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We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses

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Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses

#81
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This should drive down the death rate pretty fast. You can't drive the death rate that didn't rise in the first place. In Israel people are dying with COVID-19, not because of it. We are yet to see someone die from COVID-19 who is not terminally ill, fat and diabetic, immunosuppressed (after organ transplantation or cancer treatment) or very old.

This comment was flagged so I vouched for it. You may disagree with it but it’s a reasonable position. Look at the official moderna data from the FDA. The placebo and vaccine groups of 15k have the exact same death rate. So according to the very dataset used to approve the vaccine, there is a strong case that COVID isn’t killing people, rather it’s their underlying conditions. And curing COVID will not save most of t…

Did you look at the death rate this year? We are on track for 10٪ excess deaths, most of those with at least a decade of life expectancy.

The clinical trial for the vaccine was not going to see this with only a few hundred observed cases. That's only a handful of deaths.

Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses

#82
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having underlying health conditions that make you less likely to survive COVID-19 does not mean that you were not killed by COVID-19. Dying is not "underlying health condition". Immune system collapse is happening before COVID-19 takes hold. If not for COVID, they would die from legionella, hospital infection, gum bacteria, flu, own E.coli and thousands of other causes. This is not my personal opinion, this is from…

When people talk about "pre-existing conditions" they mean things like high blood pressure or type 1 diabetes -- the kind of thing that can be well maintained and has almost no impact on the person.

Hilarious

Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses

#83

Israelis give shots to medical workers and oldest citizens first. This should drive down the death rate pretty fast. If this approach works, Covid-related deaths in Israel should visibly drop by the end of January.

they're also administering these shots out at a much faster rate relative to delivery whereas we've only administered less than 20% of the doses that have been delivered so far (11.4 million delivered, 2.1 million administered). The delivery rate should only increase especially even as there are several more vaccines in the pipeline so being able to actually administer the delivered doses may be the bottleneck moving forward.

Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All countries are doing these groups first, of course Israel is probably the country doing it the fastest so I agree, we should see the results faster. And I agree with the topic, better 2 people somewhat immune "now" than half with the full vaccine immunity.

The CDC tried to have non-medical essential workers ahead in line of seniors. The argument was that, although more people would die (including more African Americans), it would even out black vs white ppl deaths metric. [edit] source: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...

[deleted]

Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses

#85

So what happens if the second dose arrives very (eg. many months) late? Can you start again and give 3? And is there any chance all the partial immunities will catalyze resistant mutations?

Disclaimer: not an immunologist.

> So what happens if the second dose arrives very (eg. many months) late? Can you start again and give 3?

WHO guidance on incomplete vaccine courses (pre-COVID): https://www.who.int/immunization/policy/Immunization_routine...

In almost all cases, the suggestion is "resume without repeating the previous dose". The only exceptions are typhoid and cholera vaccinations. I don't know what these suggestions are based upon, but the source is as close to expert consensus as it can go (the WHO has gotten a lot of flak on COVID, but I have never heard anyone seriously doubt its guidance on standard vaccinations).

> And is there any chance all the partial immunities will catalyze resistant mutations?

Apparently this doesn't even happen much for antibiotics ( https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl... ), so I wouldn't worry about it happening for vaccines. See https://www.pnas.org/content/115/51/12878 for a comparison. If it were a major issue, it would just as well be an issue with fully delivered vaccination courses, as they don't offer 100% immunity either. The amount of mutations arising should still be proportional to the sick population (or, rather, to its total prevalence over time and population), and anything that reduces the latter should reduce the former. Any vaccine-immune mutation can just as easily come up before the vaccine, unless it hampers the virus so strongly that it is unviable until the evolutionary landscape has shifted. At that point, however, we're looking at a much simpler problem.

Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses

#86
post #50

I don't get why nobody seriously considers a one-dose regimen for the fastest possible vaccine rollout. All available data for both, Biontech/Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines suggests that one dose is enough for >90% efficacy which would be sufficient to reach herd immunity. There was a very good opinion article in the NY Times [1] about that, but not much more. The problem here is that a one-dose regimen was not studie…

That's not what the Pfizer paper showed. There was a confidence interval from between 20-70% iirc for the first shot. Maybe if we're lucky it's on the higher end, but I would stick to proven science if we're going to combat this thing effectively.

Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where did you find these figures? I've been trying to find some reliable source to keep an eye on it and I haven't been very successful so far

Check this out: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations The sources they use to compile the data are listed here: https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/blob/master/public/dat...

Wish I could find estimates showing “At current / projected vaccination rates it will take X years to vaccinate 90% of the population”, per country. I heard on TWiV (This Week in Virology podcast) for the US it was ~6.6 years and I believe it was based on < 90% of pop.

Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s actually a lot of variety in the priority order. Other than healthcare workers the following groups will be prioritized above age 65+ in Massachusetts 1. First responders 2. Nursing home residents 3. Homeless 4. Incarcerated 5. 2+ comorbidities 6. Top priority essential workers 7. Teachers 8. One comorbidity (Check out your state here https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/covid-va... )

40% of all deaths in the US have been nursing home residents.

I've seen this number around for a long time, but since I never saw a source posted, I don't know if this is still true.

Edit: I found https://covidtracking.com/analysis-updates/ltc-deaths-pass-1... for December 2, which shows about 100,000 deaths from "long-term care facilities". Not all states report differences between staff and residents dying, but I think it's reasonable to estimate it's mostly residents. On that day they show a total of 265,000 deaths in the USA, so about 37% from LTC.

Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All countries are doing these groups first, of course Israel is probably the country doing it the fastest so I agree, we should see the results faster. And I agree with the topic, better 2 people somewhat immune "now" than half with the full vaccine immunity.

There’s actually a lot of variety in the priority order. Other than healthcare workers the following groups will be prioritized above age 65+ in Massachusetts 1. First responders 2. Nursing home residents 3. Homeless 4. Incarcerated 5. 2+ comorbidities 6. Top priority essential workers 7. Teachers 8. One comorbidity (Check out your state here https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/covid-va... )

My mother got her first vaccination shot yesterday. She's in a nursing home in Virginia. She's already had one COVID exposure (luckily she didn't get it), and it's just scary there.
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