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Europe's Vaccine Disaster

spiegel.de

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Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#161

Post by jostmey »

illuminati1911 wrote: post #140
tehjoker wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Hundreds of millions of dollars? Not even a billion dollars was set aside for vaccines as trillions of dollars are being lost?

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#162

Post by adventured »

freeflight wrote: post #117
partiallypro wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany's death rate since the fall is higher than the US though. The US largely bungled the initial response, where as Europe seems to have bungled the ongoing problem.

> Germany's death rate since the fall is higher than the US though. That is, if you actually trust the latest data coming out of the US, which could be a very misleading thing to do [0] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/trump-cdc-cor...

Correct, the data shouldn't be trusted. The US has been directly financially incentivizing the inflation of the number of Covid deaths, so the real figures are likely lower.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#163

Post by smnrchrds »

SECProto wrote: post #158
smnrchrds wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Uh, why do you think that? It has been an unfolding story for the past couple of weeks. I wish I know of an article which summarized everything with a timeline, but I do not. The gist of it is that, Canada has purchased many vaccines, but they will not be coming soon enough. It also lacks the leverage that US, UK, and EU have in terms of the production being domestic. So when Pfizer ran into production issues, init…

> initially they planned to cut Canada's deliveries by ~50% for 4 weeks but EU's by a 8% for 2 weeks. This is simply because of different contractual obligations to the different parties. If I owe you $100 by the end of year, but owe someone else $20 by end of month, I'm going to give full priority to repaying the other person. > I am deeply concerned that EU would simply block exports to Canada to make up for the sh…

> This is simply because of different contractual obligations to the different parties

I am not so sure. Canada was the 4th country to sign a contract with Pfizer. We were ahead of the EU. The initial statements by the Canadian government about the reduction in Pfizer production capacity was that they expect all countries will be affected similarly, but the next day we learned that Canada will be affected an order of magnitude more that Europe. It's unlikely that the government did not know what their contract said when they made those statements. In retrospect, Pfizer probably calculated that pissing off Canada is preferable to pissing off Europe and acted accordingly. Now we see that Canada accepted the slowdown gracefully, but Europe threw its weight and started changing the rules. Politically, they made the most expedient decision. But it was and is unfair to Canada.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#164

Post by maxerickson »

macintux wrote: post #160
katbyte wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this is something that changes post pandemic.

I just hope there is a post-pandemic era. Too many unknowns still about the mutations and whether they’ll out-maneuver the vaccines.

Lots of reason for optimism. The vaccines can be retargeted, and like the flu vaccine, approved with a faster trial. And the mRNA vaccine production can continue to scale up.

So if there is a need for a new vaccine, we can likely deploy it with a shorter interval to availability and much larger initial volume.

We can also become more disciplined. We don't need to go all the way to a strictly enforced lock down to improve on the social distancing that we've done the last year (at least, not in the US). And we can try to get people to more widely accept contact tracing/tracking.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#165

Post by ngc248 »

sn41 wrote: post #16
trianglem wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all intrinsically knew what to expect from and how to react to a pandemic. I honestly believe intentional misinformation from the Trump administration caused the massive bifurcation in dealing with this problem with a united front. Asian countries did not have this problem, and look at how much better they are faring.

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 way better than a lot of other countries, Lot of people expected it to do way worse.

>>>> 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)

This was at the point when WHO was saying there was no Human to Human transfmission.

>>> then they blamed it on a minority gathering

Well obviously since even during lockdown, they conducted that gathering which had people coming from almost all states, then after the gathering went back to their home states. This was during the height of lockdown. The problem was that people though t rules did not apply to them. There was even a riot in Bangalore by these people when lockdown was being imposed.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#166

Post by Throwawayaerlei »

xiphias2 wrote: post #149
Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sinovac CoronaVac efficacy is not useless, but not very good from what I've read. Gam-COVID-Vac on the other hand is around 91% https://sputnikvaccine.com/newsroom/pressreleases/the-sputni... , which is quite good while not reaching Pfizer/BioNTech's 95% (the German firm BioNTech developed the vaccine, they partnered with Pfizer to test, manufacture, and distribute it).

Ah, I forgot an important detail: my parents are over 70 years old. The biggest problems with these vaccines are that they can be less effective in old people, and it’s hard to find data on old people. Just as an example Sinovac is not even used in old people in China as far as I know. There’s a similar question with AstraZeneca right now, German vaccination committee would like to see more Phase 3 data on old people…

This gets complicated, live virus and mRNA type vaccines that hijack a small number of your cells for a full immune system response aren't as far as I know normally used for people that age, see https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/adult.html and note "zoster live" has been removed from the US market.

On the other hand, they might just wring out the best response possible at a slightly greater risk. Here I'm assuming your parents shouldn't try a PRC vaccine, so it's virus vector Russian or mMRA Pfizer, both essentially accomplishing the same thing, both with high overall efficacy.

Or look at it this way: if they don't get a good result from either of these two vaccines, they're not likely to fair well from a real infection. Maybe. We really don't known why even at their age most people survive.

The other factor is how much you trust quality control. Pfizer > Russia >> PRC in my book, but I have absolutely no read on Russian quality. But also note Pfizer/BioNTech is useless if not properly handled to its strict temp and physical requirements.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#167

Post by macintux »

maxerickson wrote: post #164
macintux wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just hope there is a post-pandemic era. Too many unknowns still about the mutations and whether they’ll out-maneuver the vaccines.

Lots of reason for optimism. The vaccines can be retargeted, and like the flu vaccine, approved with a faster trial. And the mRNA vaccine production can continue to scale up. So if there is a need for a new vaccine, we can likely deploy it with a shorter interval to availability and much larger initial volume. We can also become more disciplined. We don't need to go all the way to a strictly enforced lock down to imp…

Right, but for the most part your optimism is about better managing an ongoing pandemic, which is certainly not what most are hoping for.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#168

Post by riffraff »

outside1234 wrote: post #105
Gravityloss wrote: post #80

There's lots of medical companies in most countries of EU. Why didn't they just license some working vaccine and start cranking it out? Why does the company X developed medicine only have to be made by company X? That's against the whole idea of patents, which is making information available and usable via licensing. Money shouldn't be the issue, the cost of the shots is negligible so there is not much profit to be m…

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.

Sanofi is going to produce the Pfizer vaccine too, it was reported by Bloomberg a couple days back.

EDIT: found a CNBC article https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/26/sanofi-to-produce-100-millio...

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#169

Post by ngc248 »

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.

Woah there!!! The first Authoritarian government which peddled misinformation was China. Why is China getting a free pass here? If the WHO had't parroted china's lies, then there would have been no situation like this.

Looking at worldometer, the number of deaths in china is 4,636. This is unbelievable. No one can believe this number. This is the reason why no one wants the chinese vaccine. You cant believe anythn coming out of china. Again I am talkin about the chinese government not the chinese people.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#170

Post by maxerickson »

macintux wrote: post #167
maxerickson wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of reason for optimism. The vaccines can be retargeted, and like the flu vaccine, approved with a faster trial. And the mRNA vaccine production can continue to scale up. So if there is a need for a new vaccine, we can likely deploy it with a shorter interval to availability and much larger initial volume. We can also become more disciplined. We don't need to go all the way to a strictly enforced lock down to imp…

Right, but for the most part your optimism is about better managing an ongoing pandemic, which is certainly not what most are hoping for.

Get the active infections down and roll out a (well targeted) vaccine quickly and you end a pandemic.

I'm saying there's reason to be optimistic that we will be able to respond successfully even if the current vaccines don't end the pandemic (and it likely would be reasonably quick too, our tools are much better now than 12 months ago).

At some level of production capacity, convincing people in high risk areas to social distance and convincing people to get another vaccination are the hard parts.

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