Canada is the slowest among G7. vaccines administered per 100 people: • Canada at 0.14 • United States at 0.59 • United Kingdom at 1.18 • Bahrain at 3.23 • Israel at 4.37
Honestly no-one should be reading _too_ much into numbers, especially all-time numbers, just yet. The UK approved early, so it has a head start. Most EU countries only started in the last few days. The US and Canada are somewhere in between. Daily numbers will start to become more useful in the next couple of weeks.
We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses
161–170 of 210 posts
Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses
#162Earlier 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.
Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope so. But, frankly, most national and local responses to this outbreak have been subpar. I do not take it for granted that we (the US) can pull off this major logistical challenge smoothly or on an aggressive timeline.
New vaccines will likely be approved over the next few weeks (particularly the Oxford one), greatly increasing supply, and the kinks around distribution and administration will be slowly worked out (the Oxford one will also reduce the logistical challenges there; no special transport or storage needed). I'd be very surprised if rates don't go up considerably within a month.
Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses
#164Earlier 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…
On the other hand, given how poorly essential workers are actually treated by our society, I doubt that's how things actually work. (See - senior hospital administrators getting vaccines ahead of front-line medical staff...)
Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses
#165Earlier 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.
Please stop. Having underlying health conditions that make you less likely to survive COVID-19 does not mean that you were not killed by COVID-19. We wouldn’t say that someone with peanut allergies was killed by the allergy — and not the peanut — so please just stop with this propaganda.
Florida Department of Health in Orange County announced on Saturday that it no longer counts the death of a man aged in his 20s in a motorcycle accident as a coronavirus fatality.
The case “was reviewed and he was taken off the list for Covid fatalities,” Kent Donahue, spokesman for Orange County Health Officer Dr Raul Pino, told Fox35, which initially broke the story after perusing lists of official Covid-19 victims provided by the state."
Who knows how many more cases there are just like this. I don't trust the government's numbers at this point.
Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses
#166Berlin today closed it's sole vaccination center. Allegedly because of a lack of interest by the target audience. So we now reserve all doses, not just the second one. Total organizational fubar.
Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ma…
I think my worst case expectation is much worse than yours.
With a two week production shut down, I expect my corner of the world would not get new shipments for more than two weeks; higher priority places would be getting their previous orders filled before us, and we'd only get more once the backlog was filled. Also, I fully expect any production will take at least a week to be made public, so too late for an eager dosing regimine to start holding back.
Keep in mind, we're in winter, and winter storms often cause logistical problems.
The one dose efficacy data is too low confidence to make good decisions with. I'm open to the argument that it's better to use two doses to give two people one dose than to give one person two doses, but it would have been nice if that was trialed. There's also a related question of if you have a dose, if it's better to give that to a properly timed first dose recipient, or to give it to someone who hasn't received a dose yet. Again, there's not quality data; I would lean towards following the trial parameters.
> 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.
Where has this suddenly competent government been for the past year? Yes, we expect a new executive in the US in a month, but the handoff takes time in normal conditions, and we have reason to believe this one will be more abrupt than many.
How do antibiotics help for covid?
How do daily tests help avert a shutdown when you can spread the disease while testing negative? One person could infect most of a shift of workers, given the right circumstances; more than one shift if they do handoff work to the next shift.
Supply chain workers for the vaccine aren't in the priority lists for the vaccine either. Anyway, covid isn't the only communicable disease possibility.
Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses
#168Earlier 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.
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.
This is exactly what they did - funded by governments.
Example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed
>The program promotes mass production of multiple vaccines, and different types of vaccine technologies, based on preliminary evidence, allowing for faster distribution if clinical trials confirm one of the vaccines is safe and effective. The plan anticipates that some of these vaccines will not prove safe or effective, making the program more costly than typical vaccine development, but potentially leading to the availability of a viable vaccine several months earlier than typical timelines.
Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses
#169I 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…
Re: We should administer Covid-19 vaccines as fast as possible, not reserve doses
#170I 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.