491–500 of 1001 posts
It’s crazy that money is such a huge incentive. Knowing that a cure for Covid is a potentially $100B market means you throw the kitchen sink at it. Imagine being this lab. Do you think they ever had trouble hiring an assistant? Buying new equipment? Getting bonuses? This environment must be fantastically different from the typical meat grinder of bio R&D.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a politician hired a hundred vendors to send direct mailings, and one of them used forged stamps, would it be fair to say the politician used forged stamps?
This is more like.. what if you're a food manufacturer and find out the food was contaminated. Do you keep shipping it to recoup costs and stay quiet, or do you come clean and risk the negative PR?
The worst case scenario here is ~1,200 out of 44,000 trial participants in three out of 153 trial sites may have had bad data. I would hope that Pfizer and the FDA are double-checking the data from that vendor (and I strongly suspect that one vendor with aberrant data versus the rest of them is already something they keep an eye out for).
We've subsequently given (and monitored for the same sort of issues we look for in these trials) hundreds of millions of doses of the vaccine successfully.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's just it, there's less than a 2% chance of dying even if you get COVID.
If you die of Covid, your loved ones will not care if the chance of that happening was low. You won't care either, you'll be dead. All it really takes is that one previously-undiagnosed comorbidity to put you in the front of a the line for a casket-fitting even if you're young(-ish). If you survive but get permanent damage e.g. due to the blood clots that a lot of COVID patients develop, or due to the side effects of…
Personally I don't believe that we are living in a rational society right now. For the fun of it, maybe I'll figure out one of those browser plugins to replace the word "science" with "propaganda".
It’s crazy that money is such a huge incentive. Knowing that a cure for Covid is a potentially $100B market means you throw the kitchen sink at it. Imagine being this lab. Do you think they ever had trouble hiring an assistant? Buying new equipment? Getting bonuses? This environment must be fantastically different from the typical meat grinder of bio R&D.
You wouldn't believe it, but no one wanted to make a good hip broach to fix grandma. It took athlete injury repair R&D money to make that happen.
> Pfizer’s phase 2/3 trial randomized non-hospitalized adult COVID-19 patients who were at high risk of progressing to severe illness to receive placebo or Paxlovid, a combination of the protease inhibitors PF-07321332 and ritonavir. The efficacy analysis is based on 1,219 patients. One noteworthy feature is the newness of this drug: > PF-07321332 was developed from scratch during the current pandemic. It’s a reversi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> some assholes will use it as an excuse not to get vaxxed Well, they've succeeded in holding out long enough, now that there's no longer a good reason to get vaxxed. Because, as most people are starting to realize, the pandemic is over (at least in the US).
1500 deaths a day, how is the pandemic over?
Does anyone have a sense as to when US society will completely eliminate COVID measures? Is it just me or is there no clear exit criteria anymore? This will go on forever without exit criteria.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data shows that being vaccinated divides your odds of dying and being hospitalized from covid by about 10. There's no evidence I'm aware of showing that the vaccines create additional risk anywhere close to outweighing that benefit.
Don’t mistake relative risk for absolute risk. Not everyone who is vaccinated gets Covid, but everyone vaccinated is at risk of vaccine side effects. If a 30 year old has a 0.08% chance of hospitalization, the risk drops to 0.008%. But they might stand a 1 in 5 chance of getting infected so now it’s 0.016% to 0.0016%. But if they get injected with a vaccine, the risk of a rare side effect might be 1 in 100,000 or 0.0…
> Pfizer’s phase 2/3 trial randomized non-hospitalized adult COVID-19 patients who were at high risk of progressing to severe illness to receive placebo or Paxlovid, a combination of the protease inhibitors PF-07321332 and ritonavir. The efficacy analysis is based on 1,219 patients. One noteworthy feature is the newness of this drug: > PF-07321332 was developed from scratch during the current pandemic. It’s a reversi…
>Less than two years from lab to clinic is highly unusual. I assume like most other COVID vaccines/treatments, the timeline is shrunk by going straight to more expensive phases of the trial instead of having preliminary ones of escalating cost and confidence. Or at least prepping for them. For instance, all the vaccines started setting up commercial production around the same time they started trials, because it's no…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious. No, 5 miles means you have a different government with a different policy response. (The difference itself doesn't justify either side.) That's just inherent in the existence of political borders.
I appreciate you explaining that.. allow me to explain something to you. The parent statement was not literal, making your expansion meaningless and honestly a little stunning.
Correct. Instead it was agenda driven sarcasm, which while not forbidden on HN, adds nothing to, and always lowers the quality of discussion.
Rather than take the emotional bait and be sarcastic in return, the person who responded pointed out the misrepresentation that was behind the sarcasm, which is the most civil way to address it.
Their response was far more measured and constructive than the "take it to Reddit" response that the parent comment type usually elicits. There was absolutely nothing stunning about it - rather it was a standard civil response method in a debate whose civility has been lowered through sarcasm.