Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK • Hacker News Board

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#271

Post by VBprogrammer » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 11:56 AM UTC

kmlx wrote: post #237

VBprogrammer wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fairly stereotypical British trait to be self deprecating. If we were singlehandedly saving the world from a rogue asteroid the general sentiment would probably be "let's hope we don't mess this up".

> It's a fairly stereotypical British trait to be self deprecating. If we were singlehandedly saving the world from a rogue asteroid the general sentiment would probably be "let's hope we don't mess this up". was this always so? i've noticed this while living in London and, coming from a literal 3rd world country, I do not understand it. i'm trying to find when this started... i don't it started anytime in the recent…

It's an interesting question. I'm sure you could probably do a study and find that on average British people are no more self-deprecating than the average; and yet it does appear as one of those commonly accepted parts of the British psyche.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#272

Post by justsomeuser » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 12:05 PM UTC

sussexby wrote: post #170

jakozaur wrote: post #19

In terms of rollout. UK is the ideal country to be the first: 1. Heavily impacted by Covid-19. 2. Centralised health care system makes it easier to compare results and efficiency. E.g. it's UK which figured out that dexamethasone is efficient against Covid https://www.who.int/news/item/16-06-2020-who-welcomes-prelim... 3. Developed country with great logistics.

And we have a really good spreadsheet for tracking who's been infected /s

And also malware for taking distributed encrypted backups with excellent key hiding features.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#273

Post by La1n » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 12:08 PM UTC

tinus_hn wrote: post #253

_wmhc wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is absolutely 0% chance at the end the vaccine will not be approved. That's not true, I think it's foolish to 100% trust a company to not make any rushed mistakes, lie, or hide some facts, when there are massive amounts of money involved.

It’s not like they suddenly dumped a stack of papers on the regulators’ doorsteps. 99% of all the data they are going to get has been available for a long time and everything they are going to be able to check in their 20 days has been available for a long time. How are they going to check if the manufacturer fudged the report? Run the experiment themselves again in 20 days? Edit: by the way in the UK they were prepa…

>How are they going to check if the manufacturer fudged the report? Run the experiment themselves again in 20 days?

Site and document inspections.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#274

Post by rkangel » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 12:14 PM UTC

YaarPodshipnik wrote: post #47

I had COVID-19 early in the year, and so did my Wife (not sure about my Daughter, harder to tell with kids). I would really like to know whether I should get the vaccine or not? All the info that's out there says that immunity to C19 is temporary, so a vaccine after having gone through it doesn't seem redundant. Does anyone know if there's been any research on effects of the vaccine on the people who got C19 and reco…

> All the info that's out there says that immunity to C19 is temporary

This isn't quite true. What is true is that there is no information out there to conclusively support long term retention of antibodies, in large part because we've only got 6 months of data.

As to the latter point, I wonder about the trial design. If they didn't give all participants a Covid antibody test before starting, it is very likely that several participants were previously infected. Smaller sample size though.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#275

Post by fab1an » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 12:18 PM UTC

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #240

fab1an wrote: post #182

This should really be called the BioNTech or even "Mainz" vaccine (similar to the "Oxford" one), but Germany is terrible at this kind of marketing

In Germany it is mostly referred to as the BioNTech vaccine. I think it's more about international publications being more likely to use the name they recognize or think their audience will recognize. Most everyone is going to know Pfizer and Oxford respectively. Internationally Mainz isn't exactly a famous city, nor is AstraZeneca a well-known pharmaceutical company.

I get your point, but maybe Mainz would be more well known if we called it the Mainz vaccine? ;)

Hell, we let Trump present the Mainz vaccine as if it was his personal achievement.

Germany has got to do better here.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#276

Post by swores » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 12:23 PM UTC

Wintamute wrote: post #241

ksec wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a high level overview and global perspective, what the OP is saying, or meant , is that comparatively speaking UK is much better than possibly 80% of developed countries. Not to say NHS is without flaws, far from it. But if you step outside and look around the world many are surprised how awful public health services and logistics can be. So to put it another way, It is not that NHS is good, it is just the other…

What you're missing is that amongst a certain class of Brit, and across much of the West, relentless and savage cultural self-criticism has become the norm, and a currency used for in-group signalling. Even when people in the UK should be celebrating, as literally the first country in the world to develop an approved C19 vaccine in record breaking time, and enjoy the privilege of a free health system that can roll it…

> Even when people in the UK should be celebrating, as literally the first country in the world to develop an approved C19 vaccine in record breaking time

The UK has one of the first (Oxford/AstraZenica), but this news about the first approved is not a vaccine developed in the UK. But I'm still happy to celebrate the Turkish couple's German company that's owned by Pfizer, as I will be when Oxford hopefully release more good news on top of their initial press release.

And our culture is far from perfect in the UK. Criticising a country's problems doesn't prevent also celebrating its positives.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#277

Post by patall » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 12:24 PM UTC

shusson wrote: post #71

Out of curiosity, how do people on HN rate the risk of long term side-effects?

Guessing probabilities is nuts.

However, if they do not screw something up in production (which I regard a larger potential source of error than the vaccine itself) there won't be long term side-effects for most people. There were some side effects from swine-flu in Sweden around 2010 that were certainly major and those affected 1/12.000 people. I would guess that is an upper bound for side effect, but as I said, guessing probabilities of an unknown with sample size one is hard.

BioNtech has been developing mRNA vaccines for cancer patients for some time, so I would not expect any really large long term (in the range of 2-4 years) side-effects for fractions of the population larger than 20% based on that alone.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#278

Post by patall » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 12:29 PM UTC

apexalpha wrote: post #270

john_alan wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the SARS vaccine virus not mRNA?

Yes, this is why these mRNA vaccines are here so fast; a lot of prework was done for SARS vaccine, which is also a Corona disease. But I think SARS died out before the vaccine was ready/needed.

the parent is concerned regarding the appearance of ADE (Antibody-dependent enhancement) during the creation of the SARS vaccine.

While we cannot totally disregard ADE, I assume we should have seen it by now (and the Oxford trial was stopped exactly because they thought they might have observed something like it). Whether it appears again on a population scale level, nobody knows.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#279

Post by thunderrabbit » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 12:33 PM UTC

simonbarker87 wrote: post #14

_Microft wrote: post #5

How did they approve it that fast? Is the approval process so different and so much more efficient than the one in the EU or USA? Was it extremely rushed to make sure to get doses before they have to compete with other countries for limited supply? I'm pretty curious now. Let's hope for the best, i.e. a good vaccine, a good process and no trust problems, the latter because at least it feels rushed.

I believe a big part of speeding up was parrallelization(spelling?) of the phases rather then the usual running them in series. Also I would imagine that the teams working on these had all the resources they needed, minimal internal delays and no expense spared on budget. I can see how those things combined, coupled with 10 months of “crunch time” work from the teams involved could see a 10x improvement in vaccine pr…

parallelization

My mnemonic: the two Ls are like parallel lines.

Re: Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

#280

Post by amrangaye » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 12:39 PM UTC

Wintamute wrote: post #241

ksec wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a high level overview and global perspective, what the OP is saying, or meant , is that comparatively speaking UK is much better than possibly 80% of developed countries. Not to say NHS is without flaws, far from it. But if you step outside and look around the world many are surprised how awful public health services and logistics can be. So to put it another way, It is not that NHS is good, it is just the other…

What you're missing is that amongst a certain class of Brit, and across much of the West, relentless and savage cultural self-criticism has become the norm, and a currency used for in-group signalling. Even when people in the UK should be celebrating, as literally the first country in the world to develop an approved C19 vaccine in record breaking time, and enjoy the privilege of a free health system that can roll it…

Completely agree. Same thing happens in the US - to hear some Americans speak they have become a dictatorship with a tyrant in charge, and the whole system is broken. Meanwhile they continue to have free and fair elections, first amendment rights, the ability to take their government to court etc. In my country (in west africa) just voting against the dictator in charge can get you banned from getting any employment, send you to jail to be tortured etc. And marching on the streets in peaceful protest has actually had people sent to death row awaiting execution. I guess it’s a matter of perspective :)