How many different viruses are there that cause the common cold? About 200? If we can get an effective vaccine for this coronavirus in under a year why aren't we working on all the other coronaviruses and rhinoviruses? I know nothing about biology but let's say it costs $1 billion to develop and test a successful vaccine for a common cold virus, worldwide for $200 billion that isn't that much to not have to deal with colds anymore. Plus it seems like one vaccine might provide protection for multiple different viruses. Or do they mutate too quickly to keep up?
Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
491–500 of 569 posts
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've subsequently learned that even young healthy and initially asymptomatic people can become permanently ill from so called "long COVID". The ethicists were right to say no.
This makes no sense to me. Preventing challenge trials causes more people to die and become permanently ill. What ethical system are you operating under where that is morally preferable? FWIW, ethicists were split, but mostly on board with HCTs. It was mostly the government that was opposed.
IIRC, we were fairly unaware of the long term effects at that point. All we really knew was that age had a factor. So a bunch of healthy young people would have signed up, thinking that the chances of harm, even if they got the placebo, were fairly low, when in reality there were significant chances of being permanently (or at least very long term) maimed.
Essentially, no one signing up for the trial would have been properly able to give consent, because no one knew the real consequences.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 diabet…
Curious, in your healthcare experience, what would you estimate is the percentage of people who do have good insurance, but don't get preventative care by choice? E.g. for myself, I have good insurance, but I don't have a "primary care doctor." I don't go to the doctor unless I'm injured or sick. And I don't mean a sniffle or cough, I mean sick as in I have felt awful for several days.
If you have insurance and are not going for a routine exam once a year, you're doing a disservice to yourself because you miss the opportunity to catch issues that can be easily fixed when caught early but catastrophic if not. In fact many corporate policies require people to have regular exams exactly for this reason.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? I've read this 3 times and can't figure out what you're trying to say. Are you saying that rich countries are going to intentionally choose more expensive vaccines, with the intention of suppressing the lower classes? That's so rediculous. In rich countries (other than the usa) the gov pays for these things not the citizens. Even then, the expensive vaccine is only $40, that's within the means of most poor peop…
Fascinating ... > .. the gov pays for these things not the citizens .. You do know that the only money governments have, is the money they got from its citizens, right? That is, aside from what they may have earned (though plundered or extorted might be more fitting) from other nations. > .. the expensive vaccine is only $40, that's within the means of most poor people .. You may want to reevaluate your knowledge abo…
I'm not sure why i'm replying here. Guess i'm bored.
> Time will no doubt teach us all a lessen.
I doubt it. You need to actually have a position that can be shown to be true or false with the passage of time before you can learn something from the passage of time. You have a bizare, logically disconnected, rant that does not make any predictions. I don't think any course of events would prove you right (or wrong).
> You may want to reevaluate your knowledge about the rest of the world
In context, we were discussing afluent countries, canada europe, etc.
> Also, that vaccine probably won't cost "just" $40 equally for everyone.
They will cost $0 directly. As you say there will be indirect costs based on taxes. However that will be true regardless of if you get the vaccine and be scaled based on your income, so im not sure how you think that applies to your argument sbout class divide.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 1…
Thanks, this is a good point. I just blindly assumed it was too small because it was a small number.
I think there was a bit of an implication in the parent post that it would eliminate hospitalizations (instead of just reduce), i still think that is unrealistic.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly what a vaccine, any vaccine, does. A vaccine is something that primes the immune system, so that when the real virus enters the body it is attacked and destroyed quickly. This means that the virus can never start multiplying in the body and shedding to other people. I don't believe there is any modern vaccine that doesn't reduce or eliminate asymptomatic spreading of the disease.
Whooping cough. That vaccine causes suppressed symptoms and people can unknowingly spread the bacteria
That's a good point.
However, I believe that it is different between bacteria and viruses.
From my understanding of the whooping cough studies, they found that some vaccinated baboons who were subsequently infected still had high levels of pertussis bacteria after five weeks. These bacteria couldn't cause widespread infections in the host, but had seemingly found pockets where they were safe from the immune system.
A virus, however, can't find a "safe pocket" away from the immune system in which to survive and multiply. It needs to use the body's own cells and machinery to do so, and (outside of the blood-brain barriers) there aren't cells hidden from the immune system.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wor…
Yeah, too bad for these millions of people who died from the disease! At least we followed the procedure!
It's not about following arbitrary rules for the sake of following rules.
There are people out there that won't hesitate to kill any number of people for the hard cash or fame, some did it before and that's how the rules were born. I am sure that some of rules could be revisited thanks to the new tech but portraying it as "rules kill people" is intellectually dishonest or naive.
Look what happened with Boeing 737-MAX. Some businessmen, scientists and engineers will cut corners to get their job "done" and every now and then it will be catastrophic.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#498An important fact that I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is that 3m doses have been manufactured already and are available in the UK supply chain today. "All" that's required is the approval from the regulator - but I guess that is still a little way off. 3m would do a lot of good though - frontline staff, the most vulnerable, hotspots....
India has already made 40m and is ramping up to 100m https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-13/india-to-...
The Gates Foundation has been capital-sharing with Indian manufacturers to get more vaccine into 3rd world.
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if the vaccine gives permanent immunity, which I haven't found any research suggesting that it will. In all likelihood, it will be necessary to give yearly booster shots, so the companies developing the vaccines will be able to sell vaccines every year The quantity of vaccines needed will make even a $0.50 markup worth billions of dollars every year
You can't measure long-term immunity on a virus that's only been in the wild for ~11 months. That said, all the recent studies I've seen show no signs that immunity is going to drop significantly after a year. I hate to link to a Youtube video, but this doctor walking through the research in the first part of the video is honestly better than any news article I've seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFeJ2BqCFY0
Thank you for the link. The study definitely suggest a best-case scenario is viable. I do however think that the sample population of 183 subjects is too small to support the conclusion in the paper. The study only got a single sample from the majority of the participants andI couldn't find any indication of how many subjects from each location participated (or which locations were included outside of California), which makes me think it might not be a representative population used
I also noted that 40 of the participants were excluded because they had no PCR test done to confirm covid and no antibodies were found in the assay. This is in my opinion a major flaw, as the subjects could have been infected, but had no antibodies left, when the blood sample was taken
Finally seven of the 18 authors declare competing interests, which might have affected the research
Getting back to your post itself, I agree that you can't measure immunity for a longer period than the virus has been around, but that also means you can't say that there will only be a need for one round of vaccines, which was what I was disagreeing with
It might very well turn out, that you gain permanent immunity for a specific strain off the virus, but unfortunately that immunity also introduces selective pressure. Whether the virus is able to mutate in a way that bypass existing antibodies in a subject is obviously still an unknown, but we have seen that it's able to jump to other species like mink, which caused the emergence of the Cluster-5 variant
Since the virus is able to use other species as a reservoir and selective pressure is being introduced, I think it's reasonable to prepare for a scenario, where a vaccine won't be a permanent fix
Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes no sense to me. Preventing challenge trials causes more people to die and become permanently ill. What ethical system are you operating under where that is morally preferable? FWIW, ethicists were split, but mostly on board with HCTs. It was mostly the government that was opposed.
IIRC, we were fairly unaware of the long term effects at that point. All we really knew was that age had a factor. So a bunch of healthy young people would have signed up, thinking that the chances of harm, even if they got the placebo, were fairly low, when in reality there were significant chances of being permanently (or at least very long term) maimed. Essentially, no one signing up for the trial would have been…
Nobody knew what the long term effects were, but we knew that there was uncertainty about them. Informed consent doesn't require perfect information. Just the best possible information, and a fair appraisal of uncertainty.