Europe's Vaccine Disaster • Hacker News Board

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#131

Post by Camillo » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:17 AM UTC

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…

> 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?

That's how EU politics work. It's a storage area for unpopular politicians that did not do well at the national level, and a recycling center for unpopular legislation that was not approved in national legislatures. An example of the latter, also from Germany, is the copyright directive, which recycles proposals that German publishers could not get passed in their Bundestag.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#132

Post by maxerickson » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:22 AM UTC

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #129

maxerickson wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't say that. He has made comments that we can likely get there sometime this year if we have widespread administration of vaccines. Which widespread vaccination is a lot cheaper than other measures, but it's not doing nothing either.

Fauci said we were getting close to herd immunity. He didn't say that. Not sure it matters when he recently admitted he was lying in stages about the percentages to encourage people to get vaccinated. After that and his self-admitted lying in the masking debacle, I'm not sure why anyone still listens to him. Credibility is one of the most precious resources in public health, and our public health authorities includin…

They've since edited their comment to remove what they had said when I replied, which was How much worse do you think it could have been? Fauci said we were getting close to herd immunity. Do you think as many people would have dies again next year? 1 in 250 when finished?

I don't understand why Fauci has made those choices and still find him plenty credible.

And then, his credibility isn't really an issue when the supposed statement is a complete misunderstanding of the actual situation (we are nowhere near herd immunity via infection or vaccination).

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#133

Post by corty » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:25 AM UTC

emteycz wrote: post #124

tehjoker wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the vaccines were developed publicly, there would be no reason not to collaborate.

If the vaccines were developed publicly there might not be any vaccines. This is not your ordinary flu shot.

About a quarter of the long list of vaccines was developed by public universities. Almost all were developed with billions in public subsidies.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#134

Post by ateng » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:27 AM UTC

jackTheMan wrote: post #84

mrtksn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese and the Russian vaccines were not even considered. Now those are used in mass vaccinations, soon EU would be behind all countries but those who barely have any government at all. People don't even want to talk about that, as if those alternatives don't exists. Non-EU countries in Europe are getting them. Serbia(6.1) and Turkey(2.3) are already close to EU average(2.6) or better on the vaccination process.

I wonder if the Chinese vaccine with 50% efficiency could be used for herd immunity at all. Im not a virologyst, but the false safety of most people vaccinated with it in a country might could trigger even more death? The Chinese vaccine is not even tested above 59 years old. If the young is vaccinated and start to party etc the new more infectious variants could still spread and can reach even more elderly.

Also note that even if the vaccine couldn’t prevent one from getting infected, it could still reduce the severity of the infection (thus saves lives). I’m _guessing_ a less severe infection could potentially reduce the rate of infection as well?

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#135

Post by sn41 » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:30 AM UTC

jbritton wrote: post #106

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…

Looking at WorldOMeters covid data shows India ranks 105th in deaths per million(lower ranking is worse). India has one wave peaking in September and now relatively low cases.

Let's not get into the testing data debate here. To say that a country with 0.53 hospital beds per 1000 persons can successfully handle any medical emergency is unrealistic[1]. India is also highly populated, so the sheer number of people without access to healthcare is enormous. Access to testing is non-uniform. Very strangely, only places with relatively better access to healthcare seem to have more cases - Delhi, Bombay, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, the state of Kerala, etc.

Kind of like how 80 percent of dinosaurs are from the US and Europe - you only find things if you look. Ignorance is bliss.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_...

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#136

Post by saddlerustle » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:34 AM UTC

jackTheMan wrote: post #84

mrtksn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese and the Russian vaccines were not even considered. Now those are used in mass vaccinations, soon EU would be behind all countries but those who barely have any government at all. People don't even want to talk about that, as if those alternatives don't exists. Non-EU countries in Europe are getting them. Serbia(6.1) and Turkey(2.3) are already close to EU average(2.6) or better on the vaccination process.

I wonder if the Chinese vaccine with 50% efficiency could be used for herd immunity at all. Im not a virologyst, but the false safety of most people vaccinated with it in a country might could trigger even more death? The Chinese vaccine is not even tested above 59 years old. If the young is vaccinated and start to party etc the new more infectious variants could still spread and can reach even more elderly.

AFAIK there's two Chinese vaccines with published data: Sinovac and Sinopharm. Sinovac hasn't had great results but Sinophram has shown initial effectiveness numbers similar to AstraZeneca.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#137

Post by Animats » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:34 AM UTC

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #86

bluGill wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US bet on many different vaccines, most of which haven't arrived yet, but are still on track. On hindsight we can say we should have bet on Pfizer and Moderna, and screwed the rest - such a bet would have allowed them to increase their supply even faster. However that is hindsight, at the time we didn't have any reason to believe their vaccine would even work at all - while the ones we are waiting on we had good…

One other issue with the mRNA vaccines is that they're brand new technology, never before produced in bulk, so except for the vials, most everything is new and we're still climbing the learning curve. The production of DNA using E. Coli isn't new, but everything else is, including how physically fragile the end result is. If you shake a thawed out vial of Pfizer/BioNTech's, you're directed to throw it out, of Moderna…

One other issue with the mRNA vaccines is that they're brand new technology, never before produced in bulk

Yes, and bulk production is a serious problem. Handling those fragile pieces of RNA, and getting them inside an encapsulation, is a very touchy process. It involves custom microfluidic components made by, apparently, only one company so far.

Remember, this is a minimum viable product. A few year from now, there will probably be regular bulk production of RNA vaccines. But this was all lab scale until recently.

Once the production problem is solved, making new vaccines will be easier. The encapsulation process doesn't much care what it's encapsulating.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#138

Post by corty » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:37 AM UTC

Gravityloss wrote: post #88

bluGill wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a few governments can be smug about how they handled Covid, and they are all in Asia (counting New Zealand and Australia as Asia, which is hand wavy). Even those who can make such a claim are still only one mistake from it all crashing down. Europe likes to think they are doing better than the US, but the truth is they are not very different.

There are very different countries within Europe.

Mishandling of COVID is on the EU to a large part. Not only for the vaccine procurement. The EU also, for a very long time, actively prevented meaningful border inspections and border lockdowns that would have prevented a lot of spillover from hard-hit to not-so-hard-hit countries. E.g. in county-level charts you can see which ones border on high- and low-COVID neighbours.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#139

Post by Throwawayaerlei » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:39 AM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #132

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fauci said we were getting close to herd immunity. He didn't say that. Not sure it matters when he recently admitted he was lying in stages about the percentages to encourage people to get vaccinated. After that and his self-admitted lying in the masking debacle, I'm not sure why anyone still listens to him. Credibility is one of the most precious resources in public health, and our public health authorities includin…

They've since edited their comment to remove what they had said when I replied, which was How much worse do you think it could have been? Fauci said we were getting close to herd immunity. Do you think as many people would have dies again next year? 1 in 250 when finished? I don't understand why Fauci has made those choices and still find him plenty credible. And then, his credibility isn't really an issue when the s…

I don't understand why Fauci has made those choices and still find him plenty credible.

So you don't understand why Fauci has chosen to lie twice about very important COVID-19 issues, later admitted to these lies, and still find him "plenty credible." How do you know if the next thing you hear out of his mouth is true or a conscious lie???

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#140

Post by illuminati1911 » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:42 AM UTC

tehjoker wrote: post #112

outside1234 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were multiple efforts - but no reason to collaborate. And the French effort utterly failed to the point that they gave up. And Germany’s BioNTech signed an exclusive deal with Pfizer.

If the vaccines were developed publicly, there would be no reason not to collaborate.

It is at least partly developed (or funded) publicly.

Lots of comments are complaining about how EU "paid less" for the vaccine than country XYZ, but actually EU funded AstraZeneca with hundreds of millions of euros to develop the vaccine in the first place.

In any case unless AZ, EU etc. are able to come to reasonable agreement I think this might eventually lead to EU simply breaking the patent and then anyone can make the vaccine. That would be extremely hardcore measure to use, but in current situation, definitely possible.