Can you help me find the covid-19 side effects tracking website? I can't seem to find it. In fact I can't find anything that's enumerating the data publicly. I can't answer your comment at all without any data.
The US has various vaccine trackers for side effects. They are anyone can put anything in them. (including things like alien abduction), but they give us a guide as to what is reported. Something like 1 in 100,000 has an allergic reaction in 15 minutes and needs treatment (an epi-pen). That is the only side effect I've heard of. The numbers of allergic reaction are different for Moderna and Pfizer. If you have a hist…
VAERS would be the usual source for this kind of thing, and it's publicly available.
The AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved for use in the UK since December, but the FDA isn't currently scheduled to approve it in the US until April.
The FDA isn't scheduled for anything. They told AZ long ago that their trail wouldn't meet FDA standards, and so AZ started a new trail that would. Everyone assumes the approval will happen in April, but that is just an educated guess.
That’s just semantics around the word “scheduled”. The FDA insisted on a course of action that makes it unlikely the AZ vaccine will receive an EUA before April. They did this despite the fact that pretty much no one with vaccine expertise doubts that it will meet the safety standards or the (relatively low) efficacy standards required to grant that EUA.
No one disputes that AZ screwed up their trial, but it doesn’t make sense to prevent people from accessing a safe and reasonably effective vaccine just to make a point about that. That’s why the UK and EU have approved it and are moving forward with distribution, while the US waits months for absolutely perfect data before doing anything.
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...
Just a nit: they don't have exactly the same outcome measure, definition of "severe", "symptomatic", etc. Nor were they conducted in the same, time, or the exactly same demographics. Nor did they use the same protocol: testing weekly with a swab and detecting and informing the participant of a positive status will get that person to report symptoms to the trial more often than if you don't. They use similar measures…
You’re absolutely right, but I didn’t want the overall message to get lost in the details. I’ve been seeing people parrot the “AZ is actually much better than it looks because they included asymptomatic patients” for months now and it’s just incorrect.
Please, stop posting smart sounding misinformation. > mRNA technology is new, but not unknown. They have been studied for more than a decade. mRNA vaccines do not contain a live virus and do not carry a risk of causing disease in the vaccinated person. mRNA from the vaccine never enters the nucleus of the cell and does not affect or interact with a person's DNA. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/mrna-vaccine-…
I have a phd in biochemistry. I can tell you this is categorically wrong: "mRNA from the vaccine never enters the nucleus of the cell and does not affect or interact with a person's DNA" It should say almost never . It's low enough for the risk to be worth it, but posting actually wrong absolute statements risks causing a backlash, the last year should have taught us all this basic condition of humanity
Agreed that accuracy is important, and we're in sort of a safe space here on Hacker News, but at the same time I feel that the media's portrayal of vaccines so far has done us a disservice. "only 66% effective" may be accurate, but if it's 100% effective against hospitalization that should be the lede. It's also true that we have not proven that vaccines prevent asymptomatic spread, but that's not the same as saying they don't; they almost definitely do, and by being "scientifically accurate" we give rise to people thinking "hmm, this vaccine is only slightly better than a coin flip and I can still spread, what's the point." That's NOT TRUE! Again, all of these vaccines are nearly 100% effective against serious infection and almost definitely inhibit spread—that should be the headline!!!
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…
Such confidence about "gold standard" is hard to justify without ANY studies on mRNA long-term effects (how could there be > this is brand new vaccine technology and delivery). I would actually argue it is "safer" to take a more traditional vaccine (which have a long history of safety studies, including longer-term one) than an untested (in the long-term sense) mRNA vaccine, given equal efficacies. So, maybe not the…
The J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines are both also very new technology.
Here's the "platform" for the AstraZeneca vaccine:
They are somewhat similar to the mRNA vaccines, triggering cells in the recipients body to produce the SARS-CoV2 protein, but the mechanism is different, they use a virus to introduce the instructions into the cells instead of mRNA. The carrier virus has been altered so that it can't reproduce.
Why do you believe that the FDA is holding them back? So far the process appears to be approval after the minimum of safety and effectiveness testing. This means that people won’t waste time or be harmed by a failed vaccine candidate. I don’t work in medicine and am just a bystander like most. Is there something I am missing?
Because they care 6 orders of magnitude more about people who die from taking the vaccine than people who die from them witholding the vaccine.
What is the optimal vaccination strategy? So far, it just seems like we're following "vaccinate healthcare workers and the most vulnerable" and that, on the surface, seems intuitive. But is there some other sort of algorithm that can determine the best way to reduce overall transmission the fastest? Random vaccinations? Targeted groups in different regions? Double shots for vulnerable before single shots for others?…
Pure armchair speculation, but I'd at least like public heath officials to explain their logic. Tier 0: High risk daily exposure. (Medical, Rescue, Law Enforcement) Tier 1: Frequent contact with Tier 0 (elderly in care) and/or high risk of complications (anyone in a hospital setting for an extended duration). +++ My tier 2 seems to differ from public health models, at least that I've seen. My logical basis is to brea…
Teachers and such in many states have approximately the priority you've outlined (with over 65 overlapping).
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.
>Obesity alone means ~40% of the population of the US And that is in large part thanks to the government and its public health experts, who we are now, I guess, supposed to believe have our interests in mind, even though, by letting 40% of the population become obese, when there are plain and simple steps they could have taken to prevent it, they have irrefutably demonstrated they do not actually care about the healt…
> letting 40% of the population become obese
"letting" seems like a strong verb. I'm all for empathy for those who struggle with maintaining a healthy weight—imagine being addicted to something that you must consume about 3 times a day to stay alive—but it seems a stretch to lay the blame of obesity on the feet of public health experts. Are they also responsible for alcoholics? Other drug addicts?
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 have no idea how the FDA can hold back these vaccines in good conscience… The UK versus FDA Thalidomide experience is at least one good reason.
That's fifty years ago. If you think a fifty years ago story is why the FDA is delaying, I differ. They're delaying because of IPR chauvinism, and massive amounts of NIH and I'm not talking about nih.gov
The FDA approved phen-fen, vioxx, des, the opiod disaster.. the hold up on AZ is not because they have magic time machine insight into why AZ should be delayed.
imo 66% effectiveness is pretty good, not on a personal level, but at the population policy level. I'm glad to get another vaccine on the market soon.
On the other hand it's quite sad that we as humanity have already developed two vaccines with 95% (or even higher) effectiveness but are not able (or rather: are too greedy) to share this knowledge to vaccine every human on earth as fast as possible. Instead the US and Europe are putting trade restrictions in place to keep the vaccines for themselves. India and China are more than capable to produce the vaccines in i…
Yeah I just don’t understand why we can’t put the full industrial capacity of the U.S. government behind this. I’m genuinely curious about the on-the-ground details which make manufacturing this stuff hard. Would love to see the playbook for raw materials to vial of vaccine.