The World's Most Loathed Industry Gave Us a Vaccine in Record Time (bloomberg.com) 443
An anonymous reader shares a feature report: At the end of 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic started, the two best-known faces of the pharmaceutical business were the imprisoned Martin Shkreli and the lawsuit-laden opioid makers at Purdue Pharma. The rest of the industry was perhaps best known for the skyrocketing prices of its medicines. In a Gallup Poll of the public's view of various business sectors, pharma was ranked at the bottom, behind the oil industry, advertising and public relations, and lawyers. Who'd have guessed that a year later pharma would be getting credit for saving the world?
From cruise lines to meatpackers, business will have plenty to answer for in its handling of the pandemic, but this part of it worked. The Covid-19 vaccines developed by the drug industry, in partnership with governments, will almost certainly prevent hundreds of thousands of American deaths and millions more around the world. They will revive trillions of dollars in economic activity, let grandparents see grandchildren, and finally bring an end to a year that has -- sing it together one last time as the ball drops over an empty Times Square -- really sucked. In a time where almost everything else went wrong, the vaccine effort was something that went (mostly) right.
From cruise lines to meatpackers, business will have plenty to answer for in its handling of the pandemic, but this part of it worked. The Covid-19 vaccines developed by the drug industry, in partnership with governments, will almost certainly prevent hundreds of thousands of American deaths and millions more around the world. They will revive trillions of dollars in economic activity, let grandparents see grandchildren, and finally bring an end to a year that has -- sing it together one last time as the ball drops over an empty Times Square -- really sucked. In a time where almost everything else went wrong, the vaccine effort was something that went (mostly) right.
The industry isn't loathed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The industry isn't loathed (Score:4, Insightful)
And that because of a few instances, trumpeted by politicians, who want more power to clamp down on them.
Here we have billions invested by them, and government, to get the lifesaving product out fast. All this does is emphasize the importance of charging a lot of money to coerce new things into existence.
Remember that the next time some politician talks about "unconscionable profits".
Unconscionable profits are what gives you a new iPhone or Android every year. How much more important stuff that is not fluff like medicine.
You can't give it out for free, or cheap, until it gets invented first. Treating medicine like a static monolith to hand out already-invented stuff ignores that there are millions still dying every year from uncured or treated problems.
Re:The industry isn't loathed (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u... [nbcnews.com]
The same vial of insulin from the same company costs $32 in Canada while people in the US pay $275 out of pocket. One of the few good things Trump tried to do was allow for the government to bargain for drug prices (like many foreign countries do). Well the lobbyists went into meltdown and squished that in a hurry. Nothing but pure and simple greed keeping the costs up.
Re:The industry isn't loathed (Score:4, Insightful)
The same vial of insulin from the same company costs $32 in Canada while people in the US pay $275 out of pocket. One of the few good things Trump tried to do was allow for the government to bargain for drug prices (like many foreign countries do). Well the lobbyists went into meltdown and squished that in a hurry. Nothing but pure and simple greed keeping the costs up.
Go to Walmart they sell Relion N NPH 70/30 for $24.99, but yeah that's the real price. Quit allowing the medical/pharma INDUSTRY to scare you with boogyman retail prices. Its a game to keep people scared of change like single payer healthcare. While we're at it ban pharma ads. Who pays that million plus ad for best insulin on tv, Santa? Healthcare should be a utility a public work an act of kindness not shareholder returns.
Re:The industry isn't loathed (Score:4, Informative)
And Canada has the third most expensive pharmaceuticals in the world, behind the USA and Switzerland.
Hmm, looking for citations, it looks like I was wrong, 2nd place is more like it, including more expensive generics then America.
https://nationalpost.com/news/... [nationalpost.com]
https://www.cbc.ca/news/fifth/... [www.cbc.ca]
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remember too that those billions came from the U.S. Federal and other governments investing up front and buying the vaccine to be given to the population at no further charge.
In other words, the COVID vaccines are a triumph of socialized medicine. It is exactly the sort of thing the proponents of single payer universal healthcare have been calling for.
They are scum (Score:4, Insightful)
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Consider that it is not industry that produced the vaccine, it is its underpaid skillful workers, that also get screwed by the industry probably as much as its clients...
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The money has to come from somewhere - those thousands of scientists don't work for free. So either they charge for the product at distribution time or they as for govenrment money up front to do it. Take your pick.
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Of course, just don't think they are doing us any favours.
$20 to be exact. Cost increased by 6X, 3X (Score:4, Interesting)
> Well that's the problem, the price isn't all that reasonable.
To be specific, the cost is $20. That's paid for by taxes - zero cost at the time you get the vaccine. I guess you can call $20 outrageously expensive if you want to, but that's the cost for developing a miracle - $20.
> Come on, it's healthcare. Since when has capitalism ever delivered affordable healthcare?
When? In 1990 and before.
The cost was 83% lower under the old "capitalist" system of but what you need and get *medical insurance* to cover unexpected costs you can't afford, in 1990. Then in the 1990s medical insurance was mostly replaced by "healthcare plans" that require:
A) Bureaucratic paperwork for every little thing, like a fly shot or amoxicillin prescription
B) Coverage for stupid crap like aromatherapy
In 1990, if you got a sinus infection you'd go to your doctor and pay $35 for a quick visit. Now, when you go to the doctor for the same thing they have to file crap with your healthcare plan, which is why they have three insurance specialists working at the office with one doctor. You pay a $35 co-pay (which actually covers the cost of the doctor's time), plus you pay $50 as part of your monthly healthcare plan bill, which covers the cost of the insurance lady filing crap with the healthcare plan company, responding when they debt the claim because they have your middle initial wrong, etc.
Healthcare costs in the US doubled from 1990 to 2000, as we switched from having insurance to cover unexpected, high costs and budgeting for $35 visits paid in cash to the new healthcare plans which require bureacracy for every little thing.
Then of course we had the ACA,which doubles down on the same bad idea. Government mandates that healthcare plans get involved in everything, even a $8 vaccination or $12 prescription, thereby tripling their cost because we spend $25 on paperwork and bureacracy for a $8 medicine. So now we're paying 6X as much for healthcare as we were 30 years ago.
Anyway, that's the answer to your question, 1990.
Healthcare was 83% cheaper in 1990.
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Your problem isn't the middle men but the way the system is setup. Other countries have insurances for every tiny misplaced fart as well but it doesn't take or cost a thing. The added bureaucracy isn't remotely significant compared to the cost of the actual care.
I know how the system in the USA works, that rates are determined through complex negotiations between insurers and doctors, that different insurers get different rates. That isn't the fault of the insurers existing, that's the fault of not having a
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From or which country I referenced? Because the country I'm from is not the country I grew up in, the country I live in, or the country I currently have healthcare in (that's always an interesting one to explain).
The dental example is classic Australian, but similar results occur in any country where healthcare is actually regulated rather than left up to market negotiations. In the Netherlands for instance the rates are fixed. Completely. It doesn't matter which doctor I go to, the price is constant, the b
R&D is not the marginal production cost (Score:3)
So you were talking about Netherlands? You're up late, I think. :)
At the end there you totally confused two very different kinds of costs, which have nothing to do with each other:
> The USA only incurs an extraordinary cost of R&D and drug development .. There's a reason drug companies don't walk away when foreign countries negotiate life saving medication to a cost below that of a dinner at a cheap restaurant, they still profit from it.
Research and development is the cost of doing the research and
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> $35 in 1990 is $70 today with inflation. That's more than a lot of people can afford.
$70 is about the cost of replacing the battery in your car whenit dies (they die, that's a known fact). It's a lot less than the cost of replacing your alternator or water pump kthose also wear out and need replacement, and nobody should be surprised by this). $70 is less than the cost to replace your phone when you drop it. Phones break, it happens; that shouldn't be a surprise.
$70 is less than the "shit happens" c
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A typical, small doctor has a receptionist, and depending what he is doing, one or two colleagues (e.g. ordinary healthcare) or 3 - 4 "nurses", e.g. in a dental clinic (for preparations, x-rays, tooth cleaning etc.)
Most of those small clinics have no special worker for bureaucracy, the receptionist puts your health id card into the machine, and when the doctor/team is done, enters the data. And as I'm private insured I get a bill. Government insured, the data simply goes to the health insurance of the patie
Rarely a mustache villan. (Score:3)
This isn't to say Pharma is the big hero. But it is also not the villan.
They are in a business to create and sell medicine. Medicine is supposed to help people this is a good thing. However they also make a high demand product as there are a lot of people who want the medicine. So they will charge as much as they can for it. Which is often more than what a lot of people could afford.
Being that Insurance or Government often pays for the bulk of the medicine most people don't get the price sting so a lot of people will get this product at a high price. So for those who do not have insurance or Government paying for it are stuck with paying a high price.
Re: Rarely a mustache villan. (Score:2)
This isn't to say Pharma is the big hero. But it is also not the villan.
They are in a business to create and sell medicine.
That's the villainous part. What essentially amounts to "disaster relief" should never be part of a "free market". As other posters aptly put it: how much of that money was actually big pharma's?
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If you have a better way of funding meds development, feel free to spell it out.
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Oh. My apologies then :-) I probably should dial back on the US-bashing, people sometimes get caught in the crossfire. But then again, this is slashdot... *shrug* :-)
No biggie. But your assumption did seem to colour your initial response.
The big companies only come into play in the final stage, after all the research is done, just to wrap the final product, ship it, and cash in
This is just absolutely not how actual drug R&D works. You have this exactly backwards: the research part = drug discovery, and it's much faster and easier to find promising molecules than it is to do the development part = demonstrating safety and efficacy, and figuring out how to make the stuff in shippable quantities in accordance with GMP. Just packaging the active molecule appropriately and determining the delivery mechanism in
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Sometimes they are, like when they make insulin really expensive.
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In this case most of the vaccines available had at least some public money spent developing them, and of course big pre-orders placed by governments.
Globally around $38bn is spent on pharma research. We should just do that ourselves for our own benefit. It's a fraction of what some Western countries spend on defence. We could club together and have our own well funded medical research institutes that produce open source drugs and treatments for our benefit, not the pharma companies' profits.
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C'mon, seriously the headline 'GAVE US', what a lie, they are selling us a vaccine with 'ZERO' warranties, no matter the harm you suffer, basically piss off and it doesn't even have to work, just mostly somewhat work.
And how is that different to any other medicine?
And your statement is wrong anyway, the German vaccine (Pfizer/BioNtech) is well tested. You actually should know that. It was all over the news and even on /. Dumbass.
WTF? The Two Aren't Mutually Exclusive (Score:3)
Re:WTF? The Two Aren't Mutually Exclusive (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: WTF? The Two Aren't Mutually Exclusive (Score:2)
Yea who the hell has head of Pfizer? Must be some 3 guy startup in a garage somewhere.
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That's a terrible take. Pharma is an ecosystem of small and large players who collaborate, eg Pfizer/Biontech, AZ/University of Oxford team
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Pfizer joined BioNtech not even in November, sorry.
There is no Pharma conspiracy, only and US unethical system. Fix it and health care will be fine in your country.
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1. I live in the UK
2. The pharma industry is quintessentially global in nature
3. I'm not suggesting there's a conspiracy.
4. For at least a decade, pharma companies have been rapidly collaborating with smaller players for R&D. Obviously, the Pfizer / Biotech collaboration is new, as are many of the others focused on vaccines and treatments for covid, bc covid is new. So new agreements have been spun up quickly to commercialise products
5. What I'm objecting to is the suggestion that big pharma wasn't inv
Big Pharma didn't do it (Score:5, Informative)
Big Pharma had little to do with the actual development of the vaccines. The vaccines were developed by smaller companies (BioNTech, University of Oxford. The development and R&D was done by all these companies. The big pharma companies (AstraZenica, Pfizer, etc... ) took the work, ran it through the regulatory and testing process, but they didn't actually develop it.
Re:Big Pharma didn't do it (Score:5, Informative)
Not a year (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting article (Score:5, Insightful)
I recommend reading the article [fee.org] people.
The answer to why the FDA would allow hundreds of thousands to die rather than approve the medicine early is the same reason why the "trolley problem" is a philosophical conundrum useful for examining your ethics. Basically, most people rate deaths from your inaction as lesser than deaths from your actions.
The FDA isn't (yet) held responsible for deaths from diseases, but IS held responsible for deaths from approved medical treatments. Oh, and since actively exposing people to diseases to check on things like vaccination effectiveness is close to what the certain bad people did, we can't do that.
Volunteer challenge trials (Score:2)
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Including allowing drug companies no liability if the drugs have known side effects.
1976 Swine Flu WIKI: "On April 8, an official from the Federal Insurance Company informed Merck & Co., a manufacturer of the swine flu vaccine, that it would exclude indemnity on Merck's product liability for the swine flu vaccine on July 1, 1976...In May, other vaccine manufacturers including Marion Merrell Dow, Parke-Davis, and Wyeth, were notified of indemnity problems by their respective insurers. Assistant Secretary
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The foundation of modern human health WRT infectious disease is built on vaccinations.
The "FDA is afraid of taking the blame" view is being simplistic and trying to pin the blame on some obvious target. It's wrong.
Look at the way vaccines have been under attack from misinformed idiots the last 10 years. Idiots armed with no real data. Now, rush a single vaccine and get it wrong... watch the antivax moment absolutely explode and herd immunity fall completely apart in a single generation. Millions more deaths
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the "trolley problem" is a philosophical conundrum useful for examining your ethics.
No it isn't. It's convoluted nonsense
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Lol. The FDA is publicly damned if they do and damned if they don't. This is a great illustration. Idiots yelling that the vaccines were rushed, unsafe, tinfoil-hat-evading-cattle-trackers on one hand, and idiots yelling that whatever residue pops out of a bioreactor should be immediately distributed on the other hand.
Whatever do you do in such circumstances? Ignore the idiots and follow established procedures, including emergency ones, worked out by an international community of tens of thousands of actual
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It took two days to build an mRNA sequence on a computer. That's really not the same at all as having millions of doses of viable vaccine ready for administration. The rest of the time was spent on scaling up, and it's not finished yet. And scaling up and trials happened in parallel, not sequence
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FDA refusal to accelerate active human volunteer trials delayed it by many months.
This is a good thing. It's one of the reasons the USA avoided the Thalidomide problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] in Europe. The trials were accelerated as fast as they could be without cutting corners.
Also there's a big difference between "designed in a single weekend" and being production ready, and an even bigger difference between being production ready and being available to take en-mass. Even if the FDA approved your vaccine months earlier you still wouldn't have more doses than you have right n
hardly worlds most loathed. (Score:3)
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Vaccines aren't profit centers (Score:5, Insightful)
Apart from yearly flu shots and the roughly once a decade Tdap vaccinations, most vaccines provide a lifetime of coverage from a disease for a few dollars to a few hundred dollars. A few shots usually have 90% or higher effectiveness at giving a lifetime of protection from a disease. It's like $1/year/person of profit, that's an exceptionally reasonable price scale that is affordable by most of the world's population even ignoring international and intranational aid for the poor.
Nearly every other form of prescription medication is literally several orders of magnitude more profitable per patient. It's not uncommon for a 30 day prescription to cost $100 and often much more. If a patient lives with the condition for 10 years, the company will have made a hundred times more from treatment for a chronic condition than a magic shot that gives lifetime protection from another.
It's the slowest mRNA vaccine ever developed! (Score:2)
Long overdue, after SARS and MERS (Score:2)
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Wait! Are we *SURE* it works and side-effect free? (Score:2)
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The trial results you've been hearing about (> 90% efficacy, etc.) are phase III trials. Tens of thousands of people got each vaccine candidate in these trials.
Phase IV trials are conducted after a treatment is approved. They're surveillance studies after you make the product widely available. They are absolutely happening, and are where things like the reports of allergic reactions come from.
Fuck you (Score:3, Interesting)
Research into SARs ended when big pharma decided it would be unprofitable (or at least not profitable enough). That research continued on through government grant twenty years ago, which laid the foundation for the current Covid vaccine.
But now big pharma is here to claim the glory for research they abandoned, and had to be goosed to develop in the first place (anyone interested should peruse the wiki article on the Economics of Vaccines. And that only scratches the surface of the incestuous relationship big pharma has with public research).
It's enough to convince me that maybe medical research shouldn't be in the hands of big business (unless they want to fund it, all of it, themselves).
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That is a really good point. Look, I am all for a planetary perspective -- there are problems which individual nations can't solve on their own, so the global NGOs, United Nations, WHO, etc sound like they are a positive -- but guess what, the most effective and powerful transnational orgs are the corporate multinationals -- and they are the ones influencing and controlling the global "solutions" at WHO levels. My point is that, it is worse than we think. And all the more reason to keep research free and ab
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apologies for autocomplete errors...
The problem with health and the environment, is that global corporations have made them their market opportunities to "solve" using their idea of "solutions"
Could the US stop naming itself "the world" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
the world hasn't been saved yet (Score:2)
Is the virus really going to be stopped if there are billions of people who can't afford the vaccine?
Almost as if... (Score:2)
Oh who am I kidding this is
US != World (Score:5, Insightful)
The title refers to the "world" as determined by a "Gallup poll", which most of the world has never heard of. Just because the US has a thoroughly screwed up healthcare system doesn't mean that the rest of the world is in the same situation.
Modern medicine is amazing stuff. The pharma industry produces amazing stuff. Without capitalist incentives, the industry would not exist. One of the primary responsibilities of government is regulation, precisely to prevent excesses. USAians shouldn't be angry with the pharma industry, you should be angry with the failures of your government.
Obamacare ("We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." - seriously?) made an already bad situation infinitely worse. You're seeing it again now: a 5000+ page COVID relief bill that is 90% about other things: new copyright provisions, foreign aid, building museums, mailing regulations, and infinite amounts of pork.
The problem isn't the pharma industry.
Most loathed (Score:3)
"The world's most loathed industry?"
Whoa, wait a second now. Comcast takes exception to that.
Well, yes, of course. (Score:2)
Were you perhaps expecting the greeting card industry to produce the vaccine?
Big pharma is not the most loathed, by a long shot (Score:3)
There are worse industries: cable companies, lawyers, advertisers, news organizations, lawyers, Congress, social media companies, lawyers, etc.
The article is painting the entire industry with the same brush because of a few scumbags
Lawyers are worse. (Score:2)
Might be loathed in countries that don't have universal health care, but most rational countries out limits on rorting.
So yeah, loathed in Rome. I mean the US, got confused with the falling apart after stupid excess and the inability to see their own downfall.
Re:Dont forget (Score:5, Insightful)
And a lot of it funded by governments (ie the taxpayers).
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More accurately, the U.S. government (and I presume others) have funded vaccine research over decades. The return on that investment was the new vaccines.
Re: Dont forget (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, lots of public money was used, and only time will tell how many corners were cut.
When 1000 Americans per day are dying, cutting some corners is prudent.
There is a chance that rushed testing failed to find some long term side effect. But the Covid virus itself is even more likely to have an unknown long term adverse side effect.
So the risk of delaying was worse than the risk of rushing.
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When 1000 Americans per day are dying,...
Actually about 8000 people die in the USA per day https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
And from Covid-19 about 1400 per day this month.
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Actually about 8000 people die in the USA per day https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
And from Covid-19 about 1400 per day this month.
That's a lot. Close to a 20% rise.
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Actually about 8000 people die in the USA per day https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
And from Covid-19 about 1400 per day this month.
That's a lot. Close to a 20% rise.
We cannot see from these figures if there is a rise of total deaths per day. I think that there is no significant increase or no increase at all, because such measures as eliminating handshakes and social hugs, reducing commuting, wearing masques in crowded spaces, washing hands regularly, etc. also decreased the transmissions of other dangerous often lethal infectious diseases such us tuberculosis, influenza, hepatitis, etc.
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Where did you get your PhD in Bio-statistics?
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Have a look here. This shows you total deaths in the US over the last few years with an orange curve indicating expected (though from what I can see, the orange curve is higher than it ought to be - looking at past years it is almost always above the line)
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
It looks like there are about 10000 / week extra deaths (so the 1400/day is right on), being about 20% higher than normal. (You can hover over a given week for exact numbers). So any reduction in
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You're assuming that the 1400 deaths per day (which is a peak rate, the average is around 900) would not have died had it not been for covid, and are therefore added to the 8000 who die of other causes.
In reality, a significant proportion of the 1400 will come from the 8000 - they still would have died, but now their cause of death is different. Most people who have died due to covid were elderly or suffering from existing serious medical conditions. So the overall daily deaths is not going to be 8000+1400,
Re: Dont forget (Score:2)
Numbers from England between late March and December show that of 414K deaths, 66K are in excess of the 5 year average. This is in a year where social distancing has reduced the impact of other factors such as flu, but might be increasing deaths due to thinks like missed early cancer diagnosis due to hospitals being tied up with COVID-19.
https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/... [phe.org.uk]
This seems like a significant rate - do you have any reason to think that the CDC won't find a similar trend in the US?
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...Also the 8000 rate is based on 2019 stats, the number of deaths has naturally been increasing every year due to the population also increasing. ...
On the other hand, starting fro 18th century the life expectancy keeps growing due to the better hygiene, better refrigerators, medicaments, clothing, etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Take a look at my other comment above. Also, I will repeat the link:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
The orange line is "upper bound threshold for expected deaths" - that is, even with "normal" variations, it really should be lower than that line. The death rate, at least during significant periods of year, is 20% higher (there were lower rates - but from the week of March 28 onward the death rate was higher than the year before). The US population didn't grow anywhere near 20% be
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In reality, a significant proportion of the 1400 will come from the 8000 - they still would have died, but now their cause of death is different. Most people who have died due to covid were elderly or suffering from existing serious medical conditions.
Because a 70 or 80 year old would have died eventually anyway? Is that your point? Plenty of old people have many years of life left in them. You sound like you think all old people are perpetually on death's doorstep.
Same with pre-existing conditions. People live perfectly long lives with things like diabetes, asthma, hypertension, etc, all of which are controllable - except if you happen to get COVID.
A 60 year old with asthma who dies of COVID is not "no big deal they would have died anyway". That is
Re: Dont forget (Score:4)
small to moderate uptick in the total number of deaths
Look at all of those freezer trucks used for dead bodies because we can't process them fast enough. There's satellite photos of mass graves and cremation facilities that went from a few hours per day to 24/7 operation and storage trucks of dead bodies. "A small uptick" prediction does not align with the massive increase of corpses.
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When 1000 Americans per day are dying, cutting some corners is prudent.
If they were non-Americans, it wouldn't matter at all.
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If they were non-Americans, it wouldn't matter at all.
Rushed approval by the American FDA doesn't affect non-Americans.
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There are plenty of non americans living in the US, and therefore subject to the FDA.
The FDA approval will be used by pharma companies to push the equivalent regulators in other countries to also approve the vaccine. Many smaller countries will lack the resources to do their own reviews, and will take approval in other countries as reason to approve locally.
Re: Dont forget (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as everyone is free to evaluate their own risk/rewards of taking the vaccine
How many people have the expertise to make an informed decision?
without being barred from partaking in everyday life, Iâ(TM)m all for it.
Anti-vaxxers don't have a "right" to infect other people recklessly.
Barring these idiots from shops, schools, medical facilities, and other public venues is reasonable.
Re: Dont forget (Score:5, Informative)
The vaccine is only 90% effective. So there is still a 10% chance of infection.
Additionally, there are people with compromised immune systems that can't take the vaccine.
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Additionally, there are people with compromised immune systems that can't take the vaccine.
In this case, no, that is not correct. The RNA vaccines are not weakened viruses; they cannot possibly infect you, regardless of how weak your immune system:
“It’s only one strand of RNA for making a part of the virus – not the entire virus – and it’s not infectious,” says Rob Kozak, a scientist and clinical microbiologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. What’s more, the other leading vaccine candidates don’t contain infectious agents either, “so there is no risk of these vaccines making you sick with COVID,” Kozak says.
https://www.theglobeandmail.co... [theglobeandmail.com]
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Great, so there is not a problem. There are no people dieing now. The hospitals aren't overwhelmed and treatment of patients without life-threatening diseases aren't suspended. There are also no people who had limbs amputated or a untreated heart-attack because they were turned away from hospital because their symptoms didn't look serious at the time (source was from a dutch documentary, who interviewed several doctors from different hospitals). Also, the idea of keeping distance, and society trying to help with it, does nothing into reducing the spread of the disease.
Even if you were right (pleas provide links to actual studies), only reducing symptoms would have a huge benefit into diminishing the load on the hospitals and going back to a more normal society. The latest number that I have is that about 13% of the dutch have had the corona virus. It would definitely take a few years to build up herd-immunity (it can go faster, but then you accept thousands of deaths as hospitals and IC-units cannot treat the patients. A hospital and IC does help). A vaccin would give a tremendous boost to that immunity.
I think Dr Reis and Dr Bhakdi should go to hospitals and tell the patients that COVID has already passed. If these patients realise it, they can pack their stuff, start breathing again, and go home. Problem solved.
Re: Dont forget (Score:4, Informative)
It has not largely passed. Current daily infections and deaths are at record numbers at least in the USA. You could be misinformed or intentionally lying, but either way, you are likely getting your information diet from people who for some reason are misinformed or intentionally lying.
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No, they said it would take a year before you could properly verify that the vaccine is safe and effective. And they were right. This was massively rushed. Let's take a look at it further, starting with the deaths.
Each trial had only about 15,000 people in the experiment arm (though Pfizer had two experiment arms, one of which was much less effective than the other). This means you would expect, on average, only 1.5 deaths in each experiment arm, and even then, only if every single person in the experim
Re: Dont forget (Score:5, Informative)
I could say the same about you. A headline that thousands are dying needs checking the details. There are dozens and dozens of varied medical experts out there who are checking. But you have to make the effort to go read their stuff. And then think critically about it. And not go to easy ways to "rationally" dismiss them. For example I mentioned a book, and immediately someone replied that they must be lying. That's just bloody closed mindedness.
If you were the first person to mention a new book by a serious expert with a new proof that Corona virus "is nothing - it's just a flu blahblahblah" and we ignored you then that would be sad. There have, however, been millions of comments like yours and we have investigated the evidence behind them and found that they were total bullshitting liars. I've now wasted several minutes of my life finding out that he's a Winner of the Golden Blockhead award for most astonishing pseudo-scientific nuisance of the year [wikipedia.org]. He's a sad case who used to be a serious scientist but is now making bullshit claims [wikipedia.org].
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The bigger (issuye) is not everyone thinks the risks associated with vaccination are lower than the risks of acquiring immunity through exposure.
How many of these people are basing their decision on real information?
Re: Dont forget (Score:5, Informative)
No, that's wrong. Because vaccines aren't perfect. Even the gold standards, the best vaccines we've ever made, don't get even 99% effectiveness. Some people it just doesn't work on, no matter what. You can still infect those people. Or you can give someone a high enough viral load that their body can't fight it even with the head start the vaccine will give them. So yes, anti-vaxxers still can harm people with the vaccine.
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Plus some people have already had the disease and recovered. It's questionable as to whether the vaccine provides any protection to such individuals.
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I have a friend on chemo-therapy, she can't get vaccinated and is high risk. She's likely got 20 years of decent life left as the cancer seems to be beaten.
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The only people they are going to infect are fellow anti-vaxxers as everyone else will already be vaccinated. So what's the problem? Everyone should be free to make their own choices.
Sigh. I don't understand why we have to keep correcting this over and over and over and over again.
But I will.
THAT'S NOT HOW VACCINES WORK.
Vaccines are not, and never have been, 100% effective. There are also people who cannot take a vaccine for valid reasons. However, if everyone around me is vaccinated, I am prot
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Re: Dont forget (Score:5, Insightful)
Barring people who don't take the vaccine from activities that bring them in to proximity of other people is a wise move. Their freedom ends where it impacts somebody else's. If they're not prepared to respect other people and their freedom then it's the government's responsibility to do so. They're still free to make their choice: don't the vaccine or be part of society.
Re:Dont forget (Score:4)
And it's also socialized medicine. Let's not forget that either.
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Just to be on the safe side, do not use any computers for two weeks after receiving your vaccine.
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Many women had Trojan (condoms) pumped into them. And some men too, I'd wager.
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Re:Gates (Score:4, Insightful)
Also it is not clear what protection we get vs an unvaccinated patient that gets HCQ + zinc.
We know that giving HCQ increases the risk of death significantly. Enough so that the trials got cut off early because it was obvious that it made people a lot more likely to die.
So far the vaccine reduces your chances of getting the virus by 95%.
The results here are complete opposite ends of the spectrum.
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You actually can take too much zinc and have negative effects. A zinc pill won't hurt you, but massive doses over time can. See https://www.mountsinai.org/hea... [mountsinai.org] Taking extra zinc is really only recommended if you have a deficiency.
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Every front-line medical worker in my family and friends has gotten their first shot already: A pediatric ENT doctor in Savannah. A resident in Atlanta. A nurse in Durango. An occupational therapist in Boston. A physical therapist in Northern Virginia. Maybe some hospital staff are still waiting, but not the ones I know -- and several of the ones I mentioned work mostly or entirely outside hospitals.