine. While we cannot totally disregard ADE, I assume we should have seen it by now (and the Oxford trial was stopped exactly because they thought they might have observed something like it). Whether it appears again on a population scale level, nobody knows.

Yeah, I've thought about it too, but both mild reinfections and vaccine trials show that SARS-2 does not exhibit ADE.

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

#453
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As I read it, it was actually (and amazingly) a 65,000 column limit!

I'm pretty sure the "column limit" claim was a false online theory that just stuck around because we're in such a post-truth era that even the definition of post-truth is itself post-truth... The reputable news coverage all said it was the number of rows that was the problem.

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

#454
post #71

Out of curiosity, how do people on HN rate the risk of long term side-effects?

Well, fwiw, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine idea, Ingmar Hoerr, thinks side effects are very unlikely, since the mRNA molecules dissolve after a few days. He has been working on this for 20 years, with no serious side effects ever observed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingmar_Hoerr

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

#455
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't matter though. The results are still valid.

How could numbers in a "controlled" trial be valid if they are arrived at by accident?

"Controlled" doesn't mean what you think.

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

#456
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully expect the same. Basically, if you are less than 65 years old and not working in one of the early access professions, forget all concerns about vaccine safety. Buckle up to face the virus natively in that third wave that will sweep through unmitigated once the high mortality groups are vaccinated.

There may be places you won't be allowed to go and things you won't be allowed to do (like work, maybe) unless you show proof of having been vaccinated. There's a good chance that situation will create a black market both for vaccines (real and fake) and forged proof of vaccination.

that has already been ruled out in the UK and by many other nations and it is also not something that the WHO advocates so I dont see that getting leverage ever. Except in authorotarian regiemes where it would not be about the vaccine anyway.

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

#457
post #71

Out of curiosity, how do people on HN rate the risk of long term side-effects?

This is a good summary paper with some safety concerns: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243.pdf?origin=ppub

> A possible concern could be that some mRNA-based vaccine platforms 54,166 induce potent type I interferon responses, which have been associated not only with inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity 167,168 . Thus, identification of individuals at an increased risk of autoimmune reactions before mRNA vaccination may allow reasonable precautions to be taken. Another potential safety issue could derive from the presence of extracellular RNA during mRNA vaccination. Extracellular naked RNA has been shown to increase the permeability of tightly packed endothelial cells and may thus contribute to oedema 169. Another study showed that extracellular RNA promoted blood coagulation and pathological thrombus formation 170. Safety will therefore need continued evaluation as different mRNA modalities and delivery systems are utilized for the first time in humans and are tested in larger patient populations.

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

#458
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be places you won't be allowed to go and things you won't be allowed to do (like work, maybe) unless you show proof of having been vaccinated. The UK government has ruled out having a vacination passport (for good reason in my opinion).

The UK government had also ruled the second national lockdown, but here we are. Is there a counter since the last U-turn of the UK government?

As I recall, the UK government very loudly and repeatedly refused to rule out a second national lockdown, despite calls to do so. Now, Boris Johnson said that he really didn't want to carry out a national lockdown and that it was a last resort, but that's not the same thing at all. Didn't stop the press calling it a u-turn anyway of course.

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

#459
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the bulk of the population will receive the 'Oxford' vaccine. It's still going through the approval process but the UK has ordered more of it. I believe the Pfizer vaccine is targeted to front line workers and the clinical vulnerable.

Why? The 'Oxford' vaccine has been pretty shaky. Edit: source: https://www.wired.com/story/the-astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-da...

There's certainly been issues with how parts of the trial was run. However, it's not insurmountable. It's possible to untangle some of the past data and the trials aren't over yet and these aren't the last trials so we will have better data soon and it could all check out. This vaccine is appealing in particular because it's a lot cheaper to make and a lot more straightforward to distribute and even with questions over how the trials were run it's still looking like the good results will probably hold up mostly.

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

#460
post #375
post #71

Out of curiosity, how do people on HN rate the risk of long term side-effects?

I’m not aware of any vaccine that had long term side effects that were not also apparent in the short term. E.g. I believe it was the swine flu vaccine that caused narcolepsy in a small percentage of people receiving it. But that was apparent immediately. To my knowledge no one has identified any slow acting consequences of a vaccine that would not have been obvious from the first rollout of a vaccine. So this questi…

The 1976 Swine Flu?

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

Vaccines are also very young. We've had them for 185 years, and there were probably a lot of side effects from people getting stabbed with Horse Pox, but a lot of them probably just died and we didn't collect data back then they way we do today.

It's not comparable.

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