Live data from Hacker News

Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial

cbc.ca

131–140 of 274 posts

Re: Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial

#131
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I’d rather take the J&J which uses old, proven tech. In 5 years we will know a lot more about nRNA vaccine long-term safety, and I’ll be much more comfortable taking an nRNA vaccine at that point. When I’m eligible, I still may take the nRNA, but my preference is on older tech at this point. I fully acknowledge that the nRNA is extremely likely to be safe, but it’s just my preference

Some think the Adenovirus-vetor vaccines have more risk of certain side-effects, especially if (by chance or a prior vaccination) the person was previously infected by a related Adenovirus. By contrast, the mRNA vaccines do the same thing in the end - get your cells to appear infected & emit the target spike proteins – in the narrowest possible way, via a subset of the changes an Adenovirus infection causes.

As I understand it, the risk is not to do with the adenovirus but with the use of PEG (polyethylene glycol) or similar analogues, to make the active ingredient last longer, which may cause an allergic reaction[1] to sensitized people. The AZ vaccine does not use PEG (nor J&J, Novovax IIRC).

The complication with the adenovirus carrier is that you immune system may attack the carrier so effectively that you don't get enough exposure to the coronavirus protein that it is carrying, and hence don't develop a strong enough immune response to it. This causes problems determining how people will respond to varied treatment schedules (delay of the booster shot, mixing of vaccines, etc).[2][3]

The mRNA vaccines do not get your cells to 'appear infected'. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcTEmHlvY10

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/suspicions-grow-nano... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152500160... [3] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/02/ta...

Re: Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial

#132
post #122

The mRNA vaccines are obviously the gold standard, they're what you want, if you're in a position to pick. The traditional vaccines, like this one and the Astra Zeneca one appear to be efficient at preventing hospitalization/death. That's great - it will ease the extreme load on the hospitals, and also reduce deaths greatly. What I'm concerned about is the long-term chronical diseases that's been reported ( https://w…

The MRNA vaccines were tested prior to the existence of the variants. The Jansen vaccine efficacy was likely affected by the existence of these variants, so I’m not sure we can assume the MRNA vaccines are better.

Re: Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is deaths caused by a lack of regulation are highly visible. But all of the deaths caused by burdensome regulation are harder to point to. If we had started releasing the vaccine in August of last year we probably could have saved 100,000 lives. Also the FDA doesn't regulate medicine. Only drugs. All the rest of medicine doesn't fall under FDA regulation (like surgeries).

We could also have achieved nothing at all for our money, or have given thousands of healthy people permanent autoimmune conditions or killed them through adverse reactions and after all that we still wouldn't have known if what we were doing actually did anything to slow the pandemic. People on hacker news should know just how hard it is to really know something, the human immune system is far more complex than any…

This 'don't test it, just do it' idea really shows how paniced and irrational people are. The reasons to not rush out a population wide vax campaign are significant.

For example: the otherwise promising and effective candidate from QUT accidentally causes you to test positive for HIV on the common/cheap/simple assays, which would make effective HIV testing vastly more expensive in the population and cause a huge anti-vax movement. I think we are happy that this side effect is constrained the the small trials group.

Maybe this needs to be explained in computer terms: would you be upset if Apple rushed out a security patch and that caused every iphone to reboot randomly during odd numbered months, and was unpatchable?

Re: Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial

#134
post #62
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adenovirus vaccines are also a newish tech (not that anything wrong with that, that's why we have safety testing). Its not as bleeding edge as mRNA but its definitely not a traditional vaccine

Don't tell him that. He's willing to get any vaccine at all and the world desperately needs to be vaxxed. If people want to take adenovirus vaxs because they feel its safer I say just let them.

Informed consent is very important in medicine for good reasons.

Re: Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The figures don’t lie. Of one hundred people with covid, two will die and ten will be suffering three months later. The portion suffering long covid is growing too, and it’s poorly understood. Damaged hearts and lungs for example and there are plenty of accounts about. What are you pushing for? There are places we can look to where covid ran free, it isn’t pretty. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PII…

Balance, that's what I'm pushing for. Assess your actual chances of catching and suffering from covid. Then balance it against the risk of a rushed experimental gene therapy still in initial trials. Edit: Remember that none of the media and government published figures show recovery rates - this is hugely important.

I saw this study from USC: https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/

You can't link to the exact thing, but choose "Coronavirus Risk Perceptions" and split by age.

People under 40 believe that their risk of dying from the virus is over 10% on average. The actual risk for that age group is somewhere around 0.02%, which means they're overestimating their risk of dying by a factor of 500.

Five hundred! It's mindboggling how wrong people are.

But once you see those numbers, it becomes clear why there is such widespread support for strict lockdowns.

However, even with the accurate numbers, I would still say the case for the mRNA vaccines is strong. I think you are exaggerating the risks of the mRNA vaccines, in the same way that regular people are exaggerating the risks of the virus.

Re: Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial

#136
post #130
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I originally thought the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was significantly behind the mRNA vaccines in efficacy. But then I learned that the Oxford trials PCR-tested every participant regularly, while the Pfizer and Moderna trials only tested participants that were showing symptoms. So there's a very real chance that behind that ~95% number the mRNA vaccines also had asymptomatic cases that were never discovered during tr…

> But then I learned that the Oxford trials PCR-tested every participant regularly, while the Pfizer and Moderna trials only tested participants that were showing symptoms. That seems substantial, weird and important. Source?

They did do more PCR but that isn’t reflected in the efficacy numbers. The end point for all trials has been prevention of symptomatic disease.

Re: Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial

#137
post #136
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then I learned that the Oxford trials PCR-tested every participant regularly, while the Pfizer and Moderna trials only tested participants that were showing symptoms. That seems substantial, weird and important. Source?

They did do more PCR but that isn’t reflected in the efficacy numbers. The end point for all trials has been prevention of symptomatic disease.

And where is your source for that?

Re: Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial

#138
post #130
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I originally thought the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was significantly behind the mRNA vaccines in efficacy. But then I learned that the Oxford trials PCR-tested every participant regularly, while the Pfizer and Moderna trials only tested participants that were showing symptoms. So there's a very real chance that behind that ~95% number the mRNA vaccines also had asymptomatic cases that were never discovered during tr…

> But then I learned that the Oxford trials PCR-tested every participant regularly, while the Pfizer and Moderna trials only tested participants that were showing symptoms. That seems substantial, weird and important. Source?

"Unlike other vaccines being trialled, the Oxford team had been taking weekly swabs from all volunteers to check whether they were infected but showing no symptoms."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55308216

Re: Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial

#139
post #127
post #122

The mRNA vaccines are obviously the gold standard, they're what you want, if you're in a position to pick. The traditional vaccines, like this one and the Astra Zeneca one appear to be efficient at preventing hospitalization/death. That's great - it will ease the extreme load on the hospitals, and also reduce deaths greatly. What I'm concerned about is the long-term chronical diseases that's been reported ( https://w…

I originally thought the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was significantly behind the mRNA vaccines in efficacy. But then I learned that the Oxford trials PCR-tested every participant regularly, while the Pfizer and Moderna trials only tested participants that were showing symptoms. So there's a very real chance that behind that ~95% number the mRNA vaccines also had asymptomatic cases that were never discovered during tr…

[deleted]

Re: Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial

#140
post #137
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did do more PCR but that isn’t reflected in the efficacy numbers. The end point for all trials has been prevention of symptomatic disease.

And where is your source for that?

It's quite literally one of the first things mentioned in the trial protocols and journal articles

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04516746

"The efficacy of 2 IM doses of AZD1222 compared to placebo for the prevention of COVID-19 in adults ≥ 18 years of age [ Time Frame: 1 year ]

A binary response, whereby a participant is defined as a COVID-19 case if their first case of SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR-positive symptomatic illness occurs

≥ 15 days post second dose of study intervention. Otherwise, a participant is not defined as a COVID-19 case."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

"The primary efficacy analysis included symptomatic COVID-19 in seronegative participants with a nucleic acid amplification test-positive swab more than 14 days after a second dose of vaccine. "

Post reply on HN