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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

#131

Post by rsync »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #123
wbl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 10٪ FWIW, that "Arabic percent sign" is barely visible on my 13" laptop while ASCII's "%" is impossible to miss.

Yeah ... genuinely interested: What typing tool, or mechanism, were you using that your '1' '0' and '%' typed out in a different character set than the rest of your comment ?

Or was it manually inserted ? If so, why ?

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

#132

Post by davrosthedalek »

cygx wrote: post #124
helge9210 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you account for people who died from psychological effects of lockdown and job loss, and from not requesting medical assistance for other conditions because of fear of covid-19?

Look at the time evolution of excess deaths in countries such as Belgium that were hit hard by the virus: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... There's a clear signal we can attribute to Covid infections, whereas any such second order effects are not readily apparent.

To be fair, many lock-down/fear-of-going-to-the-doctor related things have a much longer fuse. A cancer missed now might kill you in a year or two.

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

#133

Post by est31 »

toast0 wrote: post #125
est31 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what happens if the second dose arrives very (eg. many months) late? Can you start again and give 3? Stockpiling of vaccines is a method to obtain certainty that you can vaccinate on schedule. There are better methods of ensuring certainty, e.g. by supporting manufacturers as well as possible to meet schedules, analyze weaknesses in supply chains, trying to counter them early, etc. The issue is the cost of maint…

The last year has been supply chain disruption after supply chain disruption. If the vial manufacturer has a covid outbreak at their facility and has to stop manufacturing for two weeks, your scheduled shipments aren't going to be on time. As supply goes up, and we get past the priority recpients to the general public, it probably makes sense to reduce the stockpile requirement; some general public aren't going to co…

> The last year has been supply chain disruption after supply chain disruption.

Indeed, but even if 20% of people don't get their second shot on time and the impact of that is equal to them not being vaccinated at all (we don't know but likely the impact is smaller), even then the impact would be lower than stockpiling vaccines which increases the number of symptomatic infections by 34 to 42 percent.

> If the vial manufacturer has a covid outbreak at their facility and has to stop manufacturing for two weeks, your scheduled shipments aren't going to be on time.

That's precisely where the government can step in and ensure that antibiotics therapies are available to workers in those facilities as well as daily tests. Then it doesn't have to shut down.

> As supply goes up, and we get past the priority recpients to the general public, it probably makes sense to reduce the stockpile requirement

At that point it's less relevant which strategy you choose.

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

#134

Post by Siira »

rkagerer wrote: post #72

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?

Sometimes taking chances is worth it. As far as I have heard, every single vaccine trial has concluded “yeah, our vaccine is effective.” So if people had been allowed to take experimental vaccines, the pandemic would have been a lot better.

In this circumstance as well, taking a chance is worth it. Even if the virus mutates, changing the mRNA vaccines shouldn’t take more than a week.

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

#135

Post by Siira »

tdy721 wrote: post #69
ojbyrne wrote: post #40

Seems like there could be a middle ground, administer more or less of the second dose based on the amount stockpiled and the probability of future deliveries.

Testing is already strained? And missing doses is all waste. Too risky imho?

I have heard a single dose is still pretty effective.

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

#136

Post by afavour »

Siira wrote: post #134
rkagerer wrote: post #72

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?

Sometimes taking chances is worth it. As far as I have heard, every single vaccine trial has concluded “yeah, our vaccine is effective.” So if people had been allowed to take experimental vaccines, the pandemic would have been a lot better. In this circumstance as well, taking a chance is worth it. Even if the virus mutates, changing the mRNA vaccines shouldn’t take more than a week.

> So if people had been allowed to take experimental vaccines, the pandemic would have been a lot better.

> In this circumstance as well, taking a chance is worth it.

Nope nope nope nope. This is the literal example of survivor bias. You can't look at the results and use them to inform prior behaviour. The vaccine could have had catastrophic side effects.

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

#137

Post by davrosthedalek »

BurningFrog wrote: post #27
chiefalchemist wrote: post #6

Somewhat off topic but in theory, would it be possible to have jab #1 be Moderna's and jab #2 be Pfizer? Would it be ethical to test this? Is there anything inherent in either's approach that would make this dangerous?

As just another software guy who's near that dangerous "knows enough to be overconfident" spot: That would probably not work the same way. The point of a booster shot is to make the immune system "think" it's been infected by the same intruder twice, so it steps up permanent defences to a more serious level. Both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine produces replicas of the virus "spike protein", but with (presumably) diff…

Well, they are at least similar enough to the real thing that the body would say "this shit again!" for the real virus. My guess is that they have different start/stop sequences (that shouldn't matter for the protein the mRNA is encoding) and different stabilizers to help the mRNA survive.

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

#138

Post by sieabahlpark »

afavour wrote: post #136
Siira wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes taking chances is worth it. As far as I have heard, every single vaccine trial has concluded “yeah, our vaccine is effective.” So if people had been allowed to take experimental vaccines, the pandemic would have been a lot better. In this circumstance as well, taking a chance is worth it. Even if the virus mutates, changing the mRNA vaccines shouldn’t take more than a week.

> So if people had been allowed to take experimental vaccines, the pandemic would have been a lot better. > In this circumstance as well, taking a chance is worth it. Nope nope nope nope. This is the literal example of survivor bias. You can't look at the results and use them to inform prior behaviour. The vaccine could have had catastrophic side effects.

> This is the literal example of survivor bias.

This isn't the type of bias people care about. They only care whether it has a right-leaning bias.

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

#139

Post by wolco2 »

Siira wrote: post #134
rkagerer wrote: post #72

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?

Sometimes taking chances is worth it. As far as I have heard, every single vaccine trial has concluded “yeah, our vaccine is effective.” So if people had been allowed to take experimental vaccines, the pandemic would have been a lot better. In this circumstance as well, taking a chance is worth it. Even if the virus mutates, changing the mRNA vaccines shouldn’t take more than a week.

They had to pull a few because of side effects during the trials and some just not working. Producing vast amounts before they have been tested at all would have been costly when they had to throw them out.

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

#140

Post by iso1210 »

wbl wrote: post #81
breck wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In an average year there are about 350,000 deaths in the UK. This year we've had 415,000 - 18% more deaths.

The promises from the covid-skeptics were that covid "just killed off people a few months earlier". That hasn't borne out -- in the North West where we suffered from a second wave in October, which led to 40% increase on expected deaths each week for the entire of November (people catching in October) and hospitals reached the peaks they were at in April. The partial tiered restrictions stopped the growth, but it took the full blown lockdown to bring those deaths down to "just" 10% above normal.

The figures for this latest wave, starting from the South East, are far more concerning than the mini wave we had in the north in October - not just cases, but hospitilations too.

Now I'm under 45, I don't have much to worry about from actually contracting covid and dying (about 1 in 4,000, normal risk of death is about 1 in 1,000)

The potential longer term effects are a little more concerning, but what worries the hell out of me is hospital overload.

In the last year there have been 260,000 people going into hospital with a positive covid test. Now not all people who died while having covid died because of covid, but the number with covid on the death certificate is actually higher than the excess deaths.

Even if I don't care at all about the over 50s, given the number of people who have had covid and the percentage going into hospital, if it ran rampant throughout the UK over the next 3 months, we'd be looking at another 600,000 excess deaths and 2 million+ extra hospitalisations, in for an average 10 days.

There are about 100,000 hospital beds in total in the UK, and staffing to just about meet that number.

What will we do with the millions who won't be able to get a bed (including under 45s who get run over?). Should the law be changed so that anyone over the age of 60 forfeits their right to hospital care?

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