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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

#551
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BioNTech is not a German/Turkish company. It's a German company, two of whose founders are of Turkish descent.

As someone who migrated to Germany from Turkey, people like me (and everything we are involved in) are "German" when we do something they're[0] not proud of, we are "Turkish" if we ever come close to success, and "of Turkish descent" in the normal times. Of course it depends who you are asking :) It's a bit annoying to be honest but not a huge deal. I suppose all immigrants have similar problems. [0]: I mean people l…

I didn't mean to make any judgment about the "Turkishness" or "Germanness" of Drs. Şahin and Türeci. I just mean to clarify that BioNTech was founded and is based in Germany, just as Google is an American company (not Russian-American) even though Sergey Brin was born in Moscow.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#552

We (Britain) may have totally screwed up our general response to COVID. But at least we’re still pretty good at science. Thanks Oxford for saving the day.

Tyler Cowen made this point a few months ago ( https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/wh... ): the public health response has been "generally poor" but the UK was first on the mark with dexamethasone and has been among the first with the vaccines. He went as far as saying the UK has had the best response to COVID despite the public health response.

So, a member of my immediate family is senior management at Public Health England, the civil service institution that should have been planning for this.

When the government announced they were shutting down PHE, in an attempt to copy the RKI (forgetting that PHE is far more than disease control, of course), the RKI wrote a letter to all senior management at PHE. This was quite a confused letter - the RKI didn’t understand why the UK gov were making this decision, when the RKI modelled their processes on PHE. I’ve read the letter.

Add to this, daily squabbles between cabinet office and other branches of government. If there was good news, you’d hear back immediately and you’d be blocked from sharing it. Bad news, cabinet would stall sometimes for weeks.

But ultimately all the guidance was irrelevant because the UK government are not interested in listening to it. When an adviser egregiously broke the rules, a story which dominated the headlines for weeks, they changed the rules. You see it now - the UK isn’t even on the downslope of wave 2, but apparently in 2 weeks we’ll have fans at football games and business as usual.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is preventing whom from being saved?

The people and government organizations that opposed challenge trials are preventing the participants in challenge trails from saving people who actually did die from Covid.

I'm not sure that's correct as the safety data had been the last to come in. You still have to run a large phase 3 trial to collect safety data, challenge trial or not.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#554

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?

I appreciate the need for caution, but these people are experts in what they do, any doubts we might have would have already been considered by them.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#555
post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key differentiator is the mechanism of action, not the storage system. The other two current candidates are mRNA vaccines, an approach which hasn't been used in humans before -- looks like the harbinger of a revolution but we have no past experience. This O/AZ uses the actual spike protein embedded in a simian virus (that does not affect humans and has its own DNA removed). It's possible to generate antibodies to…

The storage system is important and a key differentiator, tons of countries cannot effectively distribute a virus at -70° to population in the most vulnerable spots. I don't know why you felt the need to be so dismissive.

I am dismissive because distribution is not big-H Hard. It consists of known unknowns and can "simply" be solved by application of money. Yes, actually it's a systems problem: there is not infinite money, there are political interests. But compared to the science the problems are well understood.

On the other hand we still have no idea how well these vaccines will work. First, we have (as I discussed) two different approaches in the three current candidates, one of which is fairly new and one which is completely novel. We have had only limited time to see how well they work and have only limited experience in broad efficacy, duration of effect, and, crucially, how long they last (it takes a long time to learn if you'll need a 10 year booster!). We don't know how fast the virus mutates away from the vaccine's target (though we do currently think we have a good idea). And we simply haven't tried enough people to get a good handle on side effects.

One of the difficulties in solving these is that new approaches contain unknown unknown. Look at CRISPR-CAS: got a (deserved) Nobel this year yet may already have been discovered to be ineffective or worse in the real world. That takes time to learn.

Now it's not that the people doing the work are idiots -- they know all these problems better than I do. But I am appalled that this is treated by the press as a distinction between, say, a pair of beta implementations of something, one in Python and one in Ruby.

Going back to systems issues: when we don't know these factors we take a calculated risk (really an estimated risk). The social aspects of vaccination (close to ubiquitous use, the risk of any side effects increasing the anti-vaxx rate for other immunizations, which itself could become a public health disaster etc) mean these factors are upmost in public health officials, not whether they have adequate refrigeration.

Vaccines are particularly difficult for reasons like these above -- there's a reason why they have their own special laws and government-assumed liability insurance. I haven't worked on vaccines, so take this as you will, but I have worked in anti-invectives, have designed preclinical and clinical protocols (including first-in-human) which were submitted and approved by the FDA, run clinical trials, have presented to the FDA and defended protocol design, so I have some idea what's involved and how to read the presented endpoints and findings.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#556
post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key differentiator is the mechanism of action, not the storage system. The other two current candidates are mRNA vaccines, an approach which hasn't been used in humans before -- looks like the harbinger of a revolution but we have no past experience. This O/AZ uses the actual spike protein embedded in a simian virus (that does not affect humans and has its own DNA removed). It's possible to generate antibodies to…

What does this imply? Is the approach by Oxford worse, or just more well known / less surprises? Does this mean that dosing the vaccination is somehow more difficult? Sorry I’m a total noob in this area.

Nothing wrong with being a noob: we all are, really. Im' a vaccine noob as my pharma work is all small molecule work in a different area.

I answer your question in a parallel comment; click "parent" on your comment and look at my response to jeromegv

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#557
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they actually get to 90% or more, why would anyone bother with the more expensive and cumbersome vaccines? Except that the EU already signed a deal to buy the vaccines from AstraZeneca, Sanofi and Johnson & Johnson.

Because even with all 3 vaccines we still don't have the supply needed to vaccinate everyone immediately.

Honestly, why would any 1st world country "vaccinate everyone immediately"? Wouldn't it be more prudent for a rich country to wait until 3rd world countries vaccinate first in order to see what the side effects actually are? Not to mention the fact that we know nothing about potential long-term side-effects.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from how you think I read it? The “Spanish flu” is the name of the 1918 outbreak of H1N1. There was also a major H1N1 outbreak in 2009.

The 2009 outbreak wasn't comparable to the Spanish Flu.

Indeed, for various reasons including no world war and widespread vaccination, it was less bad. But it was literally the same virus.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#559
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. In case of need, the Swiss cheese model: https://mobile.twitter.com/sketchplanator/status/13127289416...

This and "layered defense" are good search terms for this topic in general (not limited to the pandemic).

"defense in depth" and "[the] hierarchy of controls" as well.

Re: Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the data we have is sufficient, then why hasn't it been approved yet?

The data was literally just released. Moderna and Pfizer submitted for approval shortly after they released their initial Phase 3 results. Approval is expected to be expedited, but will not be instant (I've read a few weeks, assuming no problems). Oxford/AstraZeneca will likely follow the same course now that their results are available (they were waiting for enough people in their trials to become infected, same as…

Wait, so was the data just released or has the scientific community had enough time to analyze these results and determine that the vaccine is safe?
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