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

151–160 of 187 posts

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

#151

Post by neilsense »

renaudg wrote: post #131
toyg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not like Great Britain is an island, after all. :)

Are you being purposefully silly in comparing the UK and NZ? You must realise there is a huge population difference, difference in number of elderly, excellent infrastructure both intra- and inter-city that allows spreading quickly, and between Heathrow + Gatwick, some of the busiest airports in the world that act as a hub between the West and the East.

What the UK has gone through is unique to the UK and it is hard to easily compare it to other countries. It's bad, don't get wrong, and I wish that travel lockdowns would have happened sooner, but let's not ignore a huge amount of relevant data so you can have a dig.

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

#152

Post by neilsense »

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.

Let's not forget it's also essentially been "given" to India so it can be mass-produced cheaply for those countries that can't afford it full cost.

The UK has many issues, and it's gone through a horrible few years but, in the case of the Oxford/Astra Zeneca vaccine specifically, I am incredible proud of what they have done.

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

#153

Post by neilsense »

caffeine wrote: post #29
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.

My perception of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is that their credibility is compromised. I take claims of its efficacy with a similar dose of salt to claims about the Russian and Chinese vaccines. Reason is that early on they were rushing data and approvals on grounds of national pride, in a very similar way to the Chinese and Russian authorities. Pfizer and Moderna seem to have been more thorough.

What you're saying makes no sense. Comparing the UK to China/Russia based on what? We have some of the best research and industrial pharma in the world and we don't hold scientists hostage if they say the wrong things.

What an absolutely ridiculous statement to make. I can only believe you are trolling in some way, or have you own nationalist pride over Pfizer/Moderna.

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

#154

Post by n4r9 »

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.

The UK is still pretty near the top there. What happened to Bulgaria recently?!

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

#155

Post by PJDK »

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…

Portugal is a terrifying example of this. They got through 2020 extremely successfully, but have suddenly been hit extremely hard. They've now had as many deaths in 2021 as they did in all of 2020.

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

#156

Post by fy20 »

bluGill wrote: post #44
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...

Note that deaths are very lagging. It can be a couple months between being exposed to COVID and death, maybe even more as medical science has learned about treating COVID over time. It is reasonable to assume that everyone dieing today got COVID before there was a vaccine, though there have been a few deaths by now that could have been prevented if the first vaccines were not given to someone else (if that person who…

The UK only treats deaths within 28 days of a positive test as a 'COVID death'.

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

#157

Post by timthorn »

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…

> Who were the credible experts who recommended it?

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. Membership listed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/joint-committee-on-vacc...

> What support did they give that it wasn't a pretty big risk?

Analysis available here: https://app.box.com/s/iddfb4ppwkmtjusir2tc/file/759357623956 (via the minutes hyperlink on the JCVI page above)

Relevant conclusion:

"The Committee advises initially prioritising delivery of the first vaccine dose as this is highly likely to have a greater public health impact in the short term and reduce the number of preventable deaths from COVID-19."

>The "herd immunity" strategy was also described as risky by most experts that I saw

Herd immunity was not government policy: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54252272

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

#158

Post by thu2111 »

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…

I feel I just looked into a mirror world that's exactly like the one I live in, except everything is reversed.

The UK started out very briefly with a Sweden-like strategy. We now know the Sweden strategy was correct: their results are in line with the EU average[1] despite a drastically smaller decline in GDP, a much smaller backlog of non-COVID health care problems and of course, a critically higher freedom and quality of life. The UK was 'bounced' into this reversal by its most highly educated people: literally university professors.

Later it turned out that those professors had forced the reversal using a computational model that was filled with mission-critical bugs[2][3]. It was so buggy that it produced totally different predictions every time it was run depending on what CPU architecture executed it and how many threads it used. There were typos in the constants of the hand-rolled PRNG, memory corruption errors in hand-rolled sorting functions and of course the whole thing was impossible to understand, being a single 15,000+ line C file in which basically every variable had a single letter name. The guys behind it were not merely incompetent but knew they were incompetent: the lead author (the notorious Ferguson) told a national newspaper, "For me the code is not a mess, but it's all in my head, completely undocumented. Nobody would be able to use it" [4] as if these statements weren't a contradiction. They brought in developers from GitHub to try and patch the code into an acceptable state before it was released, and then did a git squash to try and hide all the bug fixes.

People who pointed these problems out were told that it didn't matter because none of the models actually mattered - all that mattered was that "Epidemiology is not a branch of computer science and the conclusions around lockdown rely not on any mathematical model but on the scientific consensus" [5]. That is obviously 100% pure pseudo-science.

Some UK ministers and MPs have repeatedly expressed frustration that whenever they try and introduce some perspective, quietly ignore obviously dodgy numbers or reduce the damage of the proposed policies, the "scientists" immediately run to the press and whip up a mob that forces them to obey. Yet these people - the most highly educated of them all - have shown consistently very low standards about everything they are expected to know about.

Vaccines are the first chance we get to see what can happen when the British government is able to tackle something without dodgy epidemiologists constantly fucking everything up. Actual scientists, working in the world of real experiments and trials instead of student-quality C programs pretending to be theories, were paired with the private sector and a government that worked hard to clear obstacles from their path. The results have been extraordinary.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

[2] https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/

[3] https://lockdownsceptics.org/second-analysis-of-fergusons-mo...

[4] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/neil-ferguson-interview-n...

[5] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/coding-led...

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

#159

Post by rich_sasha »

dragontamer wrote: post #141
xvedejas wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first dose prevents hospitalization. Right now, for every second dose we give, that's a decision to deny someone a life-saving dose in favor of someone already protected. What a strange prioritization to make. The bright side is that, if the rate of vaccination continues to increase, those denied the first dose now should still get the first dose soon after. Let's hope we don't hit some manufacturing bottleneck.

> The first dose prevents hospitalization. Right now, for every second dose we give, that's a decision to deny someone a life-saving dose in favor of someone already protected. What a strange prioritization to make. Does 1 dose prevent the spread of COVID19? If it requires 2-doses to get a true "efficacy" (lower spread), then it might be more worthwhile to push 2-doses, rather than 1-dose (where everyone gets "less s…

As for whether 1 dose prevents spreading: for many countries, in particular UK, the current bottleneck is hospital occupancy, and that is overwhelmingly people over 70 - something like 60% IIRC.

If 1 dose, followed by a 2nd some time, can cut that number down a lot (some people won't get Covid, and few will get a bad one), hospitals can be freed and start returning to their usual work - cancer treatments etc. That's a big win. I think it's still the case that more people die of cancer than of Covid.

But that said, I also worry whether the vaccines will work with the longer spacing - I hope results like this show us they would.

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

#160

Post by nicoburns »

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…

> As I recall there was some serious doubt about whether anyone would get benefit 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.

It certainly wasn't known. And scientists used to working with statistically significant proof rightly called that out. That said, my understanding is that it works this way for most (but not all) vaccines. So unlike some of the other UK government decisions, it was a somewhat reasonable gamble with quite a high likelihood of working out.

The upside is being vaccinate twice as quickly (esp. valuable early on when supply is constrained).

Post reply on HN