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

reuters.com

281–290 of 460 posts

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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that simple. I am a non-heredi Israeli, but I live next to a Heredi neighborhood. Yes a lot of Heredim are breaking the rules, but so are a lot of non-heredi. I have yet to see any proof that the heredim are breaking them at a much larger scale than the other non-heredi groups. What is significant is that they live in much more densely populated areas with much larger families. Every infection is amplified b…

| I have yet to see any proof that the heredim are breaking them at a much larger scale than the other non-heredi groups. What about the weddings and funerals involving 1000s of people?

There is no denying that some of them are breaking the rules and yes the weddings and funerals in which there were 100s to 1000s of people are obviously bad, but that is not proof they are breaking the rules on a larger scale than the non-heredi population.

Just this past weekend the police shut down two nature parties/raves around the town I live in. This happens every weekend. Does that mean the “seculars” are breaking the rules on a larger scale than anyone else? Of course not. You and I do not have enough information to know who is and who is not breaking the rules.

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

#282
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why am i getting downvotes? The hareidim ignore lockdown because their way of life is more important to them even then some deaths. Difficult for an outsider to understand. As for being anti vax, the vaccine is practically being forced down their throats. There will be a pushback (not that i agree). (and yes there could be more compliance, this is not the forum).

Israeli here. Their way of life is not threatened by a vaccine nor by lockdown. No more than any other citizen of israel. Their leadership still has ghetto mentality and sees the state as their enemy, so they always choose to go against it while crying Nazis. It doesn't matter that these so called Nazis are jews themselves. This is the sort of mentality that 2000 years of diaspora creates. Their way of life is now de…

Israeli here as well. The Haredim way of life is less than 250 years old.

Also, name calling authorities you don’t like is a not even a national sport, it’s a global one.

There’s a lot of good arguments against them, but they require more nuance.

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

#283
post #146

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.

Good points, and Vaccination itself has a lag effect as well, If i understand it correctly. I've heard that someone vaccinated with 2nd dose today will not have the protection percentage for 10days+ or so - Which needs to taken into account with these figures.

The vaccination also does no good if you are already infected, and with the spike in infections in Israel coinciding with vaccination ramp up, those will be tricky to separate out.

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

#284
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. In Luxembourg at least you can see the clear seasonal variation and also the enforcement of stricter lockdowns pretty much 1:1 in death rates and infection rates, accounting for the ~2-3 week delay in infection intervals.

Well, as I saw in Luxembourg you surely can’t experience any of the vaccination effects yet. Is there a government there or what is going on?

For vaccinations? Nope, too few people have been vaccinated. But the claim above was for >, for which we do have data.

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

#285

Israel feels like the only nation taking the importance and urgency of vaccination seriously. Here in Europe, articles are coming out complaining that the slow vaccination could be harming the economy which, well, fucking duh. ( https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/154626/c... ) Fast rollout. Involve pharmacies. Involve the army. Distribute widely and efficiently. Prepare for months before the vaccine…

What bothers me the most, is the delay in signing the vacine contracts with Pfizer and AstraZeneca. The US for all the criticism it can take, closed this negotiation in weeks. We spent a whopping 3 months arguing with pharma companies about price and liability before closing these contracts. There are people dying avoidable deaths while we allowed for this inertia. There are no serious media outlets pushing the Europ…

I imagine the US has a ton of leverage in such negotiations. Something along the lines of "give us a good price on this to make us look good or else maybe we'll actually do something about the ridiculous price gouging for medicine in this country."

No pharma exec wants to be the one that killed the golden goose.

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

#286
post #104

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

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.

>I don't have any good explanation for that.

A good explanation is that the vaccine is not working. ( people are in denial) I looked at the Pfizer numbers and my conclusion is the it's doing nothing.

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

#287

The side effect of this amazing BioNTech/Pfizer success: Meanwhile AstraZeneca is clearly only the second choice. At least locally here in my town (EU) people line up for Biontech, but the vaccination centers that offer AstraZeneca report up to 50% no shows.

Why is that? I'm in the biotech field and I hardly get any sense of one being better than the other? Is such knowledge spread via social media? (Which I avoid)

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

#288
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, overpaying and betting on 20 candidates in parallel is the reasonable thing to do, even if you're cynical enough to not care about the loss of life or health. Every additional day of lockdown probably costs as much as the entire production lifecycle of a vaccine, including distribution. I think the EU economy contracted at least 5% in 2020. The EU GDP was $18.3 tn, so 5% is about $915bn. That's $2.5bn per day (…

6.8%. https://www.brusselstimes.com/economics/154783/euro-zone-gdp...

That makes things even worse. We're talking about a drop about the size of the entire Spanish economy.

They should have been throwing money at every reputable vaccine producer, including burning all red tape to make sure that excessive production capacity will be ready before the final approval is even given.

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers me the most, is the delay in signing the vacine contracts with Pfizer and AstraZeneca. The US for all the criticism it can take, closed this negotiation in weeks. We spent a whopping 3 months arguing with pharma companies about price and liability before closing these contracts. There are people dying avoidable deaths while we allowed for this inertia. There are no serious media outlets pushing the Europ…

I imagine the US has a ton of leverage in such negotiations. Something along the lines of "give us a good price on this to make us look good or else maybe we'll actually do something about the ridiculous price gouging for medicine in this country." No pharma exec wants to be the one that killed the golden goose.

Both the Netherlands, France and Germany, were already ready to close contracts, when the EC stepped in to do an EU wide contract. It absolutely makes sense to do an EU wide contract rather than depend on the solidarity of larger countries that order surplus.

The issue is the EC went on a panel wide long discussion to then get to more or less a carbon copy of the initial german contract. Those were 3 months wasted that could have made a difference in ramping up vaccine manufacturing.

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

#290
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?

All your points should be addressed in this (IMHO excellent) blog post:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...

In short - mRNA vaccines are cutting edge & require the most high tech machines and processes in some of their stages, which create the bottleneck. As for partnering/licensing - that's preatty much a thing & has been for a while, still there is quite some time to get a new production line working in a safe and predictable manner.

BTW, there is also a companion article about the bottlenecks for adenovirus based vaccines (Astra Zeneca and others), which have a different set of bottlenecks:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/08/ho...

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