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Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

ox.ac.uk

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Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#321

Post by DennisP »

arichard123 wrote: post #315

Here [1] it says the vaccine was designed mostly over the weekend of 11th Jan 2020. Here we are 10 months later and we know it works. If our knowledge of vaccine design is so good experts can design a vaccine that works over a weekend, what new breakthroughs are required to reduce the time between then and now substantially? A lot of benefit could have been had if we'd been able to get along this path more quickly. […

The main bottleneck is getting a bunch of volunteers, vaccinating them, and seeing how many get the disease over the next few months. Kinda hard to speed that up, unless you're confident/desperate enough to just skip testing. Maybe if the disease were 10X more dangerous and you had a vaccine that was just a minor variation of a previous one, it'd be worth it.

A little time could maybe be shaved off by speeding up production. The mRNA vaccines have an advantage here, you can basically use an RNA printer to churn out whatever RNA sequence you need.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#322

Post by mrtksn »

arichard123 wrote: post #315

Here [1] it says the vaccine was designed mostly over the weekend of 11th Jan 2020. Here we are 10 months later and we know it works. If our knowledge of vaccine design is so good experts can design a vaccine that works over a weekend, what new breakthroughs are required to reduce the time between then and now substantially? A lot of benefit could have been had if we'd been able to get along this path more quickly. […

Definitely. It’s a similar situation with the aviation too.

Unfortunately, rules in fields like medicine and aviation are written with blood. Someone gets too greedy or too comfortable and you have large numbers of people death or incapacitated.

We already have large numbers of charlatans preying on the hopes of desperate people, must be very careful not to lower the barrier too much or these might jump too. Even worse, people might be targeted by slick psychopaths and coerced into extremely dangerous things, destroying communities when anything goes wrong.

Hopefully though, some mountains might have been moved and some things might have gotten faster from now on.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#323

Post by Frost1x »

ddeck wrote: post #204
flexie wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

To be fair, Johnson & Johnson (a US company) also made a similar pledge to AstraZeneca. These two companies have collectively received more than $1.5 billion from the US government [1]. As I understand it, Pfizer have not taken any federal funding. They do have government purchase agreements, but they are dependent on Pfizer delivering a viable vaccine. Their partner BioNTech received German government funding: Berli…

>These two companies have collectively received more than $1.5 billion from the US government [1]. As I understand it, Pfizer have not taken any federal funding. They do have government purchase agreements, but they

So where did Pfizer's capital come from to shoulder these costs? It didn't come out of thin air, they've accumulated capital from somewhere. If not from taxpayers, someone is subsidizing Pfizer's expenses through Pfizer's revenue stream. Taxpayer subsidies really make sense here seeing how this issue effects everyone.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#324

Post by 542354234235 »

beagle3 wrote: post #202
noneeeed wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the fact that this doesn't even need a freezer is great news. The fact that we have three highly effective vaccines in such a short period is amazing and between them we might stand a chance of making and distributing them at the scale necessary to get things under some kind of control by August.

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…

> Pandemrix, a flu vaccine, caused a notable uptick in narcolepsy in Sweden, Finland and likely the UK.

"The increased risk of narcolepsy due to vaccination was 1 in 18400 or 0.005%."[1] Considering the fatality and long term disability rate of Covid, and the way testing and safety protocols are done for vaccines, I don't really see how there could be an unknown and unseen risk that would outweigh the risk of contracting Covid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix#Side_effects

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#325

Post by DennisP »

chimprich wrote: post #258
SpaceRaccoon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know there aren't long term side effects?

We don't for absolute certainty, but there's no reason to think there would be. Consider: a) A virus that is known to cause severe disease in a significant proportion of people, including months-long serious health effects, hospitalisation and death. b) A virus chosen because it doesn't causing any ill-effects in humans, modified to take on some non-harmful aspects of virus a) and found to not cause any significant h…

And not only that but option (b) is a virus "that has been genetically changed so that it is impossible for it to grow in humans," according to the article.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#326

Post by abacadaba »

tialaramex wrote: post #236
beagle3 wrote: post #202

Earlier 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…

If the association between Pandemrix and narcolepsy is because it caused narcolepsy (as with Guillain-Barré it's also plausible the problem is that this is an auto-immune problem and so the vaccine wasn't actually the problem it just highlighted a problem you already had) then the incidence rate was estimated at like 18k patients per case. So if you give the entire US population a vaccine like that, less than twenty…

how about compared to the covid risk of a perfectly healthy young adult?

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#327

Post by bluGill »

anoncake wrote: post #232
WalterBright wrote: post #207

Earlier 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.

Today. Just 1 year ago the next pandemic was vaporware. In hindsight we know that covid happened, but there was no more reason to think it would have than any other unlikely event.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#328

Post by jefftk »

Frost1x wrote: post #323
ddeck wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Johnson & Johnson (a US company) also made a similar pledge to AstraZeneca. These two companies have collectively received more than $1.5 billion from the US government [1]. As I understand it, Pfizer have not taken any federal funding. They do have government purchase agreements, but they are dependent on Pfizer delivering a viable vaccine. Their partner BioNTech received German government funding: Berli…

>These two companies have collectively received more than $1.5 billion from the US government [1]. As I understand it, Pfizer have not taken any federal funding. They do have government purchase agreements, but they So where did Pfizer's capital come from to shoulder these costs? It didn't come out of thin air, they've accumulated capital from somewhere. If not from taxpayers, someone is subsidizing Pfizer's expenses…

> someone is subsidizing Pfizer's expenses through Pfizer's revenue stream

Companies taking a portion of what they earn from their existing products and investing this money to create new products is beneficial, and we should have more of it.

Additionally, while this is probably not the case for Pfizer, another possibility is that a company can take outside investment to fund development of a new product.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#329

Post by DennisP »

bawolff wrote: post #111
rusticpenn wrote: post #17

Correct me if I am wrong, Oxford uses traditional Vaccine design technique (using a weaker virus and adding spikes or something similar) while Biontech(Pfizer) and ModeRNA use MRNA which is completely new technique (messenger RNA). This is awesome for more than just vaccinations. Traditionally the groups allocating govt funding to science and industries are very risk averse and this could be one more example where ta…

I thought adenoviral vaccines were also relatively new. Not as new as mRNA which is bleeding edge, but still i think this would be the first time this technique would be approved for human use should it be approved.

The article says adenovirus vaccines have been "researched and used extensively for decades."

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#330

Post by Zenbit_UX »

xiphias2 wrote: post #165
ulfw wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 95% efficacy is twice as good as 90%. And some people are willing to pay the $30 it costs to be 5% likelihood to have a non-functioning vaccine vs. a 10% likelihood the vaccine you just got won't work on you.

Also so far the mRNA vaccines look to have less side effects. AstraZeneca is not doing charity, it's cheaper because they have the inferior vaccine.

Fool, they literally are doing charity as they've pledged not to profit from the pandemic. It's was stated multiple times in the article that they will sell it at cost in perpetuity to poor and mid income countries and until the pandemic is considered over in rich countries.
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