Oxford Study Confirms Astra Covid Shot's Response in Elderly (bloomberg.com) 67
The University of Oxford confirmed that the Covid-19 vaccine it's developing with AstraZeneca produced strong immune responses in older adults in an early study, with key findings from the last phase of tests expected in the coming weeks. From a report: The results, published Thursday in The Lancet medical journal, shed more light on preliminary data released in recent months showing the experimental shot generated an immune response in the elderly, who are at highest risk of severe illness. "This is a very important step, because the big worry with any vaccine is that it doesn't work so well in older people," Richard Horton, The Lancet's editor-in-chief, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. The data is "another brick in the house that we're trying to build for this vaccine." Researchers still await late-stage trial results that will show whether the vaccine can meet the high bar set by front-runners Pfizer and Moderna. The Astra-Oxford data readout will come after there have been 53 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the trial, Andrew Pollard, Oxford's chief trial investigator, said at a press briefing.
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We have to work in the social construct we have, not the one we want. Imagine for a moment how much progress could have been made if all the scientists working on vaccines were not each isolated in their own data silo, actually able to freely share their research and testing results without management preventing the sharing of progress reports because it might affect the stock price. Instead we have the farce of three different companies all trying to hit the market at once after a phenomenal duplication
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If we remove the profit from the system, there is no money to pay the scientists, and no capital to invest in equipment and laboratories.
The alternative would be to have the government provide funding by picking winners through central planning.
If that worked, the USSR would have won the cold war.
Competition is messy and wasteful. The alternative is worse.
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If we remove the profit from the system, there is no money to pay the scientists, and no capital to invest in equipment and laboratories.
I guess you're right. It's a good thing that the National Science Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control make so much profit.
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It's a good thing that the National Science Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control make so much profit.
The NSF and CDC didn't develop the vaccine.
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If they had access to the money wasted enriching stockborkers and other useless appendages of our economy that profits feed they could have.
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We have to work in the social construct we have, not the one we want. Imagine for a moment how much progress could have been made if all the scientists working on vaccines were not each isolated in their own data silo, actually able to freely share their research and testing results without management preventing the sharing of progress reports because it might affect the stock price. Instead we have the farce of three different companies all trying to hit the market at once after a phenomenal duplication of effort that probably cost months.
I think most people would agree it is prudent to have multiple different approaches to this problem to allow for the fact that we can't expect 100% success, indeed we did not know if we would have any at all. If they pooled their resources and were unsuccessful everyone would be wondering why all the eggs were in one basket, so to speak. Also we should not underestimate the motivation among all these researchers to be first. In this case I believe open competition has brought us as close to the ideal as
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They almost certainly would have followed different approaches to the problem anyway. Specialists in mRNA, proteins, etc. will all naturally follow different paths attempting to reach the same goal. It's not that different than if you gave a programming problem to a group that is trained in C++, another which uses Java for everything, and a third group who use Python. They'll all have different approaches to the same goal.
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One day, idiots like you will figure out the difference between being against any profit whatsoever, and being against price gouging.
Re: No thanks!!! (Score:2)
Re: No thanks!!! (Score:2)
That said, if you look at the history of capitalist antagonism against socialist regimes you won't feel quite as smug. Just because capitalism succeeded in various military coups and economic destruction when socialists were not willing to, does not mean capitalism is the superior system for human life. It just means capitalism created suffering elsewhere to increase the wealth and c
House? (Score:5, Funny)
The data is "another brick in the house that we're trying to build for this vaccine."
No, it's a wall. Another brick in the wall. But I guess that particular phrase is unpopular for at least two reasons. Still, we don't want to build it a house. We want to build a defense against it, not a home for it.
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Good idea - a vaccine for the most vulnerable (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good idea - a vaccine for the most vulnerable (Score:5, Informative)
The impact of COVID-19 in retirement homes has been horrific [apnews.com]; fully 1/3 of the excess deaths in nursing homes during the pandemic have been from neglect, as staff is overwhelmed caring for COVID-19 patients. Otherwise healthy people are dying of dehydration, malnutrition, and sores.
It's simply not possible to protect people in nursing homes unless you can protect the people who care for them. Nursing care is hard, up close and personal work with highly vulnerable patients. Infected, asymptomatic patient care technicians are going to infect patients, and pretty soon it's all over the place and unavoidable for anyone who works there.
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Protect the elderly? Absolutely.
But letting the virus run wild among younger generations is still not an option. They may die less frequently, but enough of them die and enough of them will get chronically ill to do a lot of damage.
When the vulnerable people are protected we must protect the rest as well.
Repeated immune challenge - like flu vaccination (Score:1)
If this vaccine is going to be a yearly thing, like the flu shot, I wonder about the effect of the repeated challenges to the immune system.
I'm referring to the Hayflick Limit [asu.edu] -- the observation that a normal human cell can only replicate and divide forty to sixty times before apostosis.
An immune response on vaccination pretty much means mass-replication of cells. Will repeated vaccinations cause the gradual depletion of naive T cells, which drain the immune systems of effectiveness in recognising new patho [google.com]
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That Sourceforge link you posted appears to show data at a country-wide level rather than individuals. There could be any number of reasons why countries with higher incidence of flu vaccination also have higher Covid rates (higher mobility, less tolerance of lockdown restrictions, etc.). Still an issue from a societal perspective, but not necessarily relevant at an individual immune response level. The Cleveland Clinic did a detailed study looking at individuals and found no increased incidence of Covid
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Thanks for your response.
Yes, the Sourceforge link is a cross-country study. However, its a lot of countries (48, plus dozens more fit the broad pattern). The results seem consistent: the only protected outliers are South Korea, Australia and New Zealand -- three countries with very tight border restrictions (all three are pretty much island) that have done a good job of essentially stamping out the virus internally.
I communicated with the author of the Cleveland study. His work is solid. The only drawbacks
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Pretty solid?
He didn’t even write a proper paper documenting his methods and upload it to the arkiv. He just made a plot and published it on sourceforge. A proper statistical analysis requires a lot more than that.
In its current state, you can come away with a curious observation of correlation, but nothing more than that.
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You're new to this thread, so I'll just clear this up.
- I'm the Sourceforge guy (the one with the curious correlation plot, but no paper).
- I've also been talking to Dr. Zein (the one who wrote the 'solid' paper)
Re: Repeated immune challenge - like flu vaccinati (Score:2)
I donâ(TM)t understand. You are saying the Zein study is solid, but you disagree with its conclusions?
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No, I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with its conclusions - I am saying it seems to be good, solid work. But my dataset and Dr. Zein's are fundamentally different in nature. His extended results show a mild protective effect of flu vaccines on over-65s, while my data indicates the opposite. So I was trying to reconcile the differences between his study's conclusions and the indications in my dataset.
One exclusion from Dr. Zein's dataset was of the group vaccinated earlier than Fall 2019 (n=5648) -- th
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Have you done any statistical analysis on your dataset? Have you made any effort to control for confounders? You can’t say your results are showing the opposite without doing that.
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(I'm not a statistician)This is what I've done: fit a linear model and checked basic statistical variables. Checked the trend is consistent over time and over subsets of the data. Tried correlating other variables (GDP, aged population -- even eyeballed a correlation with Chinese tourism in EU countries) - but no luck; the correlation remains stark.
No I am not controlling for confounding. Do you have suggestions on potential confounders and how to measure them?
My variables are:
1. covid fatality rate
2. flu v
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An overlap propensity score weighting method was used to control for observed covariate differences between patients who did and did not receive influenza vaccination in 2019. The propensity score for each individual is the predicted probability of receiving influenza vaccination from a nonparsimonious logistic regression model using the covariates listed as clinical characteristics in Table 1.
This is the part you are missing and is what is meant by “adjusted” analysis. You have to adjust for the covariates. Correlation != causation.
The reason they dropped some data from the analysis is because “vaccination” is a categorical variable, not a continuous one. In order for the population to be uniform, they have to set a timeframe. They chose “within the last year”. You can repeat the analysis, but there is no reason to think the result would change with a longer t
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"You have to adjust for the covariates."
Can you suggest suitable covariates? The Cleveland study uses a fundamentally different dataset to mine. They study people presenting at their hospital chain, and compare outcomes for vaccinated v/s unvaccinated individuals. From what I understand, they adjust for the fact sicker people vaccinate more, using their medical records. (Without this adjustment, unvaccinated individuals have lower mortality). This is hard work, but I have no reason to doubt they did it properly. However, they may have self-select
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Thanks for the response.
No: from what I understand about vaccines, the adjuvants used help provoke a massive immune flareup, way more that the usual provocations in our environment.
Millions of naive T-cells are generated by the thymus each day: sufficient for daily needs. My question is do repeated vaccination challenges cause a spike in cell division, hastening the eventual degradation of immune function.
An interesting paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
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You don’t understand much about how the immune system works, so don’t be too quick to jump to conclusions.
Adjuvants are used to generate an innate immune response, because that is needed to induce an adaptive immune response. That’s the first thing. They don’t “use up” your naive T cells. Second, the Hayflick, observation let’s call it, has to do with telomere length and has nothing to do with the proliferation of T cells. And finally, yes, vaccination is well known
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That's true - I don't , and I also misspoke on adjuvants (plenty of influenza vaccines are unadjuvated).
As I wrote to someone else below, it'd be good to know how many cells (10^n?) of what kinds proliferate in response to a vaccination challenge. Without this I'm not concluding, just speculating. :-)
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As I wrote to someone else below, it'd be good to know how many cells (10^n?) of what kinds proliferate in response to a vaccination challenge. Without this I'm not concluding, just speculating. :-)
If you can devise a method to determine this, you will be very rich. It’s far more complicated than you might think. Being able to predict this, or even adequately measure this would greatly advance the therapeutic spaces for many diseases.
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Because from what I understand about vaccines, the adjuvants used help provoke a massive immune flareup, way more that the usual provocations in our environment. Millions of naive T-cells are generated by the thymus each day: sufficient for daily needs. My question is do repeated vaccination challenges cause a spike in cell division, hastening the eventual degradation of immune function.
I'm also asking because the data I posted earlier shows a positive correlation between flu vaccination with Covid lethalit
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Hmmm. Not according to this article [nih.gov], "even in stem cells, except for embryonal stem cells and cancer stem cells, telomere shortening occurs during replicative ageing, possibly at a slower rate than that in normal somatic cells." So there could be an impact. But one thing is true: without solid numbers, your guess is as good as mine. :-). It'd be good to know how many cells (10^n?) and what kinds proliferate in response to a vaccination challenge.
Regarding causative mechanisms, we surely don't know enough ab
just sayin (Score:2)
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Astra Shot sounds like a new drug that'd be in Cyberpunk 2077.
I hear "Astra shot" and I think of something a little more painful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Keep your damn dirty paws off of me! (Score:1)
new technologies in quarantine (Score:1)