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

KrustyUCC

ACitizenErased wrote: »

AZ vaccine is designed for that duration between doses. The issue with UK is the Pfizer/Moderna vaccine schedule.

Yeah that's true but we are following the UK in relation to AZ

Think we're better off sticking to what we're doing with the other two

ACitizenErased

KrustyUCC wrote: »

Yeah that's true but we are following the UK in relation to AZ

Think we're better off sticking to what we're doing with the other two

We're following the EMA recommendations exactly
"COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca is given as two injections into the arm, the second between 4 to 12 weeks after the first."
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ema-recommends-covid-19-vaccine-astrazeneca-authorisation-eu

Cork2021

KrustyUCC wrote: »

Yeah that's true but we are following the UK in relation to AZ

Think we're better off sticking to what we're doing with the other two

No the recommendation for AZ is between 4-12 weeks. We are going the full 12 as it’s been used in a younger population now.
If AZ was going to be used for the over 70’s I’d assume it would be the 4 week interval between doses

Dickie10

so i presumer we could be dosing 2 or 3 different sections of society at the one time with 2 or three different vaccines? that will speed things up well but really need more people recruited to give jabs this needs to be 8-8 7 days a week. no bank holiday .paddys day off carry on.

josip

Dickie10 wrote: »

so i presumer we could be dosing 2 or 3 different sections of society at the one time with 2 or three different vaccines? that will speed things up well but really need more people recruited to give jabs this needs to be 8-8 7 days a week. no bank holiday .paddys day off carry on.

At the moment, the only constraint is supply, not distribution or administering the vaccine.

Dickie10

well thats good but need everything in place to ramp up jabs the moment we get j and j and other vaccines

eoinbn

Cork2021 wrote: »

No the recommendation for AZ is between 4-12 weeks. We are going the full 12 as it’s been used in a younger population now.
If AZ was going to be used for the over 70’s I’d assume it would be the 4 week interval between doses

AZ is less efficacy with a 4 week gap than 12. It wasn't designed like that but that is how it turned out.

allaboutt

stephenjmcd wrote: »

Two friends of mine got their 2nd Pfizer dose on Saturday night, both fairly floored yesterday with tiredness & aches & pains.

Woke up this morning and not a bother, like yesterday never happened.

Anecdotally have heard a few others similar so the 2nd dose does appear to really get your immune system to work. I know of 1 fairly large multinational that plans to give staff the day off after 2nd doses.

Here is the CDC VAERS Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System for the reporting of all Vaccine Adverse Affects including Covid 19.


https://vaers.hhs.gov/


From the 1/29/2021 release of VAERS data:
Found 11,249 cases where Vaccine is COVID19
https://medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?TABLE=ON&GROUP1=CAT&EVENTS=ON&VAX=COVID19

From the 1/29/2021 release of VAERS data:
Found 501 cases where Vaccine is COVID19 and Patient Died
https://medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?TABLE=ON&GROUP1=AGE&EVENTS=ON&VAX=COVID19&DIED=Yes

Event Outcome Count
Death 501
Permanent Disability 156
Office Visit 1,446
Emergency Room 18
Emergency Doctor/Room 2,425
Hospitalized 1,066
Recovered 4,292
Birth Defect 12
Life Threatening 383
Not Serious 4,106
TOTAL † 14,405†

Happydays2020

Micky 32 wrote: »

A bit like BJ’s claim the UK variant had a higher death rate and illness. Has been proved false since.

May well be less dangerous. Look at our explosion in cases and thankfully in the end relatively fewer hospitalisations that was projected.

iamwhoiam

Dickie10 wrote: »

so i presumer we could be dosing 2 or 3 different sections of society at the one time with 2 or three different vaccines? that will speed things up well but really need more people recruited to give jabs this needs to be 8-8 7 days a week. no bank holiday .paddys day off carry on.

They are recruiting , Nurse on Call is recruiting hundreds of nurses to vaccinate .

Hmmzis

McGiver wrote: »

Interesting, change in just one single nucleotide. That's a tiny mutation then. There must be loads of similar ones around.

Yes, there are thousands that have come and gone, some are random, some are forced by our own RNA editing proteins. The virus's enzymatic proofreader generally doesn't allow for more than a single nucleotide flip or a deletion in certain cases.

So it's basically very bad luck (for us) or very good luck (for the virus)...

Yes, sort of, it might well be a way to persist in a host population in the wild. The virus is originally from bats whose immune systems are very trigger happy and very used to these sort of viruses. From the virus' point that means it needs lots of fancy accessory proteins to shut down the innate cellular immune responses and also be able to avoid an antibody army. Keeping the NSPs and ORFs around for the former needs a good proofreader, but that hinders antibody escape, so evolution has come up with this 'hinge-swing-like' motif in the RBM of the RBD where a single amino acid replacement can have a big impact on antibody recognition.

Yes, the latter is being considered by the mRNA folks (BionTech, Moderna, Curevac) as a possible strategy makes sense and easier to do with an mRNA vaccine (faster to produce the adjusted shot), right?

Moderna are also looking at just boosting with the exiting shot a few months later. In the UK they're doing trials for mix n' match doses (this could actually work very well). The mix n' match approach with AZ/Oxford as prime and an mRNA as boost, I think, might come close to what a real infection and mRNA shot can do (even SARS gets neutralized, let alone any variants).

I'd say so - their vaccines Sinopharm and Sinovac are attenuated Sars-cov-2 based. Very old school vaccine tech.

They're inactivated whole virus vaccines. Attenuated ones have only entered phase 1 trials at this stage.

IRISHSPORTSGUY

Getting visions of Mr. Burns handing over the Trillion Dollar bill here...

Johnson & Johnson will ship some Covid-19 vaccines ordered by the European Union to the U.S. for the last stage of production, raising concern among some member states that the bloc’s inoculation program could be hampered by further delays, according to a diplomatic note seen by Bloomberg.



EU ambassadors were told at a briefing last Wednesday that the pharmaceutical company will send a portion of the vaccine produced in Europe to the U.S. for what’s known as fill and finish. In that stage, the shot is put into vials, packaged and shipped for distribution.



After diplomats asked whether the process could be carried out in Europe, a senior EU official told the ambassadors that doing some fill and finish in the U.S. was a condition of the contract with the drugmaker, suggesting it could not be renegotiated, according to the note. The official explained that J&J had been transparent about the matter and that the company was intent on delivering on schedule, the note said.

DER SPIEGEL: Do you fear that materials from the U.S. will no longer be exported because the Americans want to take care of providing supplies for themselves first?

Poetting(BioNTech): There's an executive order from Donald Trump that Joe Biden has upheld. It essentially says that the vaccine will remain in the country. On top of that, there’s the Defense Production Act, which stipulates that certain substances be prioritized for domestic companies. We almost had problems with that, but we were able to get the shipment to Europe. There are still a few materials on the list. We are in contact with (Angela Merkel’s) Chancellery so that we have the necessary clearance if worse comes to worst.

josip

Sounds like we'd better crack here in the EU making vaccines for the US so that whenever they're finished we can get started with the leftovers as soon as possible

Hmmzis

Ugh, this sounds suboptimal. If J&J do the fill & finish in the US, there will be nothing coming out of there in the near future for anyone else.

Could we maybe run a domestic phase1/2 style trial of mixed doses maybe? Prime with AZ/Oxford and boost with Pfizer/BNT or Moderna. We already have a control of fully vaccinated HCWs with the Pfizer/BNT vaccine. If the mixed dose results are comparable (or better) in a pseudovirus assay, it could achieve some added efficacy among the vaccinated population. I think you only need BLS-2 conditions for those sort of assays.

RugbyLad11

That J&J news sounds terrible. So they are basically being manufactured in the EU and then shipped to the USA to be filled?

But sure once they get to the USA they won't leave because the USA will not export any vaccines.

Every single day get worse and worse for the EU...what a sh*t show.

Godot.

To the CureVac thread!

ixoy

It says "some" and "a portion". What does that equate to?

is_that_so

ixoy wrote: »

It says "some" and "a portion". What does that equate to?

Another news story of how much of a disaster all of this has been!

brickster69

RugbyLad11 wrote: »

That J&J news sounds terrible. So they are basically being manufactured in the EU and then shipped to the USA to be filled?

But sure once they get to the USA they won't leave because the USA will not export any vaccines.

Every single day get worse and worse for the EU...what a sh*t show.

Hopefully Biden does not put an American flag on them. The EU would refuse them getting sent back.

brickster69

is_that_so wrote: »

Another news story of how much of a disaster all of this has been!

Demand to get the contract made public and then wheel Macron out saying it is not efficient anyway.

ACitizenErased

I doubt the EU will allow J&J to do that without written promise that they'll be shipped directly back

Le Bruise

IRISHSPORTSGUY wrote: »

Getting visions of Mr. Burns handing over the Trillion Dollar bill here...

Give what back!?!;)

I went googling and see that bloomberg article came out 1st February and it hasn't been widely reported as a problem since? They seem to suggest in the article that delivery will not be hampered by this and that it's just a 'concern' due to the US policy. Hopefully won't be an issue (crosses fingers).

I'm sure Biden would sort Ireland out anyway should it come to it!:)

Sanjuro

Le Bruise wrote: »

Give what back!?!;)

I went googling and see that bloomberg article came out 1st February and it hasn't been widely reported as a problem since? They seem to suggest in the article that delivery will not be hampered by this and that it's just a 'concern' due to the US policy. Hopefully won't be an issue (crosses fingers).

I'm sure Biden would sort Ireland out anyway should it come to it!:)

Suddenly the trip to Washington in March is seeming like a very important trip.

polesheep

Perhaps we should just hitch our wagon to the mRNA vaccines and administer them as we get them. Once the vulnerable have been vaccinated then at least the crisis is over even if the pandemic isn't.

Hmmzis

mikelike wrote: »

It's gone crazy now

You even have to say that yourself, your the best poster here imho

What do you think about mixed doses, will they do 3-6 months saftey trials?

I'm all for getting the vaccines but not a chance i'm getting an AZ adenovirus dose and then getting a Pfizer mRNA dose a few weeks and possibly some booster dose for mutant strains down the line without large safety trials

I'm 31 years old and had asymptomatic covid last month, why should I honestly get those shots without trials?

Trials is what I'm musing about in that post. Mixing different platforms for prime and boost is nothing new, just needs a safety evaluation in a phase1/2 trial.
In most cases the immunogenicity is improved this way and given the recent results of a single dose in convalescents (neutralizing everything in sight, even SARS), mixing in such a way would not sound too outlandish. The AZ/Oxford platform uses an unmodified spike (S) while the Pfizer/BNT and Moderna (and most others) are using the S-2P constructs that stabilize it. A real infection would also be with a wild type S and boosting it with a S-2P gives spectacular results. I think trying to mimic that signal with vaccines is worth giving it a go.

Hmob

mikelike wrote: »

It's gone crazy now

You even have to say that yourself, your the best poster here imho

What do you think about mixed doses, will they do 3-6 months saftey trials?

I'm all for getting the vaccines but not a chance i'm getting an AZ adenovirus dose and then getting a Pfizer mRNA dose a few weeks later and possibly some booster dose for mutant strains down the line without large safety trials

I'm 31 years old and had asymptomatic covid last month, why should I honestly get those shots or anyone not vulnerable without trials?

I reckon the UK will pilot the mixed dose soon enough

BJ is batsh!t crazy and will try anything for spin and the scientists there are saying it looks good for better efficacy

Hmmzis

mikelike wrote: »

Are phase 1/2 enough to prove safety?

Question why didn't anyone raise concern about the unmodified spike in AZ before? Why is it headline news now? Why didn't Oxford stabilise it?

That's what phase 1/2 trials are for, safety and immunogenicity.

If I recall right the S-2P construct comes from NIH's research on MERS. Oxford was researching vaccines with a wild type MERS spike, so they just put a wild type SARS-cov-2 spike in their vaccine as well. It's been known since the very start that Oxford isn't using an S-2P version, not sure why it would be making headlines now. Both wild type and S-2P are valid approaches, J&J even went a bit further and mutated the furin cleavage site away so furin wouldn't cleave the produced spikes.

Sweet.Science

How long until vaccines administered date are pointless and these people need another jab ?

I say within 3 months

ACitizenErased

Sweet.Science wrote: »

How long until vaccines administered date are pointless and these people need another jab ?

I say within 3 months

Based on what exactly?

Hmob

Sweet.Science wrote: »

How long until vaccines administered date are pointless and these people need another jab ?

I say within 3 months

Longer like 5-8 months according to the scientists I'm hearing