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

PhoenixParker

is_that_so wrote: »

Also used in humans by prescription only for parasitic worms. There hasn't been a proper clinical trial on it yet, just some "my patients responded to it" data.

I've been following ivermectin since September it's a bit further on then a few my patients responded to it in terms of trials. None of the trials are great individually but together they're pretty compelling.

The best studies are on it as a prophylactic (giving it to close conacts) and they suggest you reduce transmission by 80% and end up with less severe disease.

It's been used widely across Africa for river blindness for decades. Literally billions of doses to humans. It's a very safe drug. Its crazy there hasn't been a faster response. Hopefully we're getting there now.

Delighted to hear the UK are doing a big trial.

is_that_so

trellheim wrote: »

I'd say the Minister will have to push the dates out a bit once they get solid numbers on the AZ shortfalls. They are meeting them during the week I think to get the details. SO a busy week anyway with EMA hopefully approving on the 29th as well.

Might be as early as the 27th! They have meetings every day next week.

Melanchthon

gally74 wrote: »

first come ,first served, the e u is poor at times,

Europe badly needs a visible "win" in terms of this, I imagine the political pressure is really ramping up with the continuous negative news.

In other news looks like France might delay time between doses like the UK has done, will they face the same criticism the UK got?

https://www.politico.eu/article/french-health-watchdog-calls-for-delay-in-second-vaccine-jab/

NeuralNetwork

There's quite big Pfizer & BioNTech production capacity coming on line in Europe very soon (next week or two) so that may actually change the balance of things a bit in the days ahead.

I would be very interested to see what the EMA has made of the AstraZeneca vaccine as the figures appear to have been all over the place. I was reading a few theories on why that might be the case and it seems it's down to the viral vector.

That type of vaccine uses an adenovirus, which has been modified so that it cannot replicate/reproduce to carry DNA which ultimately instructs cells it enters to produce spike proteins. You then develop immunity against the spike proteins, not the vaccine itself. To use their explanation, some of your cells are temporarily used as a vaccine factory.

The issue that is being speculated upon is that some people's immune systems are identifying the viral vector and killing it before it has had any chance to enter a cell at all and that this may explain why they'd had patchy results. There are loads of variables in why that might be the case in some more than others too.

It also may explain why the half dose worked. The speculation was that the full first dose was triggering the immune system of some people to just deal with the adenovirus.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the EMA's reading of the data and testing has made of it.

The mRNA vaccines, while harder to transport, are far simpler in terms of the mechanism they use. It's basically an artificial microcapsule of mRNA which enters cells directly, without any need for viral vectors. So, it's far less complex and doesn't have that immune barrier to get past first.

Again, this is speculation but it would explain the odd results they were getting with the viral vectors.

It'll also be very interesting to see how effective those vaccines have been relative to each other in the British population which has had a rollout of both types in at significant scale now.

While I know we will just be trying to get as much of any vaccine as we can, I would rather see Ireland buying the most effective ones and targeting them at the right populations.

JTMan

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1353079830506598401

Could not agree more that there is too much pessimism out there right now. We are hopefully at the beginning of the end of this and the end will hopefully be coming soon.

Meanwhile, France says it will vaccine their entire population by 31 August 2021. (I assume they mean those over 18). Can we please have the same 31 August goal here with an exact date rather than "by September"?

Doc07

fm wrote: »

That's US time though I presume, ema will be slower?

EMA won’t be slower if company submits it at the same time. Plenty regulators across EU as part of EMA ready and waiting to assess quickly once results are submitted.

CIARAN_BOYLE

Doc07 wrote: »

EMA won’t be slower if company submits it at the same time. Plenty regulators across EU as part of EMA ready and waiting to assess quickly once results are submitted.

So far the British (and I believe the Americans) are giving emergency use authorisation rather than conditional marketing authorisation which requires a higher level of information and scrutiny.

NeuralNetwork

JTMan wrote: »

Meanwhile, France says it will vaccine their entire population by 31 August 2021. (I assume they mean those over 18). Can we please have the same 31 August goal here with an exact date rather than "by September"?

That's extremely ambitious for France based on their speed of rollout to date. I would say the bigger issue there is more likely to be the other type of virus : the online ones that are driving enormous anti-vaccine conspiracy theories there.

The polling on attitudes to vaccines in France have been showing willingness to take the vaccines as low as 40% and only 29% amongst women, which seems to be getting driven by various online narratives from anti-vaxxers that are spreading like wildfire there at present.

Other than supply glitches, Ireland's actually facing very few of those problems. We've a generally pragmatic view of the vaccines and there's enthusiasm to get them rolled out quickly and to date that's been happening. So, once the supplies flow more freely we should be moving through this really rapidly.

The sense I have at the moment is this will genuinely really ramp up as those supply chain issues are ironed out. It's worth remembering that these are all new products going into production. It's not at all unusual to have bumps in the road and manufacturing glitches with something like this. If anything it's remarkable how smoothly things have gone.

I do think though the EU would have been better to have thrown everything and the kitchen sink at the purchase and sent excess capacity to COVAX, which is what we'll end up doing anyway but it just could have gone in there with a lot more financial firepower than it did.

At this stage, on an EU/EEA scale 10 or 20 billion one way or the other is chicken feed relative to the costs of the economic impact of the pandemic itself.

CIARAN_BOYLE

JTMan wrote: »

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1353079830506598401

Could not agree more that there is too much pessimism out there right now. We are hopefully at the beginning of the end of this and the end will hopefully be coming soon.

Meanwhile, France says it will vaccine their entire population by 31 August 2021. (I assume they mean those over 18). Can we please have the same 31 August goal here with an exact date rather than "by September"?

It's very easy to vaccinate the entire population when half the population will say no the vaccine.

Galwayguy35

JTMan wrote: »

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1353079830506598401

Could not agree more that there is too much pessimism out there right now. We are hopefully at the beginning of the end of this and the end will hopefully be coming soon.

Meanwhile, France says it will vaccine their entire population by 31 August 2021. (I assume they mean those over 18). Can we please have the same 31 August goal here with an exact date rather than "by September"?

So the French with a population of 67 million aim for an august deadline for vaccination,even leaving out the under 18s thats impressive.

Make you wonder what the hell we are at over here with only a few million to get jabbed.

Doc07

CIARAN_BOYLE wrote: »

So far the British (and I believe the Americans) are giving emergency use authorisation rather than conditional marketing authorisation which requires a higher level of information and scrutiny.

Correct but I promise, if J&J get their phase 3 results in soon, EMA will bust a gut to approve (CMA) ASAP as long as it meets criteria for efficacy, safety and quality of manufacture.

marno21

If J&J single dose is approved it’s an actual game changer. We have enough to vaccinate 40% of the population with their allocation alone.

NeuralNetwork

Galwayguy35 wrote: »

So the French with a population of 67 million aim for an august deadline for vaccination,even leaving out the under 18s thats impressive.

Make you wonder what the hell we are at over here with only a few million to get jabbed.

To be quite honest I think the French number is totally unrealistic based on their performance to-date.

I would also suspect we're heading for a situation where we are going to under promise and over deliver. If you over promise and under deliver it's not just a political fiasco but it's potentially going to create huge medical risks as people start to get frustrated if they had an expectations that restrictions are going to end but then that doesn't happen. The politicians really need to be extremely realistic, honest and conservative about messaging. If we end up completing the rollout a couple of months early, brilliant.

I think the Irish Government is *finally* learning that you can't give fixed time frames for unknowable unknowns. There are so many variables in this from technical ones around vaccine effectiveness, the virus possibly mutating, manufacturing hiccups etc etc. that we just need to stop trying to tie one hand behind our backs with fixed dates and deadlines.

I'd rather see a progress report showing where we're at and giving as much information as humanly possible about how fast things are going and what the availability is and all of that. There's absolutely no reason to spin anything. I honestly think Ireland's population is more than pragmatic enough to be fully on board and aware of exactly what's happening and that's exactly how you'll keep everyone on board and quash nonsense rumours too.

Keep up the daily briefings and bring in the vaccine experts and the virologists and the logistics people who are rolling out and just help everyone to know what's going on. It's far better if we are all in this together in a real way than getting political sound bytes.

If the volumes of vaccines ramp up, the programmes will accelerate rapidly. It's really not a difficulty with getting vaccines into arms in most of Europe. It's a restriction in supply of the doses.

Bubbaclaus

Galwayguy35 wrote: »

So the French with a population of 67 million aim for an august deadline for vaccination,even leaving out the under 18s thats impressive.

Make you wonder what the hell we are at over here with only a few million to get jabbed.

Is this post serious or is it some kind of joke that I am not getting?

Melanchthon

NeuralNetwork wrote: »

To be quite honest I think the French number is totally unrealistic based on their performance to-date.

I would also suspect we're heading for a situation where we are going to under promise and over deliver. If you over promise and under deliver it's not just a political fiasco but it's potentially going to create huge medical risks as people start to get frustrated if they had an expectations that restrictions are going to end but then that doesn't happen. The politicians really need to be extremely realistic, honest and conservative about messaging. If we end up completing the rollout a couple of months early, brilliant.

On the counter point to this, being too conservative just means people give up on following guidance, take social interaction, if you get told you shouldn't meet anybody indoors for 4-6 weeks, thats doable, get told that your likely not going to be able to go to a restaurant or visit people for 4 months, you decide to go the house party because to hell with it.

Additionally giving the deeply conservative predictions just feeds into the narrative, particularly in Ireland where we have had so much restrictions for so long compared to other countries that the powers that be are deliberately being slow because of their own agendas (Holohan and his anti-alcohol stance isn't a conspiracy theory for example).

I think this approach is going to ruin compliance

IRISHSPORTSGUY

marno21 wrote: »

If J&J single dose is approved it’s an actual game changer. We have enough to vaccinate 40% of the population with their allocation alone.

The US has only ordered 100m doses of J&J https://www.ft.com/content/f06ee916-0644-4379-b5c2-29c6c4e039f5 The US hope to have those 100m doses available by April. https://nypost.com/2021/01/22/johnson-johnson-eyes-100-million-covid-vaccines-by-april/

Meanwhile, the EU has ordered 400m doses.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/coronavirus-johnson-johnson-european-union

= Full population done by the time the Munster Hurling Championship starts. God bless our EU overlords :pac:

NeuralNetwork

You can go too extreme either way, but the main thing is the communication needs to be open and realistic and facts based.

The biggest problem in all of this has been politicisation of what is just a practical issue, dealing with a virus.

I'd rather not take the thread off into a topic that's not about vaccine rollouts, but I think the main thing with this one is to provide maximum information about the state of play on the vaccine situation.

We should have daily briefings and a dashboard showing availability, state of rollout, number of does delivered and whatever issues are cropping up should be openly discussed without any spin of any type being put on anything.

That's the kind of messaging that will keep people on board.

I think we need to look at as what it is - a disease we're trying to treat and ultimately eliminate the impacts of, rather than using all these political and war terms.

I mean, just as an example, I found that when I've talked to older relatives about the technical details of vaccines and they understood exactly what was going on and what the state of play is with supply chains and all of that, then they were far more likely not to wander off into all sorts of crazy theories involving everything from Brexit's revenge to anti-vaxxer stuff.

It's also very easy to end up as "man shouts at cloud" when you've stuff like people threatening to sue Pfizer because of a hiccup as they expand production capacity. Or various other angry rants where reality isn't chiming with political objectives.

There are loads of positives in what's going on at the moment and most of those are on the scientific side around vaccine development and treatments, not the politics of it. My view of it is that's where we need to be focused, otherwise we'll just sink into depression.

Sierra Oscar

A second study out this evening sounding some alarm bells regarding the 'South Africa' variant.

It's a small sample size so hopefully an anomoly.

CNN - Emerging evidence suggests new coronavirus variant could be problematic for vaccines

As researchers around the world race to see if new coronavirus variants will pose a problem for the vaccines, a second study in two days says a variant from South Africa could possibly do just that.

The variant was first spotted in South Africa in October and has now been found in more than a dozen countries.

Gradius

Sierra Oscar wrote: »

A second study out this evening sounding some alarm bells regarding the 'South Africa' variant.

Emerging evidence suggests new coronavirus variant could be problematic for vaccines

The protein recognition on antibodies from these vaccines is not going to hold up against new strains left, right and center.

And who knows what's going around China now? It's like a fooking joke, ****e emerging all over the place, and the sneaky bastards have the reliability of a conman.

Remember the attempt to blame Italy?

What are the odds that the new outbreak they are putting down to the UK strain is not actually just a completely new strain?

Getting crazy now and crazier ahead!

ACitizenErased

I recommend people who are hearing about the South African variant 'defeating' the vaccine read the input on the COVID-19 science subreddit. It's not half as bad as people think.
https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/l3cpu0/emerging_sarscov2_variants_reduce_neutralization/

ACitizenErased

Further commentary on the vaccine reports:

But the picture is murky, Altmann and other scientists emphasize. The studies — which examined the blood of small numbers of people who had recovered from COVID-19 or received a vaccine — probed only their antibodies’ capacity to ‘neutralize’ variants in laboratory tests, and not the wider effects of other components of their immune response.

Neither do the studies indicate whether the changes in antibody activity make any difference to the real-world effectiveness of vaccines or the likelihood of reinfection. “Are these changes going to be important? I really don't know,” says Paul Bieniasz, a virologist at the Rockefeller University in New York City, who co-led one of the studies.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00121-z

Basically what's after happening is they've made an advanced conclusion about the vaccine based on a comparison of the variant to antibodies of a natural infection.

Whether these could lessen the effectiveness of vaccines is still uncertain, says Volker Thiel, an RNA virologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Most COVID-19 vaccines elicit high levels of antibodies that target diverse regions of the spike protein, so some of the molecules are likely to be able to block variants of the virus. And other components of the immune response, such as T cells, might not be affected by 501Y.V2. “Although the vaccines target only the spike gene, they should still mount an immune response that is diverse enough that these new variants should be covered,” Thiel says. “But experimental studies need to be done.”

eigrod

Sierra Oscar wrote: »

A second study out this evening sounding some alarm bells regarding the 'South Africa' variant.

It's a small sample size so hopefully an anomoly.

CNN - Emerging evidence suggests new coronavirus variant could be problematic for vaccines

This evening? Article says last updated 21st January???

josip

pinkfloyd34 wrote: »

https://kclr96fm.com/iehg-statement-vaccine/

Still front line staff waiting for their first dose and now won't get it until mid February.

Does anyone know how a surplus of doses can be distributed to a hospital such as the Coombe while there's a shortage of doses for a Covid handling hospital like Lukes?

PCeeeee

Irish Stones wrote: »

Does it matter?
After the first two weeks, J&J will say that for an issue in one of their main plant, the supply will be reduced by 50%

Really? What makes you think that?

stargazer 68

josip wrote: »

Does anyone know how a surplus of doses can be distributed to a hospital such as the Coombe while there's a shortage of doses for a Covid handling hospital like Lukes?

There was no 'surplus'. You can get 5 doses from each vial and sometimes 6. But you dont know until you draw the doses. They obviously got 6 doses from some hence the extra ones.

Gael23

Is there any possibility that J&J will give us enough supply to keep on target with AZ issues?

josip

IRISHSPORTSGUY wrote: »

60% less yields is diabolical. A question of is it incompetence from AstraZeneca or is there politicking going on behind the scenes?

Call me a cynic, but I wonder how much Boris Johnson and the Tory government are pulling their strings. A delayed EU economic recovery while the UK exit from lockdown a lot earlier will makes them look good after all.

Not cynical at all and I would expect that Johnson is applying every bit of leverage that he legally can to AZ to benefit the UK over others.
That's what they chose Brexit for.
One could say that they've been lucky and struck the mother lode with the AZ vaccine, but thanks to Brexit they were in a position to fast track their own approval. They also have considerable expertise in the field, so it's not all luck.

Compare that with how Germany has been houghed with their BioNTech vaccine and haven't been able to get any priority over the rest of the EU for the initial months.

Dempo1

Are the brits making it up as they go, I'd no idea they introduced a longer gap in between dose of vaccine, 12 weeks instead of the recommended 3 weeks, this seems quite extraordinary.

I'd have assumed drug companies have made it clear, along with the reams of data what the recommendations are. This will hardly inspire confidence. This also on the back of shortages and the news the new Oxford Vaccine (yet to be approved EU wide are saying they'll only be able to supply 40 % of what was promised.

There doesn't seem much point in the UK only half vaccinating nearly 5 million people, and whilst I hope they are going on scientific advice, we've actually not even seen results from the Roll out to date.

JP Liz V1

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/health/coronavirus-variant-problem-vaccines/index.html

afatbollix

Dempo1 wrote: »

Are the brits making it up as they go, I'd no idea they introduced a longer gap in between dose of vaccine, 12 weeks instead of the recommended 3 weeks, this seems quite extraordinary.

I'd have assumed drug companies have made it clear, along with the reams of data what the recommendations are. This will hardly inspire confidence. This also on the back of shortages and the news the new Oxford Vaccine (yet to be approved EU wide are saying they'll only be able to supply 40 % of what was promised.

There doesn't seem much point in the UK only half vaccinating nearly 5 million people, and whilst I hope they are going on scientific advice, we've actually not even seen results from the Roll out to date.

After 3 weeks of your Phizer jab you are 90% immune. The 2nd jab gives you 94% immunity.

Would you rather 10 million people at 90% or 5 million at 94%?

They have looked at the data and it does make sense.


To be honest to me the 2 jabs looks like profit grabbing by Phizer.