301–310 of 460 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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%.
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…
Most developed countries seem to be able to deploy close to 100% of the vaccines provided so far, modulo whatever strategy they have chosen regarding keeping some amount of second doses in storage. So that doesn't seem to be bottleneck. Israel simply paid more and bought a larger amount of vaccines delivered earlier. Which is smart but it's not a strategy that all countries can replicate, not because we cannot afford…
Now some states _are_ close to 100%. Some are close to 60%. Investigating the differences in approach that lead to those differences in numbers mostly comes down to whether states prioritize vaccinating people or creating complicated rules and sticking to them.
When combined with things like this from https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/14/w... : "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.", it sure seems like a large part of the apparent supply bottleneck is self-inflicted. Some basic "if it's approved in another G-8 country (or whatever criterion you want to pick) we should auto-approve it here" logic would probably significantly help with this sort of thing....
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…
Isn't the vaccination distribution a zero sum game between nation states? Supply is limited. Some countries will get it sooner than others. Europe lost the bit against several other powers. Not to my surprise, I must say.
It's complicated. Right now there are vaccines that have been purchased and produced but not delivered due to regulatory approval issues (70 million from just one manufacturer, according to https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/14/w... ), vaccines being delivered but not used (see https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo... "Supply used" statistics), and so forth.
Blaming supply constraints is a great cover for these organizational and regulatory failings, though. "We don't have enough vaccine" sure sounds better than "we've only bothered to use 60% of the vaccine we got our hands on" (hello, Rhode Island and D.C.).
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.
> 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…
Most of cases both before and after vaccinations are not severe. Moreover, the share of severe cases seems to stay the same or even increase ( https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general , I hope it can be google-translated or something).
As I explained in other reply ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26142482 ), I expected change in fatality rate due to disproportional vaccination of the group with most of the fatal cases. For 60+ fatality rate is very high, and many of them are vaccinated. For everyone else, the opposite. I agree that if only severe cases were registered, we should've been looking at case number instead (which would be more stable since almost all of those would be registered).
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…
The bottleneck is vaccine production. It doesn't matter how fast you vaccinate. Sure, Israel did a great job negotiating for vaccines, but it's a zero-sum game so only a few countries could have pulled this off.
Given claims like "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." from https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/14/w... it seems like claiming that the bottleneck is production needs some serious caveats....
This is despite over 80% of its 70+ age group having both doses of the vaccine. At least half of the 70+ were fully vaccinated by January 23rd.
It is the elderly all cause mortality that ultimately matters to me. If elderly are dying of other causes, then there are problems.
Regardless, 2021 elderly mortality in Israel will serve as a good test for the vaccine as the vast majority of 70+ will be fully vaccinated for nearly the entire year.
Reassuring news! A hope for some normalcy coming with ongoing vaccinations.
Reassuring news! A hope for some normalcy coming with ongoing vaccinations.
Excess mortality for the elderly in Israel in the last 6 weeks is the highest it's been (by far) in the last 5 years. Check euroMOMO https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Making matters a bit worse is that the anti-vaccine propaganda has been quite successful in some areas, with some anti-vaxxers going as far as to book appointments only to intentionally not show up so that the vaccine is wasted. This should be a criminal offense. It's basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangerment in a more roundabout way.
It is, but I am not sure how you enforce it as it is extremely hard to prove. I think they should be going after the people who have been making posts encouraging this type of behavior. Unfortunately the anti-vaxxers in Israel are extremely aggressive and they use a lot of fear tactics and deceptive “marketing”. An approximate translation of the largest anti-vaccine group in Israel’s Facebook page title is “Vaccines,…
Personally, I hold the opinion that anti-vaxxers are more of a natural product of their environments than anything else. You can clearly see the distinction along the religious and educational boundaries, for example. Limiting the freedom of speech in attempt to silence them is not going to work, like it's not working in stopping any other kind of speech you don't like. Censorship is dangerous: it alienates people and prevents communication, effectively radicalizing those affected.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The situation is bad but not so bad that competitors could be forced to work together it seems. And yet this should have been the plan from the very beginning. Considering the vast numbers needed in Europe and the whole world, forcing all available production facilities to produce vaccines should have been part of the plan.
Absolutely, however the EU's politicians are playing dumb and claim that they couldn't foresee that mass production could be a problem. The EU ordered too late and simply not enough. Now they are trying to blame everyone else for their failure.
Trump reserved the US manufactured supply for themselves, only, so Canada is reliant on EU exports, which is kind of crazy to think about, geographically.
My understanding is many Canadian officials were caught off guard by the fact that the vaccine became available Q1 2021, they were thinking Q2/Q3 2021 was more likely and so much of the purchase deals were geared around that.