No One Who Got Moderna's Vaccine In Trial Developed Severe COVID-19 (sciencemag.org) 177
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: Continuing the spate of stunning news about COVID-19 vaccines, the biotech company Moderna announced the final results of the 30,000-person efficacy trial for its candidate in a press release today: Only 11 people who received two doses of the vaccine developed COVID-19 symptoms after being infected with the pandemic coronavirus, versus 185 symptomatic cases in a placebo group. That is an efficacy of 94.1%, the company says, far above what many vaccine scientists were expecting just a few weeks ago.
More impressive still, Moderna's candidate had 100% efficacy against severe disease. There were zero such COVID-19 cases among those vaccinated, but 30 in the placebo group. The company today plans to file a request for emergency use authorization (EUA) for its vaccine with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and is also seeking a similar green light from the European Medicines Agency. The data released today bolster an interim report from the company two weeks ago that only analyzed 95 total cases but produced similarly impressive efficacy. "I would still like to see all of the actual data, but what we've seen so far is absolutely remarkable," says Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who is a member of an independent committee of vaccine experts that advises FDA.
More impressive still, Moderna's candidate had 100% efficacy against severe disease. There were zero such COVID-19 cases among those vaccinated, but 30 in the placebo group. The company today plans to file a request for emergency use authorization (EUA) for its vaccine with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and is also seeking a similar green light from the European Medicines Agency. The data released today bolster an interim report from the company two weeks ago that only analyzed 95 total cases but produced similarly impressive efficacy. "I would still like to see all of the actual data, but what we've seen so far is absolutely remarkable," says Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who is a member of an independent committee of vaccine experts that advises FDA.
They just turned into zombie minks (Score:5, Funny)
Advertisement or article? (Score:2)
This is so overwhelmingly positive it reads like an ad.
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Are we not allowed to have some good pandemic-related news in 2020?
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Are we not allowed to have some good pandemic-related news in 2020?
You must be new to 2020. Welcome.
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Which vaccines are you going to take?
Whichever one I can.
This looks like a truly democratic vaccine, in which people who want it can take it, and those who get their medical knowledge from an outgoing president, or still think vaccines cause autism can skip it. At that point, the last argument of the people who do understand some physics, or at least trust doctors instead of Conspiracy theorists or politician can avoid infecting us, and if they choose Covid 19 as a perfectly acceptable hill to die on - not much the rest of us can do about it.
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Sure, that works if the vaccine is entirely subsidized by the government or dirt cheap. If not, the poor will get fucked, as usual. They and the morons who don't believe facts will continue to spread this shit amongst each other until a whole bunch of unwilling people unnecessarily die.
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Sure, that works if the vaccine is entirely subsidized by the government or dirt cheap. If not, the poor will get fucked, as usual.
I think there is going to be too much public scrutiny for drug companies to get away with this. There are a couple of bills recently introduced in Congress related to this. That's probably a shot across the bow, telling them that they'd better not screw around with this one.
That being said, most common vaccines you get today are actually pretty inexpensive, even at unsubsidized prices. I recently paid for my flu shot and a booster, and neither cost all that much.
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That would be a refreshing change because everybody gets away with it regarding all other health care expenses, crime, starvation, housing, and pretty much everything else and they always have.
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Vaccines usually are dirt cheep, it is your health care system that makes them expensive.
The one developed in Germany costs about $1 per shot, administering it by a doctor will be probably around $25, and in a hospital/clinic about $20.
As we are setting up "mass vaccination centers" at the moment, I have no clue what the price will be.
But: who cares!??? The health insurance pays it, that is what it is for!
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Not this time. The vaccine will be paid directly by the federal government in Germany, hence the health insurance won't be involved.
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Oh, I was not aware of that :D
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The fact that the US health care system sucks ass doesn't solve any problems. In the United States about 90 million people have inadequate or no health insurance coverage— public, private, or otherwise. While some drug companies have plans set up to help people who don't have insurance, that system is far too slow for this problem and probably not nearly cheap enough to enfranchise all of the people who need it.
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Sure, that works if the vaccine is entirely subsidized by the government or dirt cheap.
Wait are you saying vaccines generally aren't dirt cheap or automatically subsidized by governments? Shit man even 3rd world countries do that. Why are we still talking about the USA as if its a functioning 1st world country.
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Sure, that works if the vaccine is entirely subsidized by the government or dirt cheap.
Wait are you saying vaccines generally aren't dirt cheap or automatically subsidized by governments? Shit man even 3rd world countries do that. Why are we still talking about the USA as if its a functioning 1st world country.
Flu vaccines are generally around 25 dollars in the USA - it depends on who administers them. You can get one at a drugstore for pretty cheap, if you want one at a private doctor's office, if will cost a bit more. That's the standard flu stuff. In this case, due to the urgency of the matter, it's pretty close to get 'em immunized and work out the fine details as we go. There is a general plan though. Here's the skinny from the CDC regarding cost:
Vaccine doses purchased with U.S. taxpayer dollars will be g
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Well alright then.
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"Why are we still talking about the USA as if its a functioning 1st world country."
Speak for yourself!
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I believe in the US, I've heard a number of times on various news networks, that the vaccines will be free to all US citizens.
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I believe in the US, I've heard a number of times on various news networks, that the vaccines will be free to all US citizens.
Possible administrative charge. The vaccine itself will be free, and if you have no insurance, then it's free.
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Sure, that works if the vaccine is entirely subsidized by the government or dirt cheap. If not, the poor will get fucked, as usual. They and the morons who don't believe facts will continue to spread this shit amongst each other until a whole bunch of unwilling people unnecessarily die.
I am perfectly fine with the disbelievers spreading Covid 19 among themselves. And I'm certain that the poor who are willing will be able to get vaccinations.
This is why I call it a democratic vaccine. Choose. A vaccine that appears to have an excellent success rate, and even if failed, limits the severity or just take that chance. Not my problem any more.
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Everything has an easy answer in glib righty land!
Sure that might be what a flu shot cost, but it's almost certainly not going to be what this costs. The cost of my wife and my rabies immunoglobulin injections was $38,000. While the COVID vaccine isn't a purified blood product like that is, the immunoglobulin didn't involve using brand new genetic processes or building facilities solely to manufacture it.
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" This looks like a truly democratic vaccine, in which people who want it can take it, and those who get their medical knowledge from an outgoing president, or still think vaccines cause autism can skip it "
Hilarious how you put everyone into one camp or the other.
Translated: " You either agree with me and will happily take the vaccine, or you're an idiot who probably voted for Trump. "
You've left out another group of folks here I think.
Those fall into the category of having trusted doctors and medicines i
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Those fall into the category of having trusted doctors and medicines in the past and ended up with some pretty nasty side effects that were worse than the problem they were trying to solve.
From a vaccine? Seriously?
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Remember kids: vaccines cause adults.
It's a terminal condition unfortunately. Gets worse every year.
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Those fall into the category of having trusted doctors and medicines in the past and ended up with some pretty nasty side effects that were worse than the problem they were trying to solve. From a vaccine? Seriously?
Anti-vaxxers who still think that they cause autism long after it has been shown that the whole thing was a scam to extract money from pharma by unfortunate parents with autistic children.
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" This looks like a truly democratic vaccine, in which people who want it can take it, and those who get their medical knowledge from an outgoing president, or still think vaccines cause autism can skip it "
Hilarious how you put everyone into one camp or the other. Translated: " You either agree with me and will happily take the vaccine, or you're an idiot who probably voted for Trump. "
You aren't wrong. Glad to have given you a laugh.
You've left out another group of folks here I think.
Those fall into the category of having trusted doctors and medicines in the past and ended up with some pretty nasty side effects that were worse than the problem they were trying to solve. You'll have to excuse us if we approach this with a tad bit more caution than you.
However, if you wish to be a guinea pig, knock yourself out.
Then you made your choice. Simple - You have chosen to accept your and your loved ones possible deaths. There's even more groups, like the fundamentalists who believe their angry desert gawd will protect them.
But in the end - it's a personal choice. When you cannot infect me, I'm perfectly happy that you are comfortable in your choice. All basic risk/reward analysis. I'm comfortable with my choice, and if you are comfortable with the risk - knock yourself
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" This looks like a truly democratic vaccine, in which people who want it can take it, and those who get their medical knowledge from an outgoing president, or still think vaccines cause autism can skip it "
Hilarious how you put everyone into one camp or the other. Translated: " You either agree with me and will happily take the vaccine, or you're an idiot who probably voted for Trump. "
The real irony is that it's Kamala Harris and Gov. Cuomo who are claiming they don't want to take a Trump vaccine.
They did no such thing, all they did was to state that a vaccine should be tested properly and not just by Trump declaring it so - or using an incompetent talking head to do it for him. That would the difference between Scott Atlas [politico.com] recommending it - with no background in this or related fields - or Dr. Fauci [bbc.com] recommending it. Remember, Trump doesn't have a great record of sticking to the truth or listening to science - he's not exactly trustworthy. Even if you were a Republican, you'd probably avoid buying
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Bullshit. Cuomo (who is responsible for thousands of deaths of people in nursing homes due to mismanagement of the CV situation) has spoken against the vaccines from the start.
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
Their "fact check" is the opposite of what the think it is. It exposes Cuomo's TDS problems and his stupid claim that CVS and Walgreens don't have the capacity to handle this vaccine. The mind boggles. If they don't - who the hell does? Those are huge chains.
Harris was talking bad about it during
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" This looks like a truly democratic vaccine, in which people who want it can take it, and those who get their medical knowledge from an outgoing president, or still think vaccines cause autism can skip it "
Hilarious how you put everyone into one camp or the other. Translated: " You either agree with me and will happily take the vaccine, or you're an idiot who probably voted for Trump. "
The real irony is that it's Kamala Harris and Gov. Cuomo who are claiming they don't want to take a Trump vaccine.
They did no such thing, all they did was to state that a vaccine should be tested properly and not just by Trump declaring it so - or using an incompetent talking head to do it for him. That would the difference between Scott Atlas [politico.com] recommending it - with no background in this or related fields - or Dr. Fauci [bbc.com] recommending it. Remember, Trump doesn't have a great record of sticking to the truth or listening to science - he's not exactly trustworthy. Even if you were a Republican, you'd probably avoid buying a house or a car from him.
From one of the Covid 19 on April 23'rd 2020:
"A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. (To Bry
I'll hold off, thanks..... (Score:2)
I mean, props to Moderna for "cracking" this one with the messenger RNA technique that's a pretty new approach.
But I'm one of those people (like many I know) who skips the annual flu shots because of their poor track records in the past and a low perceived need for one. Year after year, I've watched friends and family members get the flu shot, yet come down with a nasty form of the flu. And every time, excuses are made about it "being a strain the vaccine didn't anticipate or cover", or there are issues wi
Advert because no confidence level limits (Score:3)
Since you only have 10 instances of infection with the vaccine this means all you can say is that you are 95% sure that your efficacy of preventing serious disease i
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Perhaps you want to show us your undergrad statistics formulas to see how you come to that conclusion.
I had had no "undergrad statistics" (what ever that mean).
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So, you do not know the formulas. But insult people with "every undergrad should know" ... :P
ROFL
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Yes! This! Please mod this up.
You don't even need any fancy calcuations to get it. I know probably 10 people who got covid and none of them had to go to the hospital. Therefore, my study says 100% of covid patients do not need hospital treatment! If you can't find the flaw in that argument, I can't help you.
The claim that it prevents 100% of serious cases makes me distrust Modernas reporting.
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It's an advert because claiming "100% efficacy at preventing serious COVID" when you only had 10 cases of the disease in vaccinated people is very unscientific.
I think you need to re-read the AAAS Science article:
So Moderna had zero cases of the disease in the vaccinated group, not 10. Your 10 cases may refer to:
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Mod up. Correct. They DID NOT SHOW THE RAW DATA.
I'll take the vaccine, we'll assume you wont?
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Sheez. GIYF, you know. You could search for "moderna vaccine side effects" and see that the reported side effects have been few and quite mild: less than 10% experienced "pain at the injection site after the first injection and sometimes fatigue, muscle aches, joint pain, headache and pain or redness at the injection site after the second injection". As compared with the 20% figure you pulled out of...somewhere. Not to mention the other absurdities you list.
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In fact having a short side effect is a positive, as it is invoking a response.
In a "normal" vaccine. Not in an mRNA based one.
I'll' be having zinc, vit D, B2 C and antioxidants a full week before my shot. :P
Which could have unknown side effect on the vaccination
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If Pfizer report small side side effects, it would seem to be a miracle or the BS brand of PR that says Moderna has significantly fewer.
Apparently a Tesla had a roof fall of it's car recently. Based on that news alone I'm just counting the days for my Renault to have it's roof magically detach too because I like you am also a moron. /s
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Not really. Moderna's vaccine was first given to humans in February, and most phase III drug trials aim for six months or less followup. Occasionally side effects will show up in phase IV post-marketing studies for regular drugs, but I couldn't find an example of a vaccine that had long-term side effects that weren't evident in pre-approval trials.
Believe me, trying to sell a drug company on one year plus followup is tough.
sample size of? (Score:2)
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Sample size of 30,000.
Here's the info on the more vulnerable over 55 and over 70 ate groups:
https://www.biopharma-reporter... [biopharma-reporter.com]
The summary is - they work. Older people may have less side-effects than younger adults.
sample size too small for conclusions (Score:3)
Only 11 people who got the vaccine got coronavirus. 30 out of 185 who got it in the placebo group got severe disease, about 1 in 6. If the vaccinated group had the same rate of severe disease, there would be (1-(30/185))**11 = a 14% chance of 11 people getting coronavirus and not getting severe disease. If the vaccinated group had half as great a chance, there would be a 39% chance of 11 people getting coronavirus and not getting severe disease.
Though this is hopeful, we will have to see many more vaccinated people get coronavirus before we can come to any conclusion about whether and to what degree the vaccine reduces the incidence of severe disease.
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For testing the hypothesis that there is a fixed chance of catching an severe case when catching a case, and that the vaccine doesn't affect severity, yes, your math is correct (and that is the correct hypothesis to test).
What I find fascinating here is that it was so effective that we can't perform the severity test, as not enough people caught it at all to make the test . . . (or you could call this promising, or even spin, I suppose . . .)
Also interesting is that the chance of eleven cases without severi
Prevents serious illness but... (Score:2)
What about other symptoms? How about long term effects? Can the virus stick around and continue to cause damage somehow even after a person has been vaccinated?
Yes, it's terrible that it's killing people. However, the long haul implications are really troubling too so I'm curious if these vaccines will vaccinate against the disease doing any damage at all, not just against hospitalization.
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The placebo group had 90 infections, the vaccine group had 5.
So the vaccine reduces infections by about 95%. That implies reducing damage from infections by at least 95%.
Oops, that was the earlier results (Score:2)
Whoops, that was the earlier results.
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Re:Knowing big co's, what I expect happened: (Score:5, Informative)
Moderna is not that big. It doesn't even have manufacturing facilities yet. It's pretty much all R&D and prototyping.
It did blow up in size with current pandemic though, specifically because the thing it was focused on (mRNA) was found to be uniquely suitable to rapidly developing a vaccine for novel coronavirus.
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Moderna is not that big.
She was in the 80s...
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Company was founded in 2010.
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That's what double blinding is for.
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It's merely speculation. Sorry if it seemed like an accusation.
In slashdot, nobody can hear you undo.
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...a gene called Bmp4 triggers a cascade of chemical signals that causes the cells in the developing penis to die off and wither away.
So it works like marriage, then?
Re:Definitions and error bars please (Score:5, Informative)
Severe disease is basically when you have to be put on breathing assistance of some kind to survive. This is the advanced variant of "symptomatic", where you develop known symptoms while being infected, but they amount to having a typical influenza potentially alongside with some novel coronavirus specific symptoms like loss of sense of smell. And then there are asymptomatic cases where you have the illness, but your immune system acts appropriately and it's killed without overreaction from it (which is the primary causal reason for the symptoms).
In this case, statistically numbers are looking great for "remove lethality and reduce severity" kind of a vaccine. The question remains if vaccine also grants immunity from being infected, or immunity from spreading the disease while infected. I suspect that is also being tested as we speak, and we'll have answers eventually.
But for now, provided there are no significant side effects at meaningful rates, this vaccine should be helpful in largely eliminating risk associated with catching the disease, if not stopping the spread of it. The latter issue will likely be addressed in tests measuring infectivity after vaccination when infected and chance of getting infected after vaccination.
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It would kind of suck if the vaccine only kept you from getting sick and didn't actually provide immunity from infection and immunity from spreading the disease.
Not getting sick is great, in its own way, but I feel like there's a need to stop the transmission that's even greater.
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Not necessarily. If vaccine is good enough at controlling the symptoms, as long as inoculation program is good enough, the vaccine is sufficient to control the disease to the point where society no longer needs to adjust behavioural patterns of people to stop the spread. You can simply let disease spread through the population naturally, and immunize people that way.
Essentially if true, while this vaccine will not immunize people to the illness but immunize people to the lethal outcomes and massively reduce
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OK, that makes sense. It's basically achieving herd immunity without any of the extreme symptoms/effects that end up killing people.
Although it'd be interesting to know how they can make a vaccine that results in basically a symptomless case of the disease without actually providing any immunity from catching the disease to begin with.
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It would indeed be interesting. I guess the most obvious hypothetical mechanism is that severity correlates with viral load, and a vaccinated person's immune system can inactivate enough virus to keep loads down. So severe becomes non-severe symptomatic, and non-severe symptomatic becomes asymptomatic.
Re:Definitions and error bars please (Score:5, Informative)
Disclamer: I'm not a virologist, but I've read a good amount of scientific papers on this topic during this year and listened to quite a few high level lectures. One of the best skills I got from my time in university is learning how to read, parse and comprehend scientific papers, and I daresay I'm quite good at it. But this is not my field, so take it with a grain of salt.
Very generally speaking, my understanding is that the reason why this sort of vaccine is effective has to do with how disease functions, and how it causes damage. In case of novel coronavirus, this type of vaccine is actually more likely because damage comes not from the virus, nor from normal passage of the illness and normative immune response. Both of these are benign. Instead damage (severe/fatal cases) comes from immune system overreaction to the virus due to delayed immune response. Specifically, this virus appears to use a very specific mechanism that affects specific immune system foreign body detection mechanisms (likely coded in part in X chromosome as recessive alleles, which is why males are twice as susceptible to severe or fatal outcome) to suppress immune detection and response against itself early on. Which results in high prevalence of the virus in target tissues. Which when finally detected, results in overwhelming "oh shit, everything is infected, unleash everything and a kitchen sink on infected tissue" level of immune response that destroys alveoli if virus made it to the lungs and spread there. Which appears to be a normative path for it when not intercepted in a timely manner, leading to severe/fatal outcomes resulting from lung damage.
In case of such an illness, a likely path to vaccine is to make a vaccine that enables immune system to recognise the virus in a more timely manner. That results in a normative response (i.e. clear majority of patients of novel coronavirus are mostly or fully asymptomatic because they have a correct immune response but can shed virus until it's fully suppressed) instead of a suppressed one followed by an overwhelming one leading to severe illness and potential fatality. So you still get infected normally when vaccinated, but you get a "normative immune response" instead of "suppressed one followed by extreme one". And since normal passage of the illness is asymptomatic, and you are still able to infect other people while normal hunter killer mechanisms of your immune system deal with the foreign invader.
It's important to remember that our immune system deals with those kinds of threats on a daily basis. Overwhelming majority of novel pathogens are found, identified and killed without us ever developing any symptoms of a severe immune response, such as fever, nausea, etc. What vaccine does is basically a calibration of correct extent of a response to this specific threat.
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Very informative and clear, thank you.
I was amused earlier today when I looked up a vaccine for a tropical disease, for which I had the jab when a kid, and under the section for rare side effects, was "death".
Of course with that one, the risk of the actual disease was pretty bad and high, so a potential side effect of "death" was acceptable.
It is really important that the public be treated like adults and given proper and nuanced information about vaccines. If there are idiots out there, then help them to
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Essentially if true, while this vaccine will not immunize people to the illness but immunize people to the lethal outcomes and massively reduce prevalence of debilitating symptoms, it will allow us to simply allow infection to progress through the population naturally to do the immunization.
There is no way to know if this will prevent further issues down the line or not. We don't even know if it will prevent vital organ damage three months or six months after contacting COVID, let alone later on in ones lifetime. You cannot just allow a virus that has the potential to cause so much damage to the human body after it has run it's course and not killed them to run free just because you have an "immunization" that will prevent the initial serious or lethal illness.
Re:Definitions and error bars please (Score:4, Informative)
I know what you mean, but this isn't the case. We work with the tools we have.
Today's bad outcomes are:
1. Death
2. Severe acute disease
3. Long covid
A vaccine that reduces acute severity but not infectivity definitely addresses 1 and 2. If we're lucky, it also addresses 3. There will be a need to determine when infection prevention measures can be relaxed, and by how much, but there's also a matter of practicality: given the amount of pushback against today's measures when bad outcomes 1 and 2 are dismayingly prevalent, the chance of maintaining these measures when 3 is the only remaining risk seems pretty remote to me.
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while this vaccine will not immunize people to the illness
That is nonsense, it vaccinates against the illness aka boots your immune system to fight the virus immediately instead of needing 14 days to figure our what to do. That is what an vaccine is for.
but immunize people to the lethal outcomes and massively reduce prevalence of debilitating symptoms
That is not possible without - see above.
Sorry, you make again an complete idiot out of your self.
Look!! We have a magical vaccine!!! It does not protect you a
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Yes, yes, you're not aware of basic virology from decades ago. It's all spiderman as you stated in your other post on this topic. Immune system response is just a simple on/off function, Germany controls wind, Sweden controls snow melt in winter and Scandes don't have temperatures below -30 degrees celcius in Winter.
The list of your idiotic anti-scientific statements is getting really long.
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The problem is that your posts are pretty anti science, or simply stupid.
Perhaps you wan want to look on a map. Sweden is very "long" from north to south.
That it is -30C in south in a winter is basically over since 1970s/1980s. You cold know that, but you don't.
Immune system response is just a simple on/off function
No, they are not. And that is why you idiotic idea that a vaccination only prevents hard cases, or makes them softer, but has otherwise no effect, is: idiotic
Unfortunately you obviously slept th
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Covid spreads through aerosol droplets dispersed by coughing and sneezing, as well as physical contact with people who wipe the noses and cough into the hands.
If people are asymptomatic, then they aren't coughing, sneezing, and wiping. So they aren't going to be spreading near as much.
The vaccine isn't going to stop infections completely, but it should push R0 below 1.0, and that is what is important.
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I wouldn't consider coughing and sneezing to be "severe", though. So without further clarification of the results, you can't really rule that out.
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Severe, no, but it would be symptomatic. As stated in the summary 185 people in the control group developed symptomatic COVID compared to 11 in the group with the vaccine. As stated, that's a 95%-ish reduction. With that level of reduction the disease would effectively stop spreading.
It gets down to the R value - eg, on average, how many people does an infected person in turn infect again. If that value is over 1, then the virus and number of infected continue to increase in volume. Below 1, then the v
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I sneeze about 5 times a day, 2 times after each other.
Some days i have to cough when I wake up, or 2 or 3 times the rest of the day.
And, also if that was not the case: you breath viruses out by simply breathing, hence the masks.
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You should probably get allergy screened....
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It is just a dust allergy - similar to pollen allergy.
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Possible, but unknown. Sad part is, we still don't fully understand the exact spreading pattern of this virus. We're way better than we were just a couple of months ago, and far better than we were at the start of the pandemic, as we keep getting new data that corrects misconceptions we had before. But same applies to current information we have about it. It's likely to get corrected as more scientific research gets done.
It's also important to remember that just as we are studying the virus using our tools,
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Some people normally sneeze or cough. It could be allergies which isn't in itself a sign of COVID. I sneezed about 8 times today. Am I sneezing because I have COVID? Sometimes I've wondered, but I remind myself that this is nothing unusual for me and if I got it, at least symptoms aren't too bad (so far anyway).
So far, I'm fairly certain I have not contracted it.
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immunity from spreading the disease.
Such a thing does not exist. You have the disease, you spread it.
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If disease has been suppressed below infective level in tissues that serve as infection vectors, but persists in other tissues, you will remain ill but you are no longer infectious.
This is really basic virology and a very large amount of illnesses have this stage simply as a result of normal immune response. But you're the guy who thinks Germany controls wind, Sweden controls rate of snow melting in Scandes based on electricity prices and that winters in Scandes do not go below -30 degrees celcius because o
Re:Definitions and error bars please (Score:4)
In most other technologies, I've lived successfully by the code :
"I love all bleeding edge technologies. I'll use any of them once they've been tested 10 years"
This is because of many reasons, the most important is that a product that has been outside of the lab that long is likely effective, with minimal negative aspects, or it would have been pulled from market.
I have never heard of any technology rushed to market to meet a demand that didn't need a version 2 or 3 before it was genuinely mass-market ready. I have a pile of books on genetics (specifically DNA/RNA oriented) on my desk at the moment... they've been there a while as I work in a related field... and I've been working my way through them.
What is most clear to me is that we are getting pretty damn good at genetics but we're still at the "We state things as facts because if we qualified each time we were guessing with a 'it is possible', 'we find it likely', 'research shows'. etc... the book would be 3 times as thick.". We are pretty much making it up as we go along and it's only recently we've even gotten a grasp on the basic principals of the topic.
I suppose if we were to compare our understanding of genetics to computers... our understanding of genetics is roughly equivalent to the designers of the ENIAC I's understanding of digital computing. It took absolutely brilliant people to design that computer, and unlike us today who have all the tools we can imagine to do most of the work for us, they figured out how to make it light light and each button click and each tube switch. They were brilliant... but they built a computer would operate very briefly before the whole team would need to run around checking and changing tubes. It was impressive because it justified our investment and peeked our interest in computers, but no one would ever want to use that computer themselves and certainly wouldn't want it to be in their business. They wanted to wait 5-10 years for the tech to develop.
I think the same should be said about this vaccine. There are an endless number of questions and now that it seems we've proven that the technology has potential, I'd like to see the scientists spend 3-5 years getting a version 2 and version 3 out with less bugs and better documentation.
It seems extremely poorly considered to me to suggest that 1/7 the world's population should take this "version 1 technology" and by version 1, I think it's actually more of a version 0.9.
All of this said, as I mentioned, I work in a related field with the specific kinds of researchers who developed this drug. And it never ceases to amazing me how absolutely brilliant these people are. I believe they are the real super heroes of this world. I also believe they're kinda like Iron Man... they got the aliens, but basically levelled NYC to do it. But still.... the investment they've had to put in their minds to establishing the knowledge they've established makes becoming a brain surgeon look like a walk in the park. I am very excited to see them get to version 2 and version 3. And at that point, if we find that we not only understand the side effects, but also are prepared to treat them, I will simply continue wearing a mask and working from home... more or less cut off from the outside world.
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This doesn't really make sense, though. While mRNA is certainly novel as a vaccine, we have decades of global experience in how to identify, characterise and manage safety risks associated with pharmaceuticals, including vaccines. And I don't understand how we should be more worried about our bodies producing some proteins that look like the viral proteins to potentiate our immune systems than about our bodies being infected by the actual virus itself.
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>The rushed testing with no clear side effects from a mostly novel pharmaceutical technology based on RNA is what bothers me.
This is a simple cost benefit calculation. Damage potential from vaccine vs damage potential from the virus continuing to rip through the populations across the globe.
We do this calculation on personal level all the time. When you eat, you ingest a lot of harmful substances. Often for no other reason than because you think they're tasty. When you get sick with flu, you probably chu
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It wasn't rushed - it was simply that the usual years of bureaucracy was eliminated from the process. Nothing like a pandemic to put a rocket up a pen-pushers arse.
mRNA vaccines have been under development for decades, but a key problem was getting enough virus sample to test (there wasn't enough SARs or MERs because, although very dangerous, neither was especially infective). SARS-Cov2 fixed that.
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The rushed testing with no clear side effects from a mostly novel pharmaceutical technology based on RNA is what bothers me.
...
It seems extremely poorly considered to me to suggest that 1/7 the world's population should take this "version 1 technology" and by version 1, I think it's actually more of a version 0.9.
I don't think your comparison of these new vaccines to computer tech flies.
The last time a vaccine was "rushed" in the US was in 2009, and it was shown to have a similar safety profile as a seasonal flu vaccine. [wikipedia.org]
The time a vaccine was "rushed" before that was in 1976. [wikipedia.org] 40 million people were vaccinated, and the only serious adverse effect was a very slight increase in the incidence of Guillain-Barre Syndrome which affected less than 500 people - and there isn't complete agreement that the vaccine caused th
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or immunity from spreading the disease while infected.
Do you really think you can be infected but *immune* to spreading it?
Are you an 8 year old child, reading to much Spiderman?
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Yes, totally. This is not at all basic virology, known for decades at this point. It's totally about comic books.
So, have you looked into how HIV treatments have been going for at least a decade at this point? I hear scientists who developed their retrovirals are apparently all into Spiderman, since their primary strategy of treating HIV is literally to suppress it to levels where infected patient is no longer contagious. All while remaining infected. Something we applied from knowledge of many other viruse
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Haseltine a couple of months ago:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/w... [forbes.com]
"Prevention of infection is not a criterion for success for any of these vaccines. In fact, their endpoints all require confirmed infections and all those they will include in the analysis for success, the only difference being the severity of symptoms between the vaccinated and unvaccinated."
Not preventing infection or death, or even the more severe symptoms.
Don't know if that is still his opinion.
Re: Definitions and error bars please (Score:4, Informative)
You're being willfully obtuse to cover up for your intellectual laziness. First Hit is a page on the CDC's website created in 2019 with a section entitled "illness severity":
Mild to moderate (mild symptoms up to mild pneumonia): 81%
Severe (dyspnea, hypoxia, or more than 50% lung involvement on imaging): 14%
Critical (respiratory failure, shock, or multiorgan system dysfunction): 5%
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If you want to know the definitions used in the study for severe, moderate and mild disease, look up the study protocol and read it. Its publicly available.
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I hope they get the vaccine, it works and the olympics don't happen. Then I can visit and eat nice food and stuff, without being priced out of hotels by throngs of deranged sport goers.
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GIYF; no, that is not what happened, go look and find out the truth. Or would you rather just spread innuendos?
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That's the number of people who got sick in a relatively short time period while under observation, with all of the extreme measures. You can't extrapolate that to what would happen in the entire population given no unusual precautions and unlimited time for the virus to spread.
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No, you absolute muppet.
The 30k population was divided into a placebo group and a vaccine group. So 15k got the vaccine and 15k did not. During the trial period, of the 15k who did not get the vaccine, 185 developed covid symptoms. That is a 1.2% infection rate *during the period of the trial*. People will have subsequently developed the disease. The trial only lasted 3 months, from July 27 to October 27. At that point it was unblinded for analysis. We will be able to look again and see how many patients in
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It's not just "Great, then double all my numbers". It was a basic failing on your part: you didn't begin to understand what you were reading.
And the same is even more true for your interpretation of ceoyoyo's comment. You failed to recognise that it was making the same core point as mine about the trial length. It's really not difficult to understand. Some of the 30k people in the study will have got sick after the trial ended, and some of them will end up with severe disease, so the infection rate isn't 1.
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Excuse me, citation needed.
What the hell is up with comments on this story making vague assertions that the numbers are wrong, with absolutely no supporting evidence proffered?
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Excuse me, citation needed.
What the hell is up with comments on this story making vague assertions that the numbers are wrong, with absolutely no supporting evidence proffered?
The new Presidential Trump anti science mathematics being taught to the gullible who are too lazy to think for themselves, is your answer. Their imaginary number creation fixation is not a new phenomena by any means, President Trump practised his imaginary math skills to a tee on many a golf course first before developing his advanced theory of rigged numbers from what I have been led to understand. Almost as bad a the famous Kim golf score [golf.com] and just as much of a core function in the new field of politically
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Because the numbers are always wrong ^_^ :P
And if not, it is the units