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Europe's Vaccine Disaster

spiegel.de

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Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#91

Post by refurb »

Clewza313 wrote: post #57
cosmodisk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a political suicide in many countries+ the likelihood of people wanting to take it may be on the lower side.

This. Singapore, an ethnically Chinese country, has announced they're buying Moderna, BioNTech and (Chinese) Sinovac, and approximately nobody trusts or wants to take the Chinese one.

Exactly. I have some friends in Singapore and the gov’t said “everyone will get a vaccine but you won’t have a choice as to which one you get”.

Since they stand a better than 1/3 chance of getting SinoVac (since the other two will be reserved for the elderly as they have strong data) a lot of them are planning to delay getting vaccinated until more is known about SinoVac.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#92

Post by jackTheMan »

peteretep wrote: post #63
robotmay wrote: post #10

From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? The utterly bonkers u-turn today was a bit of a shocker. For those that haven't seen the news, the European Commission managed to say they were effectively going to establish border controls between the…

> Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here, and had somehow undermined the EU vaccine program But let us be clear that it isn’t, and they are not.

Do you know how many doses UK is getting over the same period? Does UK also missing 60% of their contract or they are prioritized?

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#93

Post by digikata »

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #50

Some had faith in the new mRNA technology, while others preferred to rely on more time-tested methods. Sometimes articles hide a great deal in one seemingly innocuous sentence. From what I've learned from Europeans, there's only one vaccine candidate of that nature the EU considered, a Sanofi Pasteur/GlaxoSmithKline combo, the former providing the infamous spike protein, the latter an adjuvant. Everyone expected this…

I wonder why not cover younger people with the GSK version and older people with some other vaccine?

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#94

Post by Throwawayaerlei »

maxerickson wrote: post #87
InTheArena wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is the party line right now but it’s nothing more then Joe Biden is doing his best to set low expectations and to revamp history. I’m a committed never Trumper. But there’s no question that warp speed has been a insane success. Biden set at the bar as low as warp speed was already achieving. There are 1 million valid reasons to hate Trump. This might be the only reason to think his government did a reason…

They knew they had clinical vaccine candidates in February! The whole development timeline starts with one of the good vaccines already existing . We honestly don't have the information to evaluate whether they set reasonable targets or not.

20/20 hindsight. And Moderna's candidate was designed by January 13th, a weekend after the first sequences from China were uploaded to Western databases, but before we knew we'd even need it.

You should learn more about the whole process; did you know everyone has to wait two weeks for sterility testing of finished vaccines? What's entailed in Phase I, II and III trials? That the latter tend to cost a billion dollars plus or minus, and take months? How very long the FDA takes to decide things, three weeks for Pfizer/BioNTech.

More money is not the solution to every technical problem!!! I would think those of us who hang out on Hacker News would be intimately aware of this.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#95

Post by maxerickson »

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #90
maxerickson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could have bet 10 times the resources. Cheap compared to the pandemic!

You keep saying this, but you haven't demonstrated any way in which pouring more money into the process would have significantly speeded up production. Do Intel's massive financial resources allow them to profitably manufacture chips on their 10 nm and 7 nm nodes?

I mean, no one has demonstrated that it would not have either, and if you look at my comments, I've acknowledged that we don't have the information to evaluate it. And who cares if we just pissed away $40 billion dollars failing to speed things up.

But look at the distribution. Pfizer submitted their results around Thanksgiving. The FDA decided they'd look at them in a couple weeks. The Federal answer to states complaining that they didn't have funds to get programs running was "figure it out". Stupid, even if you ardently think that states should be the primary vehicle of government.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#96

Post by 99_00 »

>First, U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech informed Brussels that it would be delivering far less vaccine than planned in the coming weeks.

Which country isn't impacted by this?

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#97

Post by sn41 »

trianglem wrote: post #56
sn41 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was due to the lessons from SARS-Cov1 in 2003. Asian countries that did not suffer from SARS-Cov1 did very badly with covid-19. e.g. India. In India the misinformation was uniquely Indian - first they said that vegetarians will not get Covid, it came from bushmeat (ignoring the fact that human-to-human transmission was through cough droplets), then they said that Yoga fights Covid, then they blamed it on a minor…

India did badly for the same reason the US and Brazil did so badly. Authoritarian, right wing, populist governments that relied on misinformation and half truths, had no plan and basically shifted blame and tried to save face. India actually probably did the best out of all three considering Modi at least isn’t a science denialist.

True, the last part did surprise me. He went against the base of his party, and espoused science.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#98

Post by Throwawayaerlei »

digikata wrote: post #93
Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #50

Some had faith in the new mRNA technology, while others preferred to rely on more time-tested methods. Sometimes articles hide a great deal in one seemingly innocuous sentence. From what I've learned from Europeans, there's only one vaccine candidate of that nature the EU considered, a Sanofi Pasteur/GlaxoSmithKline combo, the former providing the infamous spike protein, the latter an adjuvant. Everyone expected this…

I wonder why not cover younger people with the GSK version and older people with some other vaccine?

Excellent question. Probably the biggest factor is that Phase III trials are insanely expensive, like a billion dollars plus or minus. High touch, 30,000 people minimum for the US, lasts two years, etc. Sanofi/GSK is hazarding some of their own money in this, and has to look at the market for COVID-19 vaccines, which is obviously weighted towards the elderly.

Might also be risk management in wondering if the final results for the younger would be disappointing or worse, this problem with the elderly was learned through surrogate endpoints from serological as in blood testing of immune system responses. See Oxford for how they were led astray from their first big 500 Phase I/II people test of their vaccine platform, and achieved much worse results than they anticipated when put in the crucible of multiple Phase III trials and the real endpoints of getting COVID-19, or serious cases of it.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#99

Post by maxerickson »

mikem170 wrote: post #68
trianglem wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Trump administration spewed misinformation from day one that caused massive dissonance in dealing with the problem. Saying they did better when they had literally no plan and let 400,000 people die is incredible dissembling and most likely a political statement than a logical one. They literally dissuaded people from using masks.

A lot of people in our democracy might not agree with your assessment of this pandemic. A lot of people feel that 1 in 750 people dying, mostly older with comorbidities, is not the disaster for society that some seem to think it is. A lot of people think that giving up a year or two of their social and economic lives is not worth trying to avoid a 1 in 750, or 0.13%, chance of dying. Especially those, like the young,…

More people die the less you control the spread of the virus, the overall death rate at this point in time is not a good gauge of the potential impact of the pandemic.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#100

Post by Throwawayaerlei »

99_00 wrote: post #96

>First, U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech informed Brussels that it would be delivering far less vaccine than planned in the coming weeks. Which country isn't impacted by this?

Every country is, because their manufacturing in the US is also disappointing, which Pfizer announced out of the blue in December. They've got issues so grave they're shutting down their Belgium plant to improve things in ways I haven't been able to made good guesses of, besides perhaps having a sterility problem.
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