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Europe's Vaccine Disaster

spiegel.de

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Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#171

Post by ggm »

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #75
xiphias2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't know whether my parents should get the Chinese / Russian vaccines or not. I'm more concerned about lack of efficiency than safety. The problem is that after they get one of the vaccines, they won't have any chance to get more from the Pfeizer vaccine when it arrives.

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).

You do know that the error bars on 91% and 94% could make the inverse outcome or equality as likely as your belief in the 94%-is-better..

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#172

Post by SECProto »

smnrchrds wrote: post #163
SECProto wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Pfizer has been pretty explicit with their comments that the deliveries will still meet the amount required by the end of quarter. Perhaps the EU has end-of-month targets instead.

I'm just not that concerned about it personally. There'll be a political price to pay if it doesn't work out, as well as a contract violation price for the manufacturers. I don't expect I'll be able to get a vaccine until August at the earliest anyway.

I wish addressing climate change was covered with the same urgency by media (mainstream, niche, social, all of the above)

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#173

Post by simonh »

jostmey wrote: post #161
illuminati1911 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's just one vaccine, there are half a dozen that have resulted in usable products, and many, many more that didn't pan out.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#174

Post by simonh »

MrRiddle wrote: post #12
jacquesm wrote: post #5

It's not just a vaccine disaster, it is a COVID disaster. The response to COVID in most of the developed world was a completely fuck up. We are still learning lessons that should have been learned a year ago, and there are still people everywhere - here too - that believe the best way to tackle a crisis of this magnitude is to stick your head in the sand and to pretend it isn't happening. I've definitely lost the ill…

Meh, I’m not convinced it’s such a disaster it’s being portayed. Serbia is/was heavily hit by Covid, yet only 12% more people died in 2020 than 5 year average before that. Again, meh.

That's the number with restrictions, lockdowns, curfews, etc, etc. In other words while Serbia was hit fairly badly, relatively speaking, the mitigation measures largely worked. This is not a good argument against mitigation measures.

The Spanish Flu seems to have similar case mortality rates and efforts to implement preventive measures were hampered by the war time conditions so it's a good candidate to compare against when considering the effectiveness of preventive measures. It's spread lead to from 17x to 50x as many deaths as we've seen from the coronavirus at the global level. In India where lockdown measures weren't significant 5% of the population died.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#175

Post by [deleted] »

ngc248 wrote: post #165
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 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…

[deleted]

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#176

Post by njanirudh »

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.

You are the one spreading misinformation here.

India is in no way an auth govt. Give took amazing steps asking with all the front like workers involved. Countries with 1/20 the population and poverty didn't handle it better.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#177

Post by mrec »

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #71
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.

The Russian Gam-COVID-Vac/Sputnik V vaccine looks very good, but for the US or to much of the West, there's a price to be paid for being in an effective state of war with another country. Although Gamaleya is now working with AZ/Oxford to see if substituting one of their doses for one of Oxford's will produce much better results, which I never would have expected. This is based on the theory that the immune system re…

> the theory that the immune system response to Oxford's virus vector is mostly negating the benefit of the second dose taken 21 days after the first

Do you know if there are more trials underway to verify this? I'm guessing it ties in to AZ's encouragement for delaying the second dose i.e. wait until the immune response has died down. I think UK medical consensus is currently recommending 12 weeks rather than the original 3-4.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#178

Post by njanirudh »

sn41 wrote: post #135
jbritton wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Then look at death per million data. You are starting to sound like the deranged people who say India and govt is wrong no matter what.

Let's face it, India did a lot better despite the population, poverty and external elements trying to sabotage.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#179

Post by simongray »

corty wrote: post #138
Gravityloss wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you talking about? Countries have been closing borders left and right, the EU hasn't prevented this.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#180

Post by mrtksn »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #82
mrtksn wrote: post #32

I still don’t understand why EU did not consider the Chinese and Russian vaccines. Very populous countries are getting them and any distrust towards the reporting of these vaccines could have been scrutinized(Turkey run its own "stage 3" on the Chinese one, got its own numbers and is inspecting the deliveries for 2 weeks before vaccinating the population). Now we have this situation where EU is lagging behind very se…

China literally runs concentration camps for some of their citizens. If that's how they treat citizens, why should foreigners expect good treatment?

We won’t have to live in China, we will consume the vaccines like we consume the iPhones.
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