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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

#291

Post by m4rtink »

MarcusE1W wrote: post #76
ilkkao wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering this myself too. Lockdowns are so expensive that I'd assume every unconventional method to expand the production is taken into use. The situation is bad but not so bad that competitors could be forced to work together it seems. I expect that the amount of angry people in EU will peak in spring or early summer when UK, US, and Israel are mostly back to normal and we are not.

I think currently the main reason why not more factories produce the BionTech/Pfizer Vaccine is that it is quite difficult to manufacture and so it takes time to set up additional capacity. As far as I know several competitors are in discussion to build additional capacity. Of course there is the question why this has not been done earlier.

It kinda reminds me of the current cutting edge chip shortage - eq. the special microfluidics machines needed for mRNA vaccines VS EUV machines needed for cutting edge ASIC manufacturing.

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

#292

Post by runako »

EvgeniyZh wrote: post #130
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'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.

> case fatality rate is approximately the same

If you vaccinate more people, you would expect that the cases that present at a physician will be selected to be the most severe. If the vaccine reduces most infections to very mild or asymptomatic cases, they will not be counted in the statistics at all.

So it would make sense that introducing a broadly effective vaccine would increase the case fatality rate. (You would also expect fewer severe cases, which is the whole point.)

A functioning vaccine should affect the CFR by changing the denominator of measured cases.

I am reminded of an analogy from improvements in battlefield medicine. As battlefield protocols (on-site treatment, rapid evacuation, etc.) have become more effective, battle fatality rates have fallen. But they have been replaced by a rise in severe chronic injuries like amputations.

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

#293

Post by StavrosK »

teekert wrote: post #287
Ulrich2 wrote: post #246

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)

I think that's because the initial announced efficacy for ModeRNA/BioNTech was 95ish%, whereas for AZ it was 75%.

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

#294

Post by m4rtink »

hef19898 wrote: post #224
readittwice wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compan…

Just throwing the same numbers in here: The EU ordered 4+ doses per inhabitant by Q4 2020. Deliveries were intially scheduled through Q3 2021, with enough doses to be delivered to reach herd immnity by end of Q2. Not sure how ordering even more , without knowing when said doses would have been available, had helped. EU politician really screwed up in summer 2020, so. They had, besides ordering (which was outsourced t…

I can confirm the Czech government did basically nothing to prepare for vaccinations till the very last moment - something resembling a mass vaccination plan was only published on Dezember 22th (!) and only now the system seems to be in somehow working state, likely due to not having that many vaccines to process yet.

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

#295

Post by alkonaut »

adevx wrote: post #181
throwaway_Ie8th wrote: post #147

There is a terrifying whistleblower interview from a Berlin elderly home, about the events after the vaccination. Of 31 patients who were vaccinated 8 died within 14 day, another 11 are in decline. https://2020news.de/en/whistleblower-from-berlin-nursing-hom... Similar reports came out of Sweden and other countries, after the first report. https://2020news.de/auch-in-schweden-sterben-die-alten-mensc... There are many…

Unfortunately any critical view of corona related vaccination is quickly downvoted to oblivion here. I am deeply concerned in how an experimental vaccine with very little research on long term effects is being promoted as our saviour. Vaccinating healthy young people who are statistically proven to not be vulnerable (there are exceptions which are highlighted in the media) sounds utterly insane to me. Smoking alone k…

I think this argument is misdirected. It's not that we can't accept the number of dead. Even at the top IFR of 1-2%, society could "stand" seeing that many dead.

But that figure (the one you are comparing to the deaths from smoking) is with mostly functioning healthcare. It's with strict mitigations. Such mitigations aren't sustainable long term.

Without those mitigations you'd be likely to have healthcare overload. That would lead to extremely hard to swallow effects, such as healthcare workers walking out leading to even bigger shortages, or IFR of the disease skyrocketing because even moderate cases lead to death when there is no healthcare available.

As a society, having healthy middle aged people die in waiting rooms and parking lots from what could be prevented with some oxygen isn't acceptable. This isn't an "irrational fear" - this actually happened already in several places across the world.

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

#296

Post by ars »

strulovich wrote: post #280
throwaway4good wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I don't understand why it is so unpopular to ask this obvious question? The numbers are falling all over the western world; probably because the policy response is largely same and maybe also because the virus' natural cycle is at the same stage. Given how much further Israel is, one would have expected it to stick much more out in the statistics. But it does not?

There an extra consideration to add here perhaps: the US experienced a post Christmas and New Year spike. That would be less pronounced in Israel where the vast majority does not celebrate Christmas and takes the New Year less seriously. (Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday of the similar time was earlier this year. And although some Arabs celebrate Christmas, many others are Muslim and do not)

Also Hanukkah is not a major holiday in Judaism. It gets inflated importance in the US because of proximity to major Christian holidays.

The major holidays in Judaism were 5 months ago, just when the lockdowns started.

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

#297

Post by hef19898 »

m4rtink wrote: post #294
hef19898 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just throwing the same numbers in here: The EU ordered 4+ doses per inhabitant by Q4 2020. Deliveries were intially scheduled through Q3 2021, with enough doses to be delivered to reach herd immnity by end of Q2. Not sure how ordering even more , without knowing when said doses would have been available, had helped. EU politician really screwed up in summer 2020, so. They had, besides ordering (which was outsourced t…

I can confirm the Czech government did basically nothing to prepare for vaccinations till the very last moment - something resembling a mass vaccination plan was only published on Dezember 22th (!) and only now the system seems to be in somehow working state, likely due to not having that many vaccines to process yet.

I just hope whatever solutions are in place are able to cope once the vaccine deliveries kick in.

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

#298

Post by bzbarsky »

bodyfour wrote: post #156
lordnacho wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I don't get is why not try to mass manufacture the candidates before we know they are effective? It seems the work of what drug to make was done really quickly, and most of the time is spent in the trials, and then mass production. Maybe I missed it, but you'd think with something so devastating we'd just make a bunch of candidates, get them out to the clinics for storage, and as soon as we thought a given…

That is exactly what happened -- governments around the world paid for pre-approval manufacturing and the pharma industry has spent the last 6-8 months ramping up production. That's the reason we have any supplies at the moment. The truth is just that mass-manufacturing of a brand new vaccine is a hard problem. The fact that we're only a couple months from the very start of vaccinations and the world is already neari…

While there was some pre-production, I disagree that vaccine supply is the only binding constraint we have going on. And the lack of sane regulatory approvals and sane distribution setups has been heartrending.

If you look at https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo... and scroll down to "U.S. Vaccination Campaign" you will see that in the US 74.5% of the vaccine doses that have been delivered have actually been used.

This could happen for a combination of two reasons, as far as I can see: either delivery is ramping up so fast that most of the delivered doses were delivered very recently, or because people are doing a terrible job of using doses that get delivered.

My impression is that the latter is a larger factor than the former, so far, based on the wide variation by state in the "Supply used" column. West Virginia has used ~96% of their supply. D.C. and Rhode Island have used only 60% (and it's not like their populations are larger or more spread out than West Virginia's!). And I should note that I can imagine various poverty-and-social-whatever issues D.C. might be facing, but they don't obviously apply to Rhode Island in the same way.

Things like http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/virus-update-3/ item 3 are pretty common: crazy vaccine-distribution setups meaning people who want vaccines can't get signed up to get them, while vaccines are getting thrown out due to spoilage.

Things like https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/us/houston-doctor-fired-c... are, I hope, not common, but you can bet that case will have a chilling effect on efforts by doctors to avoid wasting vaccines.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/14/w... includes this incredible from a major vaccine manufacturer: "Instead we have a patchwork of approvals and I have 70m doses that I can’t ship because they have been purchased but not approved. They have a shelf life of six months; these expire in April."

Does that sound like a manufacturing supply constraint to you?

Similar is https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/ap... where we have a vaccine, and a factory that can produce it, and the vaccine is approved in the UK, but it's not approved in the US. This is also not a supply constraint.

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

#299

Post by Ulrich2 »

teekert wrote: post #287
Ulrich2 wrote: post #246

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)

Unfortunately there is huge difference when it comes to the South African variant. AZ no longer works, but Pfizer does:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-55975052

vs.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/question-choices-pfi...

The 2nd key reason is that no other vaccine is backed up by so much real world data as BT because of Israel. That is the very topic of this thread. That is why I thought it is self-explanatory.

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

#300

Post by m4rtink »

darkteflon wrote: post #65
chimprich wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer: apparently, yes. The process is too unique and new to just be replicated in other factories. Derek Lowe has an in-depth and readable explanation: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...

Came here to share this exact link. In The Pipeline has been a uniformly excellent source of information on vaccines and therapeutics development throughout the pandemic and is absolutely worth a look for curious laymen. As all of us are, under the circumstances.

Exactly! Also one more thing to keep in mind - the sooner we can help end the pandemic the sooner will Derek have time to write about other stuff, like crazy unstable, explosive and toxic compounds! :)
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