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Medicine Science

Pfizer's Vaccine Offers Strong Protection After First Dose (nytimes.com) 190

The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech provides strong protection against Covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose, according to documents published on Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration before a meeting of its vaccine advisory group. From a report: The finding is one of several significant new results featured in the briefing materials, which include more than 100 pages of data analyses from the agency and from Pfizer. Last month, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their two-dose vaccine had an efficacy rate of 95 percent after two doses administered three weeks apart. The new analyses show that the protection starts kicking in far earlier. What's more, the vaccine worked well regardless of a volunteer's race, weight or age. While the trial did not find any serious adverse events caused by the vaccine, many participants did experience aches, fevers and other side effects. "This is what an A+ report card looks like for a vaccine," said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University.

On Thursday, F.D.A.'s vaccine advisory panel will discuss these materials in advance of a vote on whether to recommend authorization of Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine. Pfizer and BioNTech began a large-scale clinical trial in July, recruiting 44,000 people in the United States, Brazil and Argentina. Half of the volunteers got the vaccine, and half got the placebo. New coronavirus cases quickly tapered off in the vaccinated group of volunteers about 10 days after the first dose, according to one graph in the briefing materials. In the placebo group, cases kept steadily increasing.

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Pfizer's Vaccine Offers Strong Protection After First Dose

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  • Bring it asap (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Camembert ( 2891457 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @10:34AM (#60807346)
    I plan to get any available decent vaccine as soon as it comes available. So tired of this situation.
    • Trump will now spend the entire remainder of his term claiming 100% of the credit for this.

      (...although his proposed solution was anal bleach just a few months ago)

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Tailhook ( 98486 )

        Trump will now spend the entire remainder of his life claiming 100% of the credit for this.

        FTFY.

        And you will spend said interval spluttering all over your phone every time he does, which is amusing.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      I told my doctor that when he thought it was ready, I'm up for it, because he he's the medical professional, and if I don't trust his professional judgement, either I have the wrong doctor or he has the wrong patient. He'll at least understand the executive summary of the studies, which is far more than I will.

    • The problem is, you getting the vaccine won't change the situation. What we need to do is campaign for wide spread acceptance of the vaccine to change the situation.

  • by LatencyKills ( 1213908 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @10:45AM (#60807388)
    It's no worse than the flu. It's a democratic plot to cost Trump the election. And it failed! He really won! They had to cheat to win. I know a guy/cousin/girlfriend who saw a truckload of ballots being thrown in the river. How is it possible they've been working on a flu vaccine for 50 years and are only 40% effective, and here a year in against COVID they're at 95%? Masks are not effective. Masks make it worse. Masks are the antichrist. Did I miss anything?
    • by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @11:01AM (#60807464) Homepage Journal

      Yeah, you missed the popular claim that a tracking chip will be injected into you along with the vaccine, and also the popular claim that the vaccine works by permanently reprogramming your DNA. Also your post was completely lacking in petty racism.

      People are quick to believe nonsense whenever it suits their biases. Since the brain is a neural-net, it relies primarily on high-level pattern recognition more than point-by-point analysis in order to determine what seems true. A cognitive process like this allows for very quick snap judgments that are usually correct when the subject matter is familiar. This is a necessary ability for hunter-gatherers, but not so much for modern humans. Now, it does at least as much harm as good, if not more.

      So, otherwise-intelligent people are quick to believe this stuff, because something about each claim aligns with a bias they have, and in-depth point-by-point analysis is hard and costly and requires them to challenge their own biases (which everyone hates to do).

      I wonder if this is something we will just "grow out of," as a species, someday.

      • by fyngyrz ( 762201 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @11:24AM (#60807580) Homepage Journal

        I wonder if this is something we will just "grow out of," as a species, someday.

        I haven't seen many signs of such a trend here in the US.

        • Brainphishing kills (Score:4, Informative)

          by shanen ( 462549 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @02:18PM (#60808558) Homepage Journal

          I think the first comment in this thread (from LatencyKills) was legitimately funny as parody, but the overall topic is not funny. For example, it helped drive the American response to Covid-19 that has caused and is continuing to cause so many needless deaths.

          People will NOT grow out of Qanon beliefs because those beliefs are being deliberately cultivated. It's psychological warfare fertilized by "big data" mountains of personal information. I propose "brainphishing" as a label for what is going on here.

          It's not that "they" can push my button and make me do anything they want me to do, but rather that they can identify the buttons which are widely available and push them statistically. Starting from "Everyone believes what they want to believe" they can look for certain people who want to believe certain things and then relatively easily persuade those "easy targets" to believe other things. The Qanon stuff is clearly based on some religious BS that was spreading around America 40 years ago, but it's been deliberately mutated and ramped up in extremely dangerous directions and now it's worse than kudzu. (I spent an entire semester studying the original stuff in Texas. At base, the religious nutjobs do NOT believe in separation of church and state.)

          Hmm... I want to clarify the "they" doing the brainphishing, but without limiting it to Q. That's a fake identity, and most likely a committee, to boot. I think I can point at one leading practitioner of brainphishing, however. Putin is using brainphishing against his enemies, who he equates with Russia's enemies on the ground that “L'Etat c'est moi.” (But it's disputed that Louis the XIV ever said that.) My latest evidence is The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy D. Snyder.

          But another part of the problem is the TL;DR response of most Americans. Not a problem for brainphishing, because brainphishing focuses on short jabs at the easy marks. Mostly video jabs these days, thanks to YouTube and TikTok and related weapons.

      • I wonder if this is something we will just "grow out of," as a species, someday.

        Probably not, because conspiracy theories are fun.

      • I wonder if this is something we will just "grow out of," as a species, someday.

        The cognitive biases that enable conspiracy theories are wired deeply into the structure of our brain, because up until about 400 years ago or so, they were highly effective, in evolutionary terms, and even today they're pretty effective shortcuts most of the time. Since that means that they were actively good for 99.98% of genus Homo's history, and even longer if you want to reach back to our pre-Homo ancestors, I'd say it's safe bet that, no, we won't just "grow out of" it on anything less than evolutiona

      • Yeah, you missed the popular claim that a tracking chip will be injected into you along with the vaccine

        I heard a worse one, since people figured out that a tracking chip wouldn't fit through an injection needle: There is metal in the vaccine that combines inside your body to create a 5G antenna.

        If that was the case, then Qualcomm would send out a ninja team to hunt down and kill everyone involved, to keep their multi billion dollar business running.

      • So, otherwise-intelligent people are quick to believe this stuff, because something about each claim aligns with a bias they have, and in-depth point-by-point analysis is hard and costly and requires them to challenge their own biases (which everyone hates to do).

        I wonder if this is something we will just "grow out of," as a species, someday.

        My opinion is that it's not just difficult to challenge your own biases in terms of energy or concentration etc. For whatever reason, people start out with an ideology and keep it for some time. Maybe their parents indoctrinated them. Maybe it allowed them to make friends at one point. The longer they've stuck with it the more entrenched they get because they can't come to terms with having been so wrong for so long along with all the decisions they've made as a result. It's kind of like the sunk-cost falla

    • by RandomUsername99 ( 574692 ) on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @11:17AM (#60807538)

      Don't forget that BLM and antifa are just trying to use this vaccine to weaken the strong hardworking righties as part of the conspiracy to destroy their dream suburban lifestyle and turn everyone into trans vegan socialist animal rights activist environmentalists who drive Priuses and cry when someone uses a plastic straw.

    • by wiredog ( 43288 )

      It's a plot by Bill Gates to control the world by chipping grandma!

  • What I really want to see is the safety data.
    • Isn't the safety data exactly what this article and the other recent news reports have been covering?

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        No. What this article is covering is efficacy: how well the vaccine works to protect you against COVID-19. That says nothing about safety: what side effects will the vaccine potentially cause down the line? Long term, does the vaccine cause cancer, reproductive harm, seizures, narcolepsy, paralysis, death, etc?

        Not all past vaccines turned out to be 100% safe. Take the polio vaccines for example.

        • They don't have long term data, I think that's a given. They intend to monitor for 2 years, but obviously that's a work in progress. I suspect my employer will not let me WFH for 2 years while we wait... so I'm mostly hoping for a strong initial ramp of people who are willing to risk it, or work in areas where their employers will give them no choice, and hope it's another 6 months before I am even able to obtain it. That's probably 9 months, and a few million people? It's all we've got.

          But yes, I would lik

    • It is an mRNA vaccine that only causes your cells to produce spike proteins.
      WHAT SAFTY DATA?

      More save than that a vaccine can not be.

      • I don't expect there to be any problem, but I still want to have the safety tested experimentally. "It is safe" is a hypothesis I believe, but the scientific approach is to test it and get rid of the need for belief.
        • So far we had 30,000 test candidates (in Germany, no idea about other countries). If you want to test more ... the longer it takes to start using it :D
          Kind of chicken and egg problem.

          • So far we had 30,000 test candidates (in Germany, no idea about other countries).

            OK, where's the safety data on those test candidates?

            • OK, where's the safety data on those test candidates?

              That information is released to the FDA and other world bodies that do pretty much the same thing as the US' FDA. That information then has to be processed and put into that agency's format for data release. THEN, that has to go through an approval process. THEN, it's released to the public. Pfizer, since that's who this article is about and so I'm guessing that's who you are interested in, submitted their results to the governing bodies sometime late November. It'll take at least a month easily before

            • The typical stuff, light fever, pain at injection, fatigue.
              No idea if there are any "spread sheets" of data published.

              I assume to know about those you need to be in "medical circles".

          • Link to published peer reviewed paper or GTFO.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Here's a link to the source material. [fda.gov] Figure 2 on page 30 is quite interesting.

    Based on the cumulative incidence curve for the all-available efficacy population after Dose 1, (Figure 2), COVID-19 disease onset appears to occur similarly for both BNT162b2 and placebo groups until approximately 14 days after Dose 1, at which time point, the curves diverge, with more cases accumulating in the placebo group than in the BNT162b2 group, and there does not appear to be evidence of waning protection during the follow-up time of approximately 2 months following the second dose that is being evaluated at this point in time.

  • My concern is I go to lengths to get the first dose, and the second dose that's supposed to be administered within 15 (or however many) days suddenly becomes unavailable. Without some assurance that the second dose is secured by virtue of getting the first, I doubt I'll step up until the vaccination hullabaloo (read: shit show) has passed. You know... 2022.

    • by b0bby ( 201198 )

      Since the efficacy of the first dose alone seems to be around 80%, I wouldn't worry too much about that.

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