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

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

#141
post #52

66% protection against getting moderate to severe Covid but 100% protection against death and hospitalization. I have no idea how the FDA can hold back these vaccines in good conscience while peoples are dying by the thousands on a daily basis.

I can give you a laundry list right now. For example, millions of vials are cracking around the rim, several of the filling rooms have mold issues, one of the vial hoppers is leaving metal particulates in the vials, weekly OOS for manufacturing impurities..I think the public would freak out if they knew what was happening in the supply chain.

I think this is just a normal part of the scale up process, and why things are time consuming.

The AZ vaccine seems to be the best candidate as it can be distributed at fridge temperature. It looks like the novavax vaccine (protein + adjuvant design) may actually prevent invection. The goal of the 1st generation of vaccines is to prevent severe illness.

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

#142
post #138
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?

"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

This does not mean that this is reflected in the efficacy numbers. Read the paper and protocols they very clearly specify symptomatic disease confirmed with PCR.

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

#143

66% protection against getting moderate to severe Covid but 100% protection against death and hospitalization. I have no idea how the FDA can hold back these vaccines in good conscience while peoples are dying by the thousands on a daily basis.

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

I don't see any a-priori issues with mRNA safety - mRNA is by design an ephemeral product with no chance of self-replication. Its long term efficacy on the other hand is yet unknown and the supply chain issues are significant (it's a result of mRNA being an ephemeral cellular product being stored artificially).

Of course if you made an mRNA virus to produce some sort of toxic cellular protein then safety would be an issue - which is what the phase 1 and 2 trials are about. Phase 4 is about finding the one in a million adverse reactions.

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

#144
post #81

I find the Johnson and Johnson Press Release [1] more informative. It gives a lot more detail on the study, including linking to their protocol [2]. It’s unfortunate, but the different vaccine trials all have different demographics and different measures of efficacy. IIRC, the Moderna “95%” is not “only 5% developed COVID” but rather “95% didn’t end up showing any symptoms” while AstraZeneca was doing weekly testing…

They do not have different measures of eficacy. AZ did more testing to look at symptomatic infections but that was not used in the primary efficacy calculation.

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

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

#145
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…

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an argument... Healthy is subjective but when you say it like that then, yes, everyone has something. However, there are a bunch of things that will greatly increase your chances of dying from COVID: diabetes, obesity, cancer, immune-related illnesses so this is what I am referring to. It's fair to say that people with one or more of those (not an exhaustive list) are "unhealthy". So, it's not misleading:…

> everyone else had underlying conditions related to poor health that made them susceptible so they should have been locked down and the rest of us left to get on with things. This seems wildly expensive and impractical. Who's going to take care of all those people? Where are you going to house them (many of them live with people without those conditions)? Do you know how many people have diabetes, just to grab the f…

Do you think it's more expensive than the way we do it now?

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

#147
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about serious stuff: cancer, immune disorders, diabetes, obesity etc.

High blood pressure is a serious underlying condition (and counted as an underlying condition in Covid death). Obesity is counted as an underlying condition at stage 1 (between 30 and 35 BMI).

Exactly. Obesity alone means ~40% of the population of the US, and ~30% of the UK have an underlying condition as far as COVID risk goes.

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I'm quite confident people probably over-estimate their chance of dying in a plane crash by a few orders of magnitude as well. People are careful about their own lives, which is probably a good survival mechanism.

What specific policy are you suggesting? The more As far as I'm aware no place has let the virus spread uncontrollably, think everything was fine, and not lock down at some point. The policy clearly has to be somewhere in between fully locked down and fully opened up, and I'm not sure discriminating by age and health is going to be some magical solution.

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

#150
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?

Oxford:

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

"To test for asymptomatic infections, participants in COV002 in the UK were asked to provide a weekly self-administered nose and throat swab for NAAT testing from 1 week after first vaccination using kits provided by the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC)"

Moderna:

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/phase-3-clinic... "Investigators will closely monitor participant safety. They will call participants after each vaccination to discuss any symptoms and will provide participants with a diary to record symptoms and a thermometer for temperature readings. If a participant is suspected to have COVID-19, the participant will be asked to provide a nasal swab for testing within 72 hours."

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2035389 "although our trial showed that mRNA-1273 reduces the incidence of symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, the data were not sufficient to assess asymptomatic infection, although our results from a preliminary exploratory analysis suggest that some degree of prevention may be afforded after the first dose"

Pfizer:

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-phase-... "The Pfizer study did not report studies of the impact of its vaccine on asymptomatic infection. The Oxford study reported that efficacy for “asymptomatic or symptoms unknown infection” based on weekly self-swabbing was 3·8% (−72·4 to 46·3%) following standard dose and 58·9% (95% CI 1·0 to 82·9) following low dose regimen."

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577 "These data do not address whether vaccination prevents asymptomatic infection; a serologic end point that can detect a history of infection regardless of whether symptoms were present (SARS-CoV-2 N-binding antibody) will be reported later"

PS: Sorry, but it took a little while to dig up original sources to random news articles I'd read months earlier

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