COVID-19: Vaccine/antidote and testing procedures Megathread [Mod Warning - Post #1]

Henryq.

hmmm wrote: »

It's interesting that Gottlieb, who is on the Pfizer board, seems to be advocating that the US use all its initial supply to vaccinate as many people as possible with a first dose. There's a debate (everywhere I imagine) about whether you use just half of your initial supply, and hold the other half back for the second dose. Particularly in the US which has a raging epidemic, the right choice here could save thousands of lives.

https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1337824891450568711

Sticking to science catchphrase lol

Politicians love that one

Micky 32

jackboy wrote: »

I don’t know why this is a surprise. We have been told for weeks now that it will be at least the second half of next year before enough are vaccinated to have an impact on mask wearing and social distancing. The first half of next year is still a write off, people just need to accept that.

Doing my own weighing up, i have said it weeks back i still think it will be the last quarter of 2021 before we’ll be up and running again. I know it sounds like a longtime away but at least an end in sight. But who knows i could be wrong and things could move at a quicker rate

Water John

Hopefully a little earlier than that Micky, but that wouldn't matter in the greater scheme of things.

tobefrank321

Given that about half of deaths tend to be in care homes in most countries, vaccinating the relatively small number of care home residents should make a big difference to deaths. Vaccinating the very highest risk after that ie those with chronic underlying conditions should also make a difference.

Once high risk groups are vaccinated there's no reason why normality can't return.

Herd immunity will depend on whether the vaccine is in any ways sterilising. If it was even 50% sterilising or cut the contagious period by half this would be significant.

hmmm

tobefrank321 wrote: »

Once high risk groups are vaccinated there's no reason why normality can't return.

That depends on how high the hospitalisation rate will be in the groups who are not at risk, and how many of those at risk will end up not protected by the vaccine and what the implications will be for them. There's also the other issue of the number of people who end up with long-term illness due to long-covid.

These are questions we still don't have the answers to, and until we do things won't go back to normal.

Gael23

Water John wrote: »

Hopefully a little earlier than that Micky, but that wouldn't matter in the greater scheme of things.

With a rational and measured response it could be by summer but I think it’s going to be September 2021 before we see pubs reopening fully and an end of social distancing

Water John

Gael23 wrote: »

With a rational and measured response it could be by summer but I think it’s going to be September 2021 before we see pubs reopening fully and an end of social distancing

A bit of social distancing has meant no flu around.
In terms of holidaying I think the ski season of 2021 will be first full opening in the northern hemisphere.
Guy from Sydney writing in an agri thread said the city is almost at normal.

Gael23

Water John wrote: »

A bit of social distancing has meant no flu around.
In terms of holidaying I think the ski season of 2021 will be first full opening in the northern hemisphere.
Guy from Sydney writing in an agri thread said the city is almost at normal.

When is the Ski season?

Water John

Next winter, I mean back to full normal. Maybe most populations in European countries will be vaccinated by June/July. See Gary Barlow advertised for the 3 Arena on 28 Nov 2021, chance booking it?
If we were mostly vaccinated would the longest day of the year be a good, celebrating Covid defeated day and remembering those lost.

Hmmzis

smurfjed wrote: »

This is where it gets interesting, I hold licences from 3 countries and associated Medical’s, so let’s say country 1 approves the Chinese or Russian vaccines but these aren’t submitted for approval in the USA or Europe, then I might have issues with renewing those two medical certificates.

We truthfully don’t know how this is going to work. The FAA in the USA has stated that they expect to approve Pfizer within 5 days of the FDA approval, but we don’t know if this will come with any limitations.

Luckily, I’m expecting to get the Pfizer vaccine, but I’m not in the UAE.

Thanks for explaining that! That could end up being quite the challenge for aviation authorities then and airlines alike, to sort out what's licensed where and what they can and can't approve for their crews. We're potentially looking at there being two Chinese (Sinopharm, Sinovac), one Russian (Sputnik 5), two UK/EU (AZ/Oxford, Novavax) and three US/EU (Pfizer/BNT, Moderna, J&J/Jansen) vaccines with various approval levels in various countries and jurisdictions.

Dickie10

surely they will have most vulnerable people vaccinated by april, then its full steam ahead. euro 2021 games in dublin , id guess there could be at least 50% capacity at stadia and all pubs and restaurants open. ireland will be dragged kicking and screaming into no restrictions by the events planned here , concerts, sports etc. we will be a huge outlier if we dont in europe, can you imagine the only place locked up with 0 deaths for weeks and weeks, none in ICU . be some laughing stock

Ferris_Bueller

Apologies if I'm coming across as ignorant on the subject, but what happened to the vaccine taskforce meeting yesterday? I was expecting a big announcement and lots of talk about it but nothing so far really. Will anything be released in the coming days or was it simply leaked in dribs and drabs earlier in the week (such as who will be getting the vaccine first, etc).

Water John

Ferris_Bueller wrote: »

Apologies if I'm coming across as ignorant on the subject, but what happened to the vaccine taskforce meeting yesterday? I was expecting a big announcement and lots of talk about it but nothing so far really. Will anything be released in the coming days or was it simply leaked in dribs and drabs earlier in the week (such as who will be getting the vaccine first, etc).

The Report goes to Cabinet on Tuesday.

afatbollix

It takes 5 days to print it off and move it to another building in Ireland :rolleyes:

John O.Groats

Dickie10 wrote: »

surely they will have most vulnerable people vaccinated by april, then its full steam ahead. euro 2021 games in dublin , id guess there could be at least 50% capacity at stadia and all pubs and restaurants open. ireland will be dragged kicking and screaming into no restrictions by the events planned here , concerts, sports etc. we will be a huge outlier if we dont in europe, can you imagine the only place locked up with 0 deaths for weeks and weeks, none in ICU . be some laughing stock

Surely they won`t. Your timeline is well off the mark. Maybe next autumn would be a more realistic best case scenario.

Micky 32

hmmm wrote: »

That depends on how high the hospitalisation rate will be in the groups who are not at risk, and how many of those at risk will end up not protected by the vaccine and what the implications will be for them. There's also the other issue of the number of people who end up with long-term illness due to long-covid.

These are questions we still don't have the answers to, and until we do things won't go back to normal.

You know i’m starting to get the vibe and narrative on this thread that all the vaccine is going to do is reduce a few cases and a few hospitalisans and that we won’t ever be going back to any sort of normality because it’s only 95% effective, and between the anti-vaxxers and the ones that can’t take it. I’m out of this thread, i’ll leave ye to it..unsubscribed :rolleyes:

gw80

hmmm wrote: »

That depends on how high the hospitalisation rate will be in the groups who are not at risk, and how many of those at risk will end up not protected by the vaccine and what the implications will be for them. There's also the other issue of the number of people who end up with long-term illness due to long-covid.

These are questions we still don't have the answers to, and until we do things won't go back to normal.

Why would we not return to normal if the virus is not in the community and we have zero deaths,
Do you expect to us to be wearing masks indefinitely for a handful of people who have issues after covid?

ACitizenErased

The vaccine will bring a return to normal. Not sure why anyone would think otherwise.

donegal_man

The number of people I've spoken to recently who are buying into the various anti vaccination arguments is quite concerning.
Three of my colleagues have stated they won't be taking it on the grounds that the long term effects are unknown. One of them suffers from a fairly serious condition but would sooner, "trust my natural immune system than a rushed vaccine."
Two of my neighbours have moral objections to receiving a vaccine that may have developed using foetal cells.
These are not uneducated or stupid people and treating them as such is not helpful. My other neighbour however is patently an idiot as he believes the whole thing is merely an excuse for "them" to increase control over the population.

iguana

I've just been reading this thread on Mumsnet from a healthcare worker who got her vaccine today. Very interesting to read she describes a high uptake in her workplace and overall comments from other users are very positive. The only negativity is from someone jealous they haven't had theirs and some concern from people who probably can't be vaccinated. No deluge of anti-vaxxers so far anyway. Hopefully a positive reflection of how people will act when it's their turn.

https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/4104877-had-vaccine-today

conor_mc

gw80 wrote: »

Why would we not return to normal if the virus is not in the community and we have zero deaths,
Do you expect to us to be wearing masks indefinitely for a handful of people who have issues after covid?

I think the two key metrics are deaths and also HCW absence due to covid.

The first is self-explanatory - once we break the current ratio between infections:hospitalisation:deaths by vaccinating those most at risk of hospitalisation or death, we’re good to go on that one.

The second is trickier though. If vaccinated HCW’s are still capable of passing on the virus, then they may still be required to restrict their movements if exposed or waiting for test results. In that case, we could well see ongoing restrictions in order to “protect the health service”.... not necessarily the health of individual HCW’s, but rather the status of the health service could still be undermined by large-scale absence due to ongoing need to isolate HCW cases from potentially vulnerable patients.

In that case, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see nphet continue with restrictions of some description, given their tendency towards caution.

All that said, govt have re-opened twice now (albeit to differing degrees) so there really is no reason to be paranoid that they’ll keep restrictions just to subjugate the great unwashed.

hmmm

donegal_man wrote: »

The number of people I've spoken to recently who are buying into the various anti vaccination arguments is quite concerning.

I've no doubt there is a very active vaccine disinformation campaign being run over social media by a mixture of right-wing groups and state actors. It suits them to see the West in chaos, and if they can drag this crisis out as long as possible it's a victory for them. Trouble is they are very good at it, and with something like vaccines where there are so many medical and technical terms in use it's easy to make it sound scarier than it is. The other thing these groups are very good at is casting doubt on the legitimate politicians and institutions we would normally turn to for trusted sources of information (see anyone using the phrase "mainstream media").

This all then gets amplified by ordinary people on social media, and because they think there is a debate or genuine concerns about safety they begin to take their advice from their circle of friends and not the scientists and medical experts who they should be listening to.

It's a difficult problem to combat, and I think we all have a small contribution to play in addressing misinformation when we see it.

Le Bruise

Water John wrote: »

Next winter, I mean back to full normal. Maybe most populations in European countries will be vaccinated by June/July. See Gary Barlow advertised for the 3 Arena on 28 Nov 2021, chance booking it?
If we were mostly vaccinated would the longest day of the year be a good, celebrating Covid defeated day and remembering those lost.

I wouldn’t go buying tickets for Gary Barlow in November.....but that’s got nothing to do with the pandemic!:)

smurfjed

The US FAA moved quickly to approve the Pfizer vaccine for pilots, only restriction is no flying for two days .

https://www.faa.gov/news/updates/?newsId=96258&fbclid=IwAR24XJJguvQSqILdikjarpYu7YOduRR42wH79BawWgQ9vwK7J2Q_IWxJUxs

is_that_so

hmmm wrote: »

I've no doubt there is a very active vaccine disinformation campaign being run over social media by a mixture of right-wing groups and state actors. It suits them to see the West in chaos, and if they can drag this crisis out as long as possible it's a victory for them. Trouble is they are very good at it, and with something like vaccines where there are so many medical and technical terms in use it's easy to make it sound scarier than it is. The other thing these groups are very good at is casting doubt on the legitimate politicians and institutions we would normally turn to for trusted sources of information (see anyone using the phrase "mainstream media").

This all then gets amplified by ordinary people on social media, and because they think there is a debate or genuine concerns about safety they begin to take their advice from their circle of friends and not the scientists and medical experts who they should be listening to.

It's a difficult problem to combat, and I think we all have a small contribution to play in addressing misinformation when we see it.

In this case it's unlikely to be state actors, apart from maybe North Korea, as it's not just something that is isolated to the West. Both China and Russia have plenty to gain in the perception and take up of their own vaccines and it would be of no benefit geopolitically to start producing even more anti-vaxxers.

It's also hard to gauge just how many are out there as sharing links unread is a common pastime for a lots of social media users and sharing just means you share. Also unlike other vaccines, measles in particular, this risk is very much in our face. That should see us clear what is suggested as herd immunity. What will remain after that are the nervous, the doubters and the hard core anti-vaxxers and we shouldn't have to care about the latter at all but we do need to get everyone else.

snotboogie

is_that_so wrote: »

In this case it's unlikely to be state actors, apart from maybe North Korea, as it's not just something that is isolated to the West. Both China and Russia have plenty to gain in the perception and take up of their own vaccines and it would be of no benefit geopolitically to start producing even more anti-vaxxers.

Don't follow this line of reasoning at all. Chinese and Russian vaccines are extremely unlikely to ever see a major rollout in the Western world. Chinese social media is extremely seperate from the west, anti vaccine talk is very unlikely to bleed over to their population. China have a huge amount to gain from vaccine and covid misinformation on social media.

is_that_so

snotboogie wrote: »

Don't follow this line of reasoning at all. Chinese and Russian vaccines are extremely unlikely to ever see a major rollout in the Western world. Chinese social media is extremely seperate from the west, anti vaccine talk is very unlikely to bleed over to their population. China have a huge amount to gain from vaccine and covid misinformation on social media.

They don't expect them to, but they do want to distribute elsewhere as evidence of their superiority. In that context what would either have to gain, especially in relation to vaccine misinformation?

ACitizenErased

snotboogie wrote: »

Don't follow this line of reasoning at all. Chinese and Russian vaccines are extremely unlikely to ever see a major rollout in the Western world. Chinese social media is extremely seperate from the west, anti vaccine talk is very unlikely to bleed over to their population. China have a huge amount to gain from vaccine and covid misinformation on social media.

Astrazeneca are investigating a double dose with the Russian vaccine so I wouldn't agree with that tbh

snotboogie

is_that_so wrote: »

They don't expect them to, but they do want to distribute elsewhere as evidence of their superiority. In that context what would either have to gain, especially in relation to vaccine misinformation?

Major disruption to the economy and social cohesion. It is extremely naive to believe that major state actors are not driving covid misinformation including on the vaccine.

is_that_so

snotboogie wrote: »

Major disruption to the economy and social cohesion. It is extremely naive to believe that major state actors are not driving covid misinformation including on the vaccine.

None of which is happening anyway. This really seems like a conspiracy theory, with no foundation except your opinion.