Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

ox.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 569 posts

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#451

Post by anoncake »

dash2 wrote: post #360
anoncake wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need altruism. Vaccine researchers want the pandemic to end like everyone else plus they're interested in vaccine research anyway.

I doubt if vaccine research can be done just by a group of interested people. It's not a paper-and-pencil affair like pure maths. You need a lot of computers, drug manufacturing machinery; then you have to run big, well-organized RCTs. If you've got an example of volunteer-driven health research at scale, I'd like to hear about it.

Volunteer-driven health research has solved all zero major pandemics of the last century.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#452

Post by coliveira »

bumby wrote: post #446
coliveira wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US healthcare is good only when considering those who can pay to access it. But since large swathes of the US population cannot afford to have access (expensive insurance costs, even with Obamacare support), this becomes a mute point. If that is the metric, then even Brazil (and many other 3rd word countries) also has good medical care, because it works for the small percent of the population with money to access…

Your points are baked into the data that I linked. The metric within is "HAQ Index" which stands for "Healthcare Access and Quality". I.e., access is part of the measure. In the US everybody has access, which is part of the problem that drives costs higher. E.g., if you don't have insurance you can walk into an emergency room and get treated even if it's not an emergent situation. If you don't have insurance, there i…

You probably don't know how the US system works. The only access that is guaranteed by law is to emergency services. If you don't have a paid insurance (through your employer or yourself), then you cannot access preventive care or otherwise normal medical consultation. Millions of people in the US don't have access.

For example, if someone needs to treat cancer, it doesn't make any good to go to an emergency unit: they will discharge the patient as it is not an emergency situation.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#453

Post by Ericson2314 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #428
bleepblorp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think it should always be insanely profitable to save the world! That is something we want to encourage!

We should have drug bounties for that, rather than trying to make up R&D costs with per-dose price gouging.

This ensures equitable access, ...you know, that the whole world is actually saved.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#454

Post by paganel »

refurb wrote: post #409
paganel wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just because Pfizer's stock drops doesn't mean they can't fund their R&D. Pfizer has $10B in cash.[1] [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PFE/balance-sheet/

A 40-50% reduction in share price would have most probably eliminated the dividends completely, especially in a very adverse deflationary market, which most definitely would have seen the most of that $10 billion sum allocated to other things than R&D.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#455

Post by bb123 »

anoncake wrote: post #229
bb123 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for developing countries. And ultimately it is important for them to get vaccinated too, otherwise they will form a huge reservoir of COVID that will inevitably mutate and come back around to us.

That is not how it works. The Spanish Flu hasn't "come back" yet and coronaviruses mutate a lot more slowly. It couldn't really come back anyway, because it's still there, downgraded to regular flu.

Your example proves exactly the opposite of the point you think it does. Every year the flu virus comes back slightly mutated, and the immunity process starts all over again. In the summer the southern hemisphere acts as of reservoir of the virus and vice versa in the winter. This exact process could happen with COVID too. You are right that it does mutate more slowly, but there are upwards of 4 billion people in these countries. A very small number times 1 billion is still a much larger number.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#456

Post by bumby »

coliveira wrote: post #452
bumby wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your points are baked into the data that I linked. The metric within is "HAQ Index" which stands for "Healthcare Access and Quality". I.e., access is part of the measure. In the US everybody has access, which is part of the problem that drives costs higher. E.g., if you don't have insurance you can walk into an emergency room and get treated even if it's not an emergent situation. If you don't have insurance, there i…

You probably don't know how the US system works. The only access that is guaranteed by law is to emergency services. If you don't have a paid insurance (through your employer or yourself), then you cannot access preventive care or otherwise normal medical consultation. Millions of people in the US don't have access. For example, if someone needs to treat cancer, it doesn't make any good to go to an emergency unit: th…

>if someone needs to treat cancer, it doesn't make any good to go to an emergency unit

That's because the ER is meant to stabilize a patient, not cure chronic disease. Which is to my point: people will forgo preventative medicine until their condition deteriorates and they need to be stabilized in an ER. People get their non-emergent conditions treated all the time in American emergency rooms.

E.g., if I have diabetes, an ER will not put me on a long-term treatment plan. But if I ignore my disease until I start having hypoglycemic symptoms an ER will treat me until I am stabilized enough to be released. Is this the best system? Absolutely not, but it's much different than saying "only the rich have access to healthcare".

FWIW, I used to work in healthcare, including redesigning ER processes

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#457

Post by _jahh »

bumby wrote: post #446
coliveira wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US healthcare is good only when considering those who can pay to access it. But since large swathes of the US population cannot afford to have access (expensive insurance costs, even with Obamacare support), this becomes a mute point. If that is the metric, then even Brazil (and many other 3rd word countries) also has good medical care, because it works for the small percent of the population with money to access…

Your points are baked into the data that I linked. The metric within is "HAQ Index" which stands for "Healthcare Access and Quality". I.e., access is part of the measure. In the US everybody has access, which is part of the problem that drives costs higher. E.g., if you don't have insurance you can walk into an emergency room and get treated even if it's not an emergent situation. If you don't have insurance, there i…

this is completely missing the point, people don't take chronic or slow-developing issues to the ER so they get worse and have catastrophic consequences resulting in both worse health outcomes and more expense because by the time they do come to ER it's a more serious intervention = $$$$

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#458

Post by shmageggy »

jl2718 wrote: post #374

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, the…

Thanks for the additional context. This is interesting because the has been some worry about the safety of the new and relatively untested mRNA technology, but this makes it seem like traditional vaccines are just that with extra steps. Should that be a license to feel safer about mRNA?

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#459

Post by trentnix »

bleepblorp wrote: post #126
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]

A profit opportunity requiring significant investment has led to fast and fantastic results that will benefit us all. But you want to punish the opportunists who've absorbed significant risk to bring us those results because you've decided their motivation isn't sufficiently pure.

I pray anyone of like mind is never in a position to enact such progress-killing madness and fear terribly that government is already full of them.

And besides, it is mind-numbingly complicated to calculate "at-cost" because as others have pointed out, that includes all of the dead-end R&D, ongoing legal exposure, interest on the loans used to cashflow operations at pharmaceutical giants, appropriate licensing of existing intellectual property that these vaccines are built on, and the million other ways money is spent to develop pharmaceuticals.

Post reply on HN