Teens Fully Protected By Pfizer's COVID-19 Vaccine, Company Says (arstechnica.com) 91
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Adolescents ages 12 to 15 were completely protected from symptomatic COVID-19 after being vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine in a small Phase III clinical trial, Pfizer reported in a press release Wednesday. The company also said that the vaccine was well-tolerated in the age group, spurring only the standard side effects seen in people ages 16 to 25. The vaccine is already authorized for use in people age 16 and over.
The vaccine appeared more effective at spurring defensive immune responses in adolescents ages 12 to 15 than in the 16- to 25-year-old group, producing even higher levels of antibodies that were able to neutralize SARS-CoV-2. In a measure of neutralizing antibodies, vaccinated youths in the new trial had geometric mean titers (GMTs) of 1,239.5, compared with the GMTs of 705.1 previously seen in those ages 16 to 25, Pfizer noted. The trial involved 2,260 adolescents ages 12 to 15, of which 1,131 were vaccinated and 1,129 received a placebo. There were 18 cases of symptomatic COVID-19 in the trial, all of which were in the placebo group. In today's press release, the company trumpeted that the vaccine demonstrated "100 percent efficacy." The trial was not primarily designed to assess efficacy, however. It was primarily assessing relative immune responses, so it will require more data to fully evaluate efficacy. Additionally, Pfizer and BioNTech have only released top-line trial results, not the full data from the trial, which has not been peer-reviewed.
The vaccine appeared more effective at spurring defensive immune responses in adolescents ages 12 to 15 than in the 16- to 25-year-old group, producing even higher levels of antibodies that were able to neutralize SARS-CoV-2. In a measure of neutralizing antibodies, vaccinated youths in the new trial had geometric mean titers (GMTs) of 1,239.5, compared with the GMTs of 705.1 previously seen in those ages 16 to 25, Pfizer noted. The trial involved 2,260 adolescents ages 12 to 15, of which 1,131 were vaccinated and 1,129 received a placebo. There were 18 cases of symptomatic COVID-19 in the trial, all of which were in the placebo group. In today's press release, the company trumpeted that the vaccine demonstrated "100 percent efficacy." The trial was not primarily designed to assess efficacy, however. It was primarily assessing relative immune responses, so it will require more data to fully evaluate efficacy. Additionally, Pfizer and BioNTech have only released top-line trial results, not the full data from the trial, which has not been peer-reviewed.
You Had Room (Score:2)
Adolescents ages 12 to 15
Just say that instead of "teens" in the headline, since it excludes ages 16, 17, 18, and 19.
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The vaccine was already authorized for use in people over 15; it's the 12-15 part of the "teen" category that's new.
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Then it should say "Younger teens"
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What about ages 10 and 11, you insensitive clod?
Re: You Had Room (Score:2)
What is your position on 12-year olds then?
Re:I think kids should wait to take these vaccines (Score:5, Interesting)
Kids are vulnerable to long-COVID, which is scary as fuck. There don't seem to be any mechanisms for long term side effects - this isn't like antidepressants with uncertain pathways.
I can see both sides of that (Score:1, Flamebait)
GP has a point that kids and teens have the most to lose.
If a 94 year old has some side-effect, that side-effect won't last long. There is no such thing as a long-term side effect for the 90+ crowd.
On the other hand:
There is a non-zero possibility that a vaccine could possibly have a long term side effect for some people.
There is a 100% certainty that COVID has long-term effects, including death, for many people.
The vaccine isn't absolutely 100% certain to be absolutely safe.
It is 100% certain that it's a
Re:I can see both sides of that (Score:5, Interesting)
And then you have people like this guy I work with, who told me today about a local car salesman who got the vaccine, which gave him COVID, which then got his whole family infected. I tried to explain to him how it's completely impossible to actually contract the disease from an mRNA vaccine... and then gave up. Fuck Facebook.
Re:I can see both sides of that (Score:4, Interesting)
And then you have people like this guy I work with, who told me today about a local car salesman who got the vaccine, which gave him COVID, which then got his whole family infected. I tried to explain to him how it's completely impossible to actually contract the disease from an mRNA vaccine... and then gave up. Fuck Facebook.
Yeah, Facebook is really terrible. So I grew up in a small town and for a while I worked in IT in that same small town. I've got friends who still live there, but I long ago moved to a large metropolitan area. One of my old friends is a woman with several serious health issues, including insulin dependent diabetes and being quite a bit overweight. Diabetics don't do well with COVID. So I have watched over the past year as she has gone from "COVID is real. You need to be careful." to "The COVID vaccine is dangerous and the side effects from it are way worse than actually getting COVID" to the current "All vaccines for everything are bad and dangerous to you". She is in early retirement and she spends too much of her spare time reading dubious sources of information on Facebook and now she is not just against personally getting the COVID vaccine but a virulent anti-vaxxer for all vaccinations.
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And I don't think people realize just how damaging it is to the economy to have millions of young people with long term disabilities, potentially limiting their ability to work a regular job or pay taxes. Our current system depends on young healthy people putting in more than they take out of the system. Society collapses if the middle class can't support itself.
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Technically, it depends on men and boys putting more into the system than they take out. By the numbers, women never reach parity between their use vs what they pay in.
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Re:I think kids should wait to take these vaccines (Score:4, Interesting)
I just got back from my yearly physical and the lady drawing my blood just blurted out and asked what I thought about vaccines for young people. I told why not? She said we don't know anything about the long-term effects on kids... I thought to myself - lady you need a different job. She refused to consider the long-term effects of the virus which we have actually data for but zippo for the vaccine. I live in a very red state and this attitude prevails. I don't get it.
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Yeah, you definitely don't want to hear an opinion of someone who actually works in the medical industry. It is better to just go along with your "blue state" gut feelings, especially in a "red state"
She is a PHLEBOTOMIST! Not a virologist.
And it is not "blue state" feeling more along the lines of the bulk of scientific consensus which red-staters tend to sneer at.
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Not to mention vaccines don't really have long term effects, except not getting sick.
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We have NO indications concerning negative long-term effects of the vaccine even though there are 3 times more people who have received the vaccine than have been infected with the virus. And there is NO known pathway for the vaccine to cause long-term effects but there IS (vascular disease and occlusion) with the virus. The vaccine trials started just a few months after the pandemic started so the length of experience with the vaccine vs the virus is becoming insignificant.
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Re: I think kids should wait to take these vaccine (Score:2)
Re: I think kids should wait to take these vaccine (Score:1)
One way or another, the only way to answer this question will be the hard way.
No one turned into an alligator yet...so it's probably ok.
Re: I think kids should wait to take these vaccine (Score:2)
Moderna has been making mRNA vaccines for 11 years now.
Re:I think kids should wait to take these vaccines (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't the more-to-lose argument favor vaccination? It's also too early to assume COVID-19 is safe in the long run, and in fact all of the evidence already contradicts your assumption. So we're trying to compare a thing that looks safe (but could conceivably not be) to a thing that looks unsafe (but .. could conceivably be? not sure I buy that). If the question is "Which is safER?" then the best guess answer right now is clearly vaccination.
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Vaccines don't normally spread and mutate. COVID has and will continue to do so if left unchecked. We have proof that for many people, especially the elderly, recovering from COVID does not provide lasting immunity. Natural herd immunity is completely impossible.
Your brand is broken if you can't weigh the risks properly and instead choose to not vaccinate. I'm fine with locking up or isolating people that are insane or defective. I'd rather set shoplifters and drug dealers free if we have to make space in o
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"Vaccines don't spread and mutate."
There I fixed that for you.
At least get the math right (Score:2, Informative)
Yeesh.
If there are 18 cases in the control arm, one would expect anywhere between about 13 and 23 cases in the vaccine arm (1-sigma or 66 pct ci).
On the low end of that, a 70% efficacy would result in about 3 expected cases, so anywhere between 0 and 6.
Therefore seeing 0 vs 13 is not "100% effective", it's more like "at least 70% effective."
Doctors are bad at math and marketing guys like to pretend math doesn't exist.
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You're right about doctors not knowing math. I've yet to meet one that understands the base rate fallacy. But 70% is plenty effective enough, especially because youth itself is a strongly protective factor for symptomatic COVID. We're talking about 70% reduction on top of the reduction just being young gets you.
Re: At least get the math right (Score:2)
Any hard bound above zero by definition is a net benefit. But saying "100% effective" without a rigorous large-n trial backing up that claim is just setting up a needless pr oopsie when a couple of kids end up getting covid despite taking a "100% effective" vaccine.
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Yeah, sloppy claims can do a lot of reputational damage, like AZs arguably-faulty effectiveness figures. I worked for many years in a public health related field, and people trained in public health like epidemiologists are taught to be sober, conservative and credible in their communications; but marketing and PR people don't seem to have got that lesson.
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If you're going to criticize someone's math, do your own correctly. Counts are not normally distributed, and they're not even approximately normal for such small ones.
Zero versus 13 is 100% effective, with a confidence interval that's not stated. You should never trust a number with no confidence estimate attached, but it's not like such things are rare.
Physicians are afraid of math.
Re: At least get the math right (Score:3)
Some math:
The conceit of a clinical trial is that the prevalence of the disease is equally likely in both the vaccine and the control arm and that every test subject is more or less equally likely to get the disease at whatever it's prevalence, and that all test subjects are statistically independent of each other.
This situation where each subject is independent and has the same probability of contracting the disease is described by the poisson process.
A poisson process always has the property that its vari
Re: At least get the math right (Score:2)
And n=18 is even closer to where gaussian approximations start to become valid.
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Copying random stuff off Wikipedia doesn't make you right. Just grabbing a random bit out of that, uh, text, the central limit theorem only applies to averages, it doesn't apply to raw counts or single samples.
PS: how many sock puppets do you have?? You always seem to have mod points when someone points out you've said something dumb.
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Could you explain your math? Because I frankly don't get it.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you expose teens to a serum with the potential for unknown long term side effects?
How else are you going to know if teens can be given the shot? Guess?
It makes no sense to subject them to this. It's crap like this which undermines my trust in "The Experts".
No, it doesn't. You didn't have "trust" to begin with because you know more than those experts. You know more than people who have spent decades in their chosen profession, collaborating with others, performing tests, literally having life and death in their hands. You're just looking for another reason to whine and be a Karen.
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Ya, you don't really want to express public support for my posts unless you want to get modded to oblivion. The crowd lurking on slashdot these days have doublefisted the koolaid. Up is down, black is white, the whole 9 yards.
The funny/sad thing is that they think they're the rational ones.
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You seem to be ignorant of the fact that all these vaccines have an emergency use authorization only, none of them have the proper testing and authorizations other vaccines do. All these trials are tiny and years less than a proper authorized vaccine gets. This is indeed experimentation on the populace.
Sure, I'll get getting ones of the shots, but there is risk here.
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Youz seem to be ignorant of the fact that four vaccines have an actual market authorisation in the EU so they do have the proper testing.
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in EU it's called Conditional Marketing Authorisation (CMA) and that is what the vaccines have.
You seem to be ignorant.
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A conditional market authorisation is not the same as an emergency authorisation - several EU countries have issued emergency authorisations for sputnik v and sinovac. The main difference between a full and a conditional authorisation is that the conditional authorisation allows a rolling review. The difference between an emergency authorisation and a conditional market authorisation is that the vaccines have finished all stages of testing, they can be sold as any other medicines and that the manufacturer i
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Why would you expose teens to a serum with the potential for unknown long term side effects?
How else are you going to know if teens can be given the shot? Guess?
Are you nuts? You don't expose 100% of your population to an untested medication in order to test it for long-term effects. You expose a small sub-set and if many years later everything is fine you approve it for general use. How do you think past vaccines were approved? We had decades of testing before they were approved for general use.
It makes no sense to subject them to this. It's crap like this which undermines my trust in "The Experts".
No, it doesn't. You didn't have "trust" to begin with because you know more than those experts. You know more than people who have spent decades in their chosen profession, collaborating with others, performing tests, literally having life and death in their hands. You're just looking for another reason to whine and be a Karen.
Experts without data are still just human beings making an educated guess. The only thing that is certain is cold hard data. Do you know why we have such stringent levels of long-term testing? Because of what happened with the Polio vaccine. Mistakes were made. People died.
Vaccines are great but you don't rush experimental medicine out into the market and then shove it down everyone's throats. Limited exposure, maybe. Mass exposure... that's just shooting from the hip.
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The Polio vaccine problems where production problems, not something related to "testing" them.
That's good (Score:5, Interesting)
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Because this pandemic isn't going to be over until most people have been vaccinated, and that *includes* manchildren
FTFY. ;)
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They're not talking about it in the press much, but a lot of scientific papers seem to be of the opinion that SARS-COV-2 has a good chance of becoming endemic. A lot depends on how effective long-term immunological memory is against it. At this point we don't know whether immunity lasts a lifetime, ten years, or maybe just one or two years.
The time is coming soon when we'll have this epidemic under the control in the US and other advanced countries, but there will still be a big scientific job left to be d
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Show some data in support of your claim (Score:1, Interesting)
Because in actual cases where, after much hand-wringing and virtue signaling, schools opened up and it turned out kids didn't spread the disease, are remarkably resistant to it, and have healthier immune systems than many older people.
So if one's own immune system is handling it, why introduce a vaccine? What's the upside? Again, provide supporting data, not doomsday one-off anecdotes or whatever tripe your government officials are trotting out today.
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> Because this pandemic isn't going to be over until most people have been vaccinated,
I guess that's why the Spanish flu of 1918 never ended since they didn't isolate the influenza virus until 1933...
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> Because this pandemic isn't going to be over until most people have been vaccinated,
I guess that's why the Spanish flu of 1918 never ended since they didn't isolate the influenza virus until 1933...
People get long-term resistance to a particular strain of flu. That's not necessarily the case with SARS-nCOV-19. Also we'd rather not have 1/3 of the population infected as with the 1918 flu. That would lead to 100s of millions of dead. Therefore, the only humane way out of this is widespread vaccination.
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Just because they don't get severe illness or die doesn't mean they aren't spreading the virus to more vulnerable people. No vaccine is 100% effective, so some of those vulnerable people will die.
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It's not like death is the only bad thing with COVID. Do you like being sick? Do you like having long-term health complications? Do you like spreading disease to other people?
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Also, if children still pass COVID-19 amongst themselves - even if all adults were vaccinated - then more variants can arise. Some of these variants might target children with worse symptoms and more lethality. Other variants might be able to render the vaccine useless, bypassing the protection and putting us back to square 1 in our battle against this disease. By vaccinating children, even if they aren't likely to die, we deny the virus any safe harbor and (hopefully) speed it towards extinction.
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This! Thank you. I don't understand the headlong rush to get kids back into schools in person given the risks. Especially with the end of the school year in sight. And I say this as the parent of a 5 and 9 year old. It has been a nightmare of a school year, but I'm not in any hurry to put them back in an indoor classroom.
Re:The art of sales at its finest (Score:4, Insightful)
Aside from the obvious reasons, like "most kids interact with adults at some point in their lives" there's no reason to assume the immunity you get from surviving the virus is identical to the immunity you get from the vaccine. Just like the severity of symptoms, the strength of the natural antibody response to the virus is highly variable between people. The viral load probably matters a lot, and obviously there's no standard dose of the virus that everyone gets. The vaccine is a dose that has been found to reliably produce strong immunity. Since it doesn't do all the damage in your body that the actual virus does, it can simulate a viral load that would kill you if it was an actual infection.
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It's funny you tout vaccine immunity as being "better" than natural immunity by a seemingly logical argument when in fact the case histories and evidence show natural immunity has generally be better in the past.
Funny how this statement has been stricken from the modern internet:
> It is true that natural infection almost always causes better immunity than vaccines.
Now it's replaced with lists of vaccines that are supposedly superior to natural immunity. But it's funny how 5 years ago no one was claiming
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It's funny you tout vaccine immunity as being "better" than natural immunity by a seemingly logical argument when in fact the case histories and evidence show natural immunity has generally be better in the past.
Vaccine immunity is better because you don't have to survive a potentially deadly or debilitating virus to obtain it! Not to mention having to suffer through the symptoms of the disease. Then there is the lost economic and educational opportunity then getting sick incurs. On top of that, every new infection is an opportunity for the virus to mutate into a strain that negates both natural and/or vaccine-induced immunity.
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there's no reason to assume the immunity you get from surviving the virus is identical to the immunity you get from the vaccine
This is utter nonsense.
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>> Then why In The Tap-Dancing Fuck would you get the vaccine? Asking for a friend.
I, for one, will not be allowed to work in my company's local office without proof I have been vaccinated. There are certainly pressures already being applied that have nothing to do with my decision of how to protect my own personal well being, or even that of friends, family, acquaintances and strangers on the street.
Perhaps it is time to talk about Chicken Pox parties again, but I believe even if you've contracted t
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Who is 'trying to HIDE the ingredients'? The vaccines are patented. Everything you need to know is right there in the patents.