Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Europe's Vaccine Disaster

spiegel.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 434 posts

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#321

Post by jokethrowaway »

adventured wrote: post #157
jokethrowaway wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real disaster is yet to come, and it will be economical and caused by the prolonged lockdowns. Not to mention the third world starving, but it's not like western countries ever cared about that.

The US has been consistently providing 50% or more of the world's food aid for a century at this point. It has saved tens of millions of people from starvation over that time. No western countries eh.

We produce more than enough food for everyone on the planet (even if we were 10bln), the United Nation's World Food Program, whose mission is to "eradicate hunger", in 60 years just managed to get bigger and bigger (15k employees nowadays) without solving the problem.

The number of undernourished people is higher today than in 2014.

Poor countries don't get industrialised and never manage to make enough food by themselves.

If you ask me, I think it's just a way to spend some money to make your citizens feel good while keeping the status-quo.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#322

Post by tsimionescu »

beagle3 wrote: post #261
yyyk wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well, last night a reputable Israeli HMO posted it’s real world data for Pfizer, and it’s 50% after 18 days and doesnt seem to get much better Their initial results are actually very encouraging[0] in this regard. [0] https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/Hk2URcnku

That is propaganda. The real data is in https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.27.21250612v... and is 50% (not uniformly over age groups, but 50% is a good summary of it all). The Israeli government failed miserably in dealing with covid. They were successful in getting the vaccines (and thanks to the HMOs and no thanks to the government, deploy them quickly) and selling the hopium that this will solve every…

There seems to be a major flaw in comparing the data between the two studies: the Pfizer paper is counting Covid19 cases (symptomatic cases with confirmed PCR for SARS-CoV-2), while the Maccabi paper seems to be counting SARS-CoV-2 infections overall, which would include asymptomatic cases.

They even say so explicitly:

> Second, our case definition was positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR test irrespective to presenting symptoms that defined COVID-19 cases in the RCT. This might explain the discrepancy in results.

So, this new research is not really contradicting the Pfizer paper in any way - they are simply measuring different quantities.

Still, it's nice to know that the vaccine also offers protection from infection, not just the disease.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#323

Post by pelasaco »

petre wrote: post #231
pelasaco wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats true. At least in Germany, you are just sent to the EU Parlament if you re not performing well in the country level.

Except von der Leyen was sent in as head of the Comission, a position which is essentially the Prime Minister of the EU. The PM's or the head of the Comission's job is to get sh*t done, as opposed to bragging about it and passing the responsability and the blame onto others. Sorry to say but BJ is way better in this regard. He has delivered Brexit and the UK is in a much better position regarding vaccinations.

BJ and DT.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#324

Post by HugoDaniel »

oli5679 wrote: post #309
HugoDaniel wrote: post #255

"Europe is facing a vaccine disaster. Whereas countries like Israel, Britain and the United States. are quickly moving ahead with vaccinations, the EU is reeling from a string of setbacks. " this is a lie, per capita EU is not that bad considering that it is a coordinated effort (as opposed to a singular effort by a singular country). Overall this is Der Spiegel making an opinion article disguised as a news article.…

The EU has administered 2 doses per hundred citizens. The UK and US have administered 12 and 8 respectively. The EU treated this like a procurement exercise, fussing over price and process and not buying sufficiently diverse portfolio. UK and US treated this like an emergency. Every day of lockdown costs close to total vaccines expenditure, so they moved fast. Now the EU is scapegoating a company that is producing th…

Its a coordinated effort, a fair comparison needs to at least take that into consideration.

Even so:

Why are you comparing "today" EU numbers with those of countries that started a one or two months earlier?

If so, what makes you think that is a fair comparison (even disregarding the cost of the coordinated effort)?

Can we compare "today" EU numbers with those of countries that have just started vaccinations? Would that be fair?

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#325

Post by estaseuropano »

deathgrips wrote: post #312
saiya-jin wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes the good old covid story - sovereign states order some medicine/medical equipment from the companies, and on the airport upon sending it to the country comes US government officials with few extra (freshly printed) suitcases of money to change delivery of that order. Remember quite a few articles from spring about that. 3rd world countries having no chance of receiving what was agreed upon. I mean I understand…

Covid is not nearly as high on the priority list for many third world countries as it is for the US. Here covid shuts down everything. In many African countries it is an order of magnitude less impactful than malaria.

There's less testing, less reporting and much less transparency and awareness. Doesn't mean there's less infection or less dying.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#326

Post by helij »

wrnr wrote: post #39
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…

No way UK is to blame for this, just pure arrogance of narcissistic EU commission trowing a temper tantrum about how it can't possibly be even wrong after having grabbed all responsibility for delivering the vaccine because it was her moment to shine after the brexit, and then start pointing fingers at the first set back.

No one blamed UK. This blame thing is completely made up by UK media.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#327

Post by HugoDaniel »

HugoDaniel wrote: post #324
oli5679 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU has administered 2 doses per hundred citizens. The UK and US have administered 12 and 8 respectively. The EU treated this like a procurement exercise, fussing over price and process and not buying sufficiently diverse portfolio. UK and US treated this like an emergency. Every day of lockdown costs close to total vaccines expenditure, so they moved fast. Now the EU is scapegoating a company that is producing th…

Its a coordinated effort, a fair comparison needs to at least take that into consideration. Even so: Why are you comparing "today" EU numbers with those of countries that started a one or two months earlier? If so, what makes you think that is a fair comparison (even disregarding the cost of the coordinated effort)? Can we compare "today" EU numbers with those of countries that have just started vaccinations? Would t…

Doesn't it sound fishy to you when Der Spiegel compares a multi-country federation with multiple-languages and cultures to a single country with 9 million habitants with known shady non-democratic practices (like selling the data of its own citizens to move ahead of the vaccination stack)?

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#328

Post by Throwawayaerlei »

sampo wrote: post #202
Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

> Phase III trials are insanely expensive, like a billion dollars plus or minus Do you have a source for that? JAMA Internal Medicine says a median of 19 million, but that's for all drugs, not specifically vaccines. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...

Not a good or recent one, but reading the linked article indicates the sort of trials being done for vaccines will have a median much greater than the $19 million you cite. These trials enroll 30,000 subjects at minimum, and take 2 years, both of which substantially exceed the maximums cited in the paper that they or anyone else they knew of had tried. In the case of length, by 4 times.

Thinking further, a billion is too high an estimate today, because these trials or one I looked closely at use smartphone "ediaries" to reduce the number of direct person to person contacts. But they're still high touch affairs, nothing substitutes for phone calls and direct examinations, although the latter are limited in number, but start with a general medical exam.

Thanks for bringing that paper to my attention, I'll look more closely at it later.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#329

Post by estaseuropano »

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 use of Russian and Chinese vaccine is much about trust. No one trusts that the Russians have done proper trials or that the reported data is accurate and no outside party has a means to verify their claims. Time will tell - I very much hope it works, but wouldn't be surprised if it didn't.

France allowed the Pasteur institute to fail - a much desired vaccine was stopped because it wasn't effective enough. Impossible to imagine the same happening in Russia, as Putin needs to project power.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#330

Post by HugoDaniel »

MichaelRazum wrote: post #320
HugoDaniel wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does not answer the question or expand on what time interval the data is collected. However, since you played the Google card, please take it back: "What shady tactics did other countries use?" Also easily available by searching Google.

Id doesn't matter at all. Facts are: Other countries placed their bets faster and started vaccination faster. First come first serve, don't see anything wrong with it. Maybe the EU should also use shady tactics but it sounds more like a huge corruption and bureaucracy disaster. By the way Biotech offered more vaccines and it was refused (even the CEO of Biotech gave an interview and said it was very confusing how the…

"Huge corruption and bureaucracy disaster"

Please provide facts before making unsubstantiated claims.

This is how fake news proliferate. Don't contribute to it.

Post reply on HN