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Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
271–280 of 569 posts
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#272I 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.
Oxford one is also going to be easier to manufacture given that it is based on existing technology. Many countries e.g. Australia are licensing the formula so this is an important aspect.
I read the opposite - producing mRNA fragments at scale is supposedly cheaper than producing the inactivated vector viruses with the correct payload.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
-80C is just a pretty standard cold storage temperature in science. I'd imagine they tested stability at 4C, -20C and liquid nitrogen as well.
The notion of distributing a billion copies of a vaccine at -80°C to every corner of the planet seems rather resource intensive.
Dry ice is very common, and you get 5 days at refrigerator temperature. Everywhere in the world is reachable in 5 days if you need to. It gets really expensive to charter flights to many areas, but it is possible if you have money to burn.
Of course we now have reason to believe that vaccines that don't need dry ice will be approved, so logistics will direct the easier to ship ones to remote places.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, only to the extent that you distinguish killing someone via weapons and just letting them die via preventable disease.
With weapons, it costs money to kill someone; with medicine, it costs money to save them.
Only to the extent that you don't value human life. If you value human life, then you'll see that both have costs associated.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Historically, two cases of rushed vaccines (cutter polio and Gullah barre) were worse than the disease - and these were for diseases worse than covid. This is just patently untrue. The Cutter Incidence gave patients Polio due to an improperly activated virus. While this is bad, it could not be worse than the disease itself - since it is the disease itself, no worse, no less. Regarding risk of Gullain-Barre syndrome…
On the one hand I tend to agree, and all my expectations for this vaccine are positive. The medical industry tends to be paranoid to a level that exceeds rationality and even if they dropped their standards for this that should only get them down to "conservative and rather safe" levels of caution.
On the other, a cursory search says the current record for fastest developed vaccine was mumps at 4 years. So this is a vaccine setting new milestones, and there is a risk that not all of them will be positive. I'd rather be a little late to be vaccinated than a little early, especially being in a lower risk demographic.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#276Incoming possible Silly, Stupid and Lazy Questions, 1. Are there any vaccine ( of any Disease ) that are 100% effective? Or do we operate ( as I would assume ) something like 5 Nines effective rate and call it 100%? 2. Across all type of Vaccine, what are the average or median effective rate? i.e Should we expect Vaccine to be 90%+ effective in the first place? Or is that a wrong expectation to make? 3. What happens…
Not an epidemiologist, but I think the goal of mass vaccination if to make R drop to well below 1. If everybody is vaccinated with a 90% effective vaccine, then R drops by a factor of 10 (I think) so that sounds pretty good?
Yes, R is at 1.3 with WFH and other restriction. In March, R was 3-5 without restrictions.
If everyone got vaccinated with 90% effectivity (or even 70%), it would be enough. However, availability won't be sufficient to get to 100% within a year, and compliance seems to be somewhere around 50-70% at most given polls. (There are a huge number of people even in this forum who are antisocial - "I won't get vaccinated until I have seen super-long-term effects, and screw the people who I superspread the disease to".)
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? I've read this 3 times and can't figure out what you're trying to say. Are you saying that rich countries are going to intentionally choose more expensive vaccines, with the intention of suppressing the lower classes? That's so rediculous. In rich countries (other than the usa) the gov pays for these things not the citizens. Even then, the expensive vaccine is only $40, that's within the means of most poor peop…
Fascinating ... > .. the gov pays for these things not the citizens .. You do know that the only money governments have, is the money they got from its citizens, right? That is, aside from what they may have earned (though plundered or extorted might be more fitting) from other nations. > .. the expensive vaccine is only $40, that's within the means of most poor people .. You may want to reevaluate your knowledge abo…
Needs to be repeated again & again:
"Governments have no money of their own, it's citizens' (past, present and future - mostly the latter these days) who provide the cash via taxes".
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#278From 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…
Wow, what a fascinating phenomenon. A weak first dose somehow primes the immune system better than a full one?
Sample size is too small to say that. The vaccine works across all doses, but that is all the data shows.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Here comes my old publicly traded corporation rant: a company with a well defined owner, even with a well defined group of owners, would, given the opportunity, profit handsomely. But not overdo it. They'd rather be seen as a global saviour, not as a global ransomer.
Enter public trading: the opportunity alone for global ransoming will inevitably become the projection that defines the street price for shares and once valuation is up there ransom-level profits would suddenly appear not excessive but appropriate, given the level of paper investments of the latest, valuation-defining round of buyers.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't people worried about the fact that mRNA vaccines haven't been deployed before? I don't see much apprehension about that generally, but a few months of testing of a brand new delivery technique don't sound that extensive to me.
The delivery technique relies on LNP (lipid nano particles) which is fairly refined and existing therapeutics use today. There are potential patent violations though (both Phizer and Moderna possibly violating Arbutus patent) but it’s unclear to me how this affects distribution.
Oh that's encouraging, thanks! It's great if it works well, as I understand it it's a potential gamechanger (cancer vaccines etc).