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…
The swine flu that vaccine protected against also causes narcolepsy, in exactly the same genetically susceptible population, except more frequently and severely.
In other words those who got narcolepsy were nonetheless better off with the vaccine than if they had caught the flu.
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.
In a recent article about the Moderna vaccine, it was mentioned that the actual development only took 2 days.... and it was done in January! Given how short of a time it took to actually develop this thing, could we have drastically sped up this process by maybe being a bit more risky with the trials? At this point ~1.5 million people have died from the virus. I've really struggled with this knowledge that we've had…
Whether or not it would have been a good idea to loosen the approval process aside, accelerating it would likely not have had much of any effect on saving those lives. The bottleneck is production capacity. As I understand it Moderna and Pfizer/Biontech have both been building production capacity and creating vaccines as fast as possible, but have only now created enough to vaccinate a few tens of millions of people combined. If they had been approved in the summer, when they went to Phase III trials, they might have, perhaps, been able to turn out a few thousands vials a day which is not really enough to meaningfully impact the spread or death rates even if you were able to highly target high-risk groups.
The 'beta' test already happened. Tens of thousands of people have proven it safe and effective. Haven't you been following the news? Selfishly, I guess we should be happy that there is an anti-vaxxer sentiment; it means the rest of us will get our vaccines faster.
proven it safe and effective Having worked in the pharmaceutical industry, if I ever said my FDA approved drug was "safe and effective" I'd have the FDA dropping the hammer on me. The FDA does not prove a drug is safe . No drug is 100% safe. The FDA determines whether the risks of the treatment are outweighed by the benefit . I have no doubt that additional safety signals will pop up from Covid vaccines as the treate…
Oh boy, these people completely have missed the approved, and then later withdrawn medications. There have been quite a fuckton of them, or late black box warnings.
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.
[flagged]
You are being down-voted, but our politicians are saying exactly this. Well, either you vaccinate yourself, or you have to remain at home. How they are going to enforce it? No clue. Perhaps proof of being vaccinated before entering Government buildings, or the workplace.
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.
In a recent article about the Moderna vaccine, it was mentioned that the actual development only took 2 days.... and it was done in January! Given how short of a time it took to actually develop this thing, could we have drastically sped up this process by maybe being a bit more risky with the trials? At this point ~1.5 million people have died from the virus. I've really struggled with this knowledge that we've had…
If we were serious about preventing deaths, a lot more could and would have been done before going as far as taking risks on experimental drugs.
UK health care workers were one of the main groups affected by Pandemrix-related narcolepsy. It was a bit of a scandal over here, though perhaps not the most well-known one.
I thought it would be useful to dig out some numbers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix > The increased risk of narcolepsy due to vaccination was 1 in 18400 or 0.005% https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/swine-flu-deaths-examined/ seems to state an infection fatality rate of the 2009 H1N1 of 0.026%
The "issue" I've heard with simply referencing fatality rates is that the fatality rate does not equally apply to all age groups/risk factors.
So anyone under 30 has a dramatically lower chance of dying due to covid, and therefore would likely have a higher risk of a serious side effect when compared to the risks of contracting covid.
It's an interesting dilemma, for the good of public health you have to have certain populations actually increase their own personal risk, at the benefit of the majority overall.
There is a considerable Moral Hazard element to this, but it would make sense to vaccinate the most irresponsible people first, since they're the ones spreading it most.
How do you know whether someone is being 'irresponsible' before they catch the virus? Do you follow them around, taking photographs? Imagine the social stigma, for starters. Do you live in the real world, or a computer game?
You could go to karaoke bars, or other danger areas and hand out vaccination vouchers.
Or you could go by demographics. The hardest hit groups in the worst spreading areas. Etc.
You're right that it's not a trivial thing, but if you wanted to do it, reasonable approximations could be found.
The United Kingdom is made up of the island of Great Britain and a part of the island of Ireland (Northern Ireland). It also includes many other smaller islands You're probably thinking of Great Britain by itself, which is the island containing the main parts of the countries of Scotland, England, and Wales.
So the UK is an archipelago?
To continue the pedantry, the archipelago is called The British Isles.
Out of curiosity, how do people on HN rate the risk of long term side-effects?
Risk of long term covid side effects seems greater to me than long term vaccine side effects.
What do you know about the long-term side-effects of "the" vaccine, and how? Could you elaborate? You must know about it to be able to determine the risk between the two.
This could be the fastes approval in the whole drugs' history considering that The assessment of a marketing authorisation application for a new medicine takes up to 210 ‘active’ days. This active evaluation time is the time spent by EMA experts to evaluate the evidence provided by the applicant in support of a marketing authorisation application. This time is interrupted by one or two ‘clock-stops’ during which the…
> This could be the fastes approval in the whole drugs' history considering that Without a doubt. The closest competitors would be imatinib (3 years) and several other chemotherapy drugs (~5 years) meant to treat malignant tumors. The vast majority of the drugs approved this quickly, with the exception of the HepC treatment, treated diseases with a life expectancy of less than the time it took to approve the drugs so…
Would those drugs be in use by the majority of the patients that need them before that though, as they'd be in the studies etc? Whereas this vaccine needs to be given to a large percentage of the population. How are flu vaccines regulated? They change yearly, correct?