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

121–130 of 187 posts

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

#121

Post by refurb »

harry8 wrote: post #98
adventured wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does the FDA approving a vaccine help vaccinate people outside the US?

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

#122

Post by phatfish »

mchusma wrote: post #91
alistairSH wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

It's not a hit piece. There was a mistake during the trial with dosage, and instead of coming clean in their main announcement and explaining what happened it was obfuscated by the "half dose" story. This just caused confusion and provided ammunition for critics.

It's great the vaccine is as effective and safe as predicted, but fumbling the most important clinical trial in the companies history reflected very poorly on their competence.

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

#123

Post by Diggsey »

phatfish wrote: post #116
chrisseaton wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can be a challenge to see how the UK government could have dealt with this worse. For example they could have delayed ordering vaccines, like the Europeans have.

Yup, messing up both would have been catastrophic. Just a shame it took so many deaths for the UK government to wake up. If saving lives is the end goal then countries that took it seriously from the start and had a competent strategy for social distancing and containment are still better off. Barely a month ago Boris was promising a normal Christmas.

The UK government did a lot wrong, but we still don't know what a "competent strategy for social distancing and containment" actually looks like.

Half the time we look at a country as being a good example of this, things fall apart within a few weeks... When a single person can infect hunreds of others, or none, there's a lot of randomness that models cannot easily account for. There are still a large number of infections where we don't know how the person was infected.

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

#124

Post by harry8 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #117
harry8 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>to be fair ...taking a flyer on an utterly unproven vaccination strategy was a huge, huge risk and had it not come off there would be no vaccination strategy. Relying on being lucky doesn't seem like a "spot on" strategy to me. "We gambled everything on red it and came up so we deserve credit for the strategy." edit: This is in relation to the additional time between first and second jabs that was untested in the st…

When they do badly you say it's because of their incompetence. When they do well you still say it's because of their incompetence. At every turn they’ve had credible expert advice telling them to do contradictory things. They’ve had to use judgement. If only they had the sense to use hindsight, like you.

The UK's has been a gambler's strategy, for mine, seat-of-the-pants I'm-feeling-lucky stuff. This "win" does not compensate the losses nor justify the strategy. The win here is "the decision outcome has not been smashed by a possible downside."

There were rather a lot of people suggesting that doing an unproven vaccine strategy of getting the maximum number of people their first vaccine and a longer period between first and second that had not yet been trialed, at all as a thing that was risky. People said it in advance. Who were the credible experts who recommended it? What support did they give that it wasn't a pretty big risk? If there was some and I missed it I'll put my hand up and say I was wrong. As I recall there was some serious doubt about whether anyone would get benfit from vaccination at all. Again if it was /known/ that it was likely to work that's not a bad decision - but I haven't seen that analysis. Have you? Please do link it if you have. I'm also not clear about what the upside for running that risk was. Are there better results for people contracting covid after only one jab? Do we have data? Or was that a flyer that it might turn out to be? Any links you have with an analysis of that is welcome.

The "herd immunity" strategy was also described as risky by most experts that I saw. I think the word I used when looking at it, in advance of the numbers coming in was "insane," while being well aware there was at least a nonzero chance it could work better than the conservative approach. To say it has not come off is an understatement. If it did come off somehow due to dumb luck it would have been equally terrible decision making. It's too big a risk to take, the downside is immense.

It is reasonable to criticise a risk-loving gambling strategy for a nation's health whether it comes off or not. I criticisised it before and after and I criticisise it when it comes off and when it doesn't. By contrast a considered and careful strategy is to be commended even if it turned out to be incorrect based on subsequently available facts.

This is literally gambling on uncertain outcomes with people's lives and health. You want to do that as sensibly as you can. You want the analysis. You want it public. You're paying the downside. Getting lucky to get results out of bad decisions does NOT make a decision a good one.

But hey, take the thing as a whole. Has it been good, covid management in the UK or not? It's worthwhile analysing what when wrong and why and how that compared with other, differing strategies. Taiwan's looked pretty good initially and continues to. South Korea and Japan looked to have pretty good strategies and continue to. New Zealand and Australia had very different strategies to the UK.

It's entirely reasonable to criticise a gambling addict's decision making when they bet the rent check and the bet wins.

I hope that makes the point clearer for you, please disagree if you like but it should be clear that hindsight has nothing whatever to do with the criticisim.

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

#125

Post by ineedasername »

ummonk wrote: post #103
strstr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the lack of certainty. Most suspect that you won't lose protection by waiting longer than the suggested timeline, but what you really don't want to do is sleep-walk into throwing away the currently administered doses. Frustratingly, I'm guessing the timelines for a study on the durability of single dose moderna/pfizer would take about as long as it will take to ramp up production.

That's not how the immune system works though; you aren't "throwing away" the currently administered doses if you wait until after immunity declines to give the booster dose. Unless this virus is magically different from every other virus we create a vaccine for, waiting longer for the booster will create a better / longer-lasting immunity afterwards.

No, some vaccines wear off relatively quickly: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/how-long-do-vaccines...

So it's very important to follow the protocol here as much as possible until we know otherwise.

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

#126

Post by harry8 »

Diggsey wrote: post #123
phatfish wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, messing up both would have been catastrophic. Just a shame it took so many deaths for the UK government to wake up. If saving lives is the end goal then countries that took it seriously from the start and had a competent strategy for social distancing and containment are still better off. Barely a month ago Boris was promising a normal Christmas.

The UK government did a lot wrong, but we still don't know what a "competent strategy for social distancing and containment" actually looks like. Half the time we look at a country as being a good example of this, things fall apart within a few weeks... When a single person can infect hunreds of others, or none, there's a lot of randomness that models cannot easily account for. There are still a large number of infec…

#nzhellhole looks pretty competent to me. Does it not to you? The UK dreams about having a day as good as their biggest disaster. They were very, very conservative in their approach.

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

#127

Post by renaudg »

harry8 wrote: post #94
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 de…

> "It's a highly educated population that has put the brakes on the most destructive policies from the very start."

Anecdote : I live near a busy high street in London and went out for my daily lockdown exercise at around 6pm today.

About 10% of the "highly educated population", as you say, was wearing a mask. Even more worrying, if you looked through the windows of estate agencies and other such ""essential"" shops, it was exactly 0% indoors.

To people outside the UK reading this : supermarkets here have only made face coverings mandatory a couple of weeks ago ("unless you tell us you're exempt", of course) because the government finally asked them nicely to.

All these months, their CEOs have been emailing us bullshit newsletters about how "your safety is important to us in these unprecedented times", and to that effect they were politely asking customers to "keep your distance" and "wash your hands" and "follow local guidance about face coverings" (i.e. "none"). Meanwhile their employees were free to spend their whole shift unmasked and potentially filling the air with virus, getting their colleagues and customers sick : that was totally cool. And no mention of any effort regarding store ventilation or aerosol risk either.

There is no enforcement of lockdown whatsoever, except for the most egregious cases of partying. It all seems to be based on a gentlemen's agreement, except there seems to be very few gentlemen left indeed. It is all so hypocritical.

This situation is in stark contrast with what I hear from friends & family on the continent. Last time I was in Paris for instance, mask adherence was probably 80% in the street and 99% inside shops. And the French are not exactly known to be fond of rules.

So yeah, B.1.1.7 probably didn't help, the government has probably f**d up on everything except the vaccination programme, but the behaviour of the population alone is in my view, more than enough to explain the terrible UK death/cases figures.

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

#128

Post by toyg »

harry8 wrote: post #126
Diggsey wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK government did a lot wrong, but we still don't know what a "competent strategy for social distancing and containment" actually looks like. Half the time we look at a country as being a good example of this, things fall apart within a few weeks... When a single person can infect hunreds of others, or none, there's a lot of randomness that models cannot easily account for. There are still a large number of infec…

#nzhellhole looks pretty competent to me. Does it not to you? The UK dreams about having a day as good as their biggest disaster. They were very, very conservative in their approach.

NZ is easy mode though. They are not a nexus of international travel and commerce, and their border is quite hard (an ocean). They did well, for sure, but the UK or any other European country could not have followed the exact same strategy - except maybe Iceland or Far Oer.

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

#129

Post by harry8 »

phatfish wrote: post #119
harry8 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>to be fair ...taking a flyer on an utterly unproven vaccination strategy was a huge, huge risk and had it not come off there would be no vaccination strategy. Relying on being lucky doesn't seem like a "spot on" strategy to me. "We gambled everything on red it and came up so we deserve credit for the strategy." edit: This is in relation to the additional time between first and second jabs that was untested in the st…

To produce the vaccine so fast that had to be done. The issues European production partners (one in Belgium I think) are suffering with the AstraZeneca vaccine are similar to those already solved at the UK production sites months ago because of the risk taken to start production early. Each production facility can have unique issues that effect yield that simply need time to resolve. Maybe AstraZeneca over promised,…

I think we're talking about different things here.

The unproven strategy that I meant was the one where a longer period ellapses between first and second jabs than had ever been tested. This new data is the test and shows that we probably don't now need to be concerned about that as we did when the strategy was first decided on and implemented.

The conservative approach would have been to ensure everyone got 2 jabs with the elapsed time between them the amount of time that had been tested until this data came in to show that a longer period would actually still work.

I don't know what the advantage of more people with a single jab is. Does anyone? Are you less likely to die? Or we hope so but don't have the data yet - the other leg of this bet so to speak.

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

#130

Post by chrisseaton »

harry8 wrote: post #124
chrisseaton wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they do badly you say it's because of their incompetence. When they do well you still say it's because of their incompetence. At every turn they’ve had credible expert advice telling them to do contradictory things. They’ve had to use judgement. If only they had the sense to use hindsight, like you.

The UK's has been a gambler's strategy, for mine, seat-of-the-pants I'm-feeling-lucky stuff. This "win" does not compensate the losses nor justify the strategy. The win here is "the decision outcome has not been smashed by a possible downside." There were rather a lot of people suggesting that doing an unproven vaccine strategy of getting the maximum number of people their first vaccine and a longer period between fi…

> By contrast a considered and careful strategy is to be commended even if it turned out to be incorrect based on subsequently available facts.

But the EU also gambled - they gambled that more time thinking would pay off, and it didn't. I think this is where you're going wrong with your argument: spending more time for care and consideration is also a gamble.

How do you know how much care and consideration is the right amount? Is more care and consideration always better? Would it be better to still be considering whether to buy any vaccine at this stage? Would you commend that? No, obviously not. So at some point more care and consideration is bad, and you can't just say 'more care and consideration please' forever. At some point you need to apply judgement to stop considering and act. That's a judgement. That's a gamble. It's a gamble to stop considering your situation and it's a gamble to keep considering your situation.

Both the UK and the EU took a gamble. The EU gambled that more consideration was better and they were wrong.

So everyone's a gambler, if you want to look at it like that. But one gambler had better judgement than the other.

Post reply on HN