571–580 of 1001 posts
I've read somewhere that the vaccine uses similar tech to Pfizer, so I'm wondering how many vaccines will actually be available by end of year if both are this effective.
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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…
Contract tracing hasn't worked at scale anywhere. It's a nice idea conceptually, but the problem is psychological. People stop caring about tracing when 98% of all trace connections are false positives. If a person is infectious for a week and the r0 is around 1 then only 1 person of all the people they've been in contact with will actually contract the virus on average. The other 50+ people, assuming they can even b…
Just curious, why the reaction towards this and the ones from Russia/China are different ?
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Pretty confident it's the former, which if the case, essentially ends the pandemic in a month after it's distributed, given that the R0 would drop precipitously. The challenge will be reconciling this with the antivax crowd given that as the vaccine rolls out the rate of infection will come down correspondingly among the whole population (including the unvaccinated). They'll immediately claim that the virus is "going…
It's a 2-dose regimen, needs to be stored at -70C, and Pfizer already said they'll only have 1.5B doses over the course of the next year. It's going to be a very slow roll out.
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?
-80C storage is an issue, you are definitely right, but it is a common requirement for many biological samples and protein-based drug therapies. -80C lab freezers are not that expensive and all over the place. I used to work in biotech and, at one company, all of our intermediate drug substance storage was -80C. we had freezers big enough to drive a forklift into; one such a freezer could store millions of doses... a…
But what kind of capacity can they handle? I imagine the scale of a Covid vaccine rollout would overhelm prior existing infrastructure
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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…
It's not possible to totally eradicate a virus that has animal reservoirs. The virus apparently jumped from bats to humans once before so it will probably happen again. We can't vaccinate all the bats.
What if we can? How would we do that?
So what does being injected an mRNA vaccine means ? My DNA will be permanently altered and permanently create fake covid proteins ? will this add overhead to my biological processes, am I becoming less optimized ? Will my body consume more sugar ? will those generated proteins accelerate my ageing ? What could go wrong ? (I don't think anything will go wrong but what does the science says ?)
No, in fact, mechanisms in cells are in places so that "heteroduplexes" (meaning one filament of RNA and one of DNA paired together) are quickly degraded.
Secondly, the RNA doesn't even need to get to the nucleus, where the DNA is. All it needs is to land in the cytoplasm, where it will get processed by the protein synthesis machinery (ribosomes in primis) to produce the antigen. RNA in the cell isn't that stable as well, so it will be ultimately get degraded.
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This is incorrect. They tested SARS patients over 17 years later and they still exhibited an immune response. As long as SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t mutate dramatically the body probably has long term immunity.
There was some response. Was it sufficient or not - it has never been verified. Attempts to vaccinate animals with SARS vaccines ended with terrible outcomes of ADE.
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…
Measles et al never died out, despite very aggressive, and for years successful vaccination programmes (thank you anti-vaccesrs for messing that up). But even if we all need to get vaccinated once a year, for a 90% immunity, that sounds manageable. So good news, if it all holds up.