151–160 of 569 posts
I think I read (and I may be wrong) that the costs for the vaccines per dose were roughly as follows: Moderna: £45, Pfizer: £20, Oxford: £3, The Oxford one is also easier to store and transport.
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Google claims that the smallpox vaccine was somewhere between 90-97% effective (they didnt do fully controlled studies back in the day) Keep in mind, that controlling covid is a giant win. We don't need to eradicate it, just get things under control.
> We don't need to eradicate it, just get things under control Based on what we've seen there is no grey area. Either you fully control it which then ends up basically eradicating it e.g. Australia/NZ or you don't and then you end up like EU/US and going in and out of infection waves.
Anything that reduces the R rate sufficiently will mean fewer outbreaks and reduce the strain on the hospital system.
While we now get the results from various COVID-19 vaccines I see a societal issue brewing up. How will we deal with the perceived uncertainty of the safety of these vaccines and the surrounding (dis-)infodemic? I read recently that in some European country (was it Germany?) the willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19 went down from 80% to 60%. With these numbers policy makers will have a hard time convincing the b…
I think getting people vaccinated is going to be a huge challenge.
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This vaccine is an inactive host virus whose payload has been replaced by the coronavirus "spike". It has always been a worry that the body will generate immunity to the host virus and thus make the vaccine less effective. That is a likely explanation for the first-full-dose regimen being less effective.
Shouldn't it warrant a research if even smaller dose has even higher efficiency?
Title is misleading. They tested few configurations, we should use the most optimal one, not the average. Much better source: https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020... Good: + likely 90% effective if we use optimal dosing + no significant side effective. Looks better than Pfizer or Moderna. + already pre-produced at huge scale, 3 Bln doses in 2021 + easy to store and administer, just regular fri…
Interesting its cheaper than mRNA, i thought that was one of the benefits of using mRNA, was that it was supposed to be cheaper to manufacture.
I don't know the economics here, but I would assume that cost advantages are much more likely to appear for small-scale products here than what we have now, producing a billion doses in large factories.
The key differentiator here is the storage requirements (2-8c ‘normal refrigerator’). That’s much more accessible to developing / low GDP countries as opposed the cumbersome and expensive storage requirements of the other two.
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I dont think its true that smallpox is 100% effective
It isn't. It is comparable to the measles vaccine. Smallpox has a lot lower R-value which means the vaccine is very good at preventing outbreaks. A vaccinated individual will also have milder symptoms. Together with how rare adverse reactions are to the vaccination, the smallpox vaccine is really a wonder.
Higher R0 means you need a greater percentage vaccinated population to achieve herd immunity
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Maybe for less developed countries, but i think for major economies, the price difference is insignificant relative to the benefits of any vaccine.
If they actually get to 90% or more, why would anyone bother with the more expensive and cumbersome vaccines? Except that the EU already signed a deal to buy the vaccines from AstraZeneca, Sanofi and Johnson & Johnson.