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First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

bbc.com

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Re: First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

#391

Post by rualca »

mft_ wrote: post #357
irthomasthomas wrote: post #294

Some quick points about this. The British Medical Journal and Royal Society of medicine have published a number of concerns about this vaccine. "Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us" https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037 "All these data for the different vaccines are potentially very promising, but none of the phase III trials have been published in peer reviewed journals o…

1) BMJ is rabble-rousing. Endpoints for any pivotal trial will be agreed with regulators in advance. In this case, while I don’t know the numbers themselves, I suspect that given the low rate of serious complications of Covid overall, waiting for sufficient numbers of outcomes such as hospitalisation, intensive care visits, or death, would increase the duration, size, and cost of the trial, and maybe significantly so…

> Bitching about skipping the peer-review process in the face of a global pandemic is self-important nonsense.

Making results available to peers is the basis of science, which is a short word that means being sure things work as we think they do.

Without peer review, no one has any idea of what the vaccine does.

What if the vaccine is nothing but a big old placebo? How can we tell?

It's far more than mere "bitching". Way more than that. The Royal Society's motto is 'Nullius in verba', which means "take nobody's word for it". Think about it.

Of all places to hear that blend of anti-science, I wasn't expecting to read it here.

Re: First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

#392

Post by rualca »

mcv wrote: post #335
bstar77 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outright refusing the vaccine is absurd, but refusing at this phase of the distribution is not.

That is definitely true, but the link seems to be from September and talks about refusing a vaccine in general, not this particular at this time. 50% is insane. 5% I'd be able to understand, but not 50%.

> 50% is insane. 5% I'd be able to understand, but not 50%.

I'm hardly anti-vaxxer, but I'm going to wait this one out until a lot of people went head-first into it.

I take my vaccines like I take my software upgrades: no pre-releases of system-critical ones.

Re: First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

#393

Post by robjan »

dTal wrote: post #135
peteretep wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How it’s “meant” to be is that you’re asked for where you’re registered, and your NHS records are pulled up, and if you’re not registered at a GP practice or in the NHS system you get a bill

That's not what happens, though. You can just say "I'm not registered with a GP" (and many people aren't), and you will still be treated - no bill.

If you aren't registered with a GP and have no records at the hospital there are other ways to check, for instance your National Insurance records. It's not easy to get away without paying if you are an ineligible person.

Re: First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

#394

Post by dm319 »

thisistheend123 wrote: post #188
dm319 wrote: post #180

I work here and was in clinic this morning. We had three eligible patients. One consented to it and is having the vaccine now. The other two declined. Not making a point, just a data point.

Hey thanks for your comment. Could you describe in more detail how the vaccines are currently being stored in your clinic? How long does the vaccine can remain in room temperature, once taken out of clod storage. How many doses have been allocated to your clinic and on an average how many patients do you foresee being vaccinated over a short period of time, let's say a month. Also, are health workers also planning to…

Some details:

Vaccine storage and preparation

The Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine has the most difficult storage requirements of all the COVID-19 vaccine candidates currently undergoing trials. Currently, it needs to be stored between -80 to -60°C and has a six-month expiry. Over time and with more data being collected this may change.(4)

The vaccine needs to be thawed (for approximately three hours in the fridge or 30 minutes at room temperature) before use and may be stored undiluted at 2–8°C for five days, or for two hours at 25°C prior to use.(4) To prepare the vaccine, it should be diluted using 0.8 mL of sodium chloride 0.9% solution for injection, marked with the date and time, and can then be stored between 2 to 25°C. It must be used within six hours or the remainder discarded.(4)

To equalise the pressure in the prepared vial, 1.8 mL of air should be withdrawn using the same syringe for preparation, after which it can be mixed by gently inverting 10 times, producing an off-white solution that is ready to be administered. The vaccines are available in packs of 195. There are five 0.3 mL doses within each vial.

In comparison, the Moderna vaccine can be stored at -20°C for up to six months, 30 days at 2 to 8°C and up to 12 hours at 25°C. Each vial contains 10 doses.

The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine is much simpler than both options, with storage allowance of 2 to 8°C for up to six months. Once open, the vials should be used within six hours stored in a fridge or 48 hours if at room temperature. They are delivered in packs of 10 vials with each vial containing eight or 10 doses of vaccine.

Re: First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

#395

Post by acqq »

Slartie wrote: post #352
acqq wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible "reduced viral load" by those who are vaccinated simply doesn't mean that that load is below the threshold which makes somebody not infectious. In practice, it could, for example, mean that if such persons spend two hours in the room with you they can still transmit the virus to you, whereas the non vaccinated person with the virus would transmit to you in 15 minutes. So you can't just claim that a person is…

There is no threshold that makes people non-infectious. Or there is, and it is zero. Because even a single virus instance can potentially infect someone else. It is extremely unlikely to happen, but not impossible. Because of this, for practical purposes, you either have to arbitrarily set a threshold at which someone is considered non-infectious, ignoring that it is not impossible for that person to infect someone.…

When taking about probabilities, one usually can recognize a reasonable threshold. In practice we do exactly that with most of the medicine: there could be some small chance that somebody can have health problems because his body responds unfavorably to the medicine, but if that chance is small enough it is considered acceptable when the potential benefits overweight the potential loss when the medicine is not used, its use is allowed. If the chance is big enough (i.e. potentially too many people will be affected) such a medicine is not allowed to be used, at least with the affected group of people.

The same is with the possibility that a vaccinated person infects somebody else. There is some point behind which it could be said that some vaccine has "sterilizing immunity" even if some small level of viruses could be present somewhere. For the current vaccine, the question is if the viral load in some point after the infection is decreased at all, and if it is, how much.

At the moment, however, it's simply not known if, in this case, Pfizer vaccine provides sterilizing level of immunity, if, then when, and in which percentage of the vaccinated. At the moment more or less we just know that the vaccinated are less probable to develop symptoms. Efficacy of 95% here means only one of 20 vaccinated develops symptoms when exposed to the virus, so we know that it's also probable that at least 1 in 20, even after being vaccinated, could be able to infect somebody else while being in the "pre-symptomatic" phase (as it is believed by the researchers that one transmits the virus before one's symptoms starts). We also believe that asymptomatic are also able to transmit. We don't know how much the vaccine affects the transmission that could occur when a vaccinated person is exposed to an infected one, and then later comes in close contact with other unvaccinated persons.

Re: First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

#396

Post by newen »

rualca wrote: post #391
mft_ wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) BMJ is rabble-rousing. Endpoints for any pivotal trial will be agreed with regulators in advance. In this case, while I don’t know the numbers themselves, I suspect that given the low rate of serious complications of Covid overall, waiting for sufficient numbers of outcomes such as hospitalisation, intensive care visits, or death, would increase the duration, size, and cost of the trial, and maybe significantly so…

> Bitching about skipping the peer-review process in the face of a global pandemic is self-important nonsense. Making results available to peers is the basis of science, which is a short word that means being sure things work as we think they do. Without peer review, no one has any idea of what the vaccine does. What if the vaccine is nothing but a big old placebo? How can we tell? It's far more than mere "bitching".…

Peer review is the specific process of sending your well edited manuscript to a select few reviewers of a journal in order to get that manuscript published in that journal.

It is different from having your results available to your peers, which I'm not sure they did that here, but point being peer review is this specific time consuming process (that can take months, sometimes years).

Re: First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

#397

Post by irthomasthomas »

newen wrote: post #396
rualca wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitching about skipping the peer-review process in the face of a global pandemic is self-important nonsense. Making results available to peers is the basis of science, which is a short word that means being sure things work as we think they do. Without peer review, no one has any idea of what the vaccine does. What if the vaccine is nothing but a big old placebo? How can we tell? It's far more than mere "bitching".…

Peer review is the specific process of sending your well edited manuscript to a select few reviewers of a journal in order to get that manuscript published in that journal. It is different from having your results available to your peers, which I'm not sure they did that here, but point being peer review is this specific time consuming process (that can take months, sometimes years).

You are picking on one point out of many. Anyway, I think I would sleep better just knowing that they published everything, even if it doesnt get the formal peer review.

Re: First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

#398

Post by hhas01 »

nkohari wrote: post #306
hhas01 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please name a vaccine that is injected into your bloodstream.

It's good to see that HN continues to find ways to increase pedantry! You know what I meant, intramuscularly.

“You know what I meant”

No. I am not a mindreader. And “vaccines are injected into the bloodstream” is a standard antivax lie.

Yes there’s a risk in receiving a vaccine, just as there’s a risk in receiving any prophylactic/therapeutic treatment, but severe side-effects are closer to 1-in-100K to 1-in-a-million. Compared to a disease that is currently killing 2-in-100, with significant sequelae likely much higher.

I’m happy to accept that “bloodstream” was a slip of the tongue, but really try not to make those malignant lying bastards’ jobs any easier, when people die because of them.

Re: First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

#399

Post by nkohari »

hhas01 wrote: post #398
nkohari wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good to see that HN continues to find ways to increase pedantry! You know what I meant, intramuscularly.

“You know what I meant” No. I am not a mindreader. And “vaccines are injected into the bloodstream” is a standard antivax lie. Yes there’s a risk in receiving a vaccine, just as there’s a risk in receiving any prophylactic/therapeutic treatment, but severe side-effects are closer to 1-in-100K to 1-in-a-million. Compared to a disease that is currently killing 2-in-100, with significant sequelae likely much higher. I’m…

If you had actually read what I wrote thoughtfully -- instead of falling over yourself to type a glib reply as fast as you could get it out -- it would have been easy to recognize that I am clearly not anti-vaccine, nor was I suggesting that side effects are common. I said both of those things explicitly.

If your goal is actually to educate others, then educate others. Replying with snark achieves nothing but temporarily boosting your own ego.

Re: First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

#400

Post by mft_ »

rualca wrote: post #391
mft_ wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) BMJ is rabble-rousing. Endpoints for any pivotal trial will be agreed with regulators in advance. In this case, while I don’t know the numbers themselves, I suspect that given the low rate of serious complications of Covid overall, waiting for sufficient numbers of outcomes such as hospitalisation, intensive care visits, or death, would increase the duration, size, and cost of the trial, and maybe significantly so…

> Bitching about skipping the peer-review process in the face of a global pandemic is self-important nonsense. Making results available to peers is the basis of science, which is a short word that means being sure things work as we think they do. Without peer review, no one has any idea of what the vaccine does. What if the vaccine is nothing but a big old placebo? How can we tell? It's far more than mere "bitching".…

I can assure you it’s not being anti-science – it’s probably about a deeper understanding of how these things actually work.

> Without peer review, no one has any idea of what the vaccine does. What if the vaccine is nothing but a big old placebo? How can we tell?

This is what the regulatory authorities do. The FDA, the EMA, the MHRA, and many others. It is literally their job (amongst others) to make decisions on whether to approve drugs based on the data that they are provided with.

The process of publishing data in a peer-reviewed journal is orthogonal to this. Sure, it’s an important part of the scientific process, but it is not part of the process to decide whether or not drugs work and should be approved.

The only point that was being made is that in this sort of situation where delaying a few days means more people die, prioritising the regulatory approval process over submissions to a peer reviewed journal (if indeed that’s what happened) is entirely reasonable.

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