Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine • Hacker News Board

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#331

Post by GhostVII » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

codeulike wrote: post #241

summerlight wrote: post #131

It's interesting to layman's eyes that the dosing regime using 1.5 doses is more effective than the one using 2 doses as I would expect the inverse; are there any plausible explanations for this?

These stats are based on 130 people getting covid out of an experiment of 25,000 people. They dont give a breakdown of the stats (e.g. who was on placebo, who was on which dosing regimen ) but those are small nubmers. I think its possible that this is just noise. The difference between '60%' and '90%' might just be a handful of cases. They show that it works though, thats the main thing. edit: e.g. of those 130 cases…

Only 2700 people were in the 1.5 dose variant.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#332

Post by ithkuil » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

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…

> less than twenty thousand of them develop narcolepsy. As a reminder a quarter million of them already died from COVID-19 and more are dying every day

I assume the concern is that an unknown unknown means it could cause/trigger/amplify some other disease/condition that may be comparable/worse than the problem it solves.

Cause/effect and morals are hard. Add to the mix a general statistical innumeracy, and some general suspicion about authorities, and it makes it really hard for the general populace to actually weigh the two different options.

I don't think we should dismiss these concerns as just stuff for nutjobs. I've seen otherwise reasonable people having trouble making up their minds about that.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#333

Post by ta8645 » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

I find it disheartening how many people speculate about possible long term side effects of exposure to Covid, even in asymptomatic cases. Yet those same people seemingly have no reservations about injecting a brand new drug into their veins.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#334

Post by lbeltrame » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

sgt101 wrote: post #308

anoncake wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were any doses produced yet of the other two vaccines?

I am not sure : I know the other vaccines must be stored at a very low temperature, but does anyone know how long they can be stored for at all?

Up to six months.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#335

Post by Mumps » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #51

camkego wrote: post #16

This statement seems a big deal: "There were no hospitalised or severe cases in anyone who received the vaccine" Is that also true of the Pfizer and Moderna trials? Are the various trials measuring 'effectiveness' in the same way? Is there a standard for 'effectiveness' in these Covid-19 trials? It will take some digging and real effort to compare the risks and benefits of the various vaccines coming to market.

Seems like the sample size is probably too small to draw any conclusions there. 131 got covid in the trial, if 70% effective than 39 should be from the group that got the vaccine (i think. Did i do that right given they're combining the two dosing regime)? Maybe its chance that none of those 39 got really sick. I'm not sure what the age breakdown of trial participants was- were the people in the oxford trial younger?…

(afaict) You're right about the 39 (risk reduction = 1-39/131 ~= 70%).

But you're less correct about saying "smple size is probably too small" (in general, people really really really need to stop dismissing things based on sample sizes until they actually go through a Power calculation!). Your question about demographic breakdown is entirely valid.

Hospitalization rate for covid is about 228.7 hospitalizations per 100,000 population [0]. Or, more easily interpretted, about 10-20% of cases turning to hospitalization. Taking the more conservative (10%) rate, we'd need 31 samples for a 95% CI and 5% margin of error. Thus, the interpetation is that is it unlikely that the _lack of seeing any hospitalizations in the vaccine+covid-positive group is by chance_.

Hope that helps!

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#336

Post by tboyd47 » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

ta8645 wrote: post #333

I find it disheartening how many people speculate about possible long term side effects of exposure to Covid, even in asymptomatic cases. Yet those same people seemingly have no reservations about injecting a brand new drug into their veins.

Especially when the "gold standard" PCR procedure has a 97% false positive rate.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#337

Post by lbeltrame » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

SpaceRaccoon wrote: post #47

threeseed wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were no hospitalisations or severe incidents for either the Pfizer and Moderna trials were was related to the vaccine. And it's pretty easy to compare the vaccines. It will mostly come down to price, ease of manufacture and ease of distribution i.e. temperature. Given that for the 3 viruses all have no risks associated with their use.

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

Most adverse events (narcolepsy and GBS included) occur within a few months (1-3) of administration. The fact that some are reported after years doesn't mean they are "long term": it only means it took a while to vaccinate those people. So far none of the trials (even more so AZ) has incurred in vaccine-related adverse events of this sort.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#338

Post by Zenbit_UX » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #273

sjwright wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion of distributing a billion copies of a vaccine at -80°C to every corner of the planet seems rather resource intensive.

Dry ice is very common, and you get 5 days at refrigerator temperature. Everywhere in the world is reachable in 5 days if you need to. It gets really expensive to charter flights to many areas, but it is possible if you have money to burn. Of course we now have reason to believe that vaccines that don't need dry ice will be approved, so logistics will direct the easier to ship ones to remote places.

You can reach everywhere in 5 days but that's not enough. People have to come and get it, there's also a chance there will be a slow start due to concerns over a new drug that the media may emphasize was "rushed". Then there's the logistics of scheduling so many people. If you don't bring yourself a cold storage freezer you're committing to using 100% of your doses within 5 days which may not be possible.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#339

Post by Symmetry » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #31

Incoming possible Silly, Stupid and Lazy Questions, 1. Are there any vaccine ( of any Disease ) that are 100% effective? Or do we operate ( as I would assume ) something like 5 Nines effective rate and call it 100%? 2. Across all type of Vaccine, what are the average or median effective rate? i.e Should we expect Vaccine to be 90%+ effective in the first place? Or is that a wrong expectation to make? 3. What happens…

The sort of polio vaccine used in rich countries is almost 100% effective after three doses. I did some spot checking of a bunch of vaccines I'd heard of and most seem to be between 90% and 99% effective so Covid-19 vaccines seem to be in line with expectations. The flu is worse but that's always a guessing game of which strain will be prevalent when they're making the vaccine. I think that's because more doses tend to be more effective and if a single dose doesn't get you there they just give you more doses, like the two doses for the mRNA covid vaccines. Effectiveness here is how many people get sick. You don't know in this circumstance that they're going to get sick until it happens, though maybe you could keep track of everybody's antibody levels compared to what they should be and guess. That would be way more expensive than just giving everybody the same schedule of doses though.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#340

Post by inductive_magic » Mon, Nov 23, 2020, 2:02 PM UTC

ta8645 wrote: post #333

I find it disheartening how many people speculate about possible long term side effects of exposure to Covid, even in asymptomatic cases. Yet those same people seemingly have no reservations about injecting a brand new drug into their veins.

This goes both ways, there are plenty of people who don't take covid serious but fear the health-consequences of vaccines.

There's probably a name for the phenomenon. If not, let me propose "The duality of Hans"