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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

#371

Post by bumby »

paganel wrote: post #342
jefftk wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not the OP, but what she/he is probably hinting at is that the majority of Western Governments (i.e. both the US and the EU) have poured trillions of dollars/euros into the market as the pandemic started, money that has helped the capital markets stay afloat (and even more than that). Without those trillions of dollars/euros most probably the capital markets would have been down by at least 50% (my guesstimate, or at…

Can you help me understand your point a little better?

I think the OP was reflecting on cash flow being used for R&D but your post seems to be more about market capitalization.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#372

Post by triangleman »

dash2 wrote: post #363
Zenbit_UX wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This would be fine, but delete "fool".

It's all right, he'll live

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#373

Post by tboyd47 »

orzig wrote: post #345
tboyd47 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is asserting that the number of incorrectly positive results is equal to ALL truly negative test takers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_rate ). >> Citation needed <<

Why bother giving citation if I am going to be downvoted anyway? But, here you go.

https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/are-nc-s-coronavirus-case-n...

https://www.portugalresident.com/judges-in-portugal-highligh...

(NYT) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...

https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20200429007051320

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#374

Post by jl2718 »

In case anybody was wondering what this actually is: “The ChAdOx1 vaccine is a chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine vector.” They put a corona spike sequence into it.

By comparison, the Moderna is making a RNA vaccine, and BioNTech an epitope vaccine (the actual protein).

The ‘invasive’ effect is decreasing in that order. Oxford’s ChAdOx1 infects your cells to create RNA, then protein, then T-cell recognition/apoptosis, then epitopes trigger B-cell antibody production. Moderna RNA skips the infection part. BioNTech epitopes go right to B-cells.

But, they also have deceasing stability and manufacturing scalability in that order.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#375

Post by dragontamer »

ksec wrote: post #48
dragontamer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Sometimes, vaccines are only 30% or 40% effective, leading to terrible flu seasons. I don't really know the mean/median/mode, but 90% is really high for a vaccine. > 3. What happens in the case of 10% ineffective, do they take a t…

>How do you know if someone is one of those 10%? I would assume everyone have the vaccine and they still get caught COVID afterwards? Or do I misunderstood what effective means?

The point of a vaccine is to give you immunity WITHOUT getting the virus.

Your immune system naturally becomes immune after it fights off an infection. But because of the risk of long-term effects and/or death when you're infected with COVID19, people want a safer solution that provides immunity.

A vaccine provides immunity, but at a lesser rate than the actual virus. But 90% (or even 70%) effectiveness is a good thing: it means 90% to 70% people do NOT spread the virus anymore.

You'd think that means 90% or 70% fewer deaths, but that's mistaken. That 70% is compounded over-and-over every generation. If everyone else is vaccinated: you infect 70% fewer people. Those people infect 70% fewer people, and those people infect 70% fewer people.

After 3 generations, a 70% vaccine would wipe out 97.3% of possible infections. And a "generation" in COVID19 terms is roughly 1-week.

---------

So yes, even a 70% vaccine (if everyone took it) is a very, very, very good thing. But the two vaccine trials that finished first were 90% effective, so I think people will prefer the higher-efficacy (at least, if they have access to Dry Ice / -80C storage).

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#376

Post by triangleman »

DennisP wrote: post #321
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 pro…

Wait isn't that exactly what they did?

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#377

Post by bumby »

flexie wrote: post #228
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…

[flagged]

>Expensive, inaccessible except to the rich

I don’t think the data bears this out exactly. US healthcare tends to optimize for access and quality to the detriment to cost. As the saying goes: access, quality, or cost... you only get to choose two.

The US tends to measure better than any comparable country of its size on those two metrics (and quite poorly on cost...but some of that is because the US funds about 50% of worldwide medical R&D)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067361...

Edit: U.S. percentage of worldwide R&D has been waning and, while still the largest contributor, is now a little over 40%

https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#378

Post by jashephe »

twic wrote: post #252
rixrax wrote: post #90

Is there any research or early guestimates about risks (or benefits) of getting multiple different vaccines for Covid? E.g. What if one gets this, and then later moderna vaccine? Will they fight each other, or work together or is it unknown whats going to happen?

I'm not aware of any risks. There are definitely benefits to vaccine diversity. The Oxford ChAdOx1 virus involves putting a modified chimp adenovirus into people. People don't have immunity to chimp adenovirus, so it infects them and delivers the spike protein, which elicits immunity. But that might also elicit immunity to the chimp adenovirus! If that happens, then a later does of the vaccine - say, for a new strain…

Indeed. Maybe someone with more expertise can chime in — it's not clear to me if getting a vaccine with the chimp adenovirus backbone would preclude the possibility of getting another vaccine based on that backbone in the future (because of immunity to the backbone).

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#379

Post by mhb »

flexie wrote: post #195
ddeck wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At $3 to $4, many countries will jump on board ASAP and stay away from the expensive vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. The price difference will likely remain substantial, but in case anyone is unaware, the difference is currently greater due to AstraZeneca pledging to the sell the vaccine at cost "during the pandemic", while Pfizer and Moderna have indicated that they fully intend to profit. [1] Once AstraZeneca de…

[flagged]

Venturing A Perspective On The Drug Pricing Debate

https://lifescivc.com/2019/12/venturing-a-perspective-on-the...

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#380

Post by bumby »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #250
flexie wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> The AstraZeneca vaccine also has 90 percent efficacy when used twice No it doesn't. Both dosings use two shots, and the "90%" number from the smaller dosing is from an unreliably small sample set of 33 infections -- it could easily be 70-80% by next month when more data comes in.

Couldn’t the same be said in reverse? I.e., due to sampling error the reports could be amended to a 95% efficacy when more data comes in?
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