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First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

248 points by Urgo 6y ago

thisistheend123 6y ago
I live in India. I am already hearing companies offering planned month long vacation tours to UK/US where you could get yourself vaccinated with vaccines that aren't available in India.
- m1gu3l 6y ago
  not surprising. i am shocked people aren’t hawking fakes on the dark net yet.
  - oxfordmale 6y ago
    I am sure my Junk email box is full with offers for private vaccination already
    - jfengel 6y ago
      I just checked, and I didn't see any. The closest was an offer for KN95 masks. (Though this is GMail, which I think has started to just auto-delete a lot of the worst stuff. My spam folder now gets spams-per-day rather than kilospams-per-day.)
- mantap 6y ago
  The Pfizer vaccine won't be available privately in UK, not for a long time. So I think they will be disappointed.
  - checker659 6y ago
    What stops pfizer from selling directly to customers?
    - bencoder 6y ago
      Probably the billions that governments have paid for their place in the queue
      - checker659 6y ago
        India alone has 759k millionaires. Assuming each has a family of four, and they’re willing to pay just $500 for a two shot course on an exclusive basis (say). That alone will be make pfizer about 1.58 billion dollars. There are 13555k millionaires outside of Europe and US. The 1.9 billion paid by the US government for 100million viles pales in front of what pfizer could earn by catering to the rich. So, again, my question stands, why wouldn’t pfizer sell directly to customers? What binds them to just deal with governments alone? I ask this as a humble non-millionaire (just to clarify that I wouldn’t benefit from such a scheme in any way) :)
        jayflux 6y ago
        Do you honestly think Pfizer would come off well (PR wise) if they put millionaires in the front of the queue for cash? At a time when vulnerable people are dying? The $1.58bn wouldn’t be worth sinking their entire brand, not even close.
        howlgarnish 6y ago
        Pfizer doesn't have to do anything. The vaccines will be sent all over the world, all destined for reputable hospitals where they're intended to be used for elderly transgender orphans with pre-existing conditions working in COVID ICUs. However, some shipments will mysteriously fall off the truck on the way there, and will resurface at private hospitals for the elite who can and will pay large quantities for them.
        jeromegv 6y ago
        They are already sold out. There’s no spare. And yes they can sell to millionaire but states purchases millions of doses at a Time, not 5.
- mhandley 6y ago
  The vaccine is not available privately in the UK. If you're not registered with the NHS, you're probably not going to be able to get vaccinated in the UK anytime soon. Even if you are registered, you will probably have to wait til late spring if you're under 50 with no underlying health issues.
  - Beggers1960 6y ago
    This. The idea that people are planning 'vaccine holidays' is bizarre.
    - zwp 6y ago
      Perhaps it is a scam?
      - alibarber 6y ago
        It's absolutely is either an outright scam or just crafty marketing off the back of this. The comment says 'vaccines that aren't available in India' of which I'm sure there may well be plenty, just not necessarily the COVID one.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      I'm sure people are planning one. That doesn't mean they will be successful. Most of the people with enough money to do this are alert for scams (though they might decide it is 80% chance of scam and decide to risk it anyway), so they will be looking to see if they will get the vaccine in the end, and if they don't think you will deliver they won't go. I would expect anyone who gets a "black market" vaccine gets one of the not approved (yet) vaccines. That supply is sitting around and probably not tracked as much. Break into a warehouse (often with insider help, possibly at high levels such that most people in the company help you because your alibi checks out), get a supply, then send it to your black market buddies. Pfizer has a legal market now and will do everything to ship to that market. Moderna is close enough that they won't risk it. The Oxford vaccine has a lot of companies who can make it and an uncertain future (60% effective when there is a 95%?) so it is the most likely candidate, for this. Russia also is making a vaccine that they might be willing to sell like this. China might as well, but I find it unlikely as they have other markets. Of course this whole paragraph is pure speculation: anything is possible.
- peteretep 6y ago
  That seems bizarre — you’re much more likely to be able to get it privately in India or Thailand or any other country that has good healthcare for the rich and few qualms about allowing people to buy in private stock. Much easier to pay $500 to a private clinic in Mumbai than fly to the West and hope that you can convince the state to provide it
  - robjan 6y ago
    The state will not provide it to non-residents. As soon as you arrive in the UK, immigration stamps "no recourse to public funds" in black all-caps into your passport as a friendly reminder.
    - dTal 6y ago
      In this specific instance, you're probably right that there will be paperwork. However, in general, acute healthcare in free in the UK and does not even require ID. I don't know if that's how it's "meant" to be, but that's how it is; if you're on vacation in the UK and something bad happens, you can just turn up at the nearest hospital and it will get sorted out, no bill no fuss.
      - peteretep 6y ago
        How it’s “meant” to be is that you’re asked for where you’re registered, and your NHS records are pulled up, and if you’re not registered at a GP practice or in the NHS system you get a bill
        improbable22 6y ago
        But I think there are some exceptions for communicable diseases, which they will treat without attempting to bill you. I doubt vaccination would fall under that but don't really know.
        dTal 6y ago
        That's not what happens, though. You can just say "I'm not registered with a GP" (and many people aren't), and you will still be treated - no bill.
- alibarber 6y ago
  Is this not just cynical marketing? Sure, there are likely to be plenty of vaccines one could get in the UK/US that aren't available easily in India or elsewhere. But you/they didn't say anything about the COVID one...
- ulfw 6y ago
  I'd be up for it, no doubt. Hong Kong doesn't seem interested to vaccinate people before 2022ish. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3112750/coronavirus-hong-kong-infectious-disease-expert https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic...
aphextron 6y ago
A 90 year old woman in a nursing home is not spreading COVID. Wouldn't it make more sense to give this to people who are most at risk of spreading it, not dying from it? Why wouldn't we go at the root cause of the pandemic; young healthy asymptomatic spreaders?
- robotfelix 6y ago
  While I would certainly hope that it prevents spread too, I believe that the vaccine is only proven to prevent Covid-19 (the disease), and not to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes it).
- dbbk 6y ago
  The vaccine isn't proven to prevent spread.
- nojito 6y ago
  Because stopping the elderly from overwhelming the health infrastructure needs to be step 1. ICU beds are extremely expensive.
  - oxfordmale 6y ago
    At this age, you don't get admitted to an ICU bed
    - nobrains 6y ago
      No, you do, because no matter the age, the family members still want to have a chance of survival of their loved one. My distant relative (70 year old) was in ICU for 30 days, and on ventilator for 14 days. Yes, that is a very long time for ventilator usage, and every day more on a ventilator increases the death rate probability percentage.
      - oxfordmale 6y ago
        At the age of 90, your lungs are too fragile to be put on a ventilator. It was one of the reasons academics overestimated the number of ventilators required for COVID.
durnygbur 6y ago
The pharma industry is one of the dodgiest of them all and requires rather red taping than hasty short paths. Remind me in two months. Will they write down the vaccination into the WHO vaccination booklet? [1] I'm not installing an app for this. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Internationaler_Impfausweis.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Internat...
ck2 6y ago
Good luck to the average person getting it in the USA before March. Even with half the population refusing it because the anti-vax people might be even more crazy than the anti-maskers. Which makes you wonder which country will have covid longest.
- lagadu 6y ago
  All countries will have covid forever[0]: it's an endemic disease to nearly all continents now, much like the flu or aids. [0]for values of "forever" that don't go into the far future where viruses may have a cure or an effective form of erradication.
  - peteretep 6y ago
    The reason we have AIDS is because vaccination against HIV is very difficult and expensive. I don’t see how this generalises to all viruses? Several viruses have been eradicated, and several more have been effectively eradicated in countries with functioning healthcare
  - idnefju 6y ago
    Australia doesn’t have it. Wasn’t impossible, just had to stop air travel and lockdown for a period. Now the only people with COVID are returned Australian travellers from overseas who have to go on hotel quarantine
    - paublyrne 6y ago
      It's likely this will change next year when Australia lifts quarantining. It will be considered an acceptable risk given that most people will not be vulnerable to it.
    - walkingolof 6y ago
      Helps to have no land borders, not saying Australia didn’t do a great job curbing it ..
      - 6y ago
mikepechadotcom 6y ago
I feel like mRNA vaccines have huge potential, but I am really, really concerned about potential side effects. Does anyone know which other helper-substances are inside the vaccine, besides the RNA?
- cpfohl 6y ago
  Adjuvants in modern vaccines are extraordinarily well studied and safe. Current side effects include 6-24 hours of feeling totally crappy. Still beats Covid-19...
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    How modern is "modern" here? Because the whole Pandermix saga happened only a decade ago and some are pointing towards the combination of the adjuvant and antigen: https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3948/rr-22 https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3948/rr-22 Considering that this doesn't seem to be a settled question, I'm not so sure that it makes sense to blindly trust that everything will be alright in the current, rushed, case.
    - acqq 6y ago
      The whole Pandermix risk is much smaller than the risks in the current pandemics. Narcolepsy is very rare disease and even increased risk due to that vaccine remains very low as absolute value and it only appears high if it's expressed as a relative number. In establishing the shorter-term safety nothing was "rushed" now compared to the processes performed before (it was tested on tens of thousands of people). Regarding the longer-term safety, who would be willing to wait e.g. two more years before any vaccine could be used? As the vaccination will be voluntary for common people, as long at there are shortages, those who don't want to get it should indeed leave it to those who will.
      - acqq 6y ago
        To elaborate the absolute numbers: around 1 in 55000 vaccinated were affected by the side effects in two years, so even if everybody in the UK was vaccinated with something causing such side effects, that translates to 1200 with the side effects. To compare, there were more than 70,000 excess deaths in the UK since start of pandemics. Around 60 times more deaths than, in the case of vaccine, those still living with side effects. But these side effects were apparently the strongest in just a part of the population: 4-18, which is 11 million, resulting is estimated 200 people with side effects. Covid-19 luckily affects exactly that part of population less, but even then I'd guess that Covid-19 already made more damage to more than 200 people in it. And that small number of cases just can't be detected unless the trial covers enough of those affected. If the total effect is 200 cases in the whole population, a trial would have to be performed on at least one 20th of it: as much as 600,000 children would have to be a part of the trial to even detect that issue. Not to mention that it took two years to recognize the issue. Now, for the trial to recognize the problem, half would have to be placebo group. That gives once all outside of the trial are counted 97.5% of people unprotected for two years. In the case of whole population, and even waiting for only 10 months, there would still be 68,000 deaths more if that kind of trial would be a condition for the acceptance of vaccine.
deleted 6y ago
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daveed 6y ago
> Second in line for the jab at University Hospital in Coventry was 81-year-old William Shakespeare from Warwickshire His high priority must've been on purpose, right?
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  Maybe it was to make up for being sent to Coventry.
- soylentgraham 6y ago
  Typical, celebrities getting priority. Gotta admire how good the vaccine is though, reviving the dead
- interfixus 6y ago
  Ah, Warwickshire, the undiscovered country from whose bourn some travellers do apparently return.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sshagent 6y ago
  I wonder if he was randomly determined to patient 1 for the vaccine, then they thought the conspiracy theorists will go nuts if they find out William Shakespear had the first shot
- lsllc 6y ago
  To be ... or not to be (vaccinated!).
- dizzydot 6y ago
  Taming of the flu.
  - harrydehal 6y ago
    Given that he was second in line... He was patient 2B (or not to be)? Shamelessly stolen from Deutsche Welle :) https://www.dw.com/en/the-day-with-brent-goff-the-first-injection/av-19049331 https://www.dw.com/en/the-day-with-brent-goff-the-first-inje...
refurb 6y ago
As this rolls out I thought Derek Lowe had a good point to make https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/04/get-ready-for-false-side-effects https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/04/ge... When you vaccinate this many people, you will have those people die, get heart attacks, strokes, cancer, etc. Why? Because that would have happened to them anyways, vaccine or not. So don’t freak out when “issues” start to crop up. Wait until someone has a done a proper analysis to see if the “issue” is actually related to the vaccine.
- vixen99 6y ago
  https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/370/6520/1022.full.pdf https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/370/6520/1022.ful... 'Public needs to prep for vaccine side effects, “Take Tylenol and suck it up,” says one researcher. Fever, aches show vaccine works'.
  - avsteele 6y ago
    Thanks for posting that article. That article is going to be a bad one for convincing people. They overstate COVID lethality and downplay people's worries about the side effects. If this article is representative of the public messaging on the vaccine people are going to start being hesitant to take it. We've already seen some of this. They should instead be talking about the # of people to whom the vaccines have been given and compare their outcomes to accurate COVID stats. This is how I've worked with people who are nervous, but I don't actually have the vaccine trial outcomes (other than # who got COVID) because I don't think they have been published!
  - timrichard 6y ago
    Seeing this post reminded me that when I had the 'flu vaccine a little while back, the Pharmacist advised avoiding Paracetamol (Tylenol?) afterwards in case it reduced the efficacy of the vaccine. A bit of quick Googling turned up study results from a while back suggesting this in relation to childhood vaccines. Just wondering if anyone here with experience in the field has a opinion on whether painkillers like these are best avoided for a short time afterwards.
Jabbles 6y ago
Remember that in 6 other countries, 20,000 people have received this vaccine as part of the phase 3 trial. https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine
dm319 6y ago
I work here and was in clinic this morning. We had three eligible patients. One consented to it and is having the vaccine now. The other two declined. Not making a point, just a data point.
- thisistheend123 6y ago
  Hey thanks for your comment. Could you describe in more detail how the vaccines are currently being stored in your clinic? How long does the vaccine can remain in room temperature, once taken out of clod storage. How many doses have been allocated to your clinic and on an average how many patients do you foresee being vaccinated over a short period of time, let's say a month. Also, are health workers also planning to get vaccinated soon, as they are on the frontline and among most vulnerable to infection. Any other details you would like to share. Thanks again.
  - dm319 6y ago
    I run a specialty clinic for a type of cancer, so it isn't specific for vaccination. However, patients >80 yrs who were attending in person were identified as eligible for the vaccine. They have attended elsewhere in the hospital to receive the vaccine, but my understanding is that it needs -80/70 for storage, and can be moved a total of 4 times before needing to be discarded. I'm afraid I do not know more. Maybe if I wasn't so busy in the clinic I would have read through the info sheets in more detail, but it's always a rush!
  - bserge 6y ago
    I've stated this is my worry with the BioNTech/Fosun vaccine - transporting it safely to Eastern Europe. They can't seem to transport frozen fish properly, I really hope they keep that vaccine in proper conditions, otherwise it'll be rendered useless...
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      It's likely the chain of custody for fish and critical medical supplies will be somewhat different.
CivBase 6y ago
> First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK *after getting approval from regulators Tens of thousands already received the vaccine during trials. This marks the official rollout with general public availability (pending supply issues), so that's cool. It's just weird that the article refers to this dose in particular as a "historic event".
- whoomp12342 6y ago
  anything for attention am i rite?
- shellac 6y ago
  Literally first line of the article: > A UK grandmother has become the first person in the world to be given the Pfizer Covid-19 jab as part of a mass vaccination programme.
  - CivBase 6y ago
    Yes, I read it. Literally the second line of my comment: > This marks the official rollout with general public availability (pending supply issues), so that's cool. It's just weird that the article refers to this dose in particular as a "historic event". Here's the line from the article I'm referring to: > Prof Stephen Powis, national medical director of NHS England, who witnessed the "historic moment", said: "We couldn't hug her but we could clap and everybody did so in the room." They even quoted "historic moment" almost like they were being sarcastic about it. It's just weird.
    - antientropic 6y ago
      It's between quotes presumably because it is, you know, a quote. And the start of the first public vaccination campaign against COVID-19 legitimately seems like a historic moment. But we're just nitpicking language now.
      - CivBase 6y ago
johannes1234321 6y ago
This is not the first person receiving it. There had been clinical studies before. It's "just" the first person after the government put some stamps on it and made it a marketing event. (And yes, marketing the fact that it is safe and vaccination helps is good!)
- acqq 6y ago
  She is indeed the first person to get the "vaccine." The material that those in the trials received is usually being referred to as a "vaccine candidate" because it haven't passed the trials and it isn't officially approved for anything but the trials. During the randomized trials, until the data are evaluated nobody is even supposed to know who received the tested substance and who received placebo. Many people in the trials received placebo and still became infected. Some died. Outside of trials, we know that one and half million people died while the development and the trials had to be done and there weren't no vaccines at all. And eventually, not all vaccine candidates pass all the trials. So it is definitely an event of historical significance that should be celebrated. A lot had to be done right so that all of us can now talk about this.
deleted 6y ago
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irthomasthomas 6y ago
Some quick points about this. The British Medical Journal and Royal Society of medicine have published a number of concerns about this vaccine. "Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us" https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037 "All these data for the different vaccines are potentially very promising, but none of the phase III trials have been published in peer reviewed journals or analysed by age group, gender and case description... As public health professionals, we believe that the results of clinical trials, whether interim or final, should be subject to an appropriate systematic process, and then published in peer-reviewed professional journals. Reporting the covid-19 vaccine trial results in press releases before publication in journals is neither good scientific practice nor does it help to build public trust in vaccines" https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/11/27/covid-19-vaccines-where-are-the-data/ https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/11/27/covid-19-vaccines-where... "When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex, people die Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling." https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4425 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4425
- johncearls 6y ago
  Why is this downvoted? These are valid concerns with respectable citations.
- mcv 6y ago
  Publication in a peer reviewed journal can take a lot of time, and I don't think that should be required in an urgent situation like this. Though of course the trials should still be reviewed somehow.
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  The FDA released today all the data they're using for the upcoming Dec 10th discussion, and it is quite detailed: https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download Writing a peer-reviewed paper two weeks after the data are out is hard, even more so when you have an emergency use authorization ongoing (which requires far more data).
pepperberg 6y ago
I have one question regarding the current Pfizer data (it would be great if anyone with experience in statistics could help out): UK healthcare professionals received this information called "REG 174 INFORMATION FOR UK HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS" [1] It states that the "efficacy of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 [for 75 years of age and older] was [...] 100% (two-sided 95% confidence interval of -13.1% to 100.0%)" What does this mean? With my very minimal university statistics knowledge I would say that they are 95% sure that the efficacy lies between -13.1% and 100.0% for age >=75. And that means: We simply do not know (probably due to lack of data in this cohort). Where am I making an error? Thank you in advance! [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/941452/Information_for_healthcare_professionals.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
andy_ppp 6y ago
The 91 year old gentleman in the linked video just called the hospital and asked for the vaccine, puts to shame how paranoid and conspiracy theory focused a lot of people are. It is a breath of fresh air to see someone just leave the worrying about safety to experts, rather than thinking they know best from some arbitrary Twitter thread. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1336352635935469574?s=20 https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1336352635935469574?s=20

248 points by Urgo 6y ago

I live in India. I am already hearing companies offering planned month long vacation tours to UK/US where you could get yourself vaccinated with vaccines that aren't available in India.

m1gu3l 6y ago
not surprising. i am shocked people aren’t hawking fakes on the dark net yet.
- oxfordmale 6y ago
  I am sure my Junk email box is full with offers for private vaccination already
  - jfengel 6y ago
    I just checked, and I didn't see any. The closest was an offer for KN95 masks. (Though this is GMail, which I think has started to just auto-delete a lot of the worst stuff. My spam folder now gets spams-per-day rather than kilospams-per-day.)
mantap 6y ago
The Pfizer vaccine won't be available privately in UK, not for a long time. So I think they will be disappointed.
- checker659 6y ago
  What stops pfizer from selling directly to customers?
  - bencoder 6y ago
    Probably the billions that governments have paid for their place in the queue
    - checker659 6y ago
      India alone has 759k millionaires. Assuming each has a family of four, and they’re willing to pay just $500 for a two shot course on an exclusive basis (say). That alone will be make pfizer about 1.58 billion dollars. There are 13555k millionaires outside of Europe and US. The 1.9 billion paid by the US government for 100million viles pales in front of what pfizer could earn by catering to the rich. So, again, my question stands, why wouldn’t pfizer sell directly to customers? What binds them to just deal with governments alone? I ask this as a humble non-millionaire (just to clarify that I wouldn’t benefit from such a scheme in any way) :)
      - jayflux 6y ago
        Do you honestly think Pfizer would come off well (PR wise) if they put millionaires in the front of the queue for cash? At a time when vulnerable people are dying? The $1.58bn wouldn’t be worth sinking their entire brand, not even close.
        howlgarnish 6y ago
        Pfizer doesn't have to do anything. The vaccines will be sent all over the world, all destined for reputable hospitals where they're intended to be used for elderly transgender orphans with pre-existing conditions working in COVID ICUs. However, some shipments will mysteriously fall off the truck on the way there, and will resurface at private hospitals for the elite who can and will pay large quantities for them.
      - jeromegv 6y ago
        They are already sold out. There’s no spare. And yes they can sell to millionaire but states purchases millions of doses at a Time, not 5.
mhandley 6y ago
The vaccine is not available privately in the UK. If you're not registered with the NHS, you're probably not going to be able to get vaccinated in the UK anytime soon. Even if you are registered, you will probably have to wait til late spring if you're under 50 with no underlying health issues.
- Beggers1960 6y ago
  This. The idea that people are planning 'vaccine holidays' is bizarre.
  - zwp 6y ago
    Perhaps it is a scam?
    - alibarber 6y ago
      It's absolutely is either an outright scam or just crafty marketing off the back of this. The comment says 'vaccines that aren't available in India' of which I'm sure there may well be plenty, just not necessarily the COVID one.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    I'm sure people are planning one. That doesn't mean they will be successful. Most of the people with enough money to do this are alert for scams (though they might decide it is 80% chance of scam and decide to risk it anyway), so they will be looking to see if they will get the vaccine in the end, and if they don't think you will deliver they won't go. I would expect anyone who gets a "black market" vaccine gets one of the not approved (yet) vaccines. That supply is sitting around and probably not tracked as much. Break into a warehouse (often with insider help, possibly at high levels such that most people in the company help you because your alibi checks out), get a supply, then send it to your black market buddies. Pfizer has a legal market now and will do everything to ship to that market. Moderna is close enough that they won't risk it. The Oxford vaccine has a lot of companies who can make it and an uncertain future (60% effective when there is a 95%?) so it is the most likely candidate, for this. Russia also is making a vaccine that they might be willing to sell like this. China might as well, but I find it unlikely as they have other markets. Of course this whole paragraph is pure speculation: anything is possible.
peteretep 6y ago
That seems bizarre — you’re much more likely to be able to get it privately in India or Thailand or any other country that has good healthcare for the rich and few qualms about allowing people to buy in private stock. Much easier to pay $500 to a private clinic in Mumbai than fly to the West and hope that you can convince the state to provide it
- robjan 6y ago
  The state will not provide it to non-residents. As soon as you arrive in the UK, immigration stamps "no recourse to public funds" in black all-caps into your passport as a friendly reminder.
  - dTal 6y ago
    In this specific instance, you're probably right that there will be paperwork. However, in general, acute healthcare in free in the UK and does not even require ID. I don't know if that's how it's "meant" to be, but that's how it is; if you're on vacation in the UK and something bad happens, you can just turn up at the nearest hospital and it will get sorted out, no bill no fuss.
    - peteretep 6y ago
      How it’s “meant” to be is that you’re asked for where you’re registered, and your NHS records are pulled up, and if you’re not registered at a GP practice or in the NHS system you get a bill
      - improbable22 6y ago
        But I think there are some exceptions for communicable diseases, which they will treat without attempting to bill you. I doubt vaccination would fall under that but don't really know.
      - dTal 6y ago
        That's not what happens, though. You can just say "I'm not registered with a GP" (and many people aren't), and you will still be treated - no bill.
alibarber 6y ago
Is this not just cynical marketing? Sure, there are likely to be plenty of vaccines one could get in the UK/US that aren't available easily in India or elsewhere. But you/they didn't say anything about the COVID one...
ulfw 6y ago
I'd be up for it, no doubt. Hong Kong doesn't seem interested to vaccinate people before 2022ish. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3112750/coronavirus-hong-kong-infectious-disease-expert https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic...

aphextron 6y ago

A 90 year old woman in a nursing home is not spreading COVID. Wouldn't it make more sense to give this to people who are most at risk of spreading it, not dying from it? Why wouldn't we go at the root cause of the pandemic; young healthy asymptomatic spreaders?

robotfelix 6y ago
While I would certainly hope that it prevents spread too, I believe that the vaccine is only proven to prevent Covid-19 (the disease), and not to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes it).
dbbk 6y ago
The vaccine isn't proven to prevent spread.
nojito 6y ago
Because stopping the elderly from overwhelming the health infrastructure needs to be step 1. ICU beds are extremely expensive.
- oxfordmale 6y ago
  At this age, you don't get admitted to an ICU bed
  - nobrains 6y ago
    No, you do, because no matter the age, the family members still want to have a chance of survival of their loved one. My distant relative (70 year old) was in ICU for 30 days, and on ventilator for 14 days. Yes, that is a very long time for ventilator usage, and every day more on a ventilator increases the death rate probability percentage.
    - oxfordmale 6y ago
      At the age of 90, your lungs are too fragile to be put on a ventilator. It was one of the reasons academics overestimated the number of ventilators required for COVID.

durnygbur 6y ago

The pharma industry is one of the dodgiest of them all and requires rather red taping than hasty short paths. Remind me in two months. Will they write down the vaccination into the WHO vaccination booklet? [1] I'm not installing an app for this. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Internationaler_Impfausweis.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Internat...

ck2 6y ago

Good luck to the average person getting it in the USA before March. Even with half the population refusing it because the anti-vax people might be even more crazy than the anti-maskers. Which makes you wonder which country will have covid longest.

lagadu 6y ago
All countries will have covid forever[0]: it's an endemic disease to nearly all continents now, much like the flu or aids. [0]for values of "forever" that don't go into the far future where viruses may have a cure or an effective form of erradication.
- peteretep 6y ago
  The reason we have AIDS is because vaccination against HIV is very difficult and expensive. I don’t see how this generalises to all viruses? Several viruses have been eradicated, and several more have been effectively eradicated in countries with functioning healthcare
- idnefju 6y ago
  Australia doesn’t have it. Wasn’t impossible, just had to stop air travel and lockdown for a period. Now the only people with COVID are returned Australian travellers from overseas who have to go on hotel quarantine
  - paublyrne 6y ago
    It's likely this will change next year when Australia lifts quarantining. It will be considered an acceptable risk given that most people will not be vulnerable to it.
  - walkingolof 6y ago
    Helps to have no land borders, not saying Australia didn’t do a great job curbing it ..
    - 6y ago

mikepechadotcom 6y ago

I feel like mRNA vaccines have huge potential, but I am really, really concerned about potential side effects. Does anyone know which other helper-substances are inside the vaccine, besides the RNA?

cpfohl 6y ago
Adjuvants in modern vaccines are extraordinarily well studied and safe. Current side effects include 6-24 hours of feeling totally crappy. Still beats Covid-19...
- Mirioron 6y ago
  How modern is "modern" here? Because the whole Pandermix saga happened only a decade ago and some are pointing towards the combination of the adjuvant and antigen: https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3948/rr-22 https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3948/rr-22 Considering that this doesn't seem to be a settled question, I'm not so sure that it makes sense to blindly trust that everything will be alright in the current, rushed, case.
  - acqq 6y ago
    The whole Pandermix risk is much smaller than the risks in the current pandemics. Narcolepsy is very rare disease and even increased risk due to that vaccine remains very low as absolute value and it only appears high if it's expressed as a relative number. In establishing the shorter-term safety nothing was "rushed" now compared to the processes performed before (it was tested on tens of thousands of people). Regarding the longer-term safety, who would be willing to wait e.g. two more years before any vaccine could be used? As the vaccination will be voluntary for common people, as long at there are shortages, those who don't want to get it should indeed leave it to those who will.
    - acqq 6y ago
      To elaborate the absolute numbers: around 1 in 55000 vaccinated were affected by the side effects in two years, so even if everybody in the UK was vaccinated with something causing such side effects, that translates to 1200 with the side effects. To compare, there were more than 70,000 excess deaths in the UK since start of pandemics. Around 60 times more deaths than, in the case of vaccine, those still living with side effects. But these side effects were apparently the strongest in just a part of the population: 4-18, which is 11 million, resulting is estimated 200 people with side effects. Covid-19 luckily affects exactly that part of population less, but even then I'd guess that Covid-19 already made more damage to more than 200 people in it. And that small number of cases just can't be detected unless the trial covers enough of those affected. If the total effect is 200 cases in the whole population, a trial would have to be performed on at least one 20th of it: as much as 600,000 children would have to be a part of the trial to even detect that issue. Not to mention that it took two years to recognize the issue. Now, for the trial to recognize the problem, half would have to be placebo group. That gives once all outside of the trial are counted 97.5% of people unprotected for two years. In the case of whole population, and even waiting for only 10 months, there would still be 68,000 deaths more if that kind of trial would be a condition for the acceptance of vaccine.

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daveed 6y ago

> Second in line for the jab at University Hospital in Coventry was 81-year-old William Shakespeare from Warwickshire His high priority must've been on purpose, right?

mgkimsal 6y ago
Maybe it was to make up for being sent to Coventry.
soylentgraham 6y ago
Typical, celebrities getting priority. Gotta admire how good the vaccine is though, reviving the dead
interfixus 6y ago
Ah, Warwickshire, the undiscovered country from whose bourn some travellers do apparently return.
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sshagent 6y ago
I wonder if he was randomly determined to patient 1 for the vaccine, then they thought the conspiracy theorists will go nuts if they find out William Shakespear had the first shot
lsllc 6y ago
To be ... or not to be (vaccinated!).
dizzydot 6y ago
Taming of the flu.
- harrydehal 6y ago
  Given that he was second in line... He was patient 2B (or not to be)? Shamelessly stolen from Deutsche Welle :) https://www.dw.com/en/the-day-with-brent-goff-the-first-injection/av-19049331 https://www.dw.com/en/the-day-with-brent-goff-the-first-inje...

refurb 6y ago

As this rolls out I thought Derek Lowe had a good point to make https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/04/get-ready-for-false-side-effects https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/04/ge... When you vaccinate this many people, you will have those people die, get heart attacks, strokes, cancer, etc. Why? Because that would have happened to them anyways, vaccine or not. So don’t freak out when “issues” start to crop up. Wait until someone has a done a proper analysis to see if the “issue” is actually related to the vaccine.

vixen99 6y ago
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/370/6520/1022.full.pdf https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/370/6520/1022.ful... 'Public needs to prep for vaccine side effects, “Take Tylenol and suck it up,” says one researcher. Fever, aches show vaccine works'.
- avsteele 6y ago
  Thanks for posting that article. That article is going to be a bad one for convincing people. They overstate COVID lethality and downplay people's worries about the side effects. If this article is representative of the public messaging on the vaccine people are going to start being hesitant to take it. We've already seen some of this. They should instead be talking about the # of people to whom the vaccines have been given and compare their outcomes to accurate COVID stats. This is how I've worked with people who are nervous, but I don't actually have the vaccine trial outcomes (other than # who got COVID) because I don't think they have been published!
- timrichard 6y ago
  Seeing this post reminded me that when I had the 'flu vaccine a little while back, the Pharmacist advised avoiding Paracetamol (Tylenol?) afterwards in case it reduced the efficacy of the vaccine. A bit of quick Googling turned up study results from a while back suggesting this in relation to childhood vaccines. Just wondering if anyone here with experience in the field has a opinion on whether painkillers like these are best avoided for a short time afterwards.

Jabbles 6y ago

Remember that in 6 other countries, 20,000 people have received this vaccine as part of the phase 3 trial. https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine

dm319 6y ago

I work here and was in clinic this morning. We had three eligible patients. One consented to it and is having the vaccine now. The other two declined. Not making a point, just a data point.

thisistheend123 6y ago
Hey thanks for your comment. Could you describe in more detail how the vaccines are currently being stored in your clinic? How long does the vaccine can remain in room temperature, once taken out of clod storage. How many doses have been allocated to your clinic and on an average how many patients do you foresee being vaccinated over a short period of time, let's say a month. Also, are health workers also planning to get vaccinated soon, as they are on the frontline and among most vulnerable to infection. Any other details you would like to share. Thanks again.
- dm319 6y ago
  I run a specialty clinic for a type of cancer, so it isn't specific for vaccination. However, patients >80 yrs who were attending in person were identified as eligible for the vaccine. They have attended elsewhere in the hospital to receive the vaccine, but my understanding is that it needs -80/70 for storage, and can be moved a total of 4 times before needing to be discarded. I'm afraid I do not know more. Maybe if I wasn't so busy in the clinic I would have read through the info sheets in more detail, but it's always a rush!
- bserge 6y ago
  I've stated this is my worry with the BioNTech/Fosun vaccine - transporting it safely to Eastern Europe. They can't seem to transport frozen fish properly, I really hope they keep that vaccine in proper conditions, otherwise it'll be rendered useless...
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    It's likely the chain of custody for fish and critical medical supplies will be somewhat different.

CivBase 6y ago

> First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK *after getting approval from regulators Tens of thousands already received the vaccine during trials. This marks the official rollout with general public availability (pending supply issues), so that's cool. It's just weird that the article refers to this dose in particular as a "historic event".

whoomp12342 6y ago
anything for attention am i rite?
shellac 6y ago
Literally first line of the article: > A UK grandmother has become the first person in the world to be given the Pfizer Covid-19 jab as part of a mass vaccination programme.
- CivBase 6y ago
  Yes, I read it. Literally the second line of my comment: > This marks the official rollout with general public availability (pending supply issues), so that's cool. It's just weird that the article refers to this dose in particular as a "historic event". Here's the line from the article I'm referring to: > Prof Stephen Powis, national medical director of NHS England, who witnessed the "historic moment", said: "We couldn't hug her but we could clap and everybody did so in the room." They even quoted "historic moment" almost like they were being sarcastic about it. It's just weird.
  - antientropic 6y ago
    It's between quotes presumably because it is, you know, a quote. And the start of the first public vaccination campaign against COVID-19 legitimately seems like a historic moment. But we're just nitpicking language now.
    - CivBase 6y ago

johannes1234321 6y ago

This is not the first person receiving it. There had been clinical studies before. It's "just" the first person after the government put some stamps on it and made it a marketing event. (And yes, marketing the fact that it is safe and vaccination helps is good!)

acqq 6y ago
She is indeed the first person to get the "vaccine." The material that those in the trials received is usually being referred to as a "vaccine candidate" because it haven't passed the trials and it isn't officially approved for anything but the trials. During the randomized trials, until the data are evaluated nobody is even supposed to know who received the tested substance and who received placebo. Many people in the trials received placebo and still became infected. Some died. Outside of trials, we know that one and half million people died while the development and the trials had to be done and there weren't no vaccines at all. And eventually, not all vaccine candidates pass all the trials. So it is definitely an event of historical significance that should be celebrated. A lot had to be done right so that all of us can now talk about this.

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irthomasthomas 6y ago

Some quick points about this. The British Medical Journal and Royal Society of medicine have published a number of concerns about this vaccine. "Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us" https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037 "All these data for the different vaccines are potentially very promising, but none of the phase III trials have been published in peer reviewed journals or analysed by age group, gender and case description... As public health professionals, we believe that the results of clinical trials, whether interim or final, should be subject to an appropriate systematic process, and then published in peer-reviewed professional journals. Reporting the covid-19 vaccine trial results in press releases before publication in journals is neither good scientific practice nor does it help to build public trust in vaccines" https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/11/27/covid-19-vaccines-where-are-the-data/ https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/11/27/covid-19-vaccines-where... "When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex, people die Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling." https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4425 https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4425

johncearls 6y ago
Why is this downvoted? These are valid concerns with respectable citations.
mcv 6y ago
Publication in a peer reviewed journal can take a lot of time, and I don't think that should be required in an urgent situation like this. Though of course the trials should still be reviewed somehow.
lbeltrame 6y ago
The FDA released today all the data they're using for the upcoming Dec 10th discussion, and it is quite detailed: https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download Writing a peer-reviewed paper two weeks after the data are out is hard, even more so when you have an emergency use authorization ongoing (which requires far more data).

pepperberg 6y ago

I have one question regarding the current Pfizer data (it would be great if anyone with experience in statistics could help out): UK healthcare professionals received this information called "REG 174 INFORMATION FOR UK HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS" [1] It states that the "efficacy of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 [for 75 years of age and older] was [...] 100% (two-sided 95% confidence interval of -13.1% to 100.0%)" What does this mean? With my very minimal university statistics knowledge I would say that they are 95% sure that the efficacy lies between -13.1% and 100.0% for age >=75. And that means: We simply do not know (probably due to lack of data in this cohort). Where am I making an error? Thank you in advance! [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/941452/Information_for_healthcare_professionals.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

andy_ppp 6y ago

The 91 year old gentleman in the linked video just called the hospital and asked for the vaccine, puts to shame how paranoid and conspiracy theory focused a lot of people are. It is a breath of fresh air to see someone just leave the worrying about safety to experts, rather than thinking they know best from some arbitrary Twitter thread. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1336352635935469574?s=20 https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1336352635935469574?s=20