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Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

ox.ac.uk

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Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#231

Post by acqq »

beagle3 wrote: post #202
noneeeed wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the fact that this doesn't even need a freezer is great news. The fact that we have three highly effective vaccines in such a short period is amazing and between them we might stand a chance of making and distributing them at the scale necessary to get things under some kind of control by August.

The safety concerns cannot be resolved yet. Effective - yes. Safe? We won’t know for a while. Pandemrix, a flu vaccine, caused a notable uptick in narcolepsy in Sweden, Finland and likely the UK. This was not (and could not) be seen in smaller trial populations. It is not a given that any of the covid vaccines is safe enough. Historically, two cases of rushed vaccines (cutter polio and Gullah barre) were worse than t…

2011:

https://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/committee/topics/influenz...

“Even at this stage, it does not appear that narcolepsy following vaccination against pandemic influenza is a general worldwide phenomenon, as no excess of narcolepsy has been reported from several other European states where Pandemrix was used, or from Canada where a pandemic vaccine similar to pandemrix was used. This complicates interpretation of the findings in Finland and Sweden. It seems likely that some as yet unidentified additional factor was operating in Sweden and Finland. The findings from the VAESCO project and further investigations in Finland and Sweden, may help clarify the determinants of any increased risk of narcolepsy, which currently appears to be restricted to the months following vaccination and by age group and country.”

What’s certainly true that for some effects to be observable, millions have to be vaccinated first.

2013:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-narcolepsy-vaccine-pandem...

“In total, the GSK shot was given to more than 30 million people in 47 countries during the 2009-2010 H1N1 swine flu pandemic.”

“Independent teams of scientists have published peer-reviewed studies from Sweden, Finland and Ireland showing the risk of developing narcolepsy after the 2009-2010 immunization campaign was between seven and 13 times higher for children who had Pandemrix than for their unvaccinated peers.”

“Europe’s drugs regulator has ruled Pandemrix should no longer be used in people aged under 20.”

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#232

Post by anoncake »

WalterBright wrote: post #207
bleepblorp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Pay them their costs and not one cent more. I prefer a system where it's very worthwhile for people to risk a lot and work hard to save my life. If it was all about altruism, I doubt a vaccine would be developed for many more years.

You don't even need altruism. Vaccine researchers want the pandemic to end like everyone else plus they're interested in vaccine research anyway.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#233

Post by tokamak-teapot »

dageshi wrote: post #124
toshk wrote: post #6

The press release is interesting. Not the best way to present their data. Immediate conclusion of many newspapers is "oxford vaccine is less effective then...".

Better that than to be seen to overstate its effectiveness. The worst case scenario is people refuse to take it because they think they're being lied too or manipulated in some way.

On the (BBC) radio news earlier only the 90% figure was mentioned, not the 70%. This differs from the BBC news website, which started with the 70% figure and mentioned the 90% afterwards.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#234

Post by dageshi »

toshk wrote: post #201
dageshi wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better that than to be seen to overstate its effectiveness. The worst case scenario is people refuse to take it because they think they're being lied too or manipulated in some way.

Maybe. But it's also time to compete and current headlines are not working. If the public opinion is that it's far less effective then the other 2, what is happening now, you are putting the politicians in a difficult position that want to buy your vaccine. If you dig deeper you will find results for all vaccins are pretty similar. For instance even though one of the trials with Oxford vaccine had more people with Co…

Headlines shouldn't be manipulated to make life easier for politicians...

Also, the issue will not be which vaccine is chosen, but above a certain percentage of effectiveness who can even supply enough of their vaccine to meet demand?

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#235

Post by arindamch »

jpxw wrote: post #12

From AstraZeneca: > One dosing regimen (n=2,741) showed vaccine efficacy of 90% when AZD1222 was given as a half dose, followed by a full dose at least one month apart, and another dosing regimen (n=8,895) showed 62% efficacy when given as two full doses at least one month apart. The combined analysis from both dosing regimens (n=11,636) resulted in an average efficacy of 70%. All results were statistically significa…

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/21/astrazeneca-shares-slide-aft...

What about this news?

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#236

Post by tialaramex »

beagle3 wrote: post #202
noneeeed wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the fact that this doesn't even need a freezer is great news. The fact that we have three highly effective vaccines in such a short period is amazing and between them we might stand a chance of making and distributing them at the scale necessary to get things under some kind of control by August.

The safety concerns cannot be resolved yet. Effective - yes. Safe? We won’t know for a while. Pandemrix, a flu vaccine, caused a notable uptick in narcolepsy in Sweden, Finland and likely the UK. This was not (and could not) be seen in smaller trial populations. It is not a given that any of the covid vaccines is safe enough. Historically, two cases of rushed vaccines (cutter polio and Gullah barre) were worse than t…

If the association between Pandemrix and narcolepsy is because it caused narcolepsy (as with Guillain-Barré it's also plausible the problem is that this is an auto-immune problem and so the vaccine wasn't actually the problem it just highlighted a problem you already had) then the incidence rate was estimated at like 18k patients per case.

So if you give the entire US population a vaccine like that, less than twenty thousand of them develop narcolepsy. As a reminder a quarter million of them already died from COVID-19 and more are dying every day - not to mention the tens of thousands whose cause of death isn't listed as COVID-19 but would not be dead if not for an ongoing pandemic.

Cutter screwed up. No amount of prior safety testing can fix that. Their Polio vaccine had Polio virus in it (to be clear: The traditional Oral Polio Vaccine is supposed to have a "live" virus in it, but the injected vaccine Cutter were selling is not). Obviously nobody is going to test "What happens if we inject children with the Polio virus" because the answer is "Some of them get Polio. Duh" and so no test could have prevented Cutter from screwing up.

I have no idea what you meant by "Gullah barre" the Google results I get are all about Guillain-Barré syndrome, which I mentioned above. Guillain-Barré is not a vaccine, it's a weird auto-immune disorder, and arguably even where it's listed as very rare side effect of a vaccine, that's misleading because it's also a side effect from getting viral infection, so if you avoid vaccination but do get the virus you may get GBS as a result anyway. The human immune system is pretty inscrutable.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#237

Post by [deleted] »

SanderNL wrote: post #227
bleepblorp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

While off-putting, these same capitalist forces are what made companies like Pfizer possible in the first place. Where are the socialist factories? I do not see any communist, religious and/or otherwise motivated groups of people producing anything of value right now. Lots of noise, very little substance.

[deleted]

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#238

Post by yomly »

beagle3 wrote: post #197
Scandiravian wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I studied pharmaceutical sciences ten years ago, the rule-of-thumb was that it cost around 1 billion dollars from idea to the product being launched. That's only r&d costs and regulations have become stricter over the years, so I imagine the cost has risen since then

I’ve seen this number with some justification being the amortized cost of a successful product, which covers r&d and marketing but also the failed attempts that lead nowhere in between. There are plenty of 50-100M pharma startups; they wouldn’t exist if your number was right.

>There are plenty of 50-100M pharma startups; they wouldn’t exist if your number was right.

Isn't there a selection bias in that the startups that got to 50-100M survived because they were lucky with a candidate treatment. The ones that failed were the ones that never found a candidate in time? The difference being that large pharmaceutical companies have to swallow ALL the failures, whereas startups can "just" die.

Not to say that pharma companies don't have some fat that can be trimmed...

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#239

Post by refurb »

oblio wrote: post #203
refurb wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. And if they spent $100M on R&D and it failed? What then? Would the gov’t pay those costs? And maybe a small profit? It’s easy to complain about Pharma profits when you ignore all the money spent that goes “poof”.

When was the last time one of there big pharma companies went bankrupt, barring massive fraud? I'd be glad to be shown some examples, otherwise it's "privatize profits, socialize losses".

Bankrupt? Not many. Bought for pennies on the dollar? Plenty. Where is Upjohn? Parke-Davis? Schering-Plough? All companies with multi-billion dollar sales figures and all swallowed up when the money stopped coming in.

And if you fold in the start-ups who have one shot and if it doesn’t work out? Plenty of those. They go bankrupt.

Busting the patents on Covid vaccines would be “socializing the gains and privatizing the losses”.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#240

Post by toshk »

tokamak-teapot wrote: post #233
dageshi wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better that than to be seen to overstate its effectiveness. The worst case scenario is people refuse to take it because they think they're being lied too or manipulated in some way.

On the (BBC) radio news earlier only the 90% figure was mentioned, not the 70%. This differs from the BBC news website, which started with the 70% figure and mentioned the 90% afterwards.

Radio in the Netherlands didn't dive into the details, just saying why use this vaccine if Pfizer is better.
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