COVID-19: Vaccine and testing procedures Megathread Part 2 [Mod Warning - Post #1]

Sweet.Science

I see Leo has quoted our performance re vaccine rollout on twitter .

Where has our stats come from ? Have our numbers been released ? If Donnolly can't confirm them how come Leo can ?

I thought the HSE do it on a Thursday

CIARAN_BOYLE

Micky 32 wrote: »

Fair play to you! I wonder seeing that you had a slight headache side effect would that possibly mean you could have had the real deal? Or can placebo jabs cause the same?

Sometimes the placebo jab is a vaccine for something else (flu vaccine pneumonia vaccine tb vaccine etc) to confound this.

Le Bruise

Marhay70 wrote: »

I remember Luke O'Neill saying a while back that the RNA technology could have huge potential in various fields of medicine, including cancer. He was very enthusiastic about it.

He's fairly enthusiastic about all things positive to be fair...it's the reason I like listening to him!!

Micky 32

Le Bruise wrote: »

He's fairly enthusiastic about all things positive to be fair...it's the reason I like listening to him!!

And he’s always smiling!

Hmmzis

chrisbonnie wrote: »

Out of curiosity, what technology is the j&j single dose vaccine, mRNA or your old school "dead virus" kind of thing?

The Pfizer jab appears to be like kryptonite to covid, its efficacy, along with the moderna one is staggeringly good. They've both nearly changed the game in terms of efficacy.

Last March when this all kicked off for us, if someone said within a year you'd have a brand new technology that can deliver the data we're seeing, you'd have called them mad.

I do wonder in the long term, will this pandemic have paved the way for one of the most exciting medical discoveries ever.

Jansen/J&J are using a viral vector, similar to the Russian Sputnik V and Oxford's/AZ's ChAdOx1. Have a look at the video here:

https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/what-are-viral-vector-based-vaccines-and-how-could-they-be-used-against-covid-19

Both viral vectors and mRNA use snippets of the viral genome and a delivery mechanism to get those snippets into your cells. Once the genetic material is in a cell it will get translated into proteins, in this case the S protein of the virus. The body will recognize that protein as foreign and attack it by building an immune response to it.

For viral vectors the delivery mechanism is another virus that has been modified to carry the instructions for the desired protein (S of SARS-cov-2 in this case) along with some other modifications to prevent the vector virus, an adenovirus in this case, from replicating.

In case of mRNA, the same is achieved by packing the genetic material into a lipid shell (fatty blobs at nanoscale to put it simply, but in reality they're quite elaborate constructs). The lipid shells are absorbed by cells and the genetic material then gets released there for translation, just like with a viral vector.

Btw. mRNA has been in development for over 20 years, its initial target was oncology.

is_that_so

Article on Nature on the rise of mRNA, pretty accessible but long read.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00019-w

Van.Bosch

Daily updates on the Covid hub from this weekend according to Donnelly.

eoinbn

chrisbonnie wrote: »

Out of curiosity, what technology is the j&j single dose vaccine, mRNA or your old school "dead virus" kind of thing?

The Pfizer jab appears to be like kryptonite to covid, its efficacy, along with the moderna one is staggeringly good. They've both nearly changed the game in terms of efficacy.

Last March when this all kicked off for us, if someone said within a year you'd have a brand new technology that can deliver the data we're seeing, you'd have called them mad.

I do wonder in the long term, will this pandemic have paved the way for one of the most exciting medical discoveries ever.

J&J is more like a traditional vaccine than mRNA.
Bit of a bugbear - It isn't the Pfizer vaccine. It is the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine. BioNtech are the brains behind it.

mRNA isn't brand new. Companies like BioNtech and Moderna have been working on it for a decade or more and there was research into it for years before that. It has huge potential as a weapon against viruses, cancer and even diseases like MS. One good thing to come out of this will be that those companies will have the funding they need to advance their research.

nocoverart

Should we be concerned about this Brazilian Variant? a little bit of drama in the main thread about it but lots of posters are dramatic in there at the best of times.

opinionated3

Apologies if someone has already asked this, but do we know if the super dangerous Brazil variant can bypass these vaccines? Some worrying posts on Twitter about this new variant
Edit only seeing above post now ��

is_that_so

eoinbn wrote: »

J&J is more like a traditional vaccine than mRNA.
Bit of a bugbear - It isn't the Pfizer vaccine. It is the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine. BioNtech are the brains behind it.

mRNA isn't brand new. Companies like BioNtech and Moderna have been working on it for a decade or more and there was research into it for years before that. It has huge potential as a weapon against viruses, cancer and even diseases like MS. One good thing to come out of this will be that those companies will have the funding they need to advance their research.

BionTech don't care as it will make them enough money to pursue other challenges. Pfizer are doing the heavy lifting on manufacturing anyway.

landofthetree

opinionated3 wrote: »

Apologies if someone has already asked this, but do we know if the super dangerous Brazil variant can bypass these vaccines? Some worrying posts on Twitter about this new variant
Edit only seeing above post now ��

Ravi Gupta, professor of microbiology at Cambridge:


Gupta said the mutation “could be the start of problems for spike vaccines.”

“They should all be effective at the moment but we worry about further mutations occurring on top of these ones,” he told AFP.


https://www.timesofisrael.com/south-african-virus-mutation-raises-questions-over-vaccine-effectiveness/amp/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&__twitter_impression=true

lbj666

https://twitter.com/higginsdavidw/status/1349415639170080771

Dont like the format he put this in, but its better than me doing the number crunching

nommm

lbj666 wrote: »

https://twitter.com/higginsdavidw/status/1349415639170080771

Dont like the format he put this in, but its better than me doing the number crunching

Where is he getting reduction in Pfizer delivery from?

Cork2021

nommm wrote: »

Where is he getting reduction in Pfizer delivery from?

Going by what I’ve been reading, Pfizer’s supply will increase from April onwards as will moderna. I’ve us at about 55-60% population vaccinated by end of June and 75% by September

Water John

Good to see your projections going to 250,000/wk. That's a figure which I thought would be necessary for a priority rollout.

nommm

Cork2021 wrote: »

Going by what I’ve been reading, Pfizer’s supply will increase from April onwards as will moderna. I’ve us at about 55-60% population vaccinated by end of June and 75% by September

Yes, I can’t see our deliveries going lower than 40’000 awwek, production is being ramped up!

Cork2021

nommm wrote: »

Yes, I can’t see our deliveries going lower than 40’000 awwek, production is being ramped up!

We’ll be at at least 80% normality in July I think and back to normal fully in September

marno21

https://twitter.com/SeanDefoe/status/1349420225716957192

Looks as though we will get to herd immunity in Q3 based on current estimates.

Hopefully there's scope to bring some of those vaccines forward (especially as manufacturing fires up) and we could be in touching distance of herd immunity by end Q2.

Cork2021

marno21 wrote: »

https://twitter.com/SeanDefoe/status/1349420225716957192

Looks as though we will get to herd immunity in Q3 based on current estimates.

Hopefully there's scope to bring some of those vaccines forward (especially as manufacturing fires up) and we could be in touching distance of herd immunity by end Q2.

If the end of June is the end game to this absolute shît show I’m going on the razz until September

is_that_so

Water John wrote: »

Good to see your projections going to 250,000/wk. That's a figure which I thought would be necessary for a priority rollout.

HSE have mentioned 1m shots a month - it's the only way we'll get to those targets.

eoinbn

nommm wrote: »

Where is he getting reduction in Pfizer delivery from?

Surely that is nonsense... The new BioNtech plant is due to open in February so production should skyrocket. At a rate of 11k per week it would take 10 years to deliver the 6.6m doses we have ordered(assuming we took up the allocation of the further 300m doses that was ordered recently). Do any of these figures even account for the fact that the vials contain an extra dose(20% more)?

Minier81

josip wrote: »

A 70+ year old neighbour has been in hospital for the past week with a bad chest infection. He has an existing lung condition.

According to the grouping, he's not elligible to get the vaccine yet, since he's nominally in Group 3.
https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/39038-provisional-vaccine-allocation-groups/

Although considering his age, state of health and history and that many people contract Covid when in hospitals, I would have thought that provision would have been made for certain hospital in-patients to be vaccinated at the same time as HCWs.

Certain high risk inpatients are being vaccinated. It was all over the news on the first days of vaccinations. Sure the first person in the country was that patient in st James' Hospital

marno21

Cork2021 wrote: »

If the end of June is the end game to this absolute shît show I’m going on the razz until September

Me too. I make out 10/11 weekends on the beer once normality resumes. We're overdue it at this stage.

stephenjmcd

lbj666 wrote: »

https://twitter.com/higginsdavidw/status/1349415639170080771

Dont like the format he put this in, but its better than me doing the number crunching

Yeah that doesn't add up to be honest. Pfizer goes up not down as the weeks progress.

This was my post earlier after listening to Donnelly on Newstalk this morning

By end of Q1 (March), first 3 priority groups will be covered, all will have had first dose. You'll have a few into the first week or two of April given the time between doses. Anyway its 1.4 million doses by end of March, 700,000 people

By end of Q2 (June) , All who are most at risk, priority groups etc will be vaccinated. After end of June they would expect to open it up to anyone else who wants it, your looking at the lowest groups here groups 13 & 14

End of Q3 (September) Anyone who wants it in general population completed

lbj666

lbj666 wrote: »

https://twitter.com/higginsdavidw/status/1349415639170080771

Dont like the format he put this in, but its better than me doing the number crunching

I also dont like the fact he hasnt included numbers receiving 2nd dose. It just shows a glaring gap between 700k first doses vs 1,400k delivered by end of March. All Group 1+2 will have been jabbed twice by then along with a reasonable chunk of group 3.

Apogee

Some insight into the practicalities of the current vaccine roll-out:

Cork2021

This would be great!!

https://twitter.com/laoneill111/status/1349432125452386312?s=21

ACitizenErased

Jesus that positivity on here tonight is fantastic, roll on normality

braychelsea

With Novavax getting results this month and Curevac expected to get approval in March/April, we could have 6 vaccines for Q2. Would be incredible and imagine supply would become less of an issue.