I remember that in March somebody posted here an entry saying that mutation of the virus will make vaccinations only useful in the short term. Were these concerns already addressed at this stage?
We have seen mutations due to minks recently which could make the vaccinations ineffective. These mutations might have been controlled but similar situations may arise in the next years.
For these reasons I am not entirely sure this is the beginning of the end.
Considering Denmark is also one of the richest countries on earth we can neither expect other countries to a) detect such a mutation early and b) handle the issue promptly.
So I think it's somewhat likely that we'll see mutations emerge all over the world.
Whether this vaccine works depends on how early we get most people vaccinated. It may only be a short term patch, which we will see once it's rolled out, you can't really predict the long term without any measurements.
>I remember that in March somebody posted here an entry saying that mutation of the virus will make vaccinations only useful in the short term. Were these concerns already addressed at this stage?
Regardless of whether the mutations are significant enough to affect vaccine efficacy, it won't likely be a problem. These new mRNA vaccines have a development/production time measured in weeks and months, not years. It changes vaccines from a hardware problem to a software problem. Once the underlying delivery technology is proven safe and effective, reacting to new strains will be as swift as patching a codebase. It's hard to overstate what a massive advance in vaccine tech is happening here.
The basic idea is that now rather than needing to culture live viruses in chicken eggs, we can literally just encode the RNA for a specific antigen into a synthetic substrate and produce vaccines through a chemical process like any other drug. The RNA is then absorbed into your cells, and your own body creates the proteins which stimulate an immune response.
Coronaviruses like SARS-COV-2 mutate relatively slowly and minimally compared to others. So mutation isn't expected to be a huge concern, unlike say influenza which mutates relatively rapidly and requires an annual tweak to the vaccines.
What's more, any new strains we do see spreading more widely will do so because their mutations confer a competitive advantage. In practice that usually means more drift towards higher infectiousness but less severe symptoms - the same mechanisms that have left us with 4 other endemic but mild common cold coroanviruses.
The new SARS-COV-2 vaccines may be a useful tool to get us over this hump where the virus is still novel to a large proportion of the population, but are unlikely to be required indefinitely.
It was said (arguably in the news, so, nobody knows if true) that the mutation found in the mink populations in Denmark has a significantly different response to antibodies, in particular, they are less effective.
This is why OP is asking and mentioning the minks in Denmark.
The markets seem to wildly yo-yo with every piece of negative and positive news. Case in point: Zoom is currently down 10% but I’ll bet it will have rallied by the end of the day.
It's more than zoom, everything that's gone up from the pandemic is dropping: amzn, meli, jmia, se, shop, sq. The markets had them valued at a premium due to their monopolies in the pandemic but retail stocks are now trending up premarket: bbby, etc.
My point is that all of this is gut reaction to a headline, not a nuanced analysis of vaccine efficiency, roll out plans etc etc. Things could turn right around again once those details are resolved.
I am absolutely understanding why Zoom would drop on good vaccine news. It’s not a complicated connection!
My point is that the market overreacts to every piece of good or bad news, then settles down as the full implications become clear. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the vaccine, how we handle rollout, etc etc etc. That’s not really considered in immediate reactions like this, it’s all gut feeling.
Yeah, but investors seem to want to hold on to stocks for as long as possible (dividends? I don't know how that works, as far as I know holding stock for dividends is nowhere near as profitable as speculating)
Reuters calculated [1] that the average holding period for stocks is down to 5.5 months recently. See the chart on that page, it has been as high as 8 years in the past.
Because of day traders and HFT, it's hard to say how long your average investor holds a stock, but it's fair to say that some hold it for a long time and others "speculate" most of the time. The speculators probably have a greater impact on the movement of a stock, but over time it must move in line with the performance of the company.
The price of a stock is thought to be a "risk adjusted present value" of the underlying company. Even if you could be 100% sure a company would make X dollars per year in perpetuity, the price would not be infinite. Instead each year of earnings is "discounted" by risk, inflation rate, the cost of borrowing money, the value of competing investments, and other factors.
If it was assumed by investors that Zoom would make lots of money for the next 5 years, and then make very little money, and this news meant they would only make lots of money for the next 3 years, then that will have an impact of 2 years worth of discounted earnings immediately.
(of course it's not like Zoom pays or is planning to pay a dividends but there's still an underlying value, for instance they could be purchased by a larger company that does pay dividends.)
Just going to plug a book here that was an awesome read in my undergrad on that topic, and the history of quant finance over the 20th / early 21st centuries: https://byjustinfox.com/myth-of-the-rational-market/
If a stocks price is $100, and tomorrow there will be a news event where there is a 50% chance it will be worth $50, and a 50% chance it will be worth $200, the trading value today should probably be around $125 (it's expected value or EV, $200 + $50 / 2).
When the defining event actually occurs, it will either move from $125 to $50, or $125 to $200.
So the news event in this example is priced in at $125, but there is still scope for big moves when certainty is realised.
Obviously in real life the values are never as certain. In the above example if the stocks ever trades < $125 before the event, you would make money in the long run.
EMH shouldn't be taken seriously as the market actors are compromised of irrational humans.
everybody who knows about efficient market hypothesis knows that it's assumptions aren't applicable to the real world and it doesn't really matter; the real problem is those folks who mindlessly repeat propaganda about markets being rational or fair or generally doing the right thing when they clearly aren't.
Kind of, but two things: (1) the markets are irrational. And (2) real events (eg 100% certainty that we have a vaccine passing phase 3 right now) are different than 90% chance that we’ll have a vaccine in the next y months.
It doesn't always work like that. It's clear to some folks that ZM will decline based on the fact that a COVID vaccine was virtually inevitable. However, there are lots of investors, mostly retail investors, that are willing to buy a stock without fully pricing that in. E.g. Tim's dad sees that Tim is using Zoom for school and decides it would be a good investment. Other investors are willing to buy ZM for short-term gain as long as they can get out before it crashes back to reality.
The same thing happened to Hertz, which even after declaring bankruptcy and almost certainly being worthless continued to trade at a healthy volume. In fact, Hertz tried to get approval to dilute and sell more shares to capitalize off the fact that people were buying their worthless stock.
Well, stock prices move right? If everything was always perfectly priced in, they'd be constant. This movement or reaction is exactly that pricing in of future events given a change in information.
A vaccine was (and still is to some degree), in fact, unpredictable.
When will one be developed?
How effective will it be?
Will it have any negative side effects?
How hard will it be to manufacture and distribute?
All of these are important questions that were hard to predict. Today's announcement sheds some light on possible answers to these questions, so this new information is being priced into the market.
Well, stocks go up and down, nothing new. There are also too many investors who panicky buying and selling without much knowledge of the industries they buy/sell stocks.
Zoom has been doing up ~500% this year. The large fluctuations are expected. Online learning/work will continue to grow regardless of a vaccine. It's not going to be in a crazy rate like it has been this year because of covid. I'm not even talking about companies, cause that's a no brainer. I'm talking about education and hospitals. For example, the convenience of having a virtual appointment is great for both doctors and patients and it's not going away no matter what.
My opinion about Zoom. Selling because of a vaccine is pretty stupid. You should sell if you think they are over valued and not be able to compete with the big companies long term. One thing to pay attention to is their future plans. If they don't have plans to expand their product line I would worry long term. There's no problem for a company to pay for Zoom for video calls and for another company for things like slack/docs etc. But when you have companies like Google/Microsoft who package and integrate everything together, and can give you a good price for it too, then it's a concern. Google/Microsoft make many subpar products, and this year zoom showed it nicely. But they keep copying the important features and will eventually close the gap.
Yeah, setting aside all the politics and silliness, the science going on around this pandemic is remarkable. Going from nearly zero (yes, there was a bunch of research from SARS-Cov-1, MERS, and similar to build off of but nothing like this) to a functioning, tested, and mass manufactured vaccine in a year is absolutely jaw dropping. Even if it takes two years to distribute widely, three years to stomp out a pandemic is blindingly fast and a major credit to modern medical science, and the processes we have built up around it.
Although I want to agree, none of the companies started from zero.
All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades.
Not trying to diminish the accomplishments achieved, great effort nontheless. Just saying nobody started from zero here, that would have been insane and frankly impossible.
> All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades.
Yes, I first heard about intramuscular nucleic acid injection around the year 2000. At the time it was naked DNA and not RNA in a lipid nanoparticle suspension, but the principle was the same.
In particular BioNTech from the article was founded 2008. This is their first publicly available "product" - it applies their vision for cancer treatment to specific SARS-nCoV-2 proteins (arguably I don't know if they're working on other ideas as well).
They might be working on this particular vaccine since 2020, but AFAIK they have been working on the specific principle the vaccine uses since 2008.
True, but it's the first time we see those technologies in action. Some (many?) of the vaccine projects for example use paths that have previously been considered, played through in "toy" projects that never made it to production and so on, and now they are suddenly standing in the limelight, going live. For some sub-fields of biotech this must almost be like the mindboggling aviation had from roadshow curiosities to a major war factor in hardly more than a decade.
I don't really understand the underlying science but the nucleic acid based vaccine platforms seem really, really exciting. Getting an effective COVID vaccine is obviously huge, but the ability to rapidly develop vaccines in the future for emerging pandemics is amazing.
What I find more impressive is Moderna was finalized in February, and most of the other candidates were finalized by March.
If we could somehow develop rapid testing in some way, it's shocking to me that the vaccine could have entered mass production by the Summer.
There was a time where the only true way to test a new model Aircraft was to build one, but nowadays pretty much every characteristic is well understood by the time it enters service. To reach a similar point with vaccine testing will be important when the next pandemic hits.
The markets? Spare me. What are the markets, a handful of rich in banks and large corporations? They are neither wise nor competent, why should every news story be suffixed by how "the markets" (swt) react?
That's me again, but doesn't preclude my success...
However this 1995 paper (1) indicates that the S&P 500 behavior does "Granger Cause" changes in USA GDP. i.e changes in S&P 500 does predict changes in GDP from 1 to 3 quarters out. So that's the one legitimate reason to be encouraged by rising markets. Perhaps the woman who cuts my hair will be able to get off food stamps by spring.
Which is too bad. I'd rather have a pension and be assured of my income for however long I live than have to figure out how much to leave in my account for a future that I might not live to be old enough to enjoy.
I'm not a vaccine expert, so when vaccine news comes out and the broader market reacts extremely positively to this news it just gives me confidence this is the real deal.
There has been other vaccine news in the past which my friends/family talk about excitedly but the broader market didn't budge much.
I don't see any problem in using it a general barometer for this sort of news.
Are you suggesting that the signal of the markets today has zero corellation with the promise of this vaccine? That seems like quite the position to take.
Or are you lamenting that much attention is given to something that is primarily driven by wealthy organizations? I guess I might sympathize with you there.
> What are the markets, a handful of rich in banks and large corporations?
Glad you asked. No, "the markets" are not simply a handful of rich people, banks and large corporations. The markets are also more than just "stocks."
In fact, the majority of "the markets" is actually bonds, and most of those bonds are debt issued by nearly all the countries of the world (sovereign bonds). I think roughly 80 Trillion dollars, but don't quote me.
If you live in a country with roads, infrastructure, buildings, etc.--then the markets are responsible for everything around you.
But you seem to be complaining about stocks since they get the most media attention, so let's look at those.
You may not realize it, but the future of every single country with a socialized pension system, sovereign wealth fund, etc. depends on the returns of global stocks. They make up only a portion of most pension portfolios, but deliver nearly all of the returns. Everybody has a stake in them even if they don't realize it.
Are the markets all-knowing or perfectly efficient? Of course not. But it's literally the only place where you can measure how a global herd of humans are feeling about the state of the world at any given time with a single number. This makes it a default reference for journalists to cite, ie. "thing happened, this is what the humans and their algorithms collectively think about it."
The journalists are often wrong and don't understand what's happening, but this case seems to be pretty straightforward.
>If you live in a country with roads, infrastructure, buildings, etc.--then the markets are responsible for everything around you.
See, this kind of thing really gets to me. Here's you circa 1290: "If you live in a fiefdom with wells, irrigation, castles, etc. -- then your Lord is responsible for everything around you." See how fallacious that sounds when you transpose it this way?
The central issue is that you're justifying a thing from the context of the thing itself. You're explaining modern capitalism from the framework of modern capitalism. It's circular, and you get ridiculous things like "the markets built the roads". Ahm, no, workers built the roads!
>Are the markets all-knowing or perfectly efficient? Of course not. But it's literally the only place where you can measure how a global herd of humans are feeling about the state of the world at any given time with a single number.
They are a weighted way of seeing how some humans are feeling about things. A number that gives as much weight to 8 guys as it does to 3.7 billion. It's a pretty shitty indicator, I'd say.
> "your Lord is responsible for everything around you." See how fallacious that sounds...?"
Of course it sounds fallacious--you've constructed a straw man out of my original argument.
There's nothing circular about the concept of debt. It's a fundamental aspect of how our economy works. The way debt is raised is through markets. Again, this is not a controversial or political statement.
Of course workers built the roads. And they were paid to build those roads by debt raised via bond markets. Governments and organizations use debt to bring the future into the present and amortize large investments over long periods of time. The liquidity and demand for this debt in the global markets allows them to do this.
No marketplace for debt = no way to reliably execute big infrastructure projects for all but the richest of countries. The market (the demand for debt) is literally the enabler.
Nothing I've said here is a mischaracterization of reality.
> It's a pretty shitty indicator, I'd say.
Again, I'm not advocating that short term financial market gyrations have any explanatory power for the future. I'm simply explaining why journalists use it: because it's easy.
> If you live in a fiefdom with wells, irrigation, castles, etc. -- then your Lord is responsible for everything around you.
Well that's because it's true. No human-collective entity is entirely evil, because otherwise nothing would get done. Look at all the evils of FAANG; yet they still pay their employees and have restrooms.
>Great news and the markets are reacting very positively to the news as well which indicates to me this could be the beginning of the end!
I'd argue that has a lot more to do with the election uncertainty being over with. This is incredibly promising news, but probably not enough to account for SP500 jumping 400 points this morning.
S&P 500 is only up 90 points right now, and I don't see any evidence it was up 400 at any point today.
More generally, The DOW is way up, S&P up moderately, and NASDAQ only up a little bit. That looks like it may well be a result of vaccine news to me, which is less good for the big tech companies that make up the NASDAQ than the broader set of companies tracked by the DOW and S&P. I would expect an election related bump to have pretty equal effects on all three indices.
I think the data is what indicates this is the beginning of the end. All of the leading Western vaccine candidates showed very strong Phase 2 results. Now, we have the first vaccine showing very strong initial Phase 3 results. This is basically the best case scenario.
Great. This is the one that has to be kept ultra cold. Hoping for good news about some of the other vaccines in Phase 3 trials soon.
The vaccine reportedly needs to be held in storage at -94° Fahrenheit (-70°c), and will last for only 24 hours at refrigerated temps between 35.6° and 46.4°. (about 2° to 8° c)
"BioNTech CEO expects vaccine can be fridge-stored for two weeks"
"Speaking at an online media briefing on the purchase of an additional German production site, Chief Executive Ugur Sahin said tests have recently confirmed the genetic compound remains stable at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius for five days but he expects storability at those conditions to be two weeks or longer."
While it's a minor logistical challenge, it's simple enough to ship this in a liquid nitrogen dewar.
Even very small cities will have liquid nitrogen facilities. Shipping from the nearest city to most of the population sounds very doable in 24 hours.
Remember you only need to get most of the population to halt the spread. If there's some tiny village 3 days hike away in the rainforest, you can skip them.
Shipping hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccine at -80C is more than a “minor logistical challenge”. First, you’d never ship in a liquid nitrogen dewar. It would be a massive logistics bottleneck considering the weight of dewars and the volume you'd be shipping (Pfizer already has deals secured for hundreds of millions of doses). And plus, these are packaged vaccines - a glass vial with a label, in a paper box, with a folded product info sheet inside. You can't submerge the whole thing in liquid nitrogen.
Shipping at -10C is a major logistical challenge. Mentally it doesn't sound like like much, but that's envisioning a single vial to a single patient. Multiply that by one million and deliveries to not only NYC but to Booneville, Louisiana. Temperature excursions mean spoiled product - product that gets thrown out. -80C is way harder than -20C (there are no vaccines today that require -80C).
You can’t just throw it on dry ice and say “we’re good”. Even just packing it is complicated. You have a pallet sized box with 20,000 doses. You put it in a box and surround it with dry ice. Are all the vials the same temperature after 2 hours? Are you sure? You need temperature monitoring at multiple points in the package so you know when it’s been spoiled.
Your delivery gets held up for 12 hours at customs, are all the vials still -80C? Are you sure? What do you do when you deliver to hospital and find out they don’t have -80C storage, even though they said they did? Do you have an intermediary storage facility you can bring it to until you figure out a solution?
Do you have monitoring after it’s been delivered so it doesn’t spoil before administration? Correct thawing procedures? What happens if a dose is thawed and the patient doesn’t show up and it sits at room temp for an hour? Just throw it out? Or is it still good? Are you sure?
And to add on top of all this - you (as the manufacturer) might have all this figured out, but you need to make sure everyone along the logistics chain does too. Guaranteed you'd send emails and letters in advance, and have massive yellow stickers all over the shipment that says "Must be stored at -80C" and you'll have a customer call you a week later asking if the product that's been sitting at -10C is still good.
Here is a document from WHO that will tell you way more than you’d ever want to know about cold chain distribution. There is an entire section on how to appropriately stack the vaccine vials in the freezer so they stay the right temperature. Yeah, it's that complicated.
Even cold chain for today’s products is really fucking hard.
Derek Lowe had a good quote on this:
"Pfizer has provided these details to the CDC about shipping and storage of their candidate: the vaccine can be shipped in “dry ice pack” boxes, but that dry ice will need to be replenished within 24 hours of receipt. The shipping carton needs to be closed within one minute of opening, and not opened more than twice per day. Vaccine vials, once removed, can be kept at refrigerator temperatures for up to 24 hours or at room temperature for no more than 2 hours after thawing. So this is going to take a very organized approach to make sure that the vaccine is handled properly without wastage. We’re looking at a lot of dry ice and a lot of orders for ultra-cold freezers if this is the candidate that gets heavy nationwide distribution. And mind you, I’m talking about organized distribution in Little Rock and Long Beach. What about La Paz and Lahore? What about Lubumbashi? Even back inside the US, what’s the nearest source of dry ice in Shiprock, New Mexico or Oceana, West Virginia?"
But it's something that poor countries manage to do successfully with a reasonable reliability even on rural areas.
I am sure there will be plenty of new problems for that lower temperature. And a number of smart people will have to work really hard to solve them, a large amount of money will change hands and all that.
But I think the GP's point is that it's doable. It doesn't need any sci-fi tech or any large restructuring of humanity (and we already did some of the later for this virus).
All of your concerns are real. However it is important to remember that this is also routine. The amount of vaccine to ship this way is not that large compared to all the other things shipping in this way. Shipping companies already know how to handle this type of thing and have systems in place. They have the monitoring in place and systems to watch it because this is already done on a large scale.
Developing a safe and effective vaccine -- fundamentally hard.
Developing a nuclear weapon -- fundamentally hard.
Developing a quantum computer -- fundamentally hard.
Shipping something cold at a large scale? Hard, but not fundamentally hard. We'll solve it. There's no fucking way the vaccine effort is stopped by refrigeration needs.
That’s what’s incorrect. Yes, it’s not “put a man on the moon hard”, but you’re really underestimating how difficult it is.
I’ve worked in drug distribution for a few years and you’d be surprised the challenges to getting a room temperature drug to a patient in a developed country. None of the steps are hard, but when you introduce humans into the mix things go poorly pretty quickly.
Getting a -80C drug transported to a 2nd tier city in sub-Saharan Africa is not “easy”. Unless you’re willing to have half (or more) of your product spoil. Based on the demand and urgency for a vaccine for Covid, we can’t spare even 1 dose to spoilage.
Yes, it’s not a “we can’t figure this out” problem, but it’s a big enough problem to really bottleneck distribution. It’s going to take some pretty smart logistics people to make sure the process works all the way from Pfizer’s distribution center to the patient’s body.
I disagree. All problems you mentioned are fundamentally hard. It is unfair to say that a logistical challenge is easier simply because it involves refrigeration at scale as opposed to research, weapons development, or computing at scale.
I agree. I think sometimes it is hard to fully understand how complicated logistics can be. I mean that’s why people study logistics in school and companies pay money for professionals well versed in logistics.
Many supermarkets carry dry ice. Any city of >50,000 people will have a company supplying dry ice and liquid nitrogen. CO2 is a byproduct of several industrial process, so that market it glutted. It is easy to turn CO2 into dry ice (if you don't care about efficiency - with the supply being virtually unlimited there is no reason to care much)
They produced it within months; it's the clinical trials to prove its efficiency and safety that took a while.
I wonder if this experience has led to developments to speed up the development process (without compromising on safety); I hope so, because this is not the first and will not be the last time we see a worldwide pandemic like this.
I'm not sure it's fully possible to not compromise on safety one way or another when doing something like this quickly. Let's say a side effect is that 1% of women become sterile half a year after getting the vaccine - how would we possibly know that after testing for 3 months? All we can do is say it's very unlikely based on other vaccines with similar approaches, and monitor for effects on the reproductive system (or anything else unusual in the body) that is know to potentially lead to something like that down the line. In the end, we can (and probably must) decide that taking the time to disprove there being any long term negative effects, is more likely to cause more harm (because more covid-infections will happen in the meantime) than the good it is likely to do us. But it is still a higher risk than the usual approach where we test for longer.
At the time of writing (2020-11-09 12:04 UTC) the article uses "90% of people" and "90% protection" interchangeably. I assume it means "90% of individuals achieve immunity", rather than "individuals achieve 90% immunity".
EDIT: See child comment re: Pfizer press release.
EDIT 2: See [1] for said press release, which has more detailed information than the BBC article.
Unfortunately, there's yet another property of vaccine performance: some prevent the virus from reaching any level of footing in the host, others only make the body's eventual response stronger, preventing initial footing to cause heavy illness. SARS2-COV is rather peculiar in how its transmission performance is particularly strong in early, mostly presymptomatic stages, so it's perfectly possible to end up with a vaccine that reliably protects carriers from disease, but does not remove them from the spread equations at all, or only very little.
Neither of those. It means you don't get sick if you get in contact with the virus.
Whether that means you're immune (i.e. not spreading the virus to others) is a different question that apparently hasn't been answered by this preliminary data yet. (And I can see this is more difficult to study.)
There's no such thing as "Covid infection". There's SARS-CoV-2 infection, which often causes CoVID-19 disease.
Pfizer is saying that their vaccine is effective at protecting against CoVID-19 disease. They haven't said anything about preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection yet, as far as I can see. The difference is important, because there are vaccines (such as the Salk polio vaccine) that only protect against disease, but not against infection. People get infected and pass on the virus without ever getting sick, so there's no herd immunity.
I would assume something like with the influenza vaccine, where you have immunity to i think around 70% of currently available virus mutations, if the vaccine works.
That's a percentage on a different axis. Influenza is a diverse family of related viruses and strains vary much more than those of SARS-COV-2. No surprise given the very different time since taking foot in humans, and in addition to that (I think, working on weak knowledge here) that influenza is even part of a group of viruses that is prone to create mashup versions of itself when two strains meet in the same host. Think Dangermouse, Grey Album.
Perhaps its something like "90% percent of the individuals' immune system are successful in quick eliminating covid without any symptoms or adverse reactions".
I admit I know very little on how immunity to diseases work, but I imagine that with viruses there is a chance it'll progress to a full blown infection even if you are vaccinated in some cases.
The variations are enough to have differences in infectiousness and to allow us to trace the spread a bit, but as far as we know immunity to any of them is immunity to all of them.
Maybe there is a slight semantic misunderstanding here, but in fact a "re-infection" is defined as such:
A patient must present a infection and the particular virus must be sequenced, and then present with an infection later on where the virus is again sequenced and identified as sufficiently different from the first sample. Otherwise it cannot be deemed a re-infection.
If these small differences in the genomic sequence are already a different strand, I don't know, not an expert.
But all 5 (?) cases known so far had a different sequence identified the second time.
> The genomes of the patient’s virus samples from April and June displayed significant genetic differences between them, suggesting that the patient was infected twice by 2 distinct COVID-19 infections.
I’d read of known second infections that are from different strains, but scientists also question lasting immunity from COVID-19 infection because other coronaviruses are seasonal.
This seriously enrages me. We knew coronavirus was going to last years and could mutate. Why did people claim lockdowns were the "Science" solution?
I was censored here for pointing out the 3 options. In reality soft lockdowns seemed to be the only wrong answer. Harsh lockdowns and no lockdowns actually provide a benefit.
"Hard lockdown" has drastic socio-economic implications.
"No lockdown" has dramatic/catastrophic socio-economic implications. The easiest to understand: In very short time the ICUs are overrun and people die. A lot of people die.
"Soft lockdown" depends on the people to play along. Which seems more difficult than the people in charge thought it would be (and some still don't believe).
Notably I am not arguing here for what the "right" choice is. It is simply not that easy.
Hard lockdown causes 100% to suffer, but we save the 1%.
A soft lockdown causes the 100 to suffer, and we only save "flatten the curve" lives. Which according to NYT ventilator stats saves 12% of people. 1% times 12% is 0.12%.
No lockdown and 1% of old and obese people die.
As a note coronavirus is 4x more deadly than the yearly flu and kills the same demographic.
Are we overreacting on a virus that is on the same order of magnitude as a flu?
With no intervention, healthy people start to die because they cannot receive medical care. There is a lot of COVID care going on in hospitals other than ventilation. Ventilators are somewhat of a last resort.
We are on track for COVID to have 10x the deaths of the seasonal flu, and that is after the effects of the significant interventions that have happened here and around the globe.
This is incorrect. When hospitals are overrun, healthy people can't be treated and die. The old and obese die in higher proportions even when receiving treatment, but healthy young people often need treatment to survive.
My take is that this is a "correlation does not imply causality" case.
It was possible to positively identify a reinfection because the two infections were due to different strains. That was just the means of positively and objectively identify a reinfection. However, nothing was asserted regarding if the patient was immune to the first strain the first time around. In fact, it seems that the hallmark of reinfections is that they are far more critical than first infections. This also means that the first infections is far milder than the second one. Well, the thing about the immune system is that it is able to fight mild infections without developing immunity if they are too mild to trigger a full response from the immune system.
> but as far as we know immunity to any of them is immunity to all of them.
OK. The longevity of the immunity is also an issue perhaps; at least they have written articles about people becoming re-infected; so even the people who do become immune may not stay that way forever...
The reporting on reinfection is actually a pretty positive sign. If 10% or even 1% of people could be reinfected, you’d expect to see huge numbers of reinfections, so the fact that the news is still reporting individual cases of reinfection suggests it won’t be a practical concern.
> so even the people who do become immune may not stay that way forever...
In my country there have been hundreds of thousands of confirmed Covid infections. There have been <100 confirmed re-infections.
It's very early to draw the conclusion that people in general don't build up lasting immunity, and there is more than enough data to support that most people do build up immunity of several months at least. If the latter wasn't true you'd see much more re-infections.
I think someone should clarify the strands vs. genetic variations here.
Because the reports from Denmarks Mink fiasco indicated that antibodies were not as effective on the mutation that appeared there short time ago. This would contradict the one-fits-all immunity argument.
No, it's probabilistic, about the 'amount of protection' from or 'decrease in likelihood' of contracting it, which is why generally people are happy / would have been happy even for a much lower percentage - protecting ~everyone a bit is higher impact than protecting a few people a lot.
It's the same as 'herd immunity', where each member is '90% immune' and as a result the herd is 'more immune' than if only 10% of its members were 100% immune.
Out of 45,000 people, only 86ish people got infected in the trial arm? Isn't that too few? Even for the control arm, that's still only 774 people infected.
That's not true, population size absolutely 'enters into the math'. 9 vs. 85 does not give the same result independently of whether N=94, 200, 2k, or 2B.
It affects confidence, and potentially the result of the test entirely. I won't be more specific because stats was never a strong suit and my memory's hazy, but I remember enough to know it matters!
I'm thinking that 85/21,750 or 0.4% of the controls developed the disease (vs 0.04% of those who received vaccine).
It does seem low for the US where you have 3% of the population had disease already in 2020. Perhaps more data came from Germany? Or it could be they measure not just PCR +ve results, but antibody levels and/or severe symptoms?
If new pfizer's vaccine has similar numbers, e.g. 90% after two shots and 80% after one shot, can it be more efficient to just use one shot, considering current race with time since we need to deliver vaccine to billions of people? Are there numbers for protection level after one shot somewhere? I couldn't find it at first glance.
I think the parent is asking (if 1 shot of this vaccine confers 80% immunity) would it not be better (for the purposes of curbing transmission) to give everyone a single injection now for 80% immunity among a broader population rather than giving half the number of people two doses for 90% immunity. The implicit constraint is that it will take a relatively long time to scale up production and distribution to the extent that we can get two doses to everyone.
I am sure I misunderstood something, but what does that 80% mean, and how does it differ from "the data we currently have shows that one shot of this vaccine is not likely to convey a decent amount of protection."?
Yep, maybe they had some data about protection level rising since first shot, fewer people getting sick already etc.
It's hard to understand from just the Figure 4 how much of that increase is booster shot and how much is just level rising with time, too bad they didn't investigate this. Having top level protection vaccine with 2 shots is of course great and may be what you would be aiming for in "normal" times, but when it's race against the time trading several efficiency percents for quicker population coverage may be worth it.
Yep, J&J one is the only candidate requiring one shot. Hopefully it will show some good results soon as well.
Pretty confident it's the former, which if the case, essentially ends the pandemic in a month after it's distributed, given that the R0 would drop precipitously.
The challenge will be reconciling this with the antivax crowd given that as the vaccine rolls out the rate of infection will come down correspondingly among the whole population (including the unvaccinated). They'll immediately claim that the virus is "going away on it's own" as opposed to the truth, which is that potential spreaders are being steadily removed from the susceptible population due to the vaccine.
While true, the approach they took is extremely similar to several other vaccine candidates which is a good sign that the approach works and other vaccines will be equally effective.
Which is completely sufficient to vaccinate the elderly, teachers, immunocompromised, and healthcare workers in the Western world, and probably anyone else who really wants it.
There's no need to completely eliminate COVID - we don't aim for the same for regular influenza. We should aim to reopen economies as soon as possible instead.
Why aren’t we using _all_ the factories to make as many doses as possible? There should not be “companies” making these to their capacity. This should be a public effort
You first: why aren't you making this in your garage right now?
For the most part the same answer as to why you aren't making it yourself also apply to most factories in the world. Only a few have the equipment, supplies, and experience to make it.
I would guess that a lot of the factories that are capable of producing these type vaccines also produce a lot of other important drugs and vaccines that we can't just put on the back-shelf without even greater harm.
Not withstanding the rather enormous caveat of antivaxxers. They have grown significantly in number during this pandemic what with all the wild conspiracy theories. It’s worth checking that out.
We should be clear about the goalposts. Reducing the transmission rate to a manageable level will be very easy with even just some fraction of the population being vaccinated. What exact percentage is unclear, but it's a lot less than 100%. No realistic number of anti-vaxxers can change that.
Eradicating the virus is a whole different goal, and there could be lots of different impediments to that. After all, we still get vaccinated for a large numbers of illnesses that we haven't eradicated but are just very rare. That's not a terrible endgame for COVID.
Letting this thing circulate seems dangerous given it introduces the possibility of a vaccine-resistant mutation. If anything it drives the evolution of the virus towards vaccine resistance similar to what happened with MRSA bacteria and antibiotics.
The way these studies (most of the big trials finishing up soon, and this one too) are set up is that they measure the percentage of people that will not get symptomatic covid-19, so the only thing that is measured is whether they get symptoms or not. So the result is that 90% (within a confidence interval) of people who are given this vaccine will not develop any covid symptoms. Transmission may be impacted, and the data will reveal hints about this, but it's impossible to draw hard statistical conclusions about that, and in general a different type of vaccine technology will be needed to end transmission and thus the pandemic. This will save countless lives though, and may end lockdowns, so a great day nonetheless.
Note that they provided 'Confirmed COVID-19 in Phase 2/3 participants without evidence of infection before vaccination [ Time Frame: From 7 days after the second dose of study intervention to the end of the study, up to 2 years ]'
as their primary outcome in their study registration
UK already ordered 30M out of the 50M avail for this year. So no going on winter break to Thailand just yet!
Wondering who will grab the next 20M, and how much this vaccine is being sold per dose.
(edit: PFE is currently trading +13% pre-market on the NYSE)
Hard to say. What is in the contract? I don't know (I assume it is public but I don't know how to look this up). Different countries may have different contracts.
I wouldn't be surprised if the contract was only that X doses would be provided to the US market (as opposed to shipping to the market in Mexico...). In this case the government is only buying a spot in the shipping queue, and not any doses.
It could be that the doses were bought by the government only for the government (military and politicians), and the rest of us are on our own. (this seems unlikely - doctors should be first in line, but an obvious extension is the doses are for doctors/nurses and the leftover for the above)
It could be the government is buying all doses for their country and will distribute them for no extra charge. This is probably what Europe has done/will do - because they tend to have government health care for anything considered essential.
I wouldn't be surprised if all 3 of the above were in use by different countries. There is disagreement as to which is best on a political level.
Small but important nitpick: since at least 2005 there is no "on the NYSE", the price you're likely seeing is the best price consolidated across all national market system venues, the primary listing exchange is mostly only an administrative entity in recent times. Actually some of the largest premarket trading is occurring on NASDAQ and a CBOE-owned exchange called BATS
Edit:
The article states
“ Pfizer believes it will be able to supply 50 million doses by the end of this year, and around 1.3 billion by the end of 2021.
The UK should get 10 million doses by the end of the year, with a further 30 million doses already ordered.”
So the UK will only get 10/50 Millionen doses produced this year.
We'll have to find out. If the virus is suppressed for 6-12 months, it's basically eradicated, and vaccination would only have to start once it starts spreading again.
The rate of spreading will depend on factors such as international travel and how much people will have learned from this period. I expect/fear that everyone will try to get life as before as soon as possible, so the extra delay after the vaccine wears off might be negligible.
If you get the virus, you only appear to be immune for a short time (6months, would have to look it up). This matches other coronavirus and how you can get colds multiple times a year.
In reality, a vaccine is probably going to offer a lower (but if this study is true, acceptable) level of protection. I wouldn’t be surprised if the protection drops exponentially after 2 months. Similar to the live virus
>In reality, a vaccine is probably going to offer a lower (but if this study is true, acceptable) level of protection. I wouldn’t be surprised if the protection drops exponentially after 2 months. Similar to the live virus
Serology reports for the Moderna vaccine (very similar technology) are showing 4-5 times higher levels of antibodies than those who actually contracted the virus.
- Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis
- Analysis evaluated 94 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in trial participants
- Study enrolled 43,538 participants, with 42% having diverse backgrounds, and no serious safety concerns have been observed; Safety and additional efficacy data continue to be collected
- Submission for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) planned for soon after the required safety milestone is achieved, which is currently expected to occur in the third week of November
- Clinical trial to continue through to final analysis at 164 confirmed cases in order to collect further data and characterize the vaccine candidate’s performance against other study endpoints
You want to have at least a nontrivial group of every race and ethnicity to ensure that you collect enough data to make sure it's also effective on everyone.
Additional challenges in the US are that many minority communities are distrustful of the pharmaceutical industry due to historical reasons and you typically need a concentrated effort to do outreach there to actually collect enough volunteers to meet your sampling concerns.
That company couldn't be more irrelevant to the discussion. They specialize in keeping airplane food at between +2c to +8c on the tarmac in places like Dubai.
Probably the airlines who will both be dealing with the logistics and be able to return to BAU quicker because of the vaccine. For example, American Airlines is up 25% premarket today and IAG (owner of British Airways) is up nearly 30%.
Based on this NYT article [1], some logistics companies planning to store and transport the vaccine are using freezers from Stirling Ultracold. It may just be a curiosity, but their freezers (as the name would suggest) use bona fide Stirling engines rather than the typical two-stage compressors used in most ULT freezers.
As someone in life science research who uses plenty of -80 freezers, I've always been curious about Stirling Ultracold. Maybe they're on to something after all.
Nit: Stirling cryocoolers, not Stirling engines. Thermodynamically, it's just reversed. You're driving mechanical/electrical power in to get a thermal difference, not dissipating a thermal difference to get mechanical work/electrical power out.
gas-liquide cycle freezers typically do not have enough of a temperature gradiants to work. Normal freon (R-whatever you have heard of) don't get cold enough. That isn't to say you can't make one, but stirling cycle is not much worse so just use it.
The places that would need to worry about building cold chain infrastructure capacity probably won't have the cash for permanent installations on top of the money they'll need to buy the vaccine.
Better to invest in companies that make and lease refrigerated semi-trailers, I'd think.
Not really. Pfizer has bet big on this by preemptively manufacturing the vaccine. They're already filling freezers. Unless you're referring to the freezers some less equipped distribution centers/agencies will need you acquire?
A bit late; these companies already have vast stocks of the vaccine ready to be deployed once they get greenlit. They will be getting - and have already received - orders and reservations for tens, hundreds of millions of units of a potential vaccine, awaiting testing and approval; see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8852159/The-video-w..., citing they're aiming to produce 1.3 billion doses next year.
this is the only investment I find possibly useful. Liquid nitrogen is so common in industry that I don't think there will be a problem sourcing enough just from spare capacity.
Zoom took a hit partly because of this, and partly because of an FTC settlement that is requiring them to beef up their security and open themselves up to security audits, as a result of them basically lying about how their encryption worked.
I initially thought so too, but there are some big losers in the market today - think home delivery (Ocado) , entertainment (Netflix), and more interestingly specialist Covid test suppliers.
Since you mention it ... it's kind of hard to buy anything. I couldn't log in to my Schwab account this morning [1], and others are reporting problems with TD Ameritrade/Scottrade as well, and it seems to be affecting other brokerages, due to this high trading volume/volatility.
Dry ice manufacturers may be a better bet. Hard to change -70C/-80C freezer manufacturing capacity, but pretty easy to pump out more dry ice or LN2 for storage.
Also interesting to note that this is a mRNA vaccine, where the production of antigen within the cell is induced by injecting a RNA sequence instead of a disabled virus.
If I dumped some random code into a computer program you were building, would you expect things to still work correctly? I’d love to know if that is wildly inaccurate...
Yes but... no one is dumping anything remotely random here :)
It's using existing building mechanism in cells to have it build a specific protein that will bind to a specific pathogen.
And lot of clinical tests to try to detect if those proteins being built have other effects than instructing the cells to create the antibodies we want.
It's roughly the same mechanism at work when you inject disabled pathogen and hoping that the cells will produce the same antibodies, it's just a faster, safer, more precise way to induce it.
Heck, it's even the same mechanism that occurs when your cells encounters a wild, random virus, like it may be happening a lot more than you think, and, well, you're still alive :)
By the way, you may be thinking under the assumption that the 'program' is the DNA, and that mRNA vaccines is changing it some way or another, which is not, this is not genetic therapy.
Almost all medicine does something weird and scary. Interfere with body chemistry, trick the immune system. Many vaccines are dead viruses - that's pretty scary too!
That scariness is exactly why we did trials for 6 months, and why 20,000+ volunteers were closely monitored for half a year to make sure this technique is not harmful.
Until your body kills the infected cells. Viruses stick themselves into your cells all over the place. It's how you get the common cold. Approximately 8% of your DNA is made of past viruses that humans and their ancestors caught.
Great news, but I think the importance of the -80 degrees centigrade storage requirement is underestimated.
Serbia, where I live, has ordered this vaccine. And our medical system is far from world-class, but leaps and bounds from less developed countries, and I honestly think logistics here will not be able to match those requirements. I've seen tetanus vaccines just being kept in regular, commercial, refrigerators. There have been cases where they have been switched off because they were not on UPSs or not up to standards. Vehicles equipped for transport are an issue by itself.
In Uk I have recently recieved a vaccine, and it was in a commercial refrigirator. I don't know if they have a UPS, but it appears like a normal thing to do.
I'm not sure it can be used, since it is much colder than -80. I actually hope it can be, because there is quite a few liquid nitrogen facilities, usually near big medical facilities. Dry ice, quite rare. I've seen some for special effects, but declared at a higher temperature than -80.
Germany is planning to establish centers for vaccination exactly to avoid problems with the continous cold chain. (People travel without issue at ambient temperature. They even prefer that to other temperatures;)
I would assume that other nations will adopt similiar solutions for vaccines that have ultra-cold storage requirements.
They have only done phase 1/2 trials and this one is phase 3.
Also, people trust US/EU research more. They have not been very forthcoming with data. The data that has been made available has been lacking in detail or has patterns that indicate either fabrication or sloppiness.
Both countries appear to be moivated by domestic and geopolitical political purposes. The US has also being doing that, but the medical establishment and regulatory bodies in the US are seen to be more independent of government than in China or Russia. Also, this is a German result, and people trust Germany more.
If it were just the German corporations we were trusting, this would be relevant. But at this point, while we do not necessarily trust the German government to be nimble, agile, or innovative, they are typically relatively by-the-book, as governments go. Certainly compared to China and Russia.
I think the Russian ones were approved after 'Phase 2' trials. Which are small scale trials. That's their call if they want to start vaccinating with 'half-tested' vaccines, but it doesn't meet the typical international standards which is usually completing Phase 3 trials.
Obviously because of the geopolitical concerns and pride. Truth is the first victim as usual. The Russian vaccine was indeed registered just after the 2nd phase trials, but according to its website the 3rd phase trial has started on August 25 (one month later than for BNT162b2) and involved more than 40k people (effectively the same number).
So those who claim that Russian vaccine is only on the 1/2 phase spread an outright lie. Both vaccine have approximately the same speed of development with minor differences between regulation and testing procedures.
> So those who claim that Russian vaccine is only on the 1/2 phase spread an outright lie.
Russian vaccine was announced back in August, when it was only on phase 1/2. In contrast phase 3 Pfizer/biontech had been well under way at that time.
Russia announced a not fully tested vaccine, proudly called it "Sputnik V". The exact words Putin used when announced it was: "As far as I know, a vaccine against a new coronavirus infection has been registered this morning, for the first time in the world". So geopolitical concerns and pride are correct assessment. No wonder it drew skepticism.
Neither. It is made of two replication-deficient human adenoviruses, Ad5 and Ad26, IIRC, which carry part or the entire spike protein (I need to check, I don't remember).
One shot is with Ad5, the other with Ad26. This is done because Ad5 is a "known" adenovirus by most population, that means that a sizable fraction has antibodies against it.
Trust. Russia and China lie through their teeth on everything and anything. It's irrelevant whether or not they are lying in this particular instance: they cannot be trusted.
Do you really perceive EU/US having the same level of independence of judges, newspapers and regulation bodies as Russia and China? Do you think that minority parties and voices are accepted to the same degree?
"The West" is a bit more restricted in how much they can lie to their own citizens (even with the recent efforts from Mr Trump and Mr Johnson to change that for the worse).
Of course, in Mother Russia it is widely believed that everyone lies more or less, and those looking to expose "the truth" generally live dangerously, often with tragic results.
The difference is that placing trust in China/Russia means trusting in a narrative driven by a small group (the ruling elite), while placing trust in "the West" usually refers to the collective knowledge of scientific endeavours that tend to succeed better in a nation more friendly to liberal democracy.
It's a difference of degree. The US has done (way more than) its fair share of shitty things, no doubt about that. It's still a democratic government (a flawed one) which is miles better than the autocracy of Russia or the oppressive totalitarianism of the CCP.
America launched a fake vaccination campaign to catch osama-bin-laden; many villagers in surrounding areas are refusing to take vaccine because they have lost trust.
Western governments are no doubt better for their own citizens than say Russia or China, but we outsiders have absolutely no reason to trust one government over the others. Russia's vaccine has only passed phase 2- now that's a good point, "Trust" absolutely isn't.
I wasn’t aware of this. Looked it up and this in fact true. I imagine people from other countries are in fact weary of the US vaccine for this or similar reasons
Not just Iraq war- Vietnam war (pentagon papers), Wikileaks, Snowden revelations- boggles my mind just how many people still have unflinching trust in their government, specially when a comparison to other countries come in. I don't know if it's nationalism or a hidden desire to feel superior or something else.
But given how these western countries handled covid, and the fact that China has a history of fighting viruses like it- I'd rather trust a Chinese vaccine over an American one, all else being equal.
You have to stop reading propaganda. If we had a vote around the world, russia and china together would win over the "west" by a long shot. It wasn't russia and china brutalizing the world for 500 years. It isn't russia and china destabilizing much of the world today.
We have to stop believing that the "west" is the world. It's going to bite us in the end one day. The only thing people around the world like is wealth. As china and russia get wealthier, even that won't matter as much.
None of those have announced positive results on a phase 3, have they? In effect, the Russian one is also in phase 3; they kind of pretended it wasn't, but are doing a very limited rollout that is for all practical purposes just a phase 3 trial.
Also, this one was developed in Germany and the trial is being run in Germany and the US; people might be forgiven for trusting a combination of the EMA and FDA, who will need to approve this, somewhat more than Putin's one.
This is much farther along than the Russia vaccine. They are also publishing their data publicly. I know they haven’t published this data yet, but they say they are going to, and they have a good track record of doing so.
Interesting timing here with regards to the US election.
Edit/Update: "She said she learned of the results from the outside panel of experts shortly after 1 p.m. on Sunday, and that the timing was not influenced by the election."
Edit2: I failed to realize that it was necessary to point out that the timing of this press release is interesting. I wasn't intending to imply the vaccine would be held back for any political reason.
I don't think it's totally unbelievable that they waited until after the election to release preliminary results. Waiting a week or two wouldn't hurt the timeline, and would significantly damage Trump's campaign. If I worked at Pfizer that's what I would do.
It’s just such a fundamentally bizarre idea that I think it needs a lot more support than just “not totally unbelievable”. Most people don’t warp all their decisions around partisan politics.
At the risk of damaging Pfizers bottom-line, if someone manages to produce results before them, and at the risk of getting fired and sued for doing so.
In a double-blind, phase 3 trial only one group has on-going data access: the independent group conducting the study. No one else, including patients, doctors, and the business, has any knowledge of the results until they are "unsealed". That continues to be true throughout the entire trial even if preliminary results are unsealed at different points.
Precisely. They have seen 94 infections total so far, based on the statistics that’s likely to be almost entirely in the control group. Those infections are reported as they come in, so for example, perhaps last week there were 87 infections. The study ends once they hit ~150 infections, based on their sample size that will give them the confidence intervals they need to finalize.
So the difference between announcing preliminary results last week versus this week was their own internal decision on timing.
Ok, I have to partially take that back. According the Pfizer they intentionally did not confirm the data until last Wednesday.
> The first analysis was to occur after 32 volunteers — both those who received the vaccine and those on placebo — had contracted Covid-19. If fewer than six volunteers in the group who received the vaccine had developed Covid-19, the companies would make an announcement that the vaccine appeared to be effective. The study would continue until at least 164 cases of Covid-19 — individuals with at least one symptom and a positive test result — had been reported.
> In their announcement of the results, Pfizer and BioNTech revealed a surprise. The companies said they had decided not to conduct the 32-case analysis “after a discussion with the FDA.” Instead, they planned to conduct the analysis after 62 cases. But by the time the plan had been formalized, there had been 94 cases of Covid-19 in the study. It’s not known how many were in the vaccine arm, but it would have to be nine or fewer.
> Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage. The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday. When the samples were tested, there were 94 cases of Covid in the trial. The DSMB met on Sunday.
Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday.
They intentionally kept the samples frozen in their lab until the day after the election. The most important vaccine in the 21st century, and they kept the samples on ice? That's incredible.
First business day after the election was called, but not after the election itself (i.e. people couldn't vote after 11/02). Or are you saying that they were planning on not releasing this at all in case of a Trump win and not just trying to influence the election?
The thought didn't even cross my mind that they'd hold the vaccine for political reasons. Just the press release. Holding the vaccine itself for political reasons would be murder on a mass scale.
In your conspiracy theory, surely, they'd just have announced after polls closed? Why wait for it to be called? Also, this vaccine was actually developed by a German company, who would likely resent their partner playing this game.
This timing is consistent with when we've been told we might see early results all along, really; it shouldn't be that surprising. Expect announcements from other teams over the next couple of months.
This is exactly the point of preregistered hypotheses.
Odds of conspiracy, with a clear hypothesis and confirmation of that hypothesis, go up drastically. That happened here.
It wasn't a super-unlikely hypothesis either. We're talking about announcing a result a few weeks earlier versus later. That's not an unreasonable decision for a blue-leaning businessperson or scientist to make.
What reduces odds are the number of preregistrations. There were dozens about this strong.
My own prior went from 1% odds to maybe 35% odds. Yours may be different, likely based on your prior based on where you fall on the political spectrum. Right-wingers will probably go 35% to 80%, and left-wingers from 0.01% to 1%.
> That's not an unreasonable decision for a blue-leaning businessperson or scientist to make.
Intentionally murdering possibly thousands of people (or tens of thousands? or what, who knows?!) for some assumed political gain is absolutely, 100% an unreasonable decision for any human to make. Intentionally delaying a vaccine would certainly be a crime, no? Not to mention absolutely abhorrent and completely evil.
That is not a "reasonable decision" to make by any stretch of the imagination.
> Intentionally murdering possibly thousands of people (or tens of thousands? or what, who knows?!) for some assumed political gain is absolutely, 100% an unreasonable decision for any human to make. Intentionally delaying a vaccine would certainly be a crime, no? Not to mention absolutely abhorrent and completely evil.
You mean delaying the announcement of a vaccine. They didn't delay the process.
No. I didn't write "Intentionally murdering possibly thousands of people" or "Intentionally delaying a vaccine"
I wrote "We're talking about announcing a result a few weeks earlier versus later."
And if that was the goal, I think it worked. It looks like Biden won by literally tens of thousands votes. An announcement a week earlier probably would have swung the election to Trump.
At a cost of zero lives.
If the vaccine works as announced, we're still weeks away from the end of the trial, and months away from widespread distribution.
Do any down voters want to step up and say they think the Trump Administration has competently handled the pandemic?
It's obvious to anyone willing to look at the facts, and to be honest with themselves, that this administration has done a terrible, terrible job of responding to the pandemic which has probably caused the unnecessary deaths of a lot of people.
And that's not a partisan thing to say. Or rather, it shouldn't be ...
I mean, to be fair, the timing is interesting but I wouldn't go any further than that.
I don't think (and find it incredibly unlikely) there's any correlation per se, but quite a few people were hoping to hear certain news on the political front and the COVID front. They heard both in a pretty short window and I'd say that and the effects nationally are interesting.
Many many people are now feeling a lot of stress relief in a short period of time. Should be interesting how this effects morale around the country.
Hopefully there is more better scientific data on this vaccine before rushing it to top of HN and judgement. I am not sure how to explain 90% immunity from a disease in scientific language, because there are only two states a person get infected with COVID-19 or does not get infected with COVID-19. Not sure how this vaccine will make a person 10% infected and 90% not infected with COVID-19.
This is one of the vaccine Trump referred to in his debate, not sure how much it’s really useful or its another one like Sputnik and Coronavac.
I think the best details for Corona related vaccine efforts are from WHO. [1]
It’s a 90% reduction in cases in a vaccinated population vs unvaccinated. Basically how good is the vaccine at preventing symptomatic infection upon exposure
Real question I have is how well the study was conducted AND how long immunity lasts. Even if both were good here... we won’t have the vaccine widely available until mid to late next year.
This was developed by a German company and will be widely distributed in the EU if approved, so will have to be approved by both the FDA and EMA. Now, if the FDA passes it and the EMA says 'no', that would be reason for concern, potentially, but assuming both bodies pass it that should be good enough for most people.
Fascinating logistics problem here - distributing a vaccine that needs to be stored at -80C.
This is significantly colder than the standard cold logistics chain. I believe Pfizer are working on a special transport box that can, unpowered, stay at the right temperature for a week as long as the box is only opened for something like 1 minute a day.
That's a good thing, but with a capacity of I believe 10k vaccine doses, anywhere with fewer than 10k people to vaccinate, or anywhere that can't keep the demand level for the vaccine at the right level each hour/day as they progress through their vaccine stock, will have a hard time. This is going to disproportionately affect small communities and developing countries.
We've got hard logistical challenges ahead regardless of these details, but they make this even harder. Given this it's probably important that we continue to develop more vaccines and diversify our strategy for immunity.
This may be true for urban/suburban US/Europe/China/India, but this is not true for large parts of the world.
There are parts of rural US/Australia for example where despite people having cars, they may need to take a plane to get to a vaccine treatment centre with enough density to get stock. They may not be able to afford that travel even if the vaccine is free.
Much of the African population is spread over small communities where roads may not be reliable, let alone car access. If your minimum distributable unit is 10k vaccines, as it looks like it could be to begin with, that rules out a significant number of the population.
Yes and that's a good thing. I think it's still important to recognise that not everyone is as privileged as many of us here, and that an inclusive approach to distribution will be important for this vaccine.
Viruses also, naturally, take longer to reach harder to reach areas. Basically, if the vaccine will have trouble reaching a community, the virus will, too.
interesting... vid suggests that we have to use cryogenic techniques to store vaccine partly because there hasn't been enough time to test how they store at higher temperatures.
so perhaps the infrastructure requirements will relax as time goes on
I wonder if the people scared of permanent damage caused by Covid (for which there is no evidence) will be equally scared of the permanent damage caused by this experimental vaccine (for which there is no evidence either).
In what way does thousands of people self-reporting new and ongoing medical issues after a positive COVID diagnosis not constitute evidence that this is happening?
Clinical trials are not the only form of evidence.
One of the striking things about "Long Covid" patients is that many of them didn't have severe covid symptoms (they didn't require hospitalisation, etc), and yet they have still had ongoing problems months later (some people have reported symptoms clearing up a few months later, some people still have unresolved issues).
I've read the UK study published from the publisher in Charlottesville and it's a case study of ~60 people (and there are 8 individual cause studies from that study) and almost all of them were either over 55, or were in high risk jobs (jobs were not mentioned for privacy). Many of the old had comorbidity.
If you read the actual papers and not the press releases on "long-covid" .. it's really small groups, and honestly, it could easily be nocebo or hysteria. It could be a real effect too (like lymes disease, where the immune system continues to overreact after the infection is gone).
It's really way too early to tell. Also, ANY virus can lead to permanent neurological damage in the elderly. It can happen for things that are minor infections for 30 year olds.
> In what way does thousands of people self-reporting new and ongoing medical issues after a positive COVID diagnosis not constitute evidence that this is happening?
What we see every single day in society by massive amounts of people. People getting ill from nocebos.
Given the issues we know around self-reporting why on earth would you believe it?
And given the massive amounts of hours and funding put into the coronavirus, the missing clinical data matters.
Getting away from the trolling of the op, pretending they didn't know about the deaths.
We know being on a respirator will cause damage. We know antibiotics or steroids or whatever causes damage. We know being in a coma will cause damage.
What's being talked about is new/additional/unknown damage caused by this virus. The real data on this is slim.
> We know being on a respirator will cause damage. We know antibiotics or steroids or whatever causes damage. We know being in a coma will cause damage.
> What's being talked about is new/additional/unknown damage caused by this virus. The real data on this is slim.
We know that similar viruses (e.g. SARS-COV-1) can cause long term damage to heart/lungs. We know that several viruses can cause post-viral chronic fatigue.
> The real data on this is slim.
I think what most people are calling for is more investigation into this. And in the meantime some caution is warranted regarding the possibility.
> several viruses can cause post-viral chronic fatigue
Right, and with over 95% of fatalities being people over 55, we know this virus affects the elderly disproportionally.
Furthermore, TONS of infections cause major neurological damages, strokes and other conditions in the elderly, which rarely (but sometimes) affects young people as well. A minor fungal infection can leave you with complications that lead to permanent disability.
What we are attributing to CoV2 may just be people who were alright at high risk for any infection, taking a particularly hit to this one.
Then please post some of that evidence. Evidence, not anecdotes -- of course there are individual cases among millions of infected, that doesn't mean it's a phenomenon worth caring about.
It is not impossible to monitor an adequate number of people who had Covid and see if they are getting better. If their state plateaus, that is evidence their condition may be permanent.
Experimental vaccine? I disagree.
Nearly 45,000 people have taken this vaccine, and they have been monitored for months to make sure no adverse reactions have happened.
Combine that with the fact that we live in 2020, and that our knowledge of vaccine science is much better than it was just a couple of decades ago, and it's hard to believe that this is an "experimental" vaccine.
45,000 doesn't scale up to 100 million or a few billions. The Swing Flu vaccine left major neurological problems in over 4,000 people, many of which were paid out in law suits. We still have vaccine courts.
Thankfully, the US antivax movement is not as strong in the rest of the world, and thankfully not everyone needs to be vaccinated for the R0 figure to drop considerably.
If cretins don't want to be vaccinated, it's their loss.
This isn't "antivax" ... Are all drugs that have been approve effective and safe? Including Viox?
We have had bad vaccines before (The 1960s Swing Flu) that lead to serious complications.
I got most of my shots (MMR, Polio, Meningitis, Hep B, Tetanus booster, etc.), but I would NOT take this one. It's been rushed through the process, and vaccine safety takes years. This is a brand new type of vaccine (mRNA), a type that has never been successfully deployed before, for a virus family that's never had a successful vaccine before.
Stop dismissing legitimate concerns as "antivax". Each vaccine is very different.
I'm not at high risk (<40) and I'm also a software engineer who has watched millions in losses from badly designed, badly implemented, rushed software. Skipping the 8 ~ 10 year set of standard tests for this vaccine does not increase my confidence.
I'll wait until I turn 48~49 and watch what happens with all the volunteers first before making my assessment based on all the available data.
Given that there will be a limited number of initial doses, healthy people have the luxury of taking a "wait and see" approach. It will be interesting to see if vaccines are mandated generally or for travel.
"However, there are logistical challenges as the vaccine has to be kept in ultra-cold storage at below minus 80C."
Does anyone know how many of the other vaccine candidates have this limitation? It seems to me that a vaccine with easier logistics might still end up having a bigger impact overall, despite not being the first - although that of course needs to be combined with the ease of production too (I don't know how easy it is to mass produce these new RNA vaccines compared to more traditional ones).
I know that several of the vaccine candidates require similarly cold storage for their entire distribution cycle until they are being used. Disclaimer: I work for big pharma.
low temp storage was also required for the ebola vaccine and yet it was successfully administered to more than quarter of a million people in equatorial Africa
The virus is (heavily) mutating folks.
Heavy mutations likely related to recombination with rhino-viruses.
This vaccine will likely be outdated when generally available.
There are reported cases of people who built up immunity against the Chinese strain and got infected with the European strain while still having antibodies for the first one.
Danish are killing 17M minks because of a novel mutation that infected 12 people (reported).
Everybody also produces different antibodies, potentially targeting different aspects of the virus. Having a vaccine means you can make sure everyone gets the 'right' antibodies that generalize the best.
Rate of mutations is directly proportional to number of viruses out there. We're having exponential growth in the amount of COVID19 (with a slow exponent, with social distancing, but exponential none-the-less). That we've seen mutations back when there was a tiny fraction of the cases we have today is a very bad sign.
If it jumps species, as we saw with mink, we may have a reservoir in nature with no control. It will mutate and periodically jump back to humans.
> The data released by Pfizer Monday was delivered in a news release, not a peer-reviewed medical journal. It is not conclusive evidence that the vaccine is safe and effective, and the initial finding of more than 90 percent efficacy could change as the trial goes on.
The title is quite sensationalistic for such preliminary results. Especially when they have only been reviewed by an "outside panel of experts" [1] who sometimes have undisclosed conflict of interests.
It's a highly formalized clinical trial, it would be nonsensical to misrepresent or exaggerate the results. The preliminary analysis is based on 94 cases; not a huge number, but totally reasonable to draw conclusions from.
My point was the validation and peer-review. There are many possible confounding factors, including isolation and mask use.
Also I might have misread the protocol, since I'm no medical scientist, but wasn't the efficacy of the vaccine measured only in a 1 month timespan? Are we even sure the effects are long lasting?
I just don't want to get the hopes too high too soon. The crash after a positivity high can be quite bad. Reuters is even live streaming Wall Street because of this announcement!
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 417 ms ] threadWe have seen mutations due to minks recently which could make the vaccinations ineffective. These mutations might have been controlled but similar situations may arise in the next years.
For these reasons I am not entirely sure this is the beginning of the end.
So I think it's somewhat likely that we'll see mutations emerge all over the world.
Whether this vaccine works depends on how early we get most people vaccinated. It may only be a short term patch, which we will see once it's rolled out, you can't really predict the long term without any measurements.
Regardless of whether the mutations are significant enough to affect vaccine efficacy, it won't likely be a problem. These new mRNA vaccines have a development/production time measured in weeks and months, not years. It changes vaccines from a hardware problem to a software problem. Once the underlying delivery technology is proven safe and effective, reacting to new strains will be as swift as patching a codebase. It's hard to overstate what a massive advance in vaccine tech is happening here.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243
The basic idea is that now rather than needing to culture live viruses in chicken eggs, we can literally just encode the RNA for a specific antigen into a synthetic substrate and produce vaccines through a chemical process like any other drug. The RNA is then absorbed into your cells, and your own body creates the proteins which stimulate an immune response.
What's more, any new strains we do see spreading more widely will do so because their mutations confer a competitive advantage. In practice that usually means more drift towards higher infectiousness but less severe symptoms - the same mechanisms that have left us with 4 other endemic but mild common cold coroanviruses.
The new SARS-COV-2 vaccines may be a useful tool to get us over this hump where the virus is still novel to a large proportion of the population, but are unlikely to be required indefinitely.
This is why OP is asking and mentioning the minks in Denmark.
My point is that the market overreacts to every piece of good or bad news, then settles down as the full implications become clear. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the vaccine, how we handle rollout, etc etc etc. That’s not really considered in immediate reactions like this, it’s all gut feeling.
Really puts the nails in coffin of the whole "we're gonna work more remotely after the pandemic" narrative.
^ check the pre-trading price
Zoom was 500 at close yesterday, in premarket trading it's dropped 13% to 435.
Nasdaq open at 1430 GMT
Because of day traders and HFT, it's hard to say how long your average investor holds a stock, but it's fair to say that some hold it for a long time and others "speculate" most of the time. The speculators probably have a greater impact on the movement of a stock, but over time it must move in line with the performance of the company.
The price of a stock is thought to be a "risk adjusted present value" of the underlying company. Even if you could be 100% sure a company would make X dollars per year in perpetuity, the price would not be infinite. Instead each year of earnings is "discounted" by risk, inflation rate, the cost of borrowing money, the value of competing investments, and other factors.
If it was assumed by investors that Zoom would make lots of money for the next 5 years, and then make very little money, and this news meant they would only make lots of money for the next 3 years, then that will have an impact of 2 years worth of discounted earnings immediately.
(of course it's not like Zoom pays or is planning to pay a dividends but there's still an underlying value, for instance they could be purchased by a larger company that does pay dividends.)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-short-...
Thanks for putting it so succinctly. I really hope someone who knows a thing or two about the efficient market hypothesis can elighten us a bit.
I really appreciate the guidance as I'm quite new to it. Especially so because you're enthusiastic about this book :D
When the defining event actually occurs, it will either move from $125 to $50, or $125 to $200.
So the news event in this example is priced in at $125, but there is still scope for big moves when certainty is realised.
Obviously in real life the values are never as certain. In the above example if the stocks ever trades < $125 before the event, you would make money in the long run.
EMH shouldn't be taken seriously as the market actors are compromised of irrational humans.
The same thing happened to Hertz, which even after declaring bankruptcy and almost certainly being worthless continued to trade at a healthy volume. In fact, Hertz tried to get approval to dilute and sell more shares to capitalize off the fact that people were buying their worthless stock.
When will one be developed?
How effective will it be?
Will it have any negative side effects?
How hard will it be to manufacture and distribute?
All of these are important questions that were hard to predict. Today's announcement sheds some light on possible answers to these questions, so this new information is being priced into the market.
Zoom has been doing up ~500% this year. The large fluctuations are expected. Online learning/work will continue to grow regardless of a vaccine. It's not going to be in a crazy rate like it has been this year because of covid. I'm not even talking about companies, cause that's a no brainer. I'm talking about education and hospitals. For example, the convenience of having a virtual appointment is great for both doctors and patients and it's not going away no matter what.
My opinion about Zoom. Selling because of a vaccine is pretty stupid. You should sell if you think they are over valued and not be able to compete with the big companies long term. One thing to pay attention to is their future plans. If they don't have plans to expand their product line I would worry long term. There's no problem for a company to pay for Zoom for video calls and for another company for things like slack/docs etc. But when you have companies like Google/Microsoft who package and integrate everything together, and can give you a good price for it too, then it's a concern. Google/Microsoft make many subpar products, and this year zoom showed it nicely. But they keep copying the important features and will eventually close the gap.
All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades.
Not trying to diminish the accomplishments achieved, great effort nontheless. Just saying nobody started from zero here, that would have been insane and frankly impossible.
Yes, I first heard about intramuscular nucleic acid injection around the year 2000. At the time it was naked DNA and not RNA in a lipid nanoparticle suspension, but the principle was the same.
They might be working on this particular vaccine since 2020, but AFAIK they have been working on the specific principle the vaccine uses since 2008.
If we could somehow develop rapid testing in some way, it's shocking to me that the vaccine could have entered mass production by the Summer.
There was a time where the only true way to test a new model Aircraft was to build one, but nowadays pretty much every characteristic is well understood by the time it enters service. To reach a similar point with vaccine testing will be important when the next pandemic hits.
I'm not yet but hoping to be...
> They are neither wise nor competent
That's me again, but doesn't preclude my success...
However this 1995 paper (1) indicates that the S&P 500 behavior does "Granger Cause" changes in USA GDP. i.e changes in S&P 500 does predict changes in GDP from 1 to 3 quarters out. So that's the one legitimate reason to be encouraged by rising markets. Perhaps the woman who cuts my hair will be able to get off food stamps by spring.
1. https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?redir=1&a...
There has been other vaccine news in the past which my friends/family talk about excitedly but the broader market didn't budge much.
I don't see any problem in using it a general barometer for this sort of news.
Or are you lamenting that much attention is given to something that is primarily driven by wealthy organizations? I guess I might sympathize with you there.
Glad you asked. No, "the markets" are not simply a handful of rich people, banks and large corporations. The markets are also more than just "stocks."
In fact, the majority of "the markets" is actually bonds, and most of those bonds are debt issued by nearly all the countries of the world (sovereign bonds). I think roughly 80 Trillion dollars, but don't quote me.
If you live in a country with roads, infrastructure, buildings, etc.--then the markets are responsible for everything around you.
But you seem to be complaining about stocks since they get the most media attention, so let's look at those.
You may not realize it, but the future of every single country with a socialized pension system, sovereign wealth fund, etc. depends on the returns of global stocks. They make up only a portion of most pension portfolios, but deliver nearly all of the returns. Everybody has a stake in them even if they don't realize it.
Are the markets all-knowing or perfectly efficient? Of course not. But it's literally the only place where you can measure how a global herd of humans are feeling about the state of the world at any given time with a single number. This makes it a default reference for journalists to cite, ie. "thing happened, this is what the humans and their algorithms collectively think about it."
The journalists are often wrong and don't understand what's happening, but this case seems to be pretty straightforward.
See, this kind of thing really gets to me. Here's you circa 1290: "If you live in a fiefdom with wells, irrigation, castles, etc. -- then your Lord is responsible for everything around you." See how fallacious that sounds when you transpose it this way?
The central issue is that you're justifying a thing from the context of the thing itself. You're explaining modern capitalism from the framework of modern capitalism. It's circular, and you get ridiculous things like "the markets built the roads". Ahm, no, workers built the roads!
>Are the markets all-knowing or perfectly efficient? Of course not. But it's literally the only place where you can measure how a global herd of humans are feeling about the state of the world at any given time with a single number.
They are a weighted way of seeing how some humans are feeling about things. A number that gives as much weight to 8 guys as it does to 3.7 billion. It's a pretty shitty indicator, I'd say.
Of course it sounds fallacious--you've constructed a straw man out of my original argument.
There's nothing circular about the concept of debt. It's a fundamental aspect of how our economy works. The way debt is raised is through markets. Again, this is not a controversial or political statement.
Of course workers built the roads. And they were paid to build those roads by debt raised via bond markets. Governments and organizations use debt to bring the future into the present and amortize large investments over long periods of time. The liquidity and demand for this debt in the global markets allows them to do this.
No marketplace for debt = no way to reliably execute big infrastructure projects for all but the richest of countries. The market (the demand for debt) is literally the enabler.
Nothing I've said here is a mischaracterization of reality.
> It's a pretty shitty indicator, I'd say.
Again, I'm not advocating that short term financial market gyrations have any explanatory power for the future. I'm simply explaining why journalists use it: because it's easy.
Well that's because it's true. No human-collective entity is entirely evil, because otherwise nothing would get done. Look at all the evils of FAANG; yet they still pay their employees and have restrooms.
I'd argue that has a lot more to do with the election uncertainty being over with. This is incredibly promising news, but probably not enough to account for SP500 jumping 400 points this morning.
More generally, The DOW is way up, S&P up moderately, and NASDAQ only up a little bit. That looks like it may well be a result of vaccine news to me, which is less good for the big tech companies that make up the NASDAQ than the broader set of companies tracked by the DOW and S&P. I would expect an election related bump to have pretty equal effects on all three indices.
The vaccine reportedly needs to be held in storage at -94° Fahrenheit (-70°c), and will last for only 24 hours at refrigerated temps between 35.6° and 46.4°. (about 2° to 8° c)
from https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/pfizer-moderna-s-...
"BioNTech CEO expects vaccine can be fridge-stored for two weeks"
"Speaking at an online media briefing on the purchase of an additional German production site, Chief Executive Ugur Sahin said tests have recently confirmed the genetic compound remains stable at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius for five days but he expects storability at those conditions to be two weeks or longer."
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-biontech-...
Even very small cities will have liquid nitrogen facilities. Shipping from the nearest city to most of the population sounds very doable in 24 hours.
Remember you only need to get most of the population to halt the spread. If there's some tiny village 3 days hike away in the rainforest, you can skip them.
Shipping at -10C is a major logistical challenge. Mentally it doesn't sound like like much, but that's envisioning a single vial to a single patient. Multiply that by one million and deliveries to not only NYC but to Booneville, Louisiana. Temperature excursions mean spoiled product - product that gets thrown out. -80C is way harder than -20C (there are no vaccines today that require -80C).
You can’t just throw it on dry ice and say “we’re good”. Even just packing it is complicated. You have a pallet sized box with 20,000 doses. You put it in a box and surround it with dry ice. Are all the vials the same temperature after 2 hours? Are you sure? You need temperature monitoring at multiple points in the package so you know when it’s been spoiled.
Your delivery gets held up for 12 hours at customs, are all the vials still -80C? Are you sure? What do you do when you deliver to hospital and find out they don’t have -80C storage, even though they said they did? Do you have an intermediary storage facility you can bring it to until you figure out a solution?
Do you have monitoring after it’s been delivered so it doesn’t spoil before administration? Correct thawing procedures? What happens if a dose is thawed and the patient doesn’t show up and it sits at room temp for an hour? Just throw it out? Or is it still good? Are you sure?
And to add on top of all this - you (as the manufacturer) might have all this figured out, but you need to make sure everyone along the logistics chain does too. Guaranteed you'd send emails and letters in advance, and have massive yellow stickers all over the shipment that says "Must be stored at -80C" and you'll have a customer call you a week later asking if the product that's been sitting at -10C is still good.
Here is a document from WHO that will tell you way more than you’d ever want to know about cold chain distribution. There is an entire section on how to appropriately stack the vaccine vials in the freezer so they stay the right temperature. Yeah, it's that complicated.
https://www.who.int/immunization/documents/IIP2015_Module2.p...
Even cold chain for today’s products is really fucking hard.
Derek Lowe had a good quote on this:
"Pfizer has provided these details to the CDC about shipping and storage of their candidate: the vaccine can be shipped in “dry ice pack” boxes, but that dry ice will need to be replenished within 24 hours of receipt. The shipping carton needs to be closed within one minute of opening, and not opened more than twice per day. Vaccine vials, once removed, can be kept at refrigerator temperatures for up to 24 hours or at room temperature for no more than 2 hours after thawing. So this is going to take a very organized approach to make sure that the vaccine is handled properly without wastage. We’re looking at a lot of dry ice and a lot of orders for ultra-cold freezers if this is the candidate that gets heavy nationwide distribution. And mind you, I’m talking about organized distribution in Little Rock and Long Beach. What about La Paz and Lahore? What about Lubumbashi? Even back inside the US, what’s the nearest source of dry ice in Shiprock, New Mexico or Oceana, West Virginia?"
But it's something that poor countries manage to do successfully with a reasonable reliability even on rural areas.
I am sure there will be plenty of new problems for that lower temperature. And a number of smart people will have to work really hard to solve them, a large amount of money will change hands and all that.
But I think the GP's point is that it's doable. It doesn't need any sci-fi tech or any large restructuring of humanity (and we already did some of the later for this virus).
This is definitely false - refrigerated trailers are pretty normal. A lot of goods are shipped in similar trailers.
That's why their are specialist delivery services for cold chain. And cold chain medicine is way more complex than say, cold chain food.
Developing a safe and effective vaccine -- fundamentally hard. Developing a nuclear weapon -- fundamentally hard. Developing a quantum computer -- fundamentally hard.
Shipping something cold at a large scale? Hard, but not fundamentally hard. We'll solve it. There's no fucking way the vaccine effort is stopped by refrigeration needs.
That’s what’s incorrect. Yes, it’s not “put a man on the moon hard”, but you’re really underestimating how difficult it is.
I’ve worked in drug distribution for a few years and you’d be surprised the challenges to getting a room temperature drug to a patient in a developed country. None of the steps are hard, but when you introduce humans into the mix things go poorly pretty quickly.
Getting a -80C drug transported to a 2nd tier city in sub-Saharan Africa is not “easy”. Unless you’re willing to have half (or more) of your product spoil. Based on the demand and urgency for a vaccine for Covid, we can’t spare even 1 dose to spoilage.
Yes, it’s not a “we can’t figure this out” problem, but it’s a big enough problem to really bottleneck distribution. It’s going to take some pretty smart logistics people to make sure the process works all the way from Pfizer’s distribution center to the patient’s body.
I wonder if this experience has led to developments to speed up the development process (without compromising on safety); I hope so, because this is not the first and will not be the last time we see a worldwide pandemic like this.
EDIT: See child comment re: Pfizer press release.
EDIT 2: See [1] for said press release, which has more detailed information than the BBC article.
[1] https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-det...
"Vaccine efficacy is the percentage reduction of disease in a vaccinated group of people compared to an unvaccinated group"
So basically a 90% reduction in Covid infection.
https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson3/section6.html
So "disease" is probably an infection there, not relatively milder infection.
90% still crushes the transmission rate.
Unfortunately, there's yet another property of vaccine performance: some prevent the virus from reaching any level of footing in the host, others only make the body's eventual response stronger, preventing initial footing to cause heavy illness. SARS2-COV is rather peculiar in how its transmission performance is particularly strong in early, mostly presymptomatic stages, so it's perfectly possible to end up with a vaccine that reliably protects carriers from disease, but does not remove them from the spread equations at all, or only very little.
Pfizer is saying that their vaccine is effective at protecting against CoVID-19 disease. They haven't said anything about preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection yet, as far as I can see. The difference is important, because there are vaccines (such as the Salk polio vaccine) that only protect against disease, but not against infection. People get infected and pass on the virus without ever getting sick, so there's no herd immunity.
I'm just saying how you can have a single person that's 90% immune to something vs. Having 90% of people immune against one strain of a virus.
I admit I know very little on how immunity to diseases work, but I imagine that with viruses there is a chance it'll progress to a full blown infection even if you are vaccinated in some cases.
Hasn't this virus already mutated to a bunch of different strands? Could it mean you're immune to 90% of the known variations of the virus?
What are you basing that on, when there are known cases of people getting coronavirus and then still contracting the other strain of it?
A patient must present a infection and the particular virus must be sequenced, and then present with an infection later on where the virus is again sequenced and identified as sufficiently different from the first sample. Otherwise it cannot be deemed a re-infection.
If these small differences in the genomic sequence are already a different strand, I don't know, not an expert. But all 5 (?) cases known so far had a different sequence identified the second time.
> The genomes of the patient’s virus samples from April and June displayed significant genetic differences between them, suggesting that the patient was infected twice by 2 distinct COVID-19 infections.
I’d read of known second infections that are from different strains, but scientists also question lasting immunity from COVID-19 infection because other coronaviruses are seasonal.
I was censored here for pointing out the 3 options. In reality soft lockdowns seemed to be the only wrong answer. Harsh lockdowns and no lockdowns actually provide a benefit.
Mostly because the world is not one-dimensional.
"Hard lockdown" has drastic socio-economic implications.
"No lockdown" has dramatic/catastrophic socio-economic implications. The easiest to understand: In very short time the ICUs are overrun and people die. A lot of people die.
"Soft lockdown" depends on the people to play along. Which seems more difficult than the people in charge thought it would be (and some still don't believe).
Notably I am not arguing here for what the "right" choice is. It is simply not that easy.
Is "a lot" 1% or 80%.
Hard lockdown causes 100% to suffer, but we save the 1%.
A soft lockdown causes the 100 to suffer, and we only save "flatten the curve" lives. Which according to NYT ventilator stats saves 12% of people. 1% times 12% is 0.12%.
No lockdown and 1% of old and obese people die.
As a note coronavirus is 4x more deadly than the yearly flu and kills the same demographic.
Are we overreacting on a virus that is on the same order of magnitude as a flu?
We are on track for COVID to have 10x the deaths of the seasonal flu, and that is after the effects of the significant interventions that have happened here and around the globe.
This is incorrect. When hospitals are overrun, healthy people can't be treated and die. The old and obese die in higher proportions even when receiving treatment, but healthy young people often need treatment to survive.
It was possible to positively identify a reinfection because the two infections were due to different strains. That was just the means of positively and objectively identify a reinfection. However, nothing was asserted regarding if the patient was immune to the first strain the first time around. In fact, it seems that the hallmark of reinfections is that they are far more critical than first infections. This also means that the first infections is far milder than the second one. Well, the thing about the immune system is that it is able to fight mild infections without developing immunity if they are too mild to trigger a full response from the immune system.
OK. The longevity of the immunity is also an issue perhaps; at least they have written articles about people becoming re-infected; so even the people who do become immune may not stay that way forever...
In my country there have been hundreds of thousands of confirmed Covid infections. There have been <100 confirmed re-infections.
It's very early to draw the conclusion that people in general don't build up lasting immunity, and there is more than enough data to support that most people do build up immunity of several months at least. If the latter wasn't true you'd see much more re-infections.
OK, some (needed) good news..
Because the reports from Denmarks Mink fiasco indicated that antibodies were not as effective on the mutation that appeared there short time ago. This would contradict the one-fits-all immunity argument.
I don't think that argument is being made at all.
In fact, you only need to consider that the max efficiency that's advertised is 90% to acknowledge that this vaccine is not a silver bullet.
For the "danish mink mutation" - even if the exception to the rule - some of the above statements might not be true.
It's the same as 'herd immunity', where each member is '90% immune' and as a result the herd is 'more immune' than if only 10% of its members were 100% immune.
"One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective against rubella.
Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps."
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html#:~:te....
I didn't see the case numbers but I've inferred to arrive at 90% that there were 9 cases in vaccinated group vs 85 in controls. (95% C.I. 80-99%)
Very interested to see forthcoming results from competitors that don't face the -80 degrees issue.
Those are the numbers that matter, statistically. If the total number of people in the study were 2 thousand or 2 billion doesn't enter into the math.
It affects confidence, and potentially the result of the test entirely. I won't be more specific because stats was never a strong suit and my memory's hazy, but I remember enough to know it matters!
It does seem low for the US where you have 3% of the population had disease already in 2020. Perhaps more data came from Germany? Or it could be they measure not just PCR +ve results, but antibody levels and/or severe symptoms?
Looking at the phase 1/2 results, the booster shot seems to help a lot in getting the antibody levels up. See Figure 4 of their paper, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2027906
The FDA is not known for its improvisational disposition :)
The challenge will be reconciling this with the antivax crowd given that as the vaccine rolls out the rate of infection will come down correspondingly among the whole population (including the unvaccinated). They'll immediately claim that the virus is "going away on it's own" as opposed to the truth, which is that potential spreaders are being steadily removed from the susceptible population due to the vaccine.
It's going to be a very slow roll out.
There's no need to completely eliminate COVID - we don't aim for the same for regular influenza. We should aim to reopen economies as soon as possible instead.
For the most part the same answer as to why you aren't making it yourself also apply to most factories in the world. Only a few have the equipment, supplies, and experience to make it.
Not withstanding the rather enormous caveat of antivaxxers. They have grown significantly in number during this pandemic what with all the wild conspiracy theories. It’s worth checking that out.
Eradicating the virus is a whole different goal, and there could be lots of different impediments to that. After all, we still get vaccinated for a large numbers of illnesses that we haven't eradicated but are just very rare. That's not a terrible endgame for COVID.
Letting this thing circulate seems dangerous given it introduces the possibility of a vaccine-resistant mutation. If anything it drives the evolution of the virus towards vaccine resistance similar to what happened with MRSA bacteria and antibiotics.
A vaccine that only prevents disease, but which does not prevent infection, does not necessarily create herd immunity.
as their primary outcome in their study registration
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728
(edit: PFE is currently trading +13% pre-market on the NYSE)
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/pfizer-biontech-s-u-s-su...
I wouldn't be surprised if the contract was only that X doses would be provided to the US market (as opposed to shipping to the market in Mexico...). In this case the government is only buying a spot in the shipping queue, and not any doses.
It could be that the doses were bought by the government only for the government (military and politicians), and the rest of us are on our own. (this seems unlikely - doctors should be first in line, but an obvious extension is the doses are for doctors/nurses and the leftover for the above)
It could be the government is buying all doses for their country and will distribute them for no extra charge. This is probably what Europe has done/will do - because they tend to have government health care for anything considered essential.
I wouldn't be surprised if all 3 of the above were in use by different countries. There is disagreement as to which is best on a political level.
So the UK will only get 10/50 Millionen doses produced this year.
False. The first vaccine was developed in Russia.
https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-det...
The rate of spreading will depend on factors such as international travel and how much people will have learned from this period. I expect/fear that everyone will try to get life as before as soon as possible, so the extra delay after the vaccine wears off might be negligible.
In reality, a vaccine is probably going to offer a lower (but if this study is true, acceptable) level of protection. I wouldn’t be surprised if the protection drops exponentially after 2 months. Similar to the live virus
Serology reports for the Moderna vaccine (very similar technology) are showing 4-5 times higher levels of antibodies than those who actually contracted the virus.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2028436
- Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis
- Analysis evaluated 94 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in trial participants
- Study enrolled 43,538 participants, with 42% having diverse backgrounds, and no serious safety concerns have been observed; Safety and additional efficacy data continue to be collected
- Submission for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) planned for soon after the required safety milestone is achieved, which is currently expected to occur in the third week of November
- Clinical trial to continue through to final analysis at 164 confirmed cases in order to collect further data and characterize the vaccine candidate’s performance against other study endpoints
What does that mean exactly? Surely a random sample of people will have diverse backgrounds.
Additional challenges in the US are that many minority communities are distrustful of the pharmaceutical industry due to historical reasons and you typically need a concentrated effort to do outreach there to actually collect enough volunteers to meet your sampling concerns.
- The Whirlpool Corporation - Electrolux AB - LG Electronics Inc.
problem is these companies have a lot of exposure to other sectors as well of course.
https://www.fishersci.com/us/en/browse/90106033/ultra-low-te...
As someone in life science research who uses plenty of -80 freezers, I've always been curious about Stirling Ultracold. Maybe they're on to something after all.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/business/coronavirus-covi...
He's mocking people who are making obvious short sighted covid-based stock plays.
Zoom -15%, Nasdaq flat, Norwegian Cruise Line +28%
Better to invest in companies that make and lease refrigerated semi-trailers, I'd think.
[1] https://downdetector.com/status/charles-schwab/
Here’s a good layperson rundown: https://www.phgfoundation.org/briefing/rna-vaccines
It's using existing building mechanism in cells to have it build a specific protein that will bind to a specific pathogen.
And lot of clinical tests to try to detect if those proteins being built have other effects than instructing the cells to create the antibodies we want.
It's roughly the same mechanism at work when you inject disabled pathogen and hoping that the cells will produce the same antibodies, it's just a faster, safer, more precise way to induce it.
Heck, it's even the same mechanism that occurs when your cells encounters a wild, random virus, like it may be happening a lot more than you think, and, well, you're still alive :)
By the way, you may be thinking under the assumption that the 'program' is the DNA, and that mRNA vaccines is changing it some way or another, which is not, this is not genetic therapy.
That scariness is exactly why we did trials for 6 months, and why 20,000+ volunteers were closely monitored for half a year to make sure this technique is not harmful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_(biology)
Serbia, where I live, has ordered this vaccine. And our medical system is far from world-class, but leaps and bounds from less developed countries, and I honestly think logistics here will not be able to match those requirements. I've seen tetanus vaccines just being kept in regular, commercial, refrigerators. There have been cases where they have been switched off because they were not on UPSs or not up to standards. Vehicles equipped for transport are an issue by itself.
What about putting it into liquid nitrogen?
-80 transport often consists of good insulation and a good chunk of dry ice instead of active measures.
I would assume that other nations will adopt similiar solutions for vaccines that have ultra-cold storage requirements.
Bitcoin over 15k, the old Yello on its way out and now Covid vaccine.
Quite the November surprise.
Also, people trust US/EU research more. They have not been very forthcoming with data. The data that has been made available has been lacking in detail or has patterns that indicate either fabrication or sloppiness.
Both countries appear to be moivated by domestic and geopolitical political purposes. The US has also being doing that, but the medical establishment and regulatory bodies in the US are seen to be more independent of government than in China or Russia. Also, this is a German result, and people trust Germany more.
Like with the diesel emissions?
What people are you talking about here? Western societies or entire world?
Not sure about the Chinese ones.
So those who claim that Russian vaccine is only on the 1/2 phase spread an outright lie. Both vaccine have approximately the same speed of development with minor differences between regulation and testing procedures.
Russian vaccine was announced back in August, when it was only on phase 1/2. In contrast phase 3 Pfizer/biontech had been well under way at that time.
Russia announced a not fully tested vaccine, proudly called it "Sputnik V". The exact words Putin used when announced it was: "As far as I know, a vaccine against a new coronavirus infection has been registered this morning, for the first time in the world". So geopolitical concerns and pride are correct assessment. No wonder it drew skepticism.
One shot is with Ad5, the other with Ad26. This is done because Ad5 is a "known" adenovirus by most population, that means that a sizable fraction has antibodies against it.
Of course, in Mother Russia it is widely believed that everyone lies more or less, and those looking to expose "the truth" generally live dangerously, often with tragic results.
Western governments are no doubt better for their own citizens than say Russia or China, but we outsiders have absolutely no reason to trust one government over the others. Russia's vaccine has only passed phase 2- now that's a good point, "Trust" absolutely isn't.
That doesn't necessarily mean it was justified, but I do think it's important to note the difference.
You think russia and china lie because of propaganda. Their citizens believe we lie because of propaganda.
Whether one views another country favorably relies entirely on propaganda.
But given how these western countries handled covid, and the fact that China has a history of fighting viruses like it- I'd rather trust a Chinese vaccine over an American one, all else being equal.
We have to stop believing that the "west" is the world. It's going to bite us in the end one day. The only thing people around the world like is wealth. As china and russia get wealthier, even that won't matter as much.
Also, this one was developed in Germany and the trial is being run in Germany and the US; people might be forgiven for trusting a combination of the EMA and FDA, who will need to approve this, somewhat more than Putin's one.
Edit/Update: "She said she learned of the results from the outside panel of experts shortly after 1 p.m. on Sunday, and that the timing was not influenced by the election."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/heal...
Edit2: I failed to realize that it was necessary to point out that the timing of this press release is interesting. I wasn't intending to imply the vaccine would be held back for any political reason.
There is some incremental work that was done toward confirming this result and typing this press release in the last week.
It’s not like they waited till last week to collect the data. They have ongoing surveillance of their entire study population.
So the difference between announcing preliminary results last week versus this week was their own internal decision on timing.
> The first analysis was to occur after 32 volunteers — both those who received the vaccine and those on placebo — had contracted Covid-19. If fewer than six volunteers in the group who received the vaccine had developed Covid-19, the companies would make an announcement that the vaccine appeared to be effective. The study would continue until at least 164 cases of Covid-19 — individuals with at least one symptom and a positive test result — had been reported.
> In their announcement of the results, Pfizer and BioNTech revealed a surprise. The companies said they had decided not to conduct the 32-case analysis “after a discussion with the FDA.” Instead, they planned to conduct the analysis after 62 cases. But by the time the plan had been formalized, there had been 94 cases of Covid-19 in the study. It’s not known how many were in the vaccine arm, but it would have to be nine or fewer.
> Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage. The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday. When the samples were tested, there were 94 cases of Covid in the trial. The DSMB met on Sunday.
Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/09/covid-19-vaccine-from-pf...
Massive corporations do have political agendas. I don't think anyone would argue they don't. But maybe it's just coincidence?
This timing is consistent with when we've been told we might see early results all along, really; it shouldn't be that surprising. Expect announcements from other teams over the next couple of months.
Odds of conspiracy, with a clear hypothesis and confirmation of that hypothesis, go up drastically. That happened here.
It wasn't a super-unlikely hypothesis either. We're talking about announcing a result a few weeks earlier versus later. That's not an unreasonable decision for a blue-leaning businessperson or scientist to make.
What reduces odds are the number of preregistrations. There were dozens about this strong.
My own prior went from 1% odds to maybe 35% odds. Yours may be different, likely based on your prior based on where you fall on the political spectrum. Right-wingers will probably go 35% to 80%, and left-wingers from 0.01% to 1%.
Intentionally murdering possibly thousands of people (or tens of thousands? or what, who knows?!) for some assumed political gain is absolutely, 100% an unreasonable decision for any human to make. Intentionally delaying a vaccine would certainly be a crime, no? Not to mention absolutely abhorrent and completely evil.
That is not a "reasonable decision" to make by any stretch of the imagination.
You mean delaying the announcement of a vaccine. They didn't delay the process.
(I note that I don't understand at all what you're asserting.)
I wrote "We're talking about announcing a result a few weeks earlier versus later."
And if that was the goal, I think it worked. It looks like Biden won by literally tens of thousands votes. An announcement a week earlier probably would have swung the election to Trump.
At a cost of zero lives.
If the vaccine works as announced, we're still weeks away from the end of the trial, and months away from widespread distribution.
I just want to make the obligatory point that the way the Trump administration has handled the Covid response in the US goes beyond red and blue ...
It's obvious to anyone willing to look at the facts, and to be honest with themselves, that this administration has done a terrible, terrible job of responding to the pandemic which has probably caused the unnecessary deaths of a lot of people.
And that's not a partisan thing to say. Or rather, it shouldn't be ...
I don't think (and find it incredibly unlikely) there's any correlation per se, but quite a few people were hoping to hear certain news on the political front and the COVID front. They heard both in a pretty short window and I'd say that and the effects nationally are interesting.
Many many people are now feeling a lot of stress relief in a short period of time. Should be interesting how this effects morale around the country.
I mean honestly, it's too eerily similar.
This is one of the vaccine Trump referred to in his debate, not sure how much it’s really useful or its another one like Sputnik and Coronavac.
I think the best details for Corona related vaccine efforts are from WHO. [1]
[1] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-c...
This is significantly colder than the standard cold logistics chain. I believe Pfizer are working on a special transport box that can, unpowered, stay at the right temperature for a week as long as the box is only opened for something like 1 minute a day.
That's a good thing, but with a capacity of I believe 10k vaccine doses, anywhere with fewer than 10k people to vaccinate, or anywhere that can't keep the demand level for the vaccine at the right level each hour/day as they progress through their vaccine stock, will have a hard time. This is going to disproportionately affect small communities and developing countries.
We've got hard logistical challenges ahead regardless of these details, but they make this even harder. Given this it's probably important that we continue to develop more vaccines and diversify our strategy for immunity.
There are parts of rural US/Australia for example where despite people having cars, they may need to take a plane to get to a vaccine treatment centre with enough density to get stock. They may not be able to afford that travel even if the vaccine is free.
Much of the African population is spread over small communities where roads may not be reliable, let alone car access. If your minimum distributable unit is 10k vaccines, as it looks like it could be to begin with, that rules out a significant number of the population.
so perhaps the infrastructure requirements will relax as time goes on
This is the actual Cure without a magic needle:
* Hrdroxy chloroquine (HCQ) and Azithromycin for 6 days cures a person
Take 2 200mg HCQ chloroquine pills per day, along with Azithromycin 500g once a day, + Zinc Supplments 200mg once a day
Also supplment that with Vit C+D
Above is 100% cure rate no magic needle
According to Google, 1.26M deaths and counting. If dying is not permanent damage, I'm not sure what is.
Clinical trials are not the only form of evidence.
I've read the UK study published from the publisher in Charlottesville and it's a case study of ~60 people (and there are 8 individual cause studies from that study) and almost all of them were either over 55, or were in high risk jobs (jobs were not mentioned for privacy). Many of the old had comorbidity.
If you read the actual papers and not the press releases on "long-covid" .. it's really small groups, and honestly, it could easily be nocebo or hysteria. It could be a real effect too (like lymes disease, where the immune system continues to overreact after the infection is gone).
It's really way too early to tell. Also, ANY virus can lead to permanent neurological damage in the elderly. It can happen for things that are minor infections for 30 year olds.
What we see every single day in society by massive amounts of people. People getting ill from nocebos.
Given the issues we know around self-reporting why on earth would you believe it?
And given the massive amounts of hours and funding put into the coronavirus, the missing clinical data matters.
Getting away from the trolling of the op, pretending they didn't know about the deaths.
We know being on a respirator will cause damage. We know antibiotics or steroids or whatever causes damage. We know being in a coma will cause damage.
What's being talked about is new/additional/unknown damage caused by this virus. The real data on this is slim.
We know that similar viruses (e.g. SARS-COV-1) can cause long term damage to heart/lungs. We know that several viruses can cause post-viral chronic fatigue.
> The real data on this is slim.
I think what most people are calling for is more investigation into this. And in the meantime some caution is warranted regarding the possibility.
Right, and with over 95% of fatalities being people over 55, we know this virus affects the elderly disproportionally.
Furthermore, TONS of infections cause major neurological damages, strokes and other conditions in the elderly, which rarely (but sometimes) affects young people as well. A minor fungal infection can leave you with complications that lead to permanent disability.
What we are attributing to CoV2 may just be people who were alright at high risk for any infection, taking a particularly hit to this one.
Denying such is wildly irresponsible and hostile to the community.
Stop trolling.
Good day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bOHYZhL0WQ
45,000 doesn't scale up to 100 million or a few billions. The Swing Flu vaccine left major neurological problems in over 4,000 people, many of which were paid out in law suits. We still have vaccine courts.
If cretins don't want to be vaccinated, it's their loss.
We have had bad vaccines before (The 1960s Swing Flu) that lead to serious complications.
I got most of my shots (MMR, Polio, Meningitis, Hep B, Tetanus booster, etc.), but I would NOT take this one. It's been rushed through the process, and vaccine safety takes years. This is a brand new type of vaccine (mRNA), a type that has never been successfully deployed before, for a virus family that's never had a successful vaccine before.
Stop dismissing legitimate concerns as "antivax". Each vaccine is very different.
I'm not at high risk (<40) and I'm also a software engineer who has watched millions in losses from badly designed, badly implemented, rushed software. Skipping the 8 ~ 10 year set of standard tests for this vaccine does not increase my confidence.
I'll wait until I turn 48~49 and watch what happens with all the volunteers first before making my assessment based on all the available data.
Does anyone know how many of the other vaccine candidates have this limitation? It seems to me that a vaccine with easier logistics might still end up having a bigger impact overall, despite not being the first - although that of course needs to be combined with the ease of production too (I don't know how easy it is to mass produce these new RNA vaccines compared to more traditional ones).
I assume you aren't injecting people with something at -80C. How big of a window is there for injections?
https://www.labrepco.com/product-category/cold-storage-produ...
I get Stelara injections every three months; one milliliter is $10k, and that can't be spread out across anyone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kivu_Ebola_epidemic#Vaccinatio...
should be quite doable
Danish are killing 17M minks because of a novel mutation that infected 12 people (reported).
If it jumps species, as we saw with mink, we may have a reservoir in nature with no control. It will mutate and periodically jump back to humans.
The title is quite sensationalistic for such preliminary results. Especially when they have only been reviewed by an "outside panel of experts" [1] who sometimes have undisclosed conflict of interests.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/health/covid-vaccine-pfiz...
Also I might have misread the protocol, since I'm no medical scientist, but wasn't the efficacy of the vaccine measured only in a 1 month timespan? Are we even sure the effects are long lasting?
I just don't want to get the hopes too high too soon. The crash after a positivity high can be quite bad. Reuters is even live streaming Wall Street because of this announcement!