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Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

reuters.com

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Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#171

Post by [deleted] »

apexalpha wrote: post #149
landryl wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it needed to hold the patent to be profitable as a manufacturer ? If the research has been already paid out, I'd prefer healthy competition.

Just because they hold the patent doesn't mean they won't license it out. We're talking about the entire world here. I know a lot of people, Americans in particular, are weary of 'big pharma' and for-profit healthcare. And Americans have good reason for that mistrust. But this isn't just an American issue. Other governments such as the EU and India will force their hand if needed for the public good. As they've done…

[deleted]

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#172

Post by jlokier »

dogma1138 wrote: post #138
jlokier wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I guess the thought is that a really unlucky evolutionary accident would be when the other virus capable of replicating and the vaccine meet in a body, and by chance transfer some of those instructions across. I presume that's rare or never seen, but I don't know, and (with a safety-engineering mindset on) I'd automatically consider that a "chance" unless it is ruled out by something.

Anything can happen however we've been using weakened, inactivated and closely related viruses in vaccines for a long time now without any such natural selection accidents occurring.

From Wikipedia under "attenuated vaccine" (which I know this is not):

> In extremely rare cases, natural mutations can cause a reversion to virulence. In this case, the virus can revert to wild type or develop into an entirely new strain.

Now, the Oxford vaccine is not an attenuated virus as is usually meant by that term.

On the other hand, it's not the same as an "inactivated virus" vaccine type either, where a virus is broken apart.

It's a different sort which doesn't fall into either of those categories. It's described as a "weaken adenovirus" and "replication-deficient" because of replication genes being deleted, and spike protein coding added. (There's no coronavirus at all, just the spike protein. This is completely different from other vaccines.)

The replication-deficient adenovirus has been studied thoroughly, not just for Covid but earlier as well. There are good reasons they selected it.

I will certainly take that vaccine when it's available, if that counts as any sort of endorsement.

I have high confidence in the people engineering and studying it. (I'm in Oxford, btw ;-) But can you really generalise the observations of inactivated virus vaccines to this relatively new kind? I think no, it has to be studied and monitored with care. Thankfully, I think they are doing exactly that.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#173

Post by bufferoverflow »

JshWright wrote: post #157
bufferoverflow wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patent protects from somebody simply copying the formula. Which is many orders of magnitude cheaper than doing research and development, especially on human subjects.

Why does that matter if the research and development costs were publicly funded?

Because they can and it will make them a ton of money.

The laws need to change.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#174

Post by coldpie »

throwaway4good wrote: post #66

All these hundreds of vaccines that are being developed; are they all triggering the same immune response?

Back in May, Ars Technica did a really great overview of how each of the various types of vaccines work. It's very much worth reading. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/the-ars-covid-19-vac...

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#176

Post by ageitgey »

senko wrote: post #76
ageitgey wrote: post #69

A quick summary of were the Oxford vaccine stands since it's hard to follow: - When will the vaccine be ready? After the Phase 3 efficacy data is reported, assuming that the data shows that the vaccine prevents COVID or reduces COVID severity. This happens after enough people in the trial get sick with COVID. Then they unblind the groups and see if the people who got sick were in the control group or the vaccinated g…

Thank you for volunteering and putting your health on the line for the benefit of us all. Even if the risk is small, it takes courage. I'm assuming you also don't know if you got the active substance or a placebo?

> I'm assuming you also don't know if you got the active substance or a placebo?

Yep. In the UK, they used an existing, unrelated vaccine with similar side effects as the control so it wasn't obvious which one you got. In some countries and for some of the other vaccine trials, they are just using saline as the control so it seems like a lot of those people would know.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#177

Post by tgb »

krona wrote: post #155
input_sh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're vastly overestimating our capacity to build enough vaccines and distribute them over the world, as well as dealing with those who will refuse to vaccinate. Even if we had a vaccine ready for the roll-out today, I don't see us going back to normalish until late 2021 at earliest. As with any vaccine, you'd need about 80% of the population to vaccinate in order for herd immunity to kick in. I feel like we…

As with any vaccine, you'd need about 80% of the population to vaccinate in order for herd immunity to kick in. Wrong. The herd immunity threshold (HIT) for influenza is 33%-44%. HITs are different for every infectious disease. Current estimates for COVID-19 are 60-75%.

Isn't that a different number, though? You have to factor in that vaccines aren't 100% effective at preventing disease. Wikipedia spells it out in the vaccine section here [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#178

Post by gambiting »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #173
JshWright wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does that matter if the research and development costs were publicly funded?

Because they can and it will make them a ton of money. The laws need to change.

But, for instance - public money is used to build roads, yet companies that build them make money in the process. There is no state-owned road building company. What's the difference here?

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#179

Post by wffurr »

Unklejoe wrote: post #167
zoobab wrote: post #116

Good news for US BigPharma Merck holding the Oxford patents, while public funding has paid for its research: https://archive.is/aGUJd

I thought the vaccine was going to be free anyway?

Someone is going to pay. It may not be you at the point of the needle, but somebody will.

Governments will pay a lot to get their economies going again. That burden will in turn fall on taxpayers one way or another; whether it's directly via taxes or budget cuts or indirectly via inflation or debt service.

Re: Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old and young

#180

Post by dang »

fallingfrog wrote: post #104

Bet you they give it to everyone for free everywhere in the world except for the USA, where they charge 600 dollars a dose and consequently we never reach herd immunity and have endemic Covid indefinitely.

Would you please stop posting flamebait to HN and not use the site primarily for ideological battle? We ban accounts that do those things and have already had to ask you a few times.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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