6 ms·
That's weird they didn't notice this when doing trials.
by f311a 6y ago
That's weird they didn't notice this when doing trials.
- OscarCunningham 6y ago> Pfizer has said people with a history of severe adverse allergic reactions to vaccines or the candidate’s ingredients were excluded from their late stage trials, which is reflected in the MHRA’s emergency approval protocol.
- swalsh 6y agoCould we get to herd immunity by not immunizing those people who are part of groups excluded from the trials?
- pjc50 6y agoQuite likely - I would expect "severe" allergies to be less than 1% of the population.
- belltaco 6y agoI think most vaccines right now have not been proven to have sterilizing immunity, so ppl who have gotten the vaccine can still transmit it to others who haven't been vaccinated. That's in the 1 or 2 week widow after getting infected themselves.
- OscarCunningham 6y agoEven if it doesn't produce sterilizing immunity it will reduce the spread by stopping the virus from causing coughing and sneezing. So it's possible that it will allow reaching herd immunity anyway.
- davidw 6y agoThat's how normal vaccines for things like measles work. Not everyone can take them, or they have other issues, so they depend on the rest of us to do our part for herd immunity.
- rsynnott 6y agoYes. Almost no vaccines can be given to _everyone_, and the portion of the population with severe allergies of the epipen-carrying-around variety is fairly small.
- noja 6y agoYes this is news, so clearly there has been some mismatch in expectations.
- mittermayr 6y agoSmells a little bit like what some of us (developers) occasionally do when under pressure. As in, trying to save some crucial time in a rush, by focusing on testing just the things that were specifically worked on, instead of running it through the entire test suite (or QA dept) before deploying. If something comes up, user feedback will certainly bubble through quickly enough and can be worked on. Which, to be perfectly frank, often does work out just fine.
- TotempaaltJ 6y agoI'm pretty certain this has nothing to do with pressure. The risks profile is very different, and for the same reason my trials aren't run on pregnant women. It hardly makes sense (and would be immoral) to include people in a clinical trail who you know are more likely to get adverse affects (up to death) from the drug/vaccine. Especially for vaccines you know there will be certain subgroups that can't be vaccinated anyway, and because of herd immunity that doesn't matter too much.
- mittermayr 6y agoWhy let those subgroups participate in the first vaccinations though? If they were clearly aware of this, why go ahead in one of the most-watched "deployments" (in my life-time), and invite the potential risk (and it's a huge risk) in only after it's gone "live" with the real population? I mean, if I knew those subgroups would be problematic, I sure as hell would make sure the first week of those vaccinations would go as smooth as possible (with all the media and the rest of humanity carefully watching), and give it to people I am most certain will be fine with it. Everything else, the trials should've caught, or should catch in the near future? Why play the risk on day one?!
- rsynnott 6y agoWhile they haven't said yet, it's fairly clear this was an error; either the people with a history of allergies ignored the warnings (every vaccine I've had as an adult has come with allergy warnings) or the warnings weren't given (which would be bad and must be fixed).
- mcintyre1994 6y agoThat's a much smaller group than the people who have just been advised not to take it though, and I assume that people in that group would already have been advised not to take it. We don't know what allergies the affected people had AFAIK, but the advice goes far beyond people with a history of severe reactions to vaccines/its ingredients: > “Any person with a history of a significant allergic reaction to a vaccine, medicine or food (such as previous history of anaphylactoid reaction or those who have been advised to carry an adrenaline autoinjector) should not receive the Pfizer BioNtech vaccine,” it said. I've never had a reaction to vaccines, I'm unaware of having a reaction to any medicine, so from what Pfizer said I could have been in the trial. But I'd be excluded by this new advice because I carry an epi-pen for a food allergy.
- petertodd 6y agoI wouldn't read too much into that warning, at least in terms of overall safety. The fact is, they're releasing these vaccines on a broad scale much faster, and with less safety testing completed, than usual. So there's plenty of things that we normally wouldn't know yet at this stage of development; in this case just leads to authorities being extra cautious, because this is an experiment. It's just that with other vaccines the general public would never become aware of issues like that, because the vaccines wouldn't have been released so early to so many people. FWIW, looks like the HPV vaccine also had problems with occasional severe allergic reactions: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vaccine-reaction-idUSN3146783220080901 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vaccine-reaction-idUSN314... That article is from 2008, so I don't know if that issue has been fixed or not. Regardless, it obviously wasn't a deal breaker, as Gardasil is still being used.
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- noja 6y agoThey excluded people in this group from the trials.
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- qz2 6y agoAnd really old people. The first person was ironically in that group.
- fsh 6y agoThe BioNTech/Pfizer trial included 1712 people age 75 and over. The mean age in that group was 78 and the maximum 91.
- FerretFred 6y agoThe Queen (94) and Prince Phillip (99) will be having their jabs soon, to "inspire the naton" :/
- sschueller 6y agoDid they have blue blooded individuals in the trial? /s
- bmj 6y agoI guess the question is whether there is any sort of screening done prior to a patient receiving the vaccine. A simple question ("do you carry an adrenaline autoinjector") would have prevented this.
- mmis1000 6y agoI would doubt that inject into people with known allergies will ever pass the ethics committee. It sounds like `let's do a thing that is known harmful to people in experiment`. Should a normal people allow that experiment to proceed?