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

Oxford vaccine shows sustained protection of 76% in 3-month gap til second dose

ox.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 187 posts

Re: Oxford vaccine shows sustained protection of 76% in 3-month gap til second dose

#91

Post by mchusma »

alistairSH wrote: post #31
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #26

It’s interesting how the Astra Zeneca vaccine is such an emotional topic. In the UK it’s seen as the greatest weapon against the pandemic, in the US it is not playing much of a role and in the EU public perception is super negative.

Astra Zeneca bungled their FDA trials in 2020. They went from being one of the most promising vaccines to an also-ran. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/business/covid-vaccine-ox...

This is basically a hit piece, and this type of journalism really hurts us because it misses the big picture. The reality is that Astrazeca ran full trials which proved safety and efficacy in peer reviewed journals. Were things a bit messy? Yes! Its a pandemic, things didn't go perfectly. But is there any scientifically based reason to believe that the vaccine is not safe and effective against death? Their studies categorically proved that.

Re: Oxford vaccine shows sustained protection of 76% in 3-month gap til second dose

#92

Post by mchusma »

jaynetics wrote: post #50

Even more consequential than the fact from the headline is the preliminary result that a spacing of 12 weeks does not seem to reduce efficiency. I wish my country and others would take note and give priority to handing out as many first doses as possible, but my hope for such quick adoption of scientific findings has been rather diminished by the whole event.

Its typical of vaccines for longer spacing to improve the efficacy. This is why for most vaccines you get your booster spread out by a lot more (like 1 year). So generally speaking, the expectation was that it would improve efficacy and it did.

Another study supporting "First doses first".

Re: Oxford vaccine shows sustained protection of 76% in 3-month gap til second dose

#93

Post by adventured »

lbeltrame wrote: post #74
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #26

It’s interesting how the Astra Zeneca vaccine is such an emotional topic. In the UK it’s seen as the greatest weapon against the pandemic, in the US it is not playing much of a role and in the EU public perception is super negative.

> in the US it is not playing much of a role That's because the FDA is waiting for the completion of AZ's trial in the US. This should be definitely better run than the meta-trials done elsewhere and give clearer numbers. A likely readout would be in March, or April.

It's also because the US has numerous vaccine options for 2021 and eg the EU does not.

The Oxford vaccine simply isn't that important to the US accordingly. We have Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, along with Oxford. The US will end up with far more vaccine options than it needs. The EU is desperate for any vaccine supply because of how they massively screwed everything up. The US by contrast is going to be flooded with vaccine supply and is barely breaking a sweat. Given the US didn't even put forth its best effort and it's showing up the EU so dramatically, you know the EU really botched things.

Re: Oxford vaccine shows sustained protection of 76% in 3-month gap til second dose

#94

Post by harry8 »

simonswords82 wrote: post #3

It just gets better and better for the UK - which is a relief because early January had some grim sickness and death numbers. Check out the data on the UK Gov dashboard if you've not seen it: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ Also - we are all in lockdown, which helps.

Here's another way of framing it:

Having messed this up so very badly doing idiotically risky things from the start the latest big risk taken by the UK government didn't actually backfire as badly as the previous ones. Others have pointed at the current per-capita deaths. This completely ignores the long-term effects to survivors accross the population.

It can be a challenge to see how the UK government could have dealt with this worse. It's a highly educated population that has put the brakes on the most destructive policies from the very start.

I really hope the wider population comes to an appreciation of "asymmetric risk" from this the way "metal fatigue" entered popular usage with the aeroplane disasters of I think the DC-10.

Re: Oxford vaccine shows sustained protection of 76% in 3-month gap til second dose

#95

Post by Traster »

simonswords82 wrote: post #3

It just gets better and better for the UK - which is a relief because early January had some grim sickness and death numbers. Check out the data on the UK Gov dashboard if you've not seen it: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ Also - we are all in lockdown, which helps.

I'm sorry but "better and better" is a pretty ridiculous way to characterize the situation in the UK. We're under pretty much the most strict lockdown conditions, and deaths peaked to a ridiculous level in a totally predictable and preventable way due to the christmas fuck up.

Re: Oxford vaccine shows sustained protection of 76% in 3-month gap til second dose

#96

Post by [deleted] »

sgt101 wrote: post #81
throwaway2245 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Better" is doing a lot of work here. The UK (in particular, England) is currently reporting the second highest new death rate per capita in the world, still higher than it was at any point in 2020. It continues to report 1000+ unnecessary deaths per day. And, is it still the case that the UK has 50% more excess deaths than it is reporting in the daily coronavirus figures? A mystery...

It's worth looking here : https://github.com/dkobak/excess-mortality for clear statistics. There is a big difference between what is reported and what the actual numbers work out to be.

[deleted]

Re: Oxford vaccine shows sustained protection of 76% in 3-month gap til second dose

#97

Post by harry8 »

lbeltrame wrote: post #9
dhbradshaw wrote: post #4

What exactly does "percent protection" mean in these announcements? Can we use the definition to derive a percent protection associated with having been through the virus? Is there a percent protection associated with your age / gender / race profile? It feels like the number doesn't mean much without having a similar number for the null cases.

It is a reduction of the risk of symptomatic disease by 76% once vaccinated. But more importantly, there were no hospitalizations or deaths in the vaccinated people. This is a point the media often overlooks.

Is it known what the effect is on so-called "long covid" and other pretty serious long-term covid affects that might be suffered by people who don't get it badly enough to go to hospital?

Re: Oxford vaccine shows sustained protection of 76% in 3-month gap til second dose

#98

Post by harry8 »

adventured wrote: post #93
lbeltrame wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in the US it is not playing much of a role That's because the FDA is waiting for the completion of AZ's trial in the US. This should be definitely better run than the meta-trials done elsewhere and give clearer numbers. A likely readout would be in March, or April.

It's also because the US has numerous vaccine options for 2021 and eg the EU does not. The Oxford vaccine simply isn't that important to the US accordingly. We have Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, along with Oxford. The US will end up with far more vaccine options than it needs. The EU is desperate for any vaccine supply because of how they massively screwed everything up. The US by contrast is…

>The Oxford vaccine simply isn't that important to the US

Beg to differ there. We need to vaccinate the world. This is in the interests of the US. (Consider mutation etc). The analysis of the Oxford vaccine is that it is much easier to perform the logistics because of the significantly more modest refrigerations requirements. The US needs 7 billion to be vaccinated as much as anyone is my understanding.

Re: Oxford vaccine shows sustained protection of 76% in 3-month gap til second dose

#99

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

CodeGlitch wrote: post #11
mchusma wrote: post #10

Hopefully this additional data will get the US to act the way they should have in November. Lift the ban on Astrazeneca. It's been given safely to millions now, with zero deaths from covid in the vaccinated (+14 days). The FDAs failure to approve Astrazeneca is the most horrifying government agency failure I have ever seen.

I was thinking the other day whether whether the world-wide effort to vaccinate as many people as possible will be a major blow to the anti-vax movement - in that once it is shown that there's no negative consequences of so many people taking a vaccine. E.g. no increase in autism rates. Fingers crossed.

You're assuming facts matter to anti-vaxxers.

It doesn't matter who reports the data. FDA, CDC, some other TLA. Some mommy blog will claim that autism rates are up 25% since we started distributing the COVID vaccines and the anti-vaxxers will eat it right up.

Re: Oxford vaccine shows sustained protection of 76% in 3-month gap til second dose

#100

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

jmorse2 wrote: post #88
Veen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, it was 33 people out of around 50,000 elderly and vulnerable people who were vaccinated. Your source is outdated. Second, it went under the radar because it's probably not attributable to the vaccine. The people who died were over 80 and already extremely frail with pre-existing conditions. They either died from those conditions or from their inability to cope with the mild side-effects of the vaccine, which e…

To reinforce this, one of the statistics that the beeb have wheeled out is that in the most vulnerable group being vaccinated (in the UK), aged 80+, one in ten of them will die regardless of covid in the next year. Quoted from "How to vaccinate the world -- Vaccine Hesitancy" [0] from 12 minutes in to 15 minutes. (And because it's BBC sounds, for some reason it randomly skips episodes when I load the page). The entir…

> the beeb

Never heard this term. From context I'm assuming it's slang for the BBC?

Post reply on HN