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Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#441

Post by amb23 »

adrianN wrote: post #157
benlumen wrote: post #149

I'm feeling a deep-seated wave of relief that I never thought possible. Like waking up from a year-long nightmare. Thank God.

It will still take a long time before a sufficient number of people have been vaccinated that life can return back to normal.

One of the lead doctors in the UK is saying life will start to look normal in Spring 2021 (albeit, I assume he was referring to the UK alone). There's good reason for cautious optimism & patience.

Science has done its job; now we need to push for coordination between infrastructure, government, and business to finish it.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#442

Post by kube-system »

ketamine__ wrote: post #363
acdha wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I get that you find lockdowns an inconvenience but the real world isn’t a TV show where a cheap and easily distributed cure will be invented 10 minutes before the end of the episode. People will reliably die until a vaccine or highly effective treatment is widely available, and the only way to slow that is to rely on proven public health techniques. While you’re being inconvenienced remember that you’re better…

You criticized the commenter for objecting to lockdown. Why are the people you refer to dying? Is it possible it is because they aren't quarantining and staying at home?

The vast majority of Americans live in households where someone has to physically go to work in order to feed their family. Many others must leave their homes to purchase basic essentials.

The value of a lockdown isn't in changing the behavior of those who are already voluntarily avoiding exposure -- its value is in changing the behavior of those who inconsiderately spread it to others during their essential travels outside of their house.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#443

Post by SomeoneFromCA »

matz1 wrote: post #334
MichaelApproved wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How dangerous did you assess it to be?

Vast majority of the cases are asymptomatic or only have mild symptoms.

So what? 1% IFR is very, very high. If 90% of world population gets sick with it, 70 000 000 will die. Compare that with 700 000 flu death every year.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#445

Post by [deleted] »

charlesdm wrote: post #364
aphextron wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm feeling a deep-seated wave of relief that I never thought possible. Like waking up from a year-long nightmare. Thank God. Moderna is also only weeks behind Pfizer/Biontech here with a very similar technology and manufacturing capability of hundreds of millions of doses. We'll be seeing the first EUA's by December, and shots in the arm before the end of the year. Pretty incredible that we can just science our way…

This is great and all, and I'm not against vaccinations, but is this safe long term? Am I the only one here who doesn't want to get inoculated in basically the first batch?

[deleted]

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#446

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

refurb wrote: post #10
3dbrows wrote: post #5

At the time of writing (2020-11-09 12:04 UTC) the article uses "90% of people" and "90% protection" interchangeably. I assume it means "90% of individuals achieve immunity", rather than "individuals achieve 90% immunity". EDIT: See child comment re: Pfizer press release. EDIT 2: See [1] for said press release, which has more detailed information than the BBC article. [1] https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/pre…

From Pfizer's press release, they use "vaccine efficacy" which has a very specific definition. "Vaccine efficacy is the percentage reduction of disease in a vaccinated group of people compared to an unvaccinated group" So basically a 90% reduction in Covid infection.

There's no such thing as "Covid infection". There's SARS-CoV-2 infection, which often causes CoVID-19 disease.

Pfizer is saying that their vaccine is effective at protecting against CoVID-19 disease. They haven't said anything about preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection yet, as far as I can see. The difference is important, because there are vaccines (such as the Salk polio vaccine) that only protect against disease, but not against infection. People get infected and pass on the virus without ever getting sick, so there's no herd immunity.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#447

Post by [deleted] »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #425
bufferoverflow wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can eradicate it by contact tracing. With 90% efficiency it will be extremely tough for the virus to spread. For any new cases you simply test everyone in the vicinity of the infected person. But I don't think even that will be necessary. 90% efficiency reduces R so much, it will probably die out on its own. The real problem is mutations that are not covered by the vaccine. If it mutates as efficiently as…

This is 90% protection against disease, not necessarily 90% protection against infection. There's an important distinction: * Protection against disease means that you don't get sick. You may still contract the virus and spread it to others (the Salk vaccine against Polio works this way). * Sterilizing immunity means that you can't even get infected, so that you can't pass the virus on to other people. It does not lo…

[deleted]

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#448

Post by Tor3 »

matz1 wrote: post #342
HelloMcFly wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three of my dead family members (edit for clarity: not my immediate nuclear family, but people I'm still close to) don't feel the same way (nor do those who were impacted by the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths in the US), but I'm glad you've found this whole thing to be overblown.

I didn't say there won't be any people dead due to virus. Many people too die due to flu virus.

In my whole life (and I'm not young anymore) I have never known or been acquainted with someone who died of the flu. And I've also never known anyone who were still completely out five months after they had the flu, unlike a couple of young friends of mine who got Covid in March. One of them (a thing until October. If my parents get the flu it's extremely likely they'll be fine in a week or two. Covid would be a completely different story.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#449

Post by try-perforate »

lbeltrame wrote: post #271
jakozaur wrote: post #214

Good: + ~90% of individuals achieve immunity. + no significant side-effects. Not so good: - two doses needed, 3 weeks apart, immunity after one month from first dose. Slow rollout. - -80C storage and transport needed. Challenging, but doable in developed countries, but still may slow down mass rollout. Not feasible in many developing countries. I still wonder about long-term immunity. Anyone can share any insight?

The latest data (preprint, not peer reviewed etc etc) mention memory B and T cells up to 8 months after recovery from the illness. This means that an immunity of one year is probably likely. This would be probably enough to quench the spread, but not to eradicate the virus.

This vaccine is against the entire spike glycoprotein. Some in production vaccines are only against the RBD (the protein that actually latches onto ACE2). There are variants out there that have been shown to escape RBD antibodies. However, since this vaccine encodes the entire spike, there are other areas that antibodies can bind to. They stated in their press release that the vaccine elicits a Th1, CD4+, and CD8+ T-cell response against both the RBD and other areas on the spike. I think this is the most promising aspect. This means it should hopefully be effective against even escape variants.

Re: Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

#450

Post by lm28469 »

317070 wrote: post #439
charlesdm wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great and all, and I'm not against vaccinations, but is this safe long term? Am I the only one here who doesn't want to get inoculated in basically the first batch?

> but is this safe long term Is getting COVID safe long term? There are plenty of viruses that cause issues in the long term. HIV causes AIDS, HPV and Hepatitis cause cancers years later. We have no clue on the long term effects of SARS-Cov-2, other than that it causes COVID-19 in the short term. It's a choice between the pest and the cholera at this point.

> Is getting COVID safe long term?

For most people yes

edit: so the whole world is studying this virus 24/7 for almost a year and nobody detected anything, yet you think it might give us aids v2 ? Feel free to link any study that hints to anything remotely going in that direction because I couldn't find anything at all.

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