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EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry

reuters.com

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Re: EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry

#151

Post by incrudible »

ericb wrote: post #61
seriousquestion wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long Covid is mostly self reported vague symptoms, namely fatigue and brain fog. It's what happens when you stay at home too much and don't get enough exercise and have a poor diet. Isolation? The Covid 15* that many of us packed on? You will feel worse and especially more fatigued, no doubt. Not to mention being constantly immersed in an environment of fear. It's a misattribution to associate side effects of weight…

Source? Yesterday I met a woman whose husband has lost his sense of smell for 4+ months and still has not regained it. My lungs still hurt sometimes on deep breaths 6 months later.

We'd have to distinguish between physical symptoms that are well-known long-term effects of viral infections and psychosomatic disorders that may be triggered without any infection whatsoever.

Losing your sense of smell, even permanently, is a known side-effect of Influenza infection:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23948436/

The same is true for many inflammatory conditions, such as myocarditis.

As for diffuse symptoms that are most likely psychosomatic: Look into ME/CFS. These are patients which may have a very real perception of debilitating symptoms that have no tangible underlying physical cause. There's a lot of misguided activism surrounding the topic, because people don't want to be perceived as having a mental disorder, due to the associated stigma.

Re: EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry

#152

Post by JamisonM »

polack wrote: post #91
boringg wrote: post #55

Seems short sighted to me given we don't know efficacy against the variants. If I were in the contractual chair I'd keep all my options on the table, we aren't out of this yet. assuming this is true, as opposed to some kind of way to leverage better terms out of a deal

The EU have options to buy 100 million doses of AZ vaccine for 2022, but they need to make up their minds now if they want them or not. With AZ's history of not delivering on time I think this is a no-brainer, especially since we don't know if the AZ vaccine will work on the new Covid variants. Why pour more money down the AZ drain when we have better alternatives?

It is a no-brainer to spend this money.

Someone in the world is going to have a use for these vaccines, buy them and then give them away if you don't need them in the end but in the meantime just book more supply. 18 months from now if the world is flushing COVID-19 vaccines down toilets due to surpluses every dollar will have been worth spending, the downsides are too great.

Re: EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry

#153

Post by 8note »

jleyank wrote: post #36

Probably every drug has risks, many higher than the 1:1,000,000 reported for AZ/J&J. It's always a balance between the risk untreated vs. treated - many cancer drugs will kill you, but slower than they kill the cancer. Contraceptives have various issues, but their "social good" is deemed worthwhile. I've read that they are doing gene analysis to try and determine why these cases appear - is it gender, age, cross-reac…

Does the calculus change based in how many people you'll be giving this to?

A 1:1M chance is much different to me if you give it to 3 people or 2 Billion

Re: EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry

#154

Post by JamisonM »

rossdavidh wrote: post #67

Even if true (and apparently some German officials are saying it isn't), the contracts go through the end of 2021 is my understanding, so that makes these announcements a bit less significant than the headlines suggests. To be honest, it seems like there is an argument to be made that the rich countries _should_ stop buying the J&J and AZ vaccines, except perhaps to donate to poorer countries, because the mRNA vaccin…

The rich countries shouldn't stop buying they should buy and give away for sure. Not some strings-attached bullshit but just straight-up dropping refrigerated containers of them at airports.

Politics is unfortunately going to get in the way of that.

Re: EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry

#155

Post by sokoloff »

8note wrote: post #153
jleyank wrote: post #36

Probably every drug has risks, many higher than the 1:1,000,000 reported for AZ/J&J. It's always a balance between the risk untreated vs. treated - many cancer drugs will kill you, but slower than they kill the cancer. Contraceptives have various issues, but their "social good" is deemed worthwhile. I've read that they are doing gene analysis to try and determine why these cases appear - is it gender, age, cross-reac…

Does the calculus change based in how many people you'll be giving this to? A 1:1M chance is much different to me if you give it to 3 people or 2 Billion

I don't think it's different based directly on that, but rather based on something which is strongly related to that.

If you're giving a chemotherapy drug to patients with advanced cancer, 1 in 10⁶ is perfectly acceptable. But it's acceptable because the do-nothing course is probably worse. Even serious, chronic pain relief I'd consider 1 in 10⁶ to be a good tradeoff.

With vaccines, you're taking healthy people with no acute condition and exposing them so the do-nothing course is much better than the cancer case.

Those differences of course drive the "do we give it to 3 people or 2 Billion people?" decision, but it's not directly the breadth but the underlying reason for the breadth that make me think differently about the acceptable risk level. If 2 Billion people had cancer or serious, chronic pain, I'd be in favor of giving them a drug which would cure 999,999 of them for every 1 that it killed.

Re: EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry

#156

Post by hyko »

syntaxing wrote: post #39

Seems like mRNA vaccines is winning the the race against other emerging technology like viral vector. If we manage to figure out the nanolipids to live in better temperature conditions, mRNA will change our generation.

Viral vectors have been around since the 1970s.

The mRNA tech feels like a glimpse of the future, let’s hope they can iron out some of the teething problems (e.g. anaphylactic shock, absurd storage requirements).

Re: EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry

#157

Post by vanattab »

petre wrote: post #150
josefx wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might just be the straw that broke the camels back. As far as I remember the contracts the EU signed turned out to be incredibly one sided, with deliveries getting cut down when someone found out that more dosages could be extracted, no hard delivery requirements leading to constant shortages, etc. . Not getting out of that mess when alternatives exist seems like a bad idea.

This is very likely a political decision. AZ has not honoured their "best effort" contract obligations, the company priortized UK deliveries to honour their other contract and Western Europeans are reluctant to take it because it's less well tolerated than mRNA vaccines and now the very rare blood clot issues. It's too bad, because vaccination rollouts are well behind schedule with less than 10% or so of the EU popul…

What do you mean "first AZ" shot? The AZ vaccine is "one and done" is it not?

Re: EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry

#158

Post by dragonwriter »

vanattab wrote: post #157
petre wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very likely a political decision. AZ has not honoured their "best effort" contract obligations, the company priortized UK deliveries to honour their other contract and Western Europeans are reluctant to take it because it's less well tolerated than mRNA vaccines and now the very rare blood clot issues. It's too bad, because vaccination rollouts are well behind schedule with less than 10% or so of the EU popul…

What do you mean "first AZ" shot? The AZ vaccine is "one and done" is it not?

No, AZ is two-dose, J&J is one-and-done.

Re: EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry

#159

Post by ssdspoimdsjvv »

vanattab wrote: post #157
petre wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very likely a political decision. AZ has not honoured their "best effort" contract obligations, the company priortized UK deliveries to honour their other contract and Western Europeans are reluctant to take it because it's less well tolerated than mRNA vaccines and now the very rare blood clot issues. It's too bad, because vaccination rollouts are well behind schedule with less than 10% or so of the EU popul…

What do you mean "first AZ" shot? The AZ vaccine is "one and done" is it not?

No, that's J&J.

Re: EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry

#160

Post by tpm »

andy_ppp wrote: post #130
tpm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Danish Health Authority said studies had shown a higher than expected frequency of blood clots following doses, affecting about one in 40,000 people." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56744474

It's a weird one isn't it - 1/40,000 but they only gave 150,000 doses out. This seems like the error bars on this would be huge - we've seen in the UK very few of these events with millions vaccinated which is pretty strange. Is there something different about Denmark and Britain at this time of year? I've had the AZ vaccine 1st dose 3 weeks ago now and I keep getting very concerned by the ever changing picture; is i…

I think they have also used Norway's numbers.

As to the difference, maybe they first vaccinated health professionals with AZ and UK mostly vaccinated older people with it, so different issues became apparent? It affects mostly younger women, so it would manifest pretty clearly with female nurses.

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