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Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine

reuters.com

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Re: Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine

#211

Post by readittwice »

akie wrote: post #105
readittwice wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, however the EU's politicians are playing dumb and claim that they couldn't foresee that mass production could be a problem. The EU ordered too late and simply not enough. Now they are trying to blame everyone else for their failure.

Yes, that's true, but it also has to be said that producing these vaccines is not so simple. It's all new technology, no mRNA vaccine was ever approved before, and you can't just dial up production so easily. Unfortunately. You can't just convert any old pill-factory into a factory that produces these vaccines. Apparently there are supply chain issues as well - some of the things that are needed for the production of…

I can absolutely imagine that scaling production is extremely hard.

However I don't have confidence that the same politicians that just claimed that they couldn't foresee problems with mass production did everything in their power to help here last summer. I mean the EU ordered only in November from Biontech and Moderna (and less doses than the companies offered). That doesn't really look like an incentive for companies to look into opening another factory already in summer.

Re: Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine

#212

Post by hef19898 »

timrichard wrote: post #175
1996 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they payed more per vaccine, thus guaranteeing the supply needed to be able to mass vaccinate Who could have guessed that paying the right price would guarantee the supply of a rare commodity everyone would want? :)

Quite right. And on the flip side, who would have guessed that haggling down the price of a super cheap at-cost AZ dose and playing hardball on liability when everyone else was bending over backwards would result in delays and supply problems for the EU...

Who would have thought ordering twice as many doses as needed wouldn't be enough for some? And who would have thought that ordering more, and above manufacturing capacity, would reduce availability?

Re: Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine

#213

Post by bodyfour »

Robin_Message wrote: post #127
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If EU countries had the same supply as the UK, they would also have vaccinated roughly the same percentage of people.

EU approved the vaccines over a month later IIRC, and Germany and France won't use the easy to distribute vaccine (astraveneca) in over 65s, the major target group. So I'm not sure it's only a supply issue.

The issue with the EMA approval date is a red herring, in my opinion. Unfortunately it gets given a lot of attention (especially in the UK press) even by organisations that should know better.

The most important thing to remember is that both the UK and EU pre-paid for AZ to manufacture their vaccine pre-approval. The date of regulatory approval and the manufacturing schedule are supposed to be completely decoupled.

It's true that the UK got their vaccine order in first and nobody is denying that. That's why the UK was getting shipments from AZ back in December. When the EU finally signed their contract they were told that their deliveries could start in February.

While I doubt the EMA is going to comment publicly on the timing of their decisions, I don't think it's a coincidence that their approval of AZ was done in late January. They already knew that the meaningful supplies were starting in February so they simply collected as much data as they could before making the "go/no-go" decision.

So while the "feckless EU bureaucrats screwed it up" storyline is forever popular (both in the UK and EU press) they seem pretty blameless on the issue of AZ approval. They just had to get it approved before the manufacturer was ready to start deliveries and they managed that.

What kicked this into a crisis is that AZ announced that their February deliveries to the EU would be less than half of the expected amount. The EU's position is that the UK and EU should be treated equivalently at this point: they both pre-paid for certain quantities to be delivered in February, so any production shortfall should be shared. Needless to say, the UK sees it differently and doesn't want any UK-based manufacturing to go to the EU. Hence we got this ugly diplomatic standoff.

Re: Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine

#214

Post by Anthony-G »

saiya-jin wrote: post #128
lnsru wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was time. I work in manufacturing, we plan factories years in advance of manufacturing start. Abandoned biotech factory cost is a drop in the ocean compared to weekly lockdown cost. Why countries failed here? If I would do such crap professionally, shelves of electronics stores would be empty.

You are an expert with hand-on experience. Here decisions were done by career politicians, who are utterly clueless in any hard science, and basically often have only one skill mastered - the skill of selling themselves to population to get voted in. Hence the results.

Electronics manufacturing is very different from pharmaceutical manufacturing. Decision-makers can't just magically hand-wave the problem away and if politicians were to invest money in building up the infrastructure for all possible vaccine solutions, they would later face huge criticism for wasting public finance on all the potential vaccines that didn't pan out. I'm still hugely impressed that we have any vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 just under a year after the virus was discovered.

Re: Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine

#215

Post by EvgeniyZh »

corty wrote: post #146
EvgeniyZh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expect that case fatality rate would significantly reduce after 60+ population (which is 90%+ of deaths) is vaccinated. However, even though more than 80% of 60+ got second dose already, case fatality rate is approximately the same. I don't have any good explanation for that.

Death usually comes 2 to 4 weeks after hospitalization which comes 1 to 2 weeks after infection. So the drop in death rates should be visible 2 to 4 weeks after the drop in hospitalizations, and should be less steep initially.

There was large amount of 60+ vaccinated with second dose 2 to 4 weeks ago. Iirc it was at least 50%.

If half of population responsible for 90% of deaths is vaccinated it should affect death-per-case ratio.

Re: Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine

#216

Post by nicoburns »

dm319 wrote: post #161
jansan wrote: post #10

The Google COVID-19 statistics for Israel show that cases and deaths are declining, but not at a faster rate than elsewhere in the world. Reported deaths lag behind sometimes for weeks and new deaths were caused by infections weeks ago, so vaccination may not have much effect on deaths, yet. But the number of positive tests should have gone down considerably with 50% of the population vaccinated. Are all these aympto…

The data for age group specific data is available freely in the UK. I did a quick analysis in R, and even though all over 75 and most over 70 have been vaccinated, I didn't see any increase in the rate of descent compared to other age groups. So not quite having a public health impact in overall numbers just yet (it's the lockdown that is doing that), but I have no doubt it will eventually. I wonder if part of it is…

> So not quite having a public health impact in overall numbers just yet (it's the lockdown that is doing that), but I have no doubt it will eventually.

I guess to the extent that people are actually following the lockdown rules, that substitutes pretty well for a vaccinated population. The advantage of vaccination (at least in theory) is that you can maintain those rates without being locked down.

Re: Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine

#217

Post by smiley1437 »

it_robot wrote: post #189
lucd wrote: post #104

Here is some chart showing vaccination effect on hospitalization for severe forms. Very telling. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/israel-severe-hospitaliza...

ehhhh im not sure how you are reading this but the chart looks quite bad

it looks that way because it's a relative chart - exaggerates the uptick in hospitalizations of unvaccinated non-elderly people

If you toggle the 'relative' button you'll see the actual numbers - basically, hospitalization count for vaccinated elders is is decreasing, and the hospitalization of unvaccinated non-elders is slightly increasing.

Re: Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine

#218

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

lucd wrote: post #104

Here is some chart showing vaccination effect on hospitalization for severe forms. Very telling. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/israel-severe-hospitaliza...

I don't get it, the chart goes down after the lockdown starts, like they always have in the past year. How does it say anything about the effects of vaccination?

edit: nvm a different chart is shown when javascript is not activated

Re: Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine

#219

Post by readittwice »

retromario wrote: post #123
readittwice wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the EU still communicates there is no problem with the procurement but only with evil pharmaceutical companies not delivering as promised. There will not be any remorse. It really must hurt them that even the heavily criticized politicians Johnson, Netanyahu and Trump did a much better job with procurement than the EU.

The EU messed up but they are at least publicly owning up to some of the blame (finally): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/10/ursula-von-der...

In that particular interview, I tend to agree. However I've seen/read multiple other interviews and talk shows where EU politicians talk quite differently. They may admit some general mistakes (without naming one) but still dispute each and every critic.

In one talk show for example a representative of the European Commission at least mentioned twice that in Africa even less people got vaccinated than in the EU. Like this would be the frame of reference.

Re: Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine

#220

Post by neuronic »

Ulrich2 wrote: post #182
ancymon wrote: post #17

As I understand, for example in Europe Pfizer is producing vaccines in single factory and not in sufficient number. Why production doesn't happen in more places? Couldn't they sell license to other European pharmaceutical companies to produce it? Is production process so unique it can't be replicated in other places?

Marburg started production a few days ago: Brand new factory just came online: https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det... This process started in September already. It was founded partly with EU and German money, and will be producing vaccines for the world.

It's important to keep in mind that COVID is a danger for the entire planet at least until every nation on the planet is vaccinated.

As long as this virus can spread in unvaccinated populations, mutations are bound to happen and sooner or later they will be knockout mutations, circumventing current vaccine effects.

So no one on this planet is truly safe from future lockdown/pandemic status until we are all vaccinated. And even that is debatable.

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