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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

#201

Post by jean_tta »

incrudible wrote: post #200
jean_tta wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I apologize for not being American and the press in my country costing money. I'll try to do better next time. I note that your link astablishes that long covid is the thing, which the parent comment denies.

> I apologize for not being American... There's nothing wrong with not being American. You should apologize for being French. > ...and the press in my country costing money. Indeed, it's absurd to charge money for articles written in French. They should pay you for reading them. > I note that your link astablishes that long covid is the thing, which the parent comment denies. Nobody in this thread denies that it exis…

> It's what happens when you stay at home too much and don't get enough exercise and have a poor diet.

Surely this means that "long covid" is not caused by the coronavirus infection itself, but by staying at home too much and a poor diet and not enough exercise. Is that not what this meant?

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

#202

Post by incrudible »

jean_tta wrote: post #201
incrudible wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I apologize for not being American... There's nothing wrong with not being American. You should apologize for being French. > ...and the press in my country costing money. Indeed, it's absurd to charge money for articles written in French. They should pay you for reading them. > I note that your link astablishes that long covid is the thing, which the parent comment denies. Nobody in this thread denies that it exis…

> It's what happens when you stay at home too much and don't get enough exercise and have a poor diet. Surely this means that "long covid" is not caused by the coronavirus infection itself, but by staying at home too much and a poor diet and not enough exercise. Is that not what this meant?

It is true that many "long covid" symptoms are vague symptoms like fatigue, it also true that many who self-report "long covid" never had a positive COVID test.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/these-patients-tested-ne...

It is also true that staying at home and listening to media dramatizations causes stress, which can cause the aforementioned symptoms.

So, if you put two and two together, you may come to the conclusion that many or even most "long covid" cases are psychosomatic and not caused by the virus itself, even in those people who actually were infected.

Like I said, this needs to be differentiated from symptoms that are clinically verifiable long-term effects of respiratory illness and viral infection.

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

#203

Post by shlant »

imchillyb wrote: post #115
shlant wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

although we do not have data yet to show if there are any side effects 1+ years after vaccination, it would be very unlikely that there would be. Serious side effects from vaccines are almost always immediate and seen within a few weeks after administration, not months or years later. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....

Almost one-third of new drugs approved by the FDA ended up years later with warnings about unexpected, sometimes life-threatening side effects. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/new-drugs-found-c... Your supposition about likelihood bears no resemblance to reality. It's almost as if you're misleading people on purpose. I certainly hope that's not the case. Fully 1/3 of all medications approved by the FDA tur…

we are not talking about new drugs in general - we are talking specifically about vaccines. Here is an opportunity to easily prove your point: show me significant examples of serious side effects from vaccines 6+ months after they were administered.

It's clear with statements like "This new Covid Vaccine is not a true vaccine" that you are just parroting anti-vax talking points. Nobody changed the definition of vaccines and mRNA vaccines fit the definition no matter how you describe them

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-latest-antivax-false-cl...

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

#204

Post by shlant »

bmj wrote: post #117
shlant wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes you are correct that we don't really know until we know, but there is good reason to believe that mRNA vaccines are actually safer than traditional methods https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/multimedia-article/were-be... This seems to be at least partially supported by the current risks in regards to currently available non-mRNA vaccines (such as AZ). Also I'm not really sure what saying "we don't know the long te…

Also I'm not really sure what saying "we don't know the long term effect are" accomplishes. It's not really adding much to the conversation. You are making the claim that there may not be any long term effects to the vaccine, but the information you cite has nothing to do with mRNA-based vaccines. I'm simply suggesting we don't have the data yet to make such claims.

the link I posted was to provide a list of known vaccine adverse reaction events throughout history to show that none of them occurred months after vaccination. Adverse events are almost always acute so the fact that we haven't seen widespread serious side effects after 6+ months means they are very likely incredibly safe.

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

#205

Post by Izkata »

gnfargbl wrote: post #83
quantgenius wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Population level studies on the effectiveness of the AZ vaccine everywhere but the UK would seem to show it is barely effective or ineffective. This is blatantly untrue. Here is a US study: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04516746 . The US NIH is reporting 78.9% efficacy against symptomatic disease and 100% efficacy in preventing severe or critical disease and hospitalization: https://www.nih.gov/news-events…

"Barely effective" (specifically against the local variant) is why South Africa stopped using AstraZeneca:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-safric...

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2102214?query=fe...

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

#206

Post by tertius »

elliekelly wrote: post #10
tertius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ending a contract would encourage them to do more R&D for more future contracts. Don't subsidize drugs/vaccines that don't work. There are 100+ vaccines being worked on. We're fine.

> Don't subsidize drugs/vaccines that don't work. Why not? Funding vaccine research seems a worthy endeavor even if some of the research doesn’t pan out. The end result doesn’t need to be an immediately usable vaccine in order for the time & money spent to be worthwhile. Even a completely failed vaccine project could yield a piece of information that helps ensure the next project doesn’t fail.

> Why not?

Because money is finite? Not every research grant gets funded. So let's start with the most promising ones?

Funding vaccines that are not meeting standards should be dropped so that standards can be met. These companies don't need money for R&D, they have enough and can recoup it if they create a product that the market wants.

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

#207

Post by JamisonM »

guitarbill wrote: post #184
JamisonM wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

COVAX is a thing, so there's hope. But even the usual politics aside, it's going to be a hard sell if you can't even get your own population vaccinated quickly and safely. Also, let's be realistic here - there's more to vaccine distribution than just dropping refrigerated containers of perishable vaccines off. I get the intention of the sentence, but just giving away doses is not in itself a recipe for success or hel…

Giving away vaccines is a necessary if not sufficient condition for success, we can pile on additional conditions to the point of paralysis if we want.. but bottom-line, there are hundreds of millions if not billions of people who want vaccines that can't get them... roll those shots out!

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

#208

Post by SamReidHughes »

agubelu wrote: post #169
SamReidHughes wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charging money allows higher risk people to purchase it.

How exactly is selling vaccines directly to private citizens going to fix the underlying issue, which is insufficient production?

When dealing with complex dynamical systems (such as markets), you don't get exact answers. You get general phenomena which require intelligence to understand.

But in this case, the answer's very simple, and in my opinion, very obvious: High-risk people value the vaccine more, and allocating a proportion to the open market gives them the option of paying for one instead of having to wait for government permission. This is a first-order effect, not even a second-order effect.

The second-order effect would have been that more people might have been incentivized to create a vaccine if you opened the door for more profits. Right now there are lots of individuals throughout the world who don't have access to a vaccine.

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

#209

Post by quantgenius »

gnfargbl wrote: post #83
quantgenius wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Population level studies on the effectiveness of the AZ vaccine everywhere but the UK would seem to show it is barely effective or ineffective. This is blatantly untrue. Here is a US study: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04516746 . The US NIH is reporting 78.9% efficacy against symptomatic disease and 100% efficacy in preventing severe or critical disease and hospitalization: https://www.nih.gov/news-events…

If the data are so good, why hasn't the vaccine been approved. Mainly because it's not clear that you could replicate these results, partly because of how the data was analyzed, partly because of how the experiment was run, partly because AZ has (and openly admitted) been p-hacking their results.

If you are looking for 95% significance and you test something ineffective 20 times, you should expect to get one significant result.

AZ and the Oxford team openly did this this prior to this trial and actually admitted to it in a press conference. In fact they not only released data only from some trials but they only released some of the data from some of the trials.

In the real world, where you look at results from any trial in the context of other trials and available data, these results are not credible.

The AZ, PFE and MRNA vaccines were designed to combat the original virus. PFE and MRNA were over 95% effective in trials where they were tested against only the original strain but only about 90% effective against a mix of the new strains and the old strain that exists now. PFE and MRNA and all vaccines in general are somewhat less effective in over 65s. AZ was only 65% effective against the original strain in a population which included no over 65s in the original trials and the data from these trials were p-hacked and so almost certainly overstated effectiveness. AZ would have you believe that their vaccine is now magically 10% more effective in an environment where the variants are circulating and the 20% of the tested population is over 65. This when, real-world large scale population level data in populations where it's been widely used shows an effectiveness nowhere near that.

Also remember, this is in a context where they have openly, in a press conference admitted to p-hacking. The head of the Oxford team actually, for real, insisted that if the vaccine efficacy is seems significant in a sub-sample of the tested population at any point before the trial endpoint, it's effective even if it's not significant in the entire population at any point or not significant at the endpoint. There is something like a 70% chance that if you used his criteria, a saline injection would seem to be effective.

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