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Pfizer vaccine appears effective against mutation in new coronavirus variants

661 points by awnird 6y ago

meekmockmook 6y ago
Another social media panic for no reason. Big Tech is the ultimate superspreader.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- eclipxe 6y ago
  Nope, you are incorrect.
  - meekmockmook 6y ago
    The vaccine works on the new variants. The variant spreads faster than previous ones, but in the end the rules don't change: Wear a mask, wash your hands, don't go inside with people if possible. People were sharing on a Facebook and tweeting that the new strain was being spread through touching surfaces and farts and that masks no longer work. Big Tech is poison and many thousands would still be alive today if they had never logged on. These companies are no longer defensible.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      The problem is that, because the variant spreads faster than previous ones, rules which were sufficient to keep previous ones in check will likely be insufficient to keep the new one in check. We'll have to get stricter about the rules, get vaccine rollout accelerated quite a bit, or find ways to handle a lot more disease than currently exists. I have no doubt some people shared weird falsehoods about it, but there's still a true reason for concern.
      - meekmockmook 6y ago
        Speaking from California, the only change we could make is convincing law enforcement to enforce the rules (they won't) and changing the bizarre vaccine restrictions that are leaving 75 percent of our doses in a freezer while thousands who are offered it say no thanks. A massive percentage of the public has decided to give up on safety protocols and if Thanksgiving and Christmas didn't change any minds, why would this? What good did terrorizing the people who are already following the rules with this variant panic do? "THE VACCINE MIGHT NOT WORK NOW!" only scares people who want the vaccine. The media frenzy around the variant did absolutely no good.
        SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        What you're saying is probably true. But I don't think the media should refrain from reporting true, relevant information just because they don't think it will do any good if it's known.
        meekmockmook 6y ago
        Oh, of course news should be reported. But a week straight of panic mongering headlines? That does people a disservice and spreads fear for $. Big Tech and corporate media have a profit incentive in spreading terror.
        SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        Fair, I certainly can't endorse a lot of the headlines I've seen. Headlines are just very bad and we as a society have got to find a way to fix them.
        wwweston 6y ago
        What's bizarre about the vaccine restrictions? The publicized plans I'm aware of start with healthcare workers and long-term care residents, which is pretty much what I expected. I've heard there are about 3 million of those people and 1 million doses, so even if over half of those people for some reason are refusing doses, there's no reasons to expect that we're through that crowd yet. I've got several acquaintances who work in both areas and what I'm hearing that there are challenges: not ones that have to do with "rules", but actual supply and logistics. Still, among these are people who've received their first dose.
qwerty456127 6y ago
Does this suggest that immunity against some ordinary old pre-2019 coronaviruses also applies against the current strains?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- TylerE 6y ago
  No. Coronavirus is a generic term for a type of virus. For example, a few of the more common strains of the common cold, representing perhaps 15% of cases, are coronavirus - but they have no real relation to _the_ coronavirus, as term is typically used.
  - qwerty456127 6y ago
    That's what I meant.
  - nradov 6y ago
    It depends what you mean by real relation. Both OC43 and HKU1 are betacoronaviruses, in the same genera as SARS-CoV-2. So they're genetically very similar, but there's no reliable evidence of significant cross immunity.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  There is some anecdotal evidence of prior immunity, but is tangental to this development.
- zaroth 6y ago
  There is clearly something that prevents certain people (particularly kids) from contracting COVID to the point where they will not test PCR positive even if they are heavily exposed and have not had it before. I know several families in my town who have gotten COVID. All of these families had 2 or more kids and in 3 of the families there was at least one kid who never had any symptoms and never tested positive despite being PCR tested repeatedly. It’s theorized that there is some cross-immunity that some people have from other coronaviruses.
iridium_core 6y ago
Is there any evidence that this new 'variant' has any impact to infectiousness or death? Or is it simply genetic drift?
- avl999 6y ago
  No evidence that it is deadlier than other variants. Some evidence that it is more infectious.
  - sbinthree 6y ago
    It's been rapidly becoming the dominant variant in places with various different kinds of measures so I think it's for sure more infectious at this point.
    - iridium_core 6y ago
      So incessant, and seemingly ineffective, lockdowns have succeeded - in selecting for a variant of COVID which is resistant to lockdown? What biological or physical mechanism could allow it to spread more than the original?
      - sbinthree 6y ago
        Yes
      - wwweston 6y ago
        On one hand, it may be plausible that taking any measure that makes it harder to spread... favors a variant that can spread more easily. On the other hand, spreading more easily means higher reproductive fitness under any circumstance. And not taking measures to reduce spread probably just means more infections faster, which is more opportunity for reproduction and mutation, which means you probably get higher fitness variations sooner. Also I'm trying to think of anywhere in US/UK society for which "incessant lockdown" could possibly be an accurate description of policy much less behavior.
      - 6y ago
alevskaya 6y ago
Sadly, note that the study talked about here [1] is investigating the effect of the N501Y mutation, not the more worrying E484K mutation found in the South African 501.v2 strain that likely does escape antibody drugs and reduces neutralization by convalescent sera from past infections. [2] [1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.07.425740v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.07.425740v1 [2]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.31.425021v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.31.425021v1
- pageandrew 6y ago
  Does the 501.v2 strain resist vaccine antibodies as well, or only things like the antibody cocktail / convalescent plasma therapy?
  - whoisburbansky 6y ago
    The first paper describes the effect of mRNA based vaccine derived serum on both variants, showing that both variants are affected about equally by the vaccine, if I’m not horribly mistaken?
    - alevskaya 6y ago
      The first study is only studying the effect of the N501Y mutation as found in several emergent strains, not the E484K mutation.
      - whoisburbansky 6y ago
        Yes, sorry, I phrased that badly. I meant N501 and Y501 when I said both variants here.
  - alevskaya 6y ago
    What I meant by sera above was general adaptive immunity. It's likely to partially resist past immunity from both vaccines (esp. from the spike-only vaccines: moderna, pfizer, etc) and natural infections from older strains. We'll probably know a lot more about it soon, but we may need to update our vaccines to include this mutant class.
zaroth 6y ago
The bigger question I have is when will we be ready to confidently claim that the vaccine doesn’t just prevent symptoms but also prevents spread? (Edit: at the same or nearly the same 95% rate) I can’t see a human trial being able to show this, and contact tracing is overall so poor how long will we have to wait to not see a case that can be tracked back to a vaccinated individual before we are willing to agree that the vaccine is highly effective at stopping transmission? For example, by Feb 1 we will have millions of people who are effectively protected at least from symptoms due to vaccine. So e.g. by March 1, if we have no, or single digit, reported cases of 2-week post-jab transmission? The corollary is how durable is the effect? To fully reopen the economy you need some kind of consensus on where the truth lies to these two questions. I wonder if public health agencies will never really admit, but just the case count will start to dwindle and mitigations will start to lessen, without ever really coming out and admitting vaccinated people don’t need mitigations 2-weeks-post-jab. Similar to how we’ve never really admitted that people who’ve had COVID are immune and can no longer spread it. I think fundamentally gov’t is too afraid of having two classes of citizens, and mainly, that one class (the antibody negative class) lying that they are actually the other.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  From the phase 3 trials you'd absolutely expect cases to occur after vaccinations. That's what the 95% efficacy after 2 doses means, that 5% of people had symptomatic infections. Hopefully it is the case that the 5% are people that have a weak response to the vaccine and the remainder mostly aren't infectious. They can study this by monitoring for asymptomatic infections (I don't know if they are going to or not).
  - doktorhladnjak 6y ago
    95% effectiveness does not mean 5% of people had symptomatic infections. It means there were 20 times more infections in the placebo group compared to control. If you gave the vaccine to 1000 people and placebo to 1000 people, and 100 of the placebo and 5 of the treatment group got sick, that's 95% effective, as is if all 1000 in the control group got COVID and only 50 in the treatment group.
PurpleFoxy 6y ago
What worries me is the chance that we will see another super virus in a few years except one country already has vaccines developed on day one and will not share the information on them.
- duxup 6y ago
  I feel like in this economically connected world, that would be a sort of global politics suicide. It would be one of the few acts that would likely galvanize... everyone. The leaders of those nations would be pariahs in a way that even a nation like N. Korea is not. For the nation's without a vaccine, the leaders there likely would be quite motivated to act and enjoy a great deal of support at home.
- ggm 6y ago
  Remember China and the USA were in a full bore trade war and despite some mud flinging and half-truths,essentially the global health system was kept informed. The genome was shared. At least four competitors in global economic terms (China, Russia, the EU and the USA) all developed vaccines. This is not like pre-hydrogen bomb information hoarding. The techniques behind mRNA are taught worldwide. Most medicines come from India, which was a leading non-aligned economy for years and years.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    In general sharing vaccine information with your enemy is considered a good thing by generals. No good army wants to get involved in biological warfare at this time as it is too risky as to turning against you. The above does leave room for bad armies. Some tiny insignificant nation might do this. China isn't insignificant, and not stupid. Even in an all out war they would still share virus and vaccine information with their enemies as there is nothing to lose and goodwill to gain.
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  Developing vaccines are easy. The cost is all testing. Other countries could easily reverse engineer the vaccine and make it.
- 6y ago
corona-research 6y ago
Does the vaccine cure hypochondria?
noncoml 6y ago
Slightly off-topic, but I don't have any other good forum to ask that. Once we are done with COVID, will the new vaccine methods enable us to develop vaccines for virus that we couldn't do before. E.g. maybe HIV?
- jojobas 6y ago
  HIV is hard as it attacks the very immune cells that come to get it.
  - raducu 6y ago
    It's not just that. People do develop neutralizing antibodies against HIV. HIV, like other retroviruses, embedds itself in the cell DNA. Some cells remain dormant for weeks and then start producing virions. So the other problem with HIV, even if it didn't attack immune cells, is the hidden virus reservoir, I guess, just like other incurable viruses, like herpes and some hepatitis.
    - fastball 6y ago
      Right but if you're vaccinated, you'd hope the immune system could attack HIV before it could take hold.
      - raducu 6y ago
        I really don't know enough about immunology to answer that -- but I presume most neutralizing antibodies wane over time. If you take antiretrovirals you're very unlikely to become infected with HIV, even if you take it after initial exposure (but do your own research on that), but as soon as you stop, you lose that protection -- same with antibodies (not sure how a vaccine would help T-cell immunity if HIV infects T-cells).
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      CRISPR can edit herpes simplex virus out of cells, so maybe it can do the same for HIV. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/11/18/1948896/0/en/CRISPR-Gene-Editing-Eliminates-Herpes-Simplex-Virus-and-JC-Virus-Demonstrating-Feasibility-of-a-Potential-Functional-Cure.html https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/11/18/194889...
jerzyt 6y ago
>>> appears effective I'm not knocking the vaccine, but that's a pretty low scientific standard. The public is so polarized that we have crazy conspiracy theories on one side, and complete acceptance with very little questioning on the other side. A typical drug takes about 5 years to develop and another 5-7 for clinical trials, and for good reasons. It takes time to discover side effects. This vaccine has been developed in less than a year from virus discovery to production. I really hope this vaccine works, but I can understand the skepticism.
- fsh 6y ago
  This is incorrect. Vaccines take forever to develop for economic reasons. Big studies are very expensive, so companies are typically quite hesitant to move to the next step. Vaccine side effects are usually quite rare, so you wouldn't see them in a Phase-3 trial, even if you waited for decades. This is why any drug is studied after approval in Phase-4 trials. Furthermore, vaccines side effects have historically pretty much always shown up at most weeks after the vaccination.
- rimliu 6y ago
  To develop mRNA vaccine took what, ~10 years? It's about how long it takes to develop the printing press vs. how long does it take to print a book.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Oh yes, pandemic. I feel like I was forgetting something. That’s good news at least.
johndoe42377 6y ago
Why should it be not? It will be effective as long as the core protein against which the immune system response is to be triggered will remain the same.
- lrossi 6y ago
  This is like saying that your input schema has changed a little, but you still want to push the code to production without retesting it.
  - rimliu 6y ago
    It is nothing like that.
zelly 6y ago
Why does the vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 work so well but there was no vaccine at all and still isn't for SARS?
- CorrectHorseBat 6y ago
  Hard to test the efficacy of a vaccine on an eradicated disease.
- hobofan 6y ago
  Because mRNA tech for rapid vaccine development wasn't available back then and it didn't spread so far that there was political pressure for expedited trials. Now it is eradicated anyway.
- QuesnayJr 6y ago
  Part of why these vaccines were developed so quickly is that much of the preliminary work was done for SARS.
- bluGill 6y ago
  The is/was several SARS vaccines. They never got to phase 3 trials, because of various problems. We learned enough from them to skip all the issues this time around.
- bagacrap 6y ago
  what's the incentive to work on a sars vaccine? the outbreak was contained before a vaccine was approved so they stopped work.
jonplackett 6y ago
Pfizer have said it will only take a few weeks to tweak their Rna vaccine, if it does need to be changed. Anyone know how long it would take AstraZeneca with a more traditional vaccine?
- phreeza 6y ago
  Will a tweaked vaccine have to go through the full approval process again?
  - lame-robot-hoax 6y ago
    I believe only phase 1 and phase 2.
    - jonplackett 6y ago
      How long do phase 1/2 take? I wonder if, under some potential circumstances (eg. the virus turns out to escape current vaccine & be much more contagious) exceptions will be made.
      - bluGill 6y ago
        A few months. Though we don't have enough understanding of mRNA to skip phase 3 yet. That dull take time. How much time is a question of tradeoffs.
- libertine 6y ago
  The problem is that we're turning this into a cat and mouse - Pfizer has nowhere near the capacity to ramp up production to make a positive impact after all. If we enter a cycle of new variants every 9-6 months that require new vacines, simply because the volume of people infect allows the virus to have enough diversity, then it's pointless. It's basically a "weird flex" from Pfizer, because what they should say is: even though we can make a new vaccine easily, we will have nowhere near the production capacity to make a difference, so global governments need to get their shit together.
phreeza 6y ago
What I haven't seen widely discussed regarding the new variant is whether the higher infectiousness means herd immunity will be achieved later. From my amateur understanding of the SIR model, this should be the case. So ultimately we may not achieve herd immunity except with mandatory vaccination campaigns.
7OVO7 6y ago
good for all those suppressed people
GistNoesis 6y ago
What worries me is that there doesn't seem to be some global coordination in the distribution of the vaccines. It looks more like an individual race, than a synchronized collective effort. In the scenario where only the old accept to get vaccinated, and the vaccine doesn't reach the required threshold to stomp the virus. The virus become manageable, the economy reopen but the virus run rampant in the asymptotic population slowly mutating over-time until it finds a variant that is resistant to the vaccine by successfully infecting a vaccinated person. And it just needs for this to happen in a large population cluster where the vaccination doesn't reach the threshold, either because they do not have access to the vaccine yet or because some fraction of the population decide to not get vaccinated, for everyone to get screwed-up again. Then we get a new vaccine every year.
- Thorentis 6y ago
  Congratulations, you discovered the flu.
  - GistNoesis 6y ago
    Touché ! What is so sad is that it can still be avoided. But the current situation where we simultaneously have a high number of active case and high number of vaccinated people over a sufficiently long time because of slow vaccination schedule, is a recipe for creating vaccine resistant variants. As soon as we start vaccinating we are giving the virus opportunities to pressure-select against the vaccine. The more active case we have and the longer it takes the better for the virus. I'm no epidemiologist, but with the apparition in a short amount of time of 2 variants which affects the spike protein, it seems the current level of active case we are entering a red-zone, where the virus is given too many opportunities to mutate. And we should try to contain it via the current measures (masks, tracking and lock-downs), before sabotaging our best card.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
AhmedHassan2027 6y ago
Thanks to pfizer to take affective medicine to open the world
- allendoerfer 6y ago
  Also thanks to BioNtech for developing said medicine.
anonthinker 6y ago
I know some of you are following this closely and I have some questions I haven't seen any proper answer. I am hoping one of you can shine some light. How long will the mod-RNA express the spike proteins? (where is the actual 'protein expression'/time plot?) The poly(A) tail isn't just A (which would give a mechanic answer to my first question?), there is also a 10-nucleotide linker (GCAΨAΨGACΨ). I wonder if this could be there to trigger some sort of self-amplification. Can someone point me to the relevant paper?
UltimateBallR 6y ago
Extremely good news!
luikore 6y ago
We still need Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment in vaccine development.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  The question is whether or not we're confident enough to administer the latest vaccine variants without clinical trials.
williesleg 6y ago
Calm down, it's a cold virus.
Capira 6y ago
I hope it isn't mandatory?
m3kw9 6y ago
How effective is it to use one of those molecular simulation tools to quickly calculate if the antigens created still have high affinity to bind to the mutated spike?
jakub_jo 6y ago
It's not the "Pfizer" vaccine. It's either the "Biontech" vaccine or the "Biontech/Pfizer" vaccine. Please fix the title.
- mseidl 6y ago
  AFAIK, Biontech developed the vaccine and had successful tests in mice/monkeys, then they asked Pfizer help for bigger scaled testing/manufacturing?
TexasfoldsEm 6y ago
If you believe this you need to research mRNA vaccine and the antibodies they are attempting to make and the other findings in the blood of those who really take it unlike Fauci who faked it on TV. Had shot of probably saline in his left arm then next day on TV aid no side effects just my arm is sore as he held his sore RIGHT ARM! This is copletely a different nefarious global event. Why are the not reporting on all the deaths already occurring and Bells Palsy. Even removing the videos of healthcare workers from the sick platforms such as Twitter and Youtube whom have played the part to divide this nation using this fake two party fight. People we must unite in order to fend off what is coming. SEEK FOR YOURSELVES. You can even use Google Earth to find staging areas in rural locations of hundreds of thousands of UN armored vehicles. Wonder what those are for?

661 points by awnird 6y ago

meekmockmook 6y ago

Another social media panic for no reason. Big Tech is the ultimate superspreader.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
eclipxe 6y ago
Nope, you are incorrect.
- meekmockmook 6y ago
  The vaccine works on the new variants. The variant spreads faster than previous ones, but in the end the rules don't change: Wear a mask, wash your hands, don't go inside with people if possible. People were sharing on a Facebook and tweeting that the new strain was being spread through touching surfaces and farts and that masks no longer work. Big Tech is poison and many thousands would still be alive today if they had never logged on. These companies are no longer defensible.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    The problem is that, because the variant spreads faster than previous ones, rules which were sufficient to keep previous ones in check will likely be insufficient to keep the new one in check. We'll have to get stricter about the rules, get vaccine rollout accelerated quite a bit, or find ways to handle a lot more disease than currently exists. I have no doubt some people shared weird falsehoods about it, but there's still a true reason for concern.
    - meekmockmook 6y ago
      Speaking from California, the only change we could make is convincing law enforcement to enforce the rules (they won't) and changing the bizarre vaccine restrictions that are leaving 75 percent of our doses in a freezer while thousands who are offered it say no thanks. A massive percentage of the public has decided to give up on safety protocols and if Thanksgiving and Christmas didn't change any minds, why would this? What good did terrorizing the people who are already following the rules with this variant panic do? "THE VACCINE MIGHT NOT WORK NOW!" only scares people who want the vaccine. The media frenzy around the variant did absolutely no good.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        What you're saying is probably true. But I don't think the media should refrain from reporting true, relevant information just because they don't think it will do any good if it's known.
        meekmockmook 6y ago
        Oh, of course news should be reported. But a week straight of panic mongering headlines? That does people a disservice and spreads fear for $. Big Tech and corporate media have a profit incentive in spreading terror.
        SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        Fair, I certainly can't endorse a lot of the headlines I've seen. Headlines are just very bad and we as a society have got to find a way to fix them.
      - wwweston 6y ago
        What's bizarre about the vaccine restrictions? The publicized plans I'm aware of start with healthcare workers and long-term care residents, which is pretty much what I expected. I've heard there are about 3 million of those people and 1 million doses, so even if over half of those people for some reason are refusing doses, there's no reasons to expect that we're through that crowd yet. I've got several acquaintances who work in both areas and what I'm hearing that there are challenges: not ones that have to do with "rules", but actual supply and logistics. Still, among these are people who've received their first dose.

qwerty456127 6y ago

Does this suggest that immunity against some ordinary old pre-2019 coronaviruses also applies against the current strains?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TylerE 6y ago
No. Coronavirus is a generic term for a type of virus. For example, a few of the more common strains of the common cold, representing perhaps 15% of cases, are coronavirus - but they have no real relation to _the_ coronavirus, as term is typically used.
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  That's what I meant.
- nradov 6y ago
  It depends what you mean by real relation. Both OC43 and HKU1 are betacoronaviruses, in the same genera as SARS-CoV-2. So they're genetically very similar, but there's no reliable evidence of significant cross immunity.
bpodgursky 6y ago
There is some anecdotal evidence of prior immunity, but is tangental to this development.
zaroth 6y ago
There is clearly something that prevents certain people (particularly kids) from contracting COVID to the point where they will not test PCR positive even if they are heavily exposed and have not had it before. I know several families in my town who have gotten COVID. All of these families had 2 or more kids and in 3 of the families there was at least one kid who never had any symptoms and never tested positive despite being PCR tested repeatedly. It’s theorized that there is some cross-immunity that some people have from other coronaviruses.

iridium_core 6y ago

Is there any evidence that this new 'variant' has any impact to infectiousness or death? Or is it simply genetic drift?

avl999 6y ago
No evidence that it is deadlier than other variants. Some evidence that it is more infectious.
- sbinthree 6y ago
  It's been rapidly becoming the dominant variant in places with various different kinds of measures so I think it's for sure more infectious at this point.
  - iridium_core 6y ago
    So incessant, and seemingly ineffective, lockdowns have succeeded - in selecting for a variant of COVID which is resistant to lockdown? What biological or physical mechanism could allow it to spread more than the original?
    - sbinthree 6y ago
      Yes
    - wwweston 6y ago
      On one hand, it may be plausible that taking any measure that makes it harder to spread... favors a variant that can spread more easily. On the other hand, spreading more easily means higher reproductive fitness under any circumstance. And not taking measures to reduce spread probably just means more infections faster, which is more opportunity for reproduction and mutation, which means you probably get higher fitness variations sooner. Also I'm trying to think of anywhere in US/UK society for which "incessant lockdown" could possibly be an accurate description of policy much less behavior.
    - 6y ago

alevskaya 6y ago

Sadly, note that the study talked about here [1] is investigating the effect of the N501Y mutation, not the more worrying E484K mutation found in the South African 501.v2 strain that likely does escape antibody drugs and reduces neutralization by convalescent sera from past infections. [2] [1]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.07.425740v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.07.425740v1 [2]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.31.425021v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.31.425021v1

pageandrew 6y ago
Does the 501.v2 strain resist vaccine antibodies as well, or only things like the antibody cocktail / convalescent plasma therapy?
- whoisburbansky 6y ago
  The first paper describes the effect of mRNA based vaccine derived serum on both variants, showing that both variants are affected about equally by the vaccine, if I’m not horribly mistaken?
  - alevskaya 6y ago
    The first study is only studying the effect of the N501Y mutation as found in several emergent strains, not the E484K mutation.
    - whoisburbansky 6y ago
      Yes, sorry, I phrased that badly. I meant N501 and Y501 when I said both variants here.
- alevskaya 6y ago
  What I meant by sera above was general adaptive immunity. It's likely to partially resist past immunity from both vaccines (esp. from the spike-only vaccines: moderna, pfizer, etc) and natural infections from older strains. We'll probably know a lot more about it soon, but we may need to update our vaccines to include this mutant class.

zaroth 6y ago

The bigger question I have is when will we be ready to confidently claim that the vaccine doesn’t just prevent symptoms but also prevents spread? (Edit: at the same or nearly the same 95% rate) I can’t see a human trial being able to show this, and contact tracing is overall so poor how long will we have to wait to not see a case that can be tracked back to a vaccinated individual before we are willing to agree that the vaccine is highly effective at stopping transmission? For example, by Feb 1 we will have millions of people who are effectively protected at least from symptoms due to vaccine. So e.g. by March 1, if we have no, or single digit, reported cases of 2-week post-jab transmission? The corollary is how durable is the effect? To fully reopen the economy you need some kind of consensus on where the truth lies to these two questions. I wonder if public health agencies will never really admit, but just the case count will start to dwindle and mitigations will start to lessen, without ever really coming out and admitting vaccinated people don’t need mitigations 2-weeks-post-jab. Similar to how we’ve never really admitted that people who’ve had COVID are immune and can no longer spread it. I think fundamentally gov’t is too afraid of having two classes of citizens, and mainly, that one class (the antibody negative class) lying that they are actually the other.

maxerickson 6y ago
From the phase 3 trials you'd absolutely expect cases to occur after vaccinations. That's what the 95% efficacy after 2 doses means, that 5% of people had symptomatic infections. Hopefully it is the case that the 5% are people that have a weak response to the vaccine and the remainder mostly aren't infectious. They can study this by monitoring for asymptomatic infections (I don't know if they are going to or not).
- doktorhladnjak 6y ago
  95% effectiveness does not mean 5% of people had symptomatic infections. It means there were 20 times more infections in the placebo group compared to control. If you gave the vaccine to 1000 people and placebo to 1000 people, and 100 of the placebo and 5 of the treatment group got sick, that's 95% effective, as is if all 1000 in the control group got COVID and only 50 in the treatment group.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago

What worries me is the chance that we will see another super virus in a few years except one country already has vaccines developed on day one and will not share the information on them.

duxup 6y ago
I feel like in this economically connected world, that would be a sort of global politics suicide. It would be one of the few acts that would likely galvanize... everyone. The leaders of those nations would be pariahs in a way that even a nation like N. Korea is not. For the nation's without a vaccine, the leaders there likely would be quite motivated to act and enjoy a great deal of support at home.
ggm 6y ago
Remember China and the USA were in a full bore trade war and despite some mud flinging and half-truths,essentially the global health system was kept informed. The genome was shared. At least four competitors in global economic terms (China, Russia, the EU and the USA) all developed vaccines. This is not like pre-hydrogen bomb information hoarding. The techniques behind mRNA are taught worldwide. Most medicines come from India, which was a leading non-aligned economy for years and years.
- bluGill 6y ago
  In general sharing vaccine information with your enemy is considered a good thing by generals. No good army wants to get involved in biological warfare at this time as it is too risky as to turning against you. The above does leave room for bad armies. Some tiny insignificant nation might do this. China isn't insignificant, and not stupid. Even in an all out war they would still share virus and vaccine information with their enemies as there is nothing to lose and goodwill to gain.
JamesBarney 6y ago
Developing vaccines are easy. The cost is all testing. Other countries could easily reverse engineer the vaccine and make it.
6y ago

corona-research 6y ago

Does the vaccine cure hypochondria?

noncoml 6y ago

Slightly off-topic, but I don't have any other good forum to ask that. Once we are done with COVID, will the new vaccine methods enable us to develop vaccines for virus that we couldn't do before. E.g. maybe HIV?

jojobas 6y ago
HIV is hard as it attacks the very immune cells that come to get it.
- raducu 6y ago
  It's not just that. People do develop neutralizing antibodies against HIV. HIV, like other retroviruses, embedds itself in the cell DNA. Some cells remain dormant for weeks and then start producing virions. So the other problem with HIV, even if it didn't attack immune cells, is the hidden virus reservoir, I guess, just like other incurable viruses, like herpes and some hepatitis.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Right but if you're vaccinated, you'd hope the immune system could attack HIV before it could take hold.
    - raducu 6y ago
      I really don't know enough about immunology to answer that -- but I presume most neutralizing antibodies wane over time. If you take antiretrovirals you're very unlikely to become infected with HIV, even if you take it after initial exposure (but do your own research on that), but as soon as you stop, you lose that protection -- same with antibodies (not sure how a vaccine would help T-cell immunity if HIV infects T-cells).
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    CRISPR can edit herpes simplex virus out of cells, so maybe it can do the same for HIV. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/11/18/1948896/0/en/CRISPR-Gene-Editing-Eliminates-Herpes-Simplex-Virus-and-JC-Virus-Demonstrating-Feasibility-of-a-Potential-Functional-Cure.html https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/11/18/194889...

jerzyt 6y ago

>>> appears effective I'm not knocking the vaccine, but that's a pretty low scientific standard. The public is so polarized that we have crazy conspiracy theories on one side, and complete acceptance with very little questioning on the other side. A typical drug takes about 5 years to develop and another 5-7 for clinical trials, and for good reasons. It takes time to discover side effects. This vaccine has been developed in less than a year from virus discovery to production. I really hope this vaccine works, but I can understand the skepticism.

fsh 6y ago
This is incorrect. Vaccines take forever to develop for economic reasons. Big studies are very expensive, so companies are typically quite hesitant to move to the next step. Vaccine side effects are usually quite rare, so you wouldn't see them in a Phase-3 trial, even if you waited for decades. This is why any drug is studied after approval in Phase-4 trials. Furthermore, vaccines side effects have historically pretty much always shown up at most weeks after the vaccination.
rimliu 6y ago
To develop mRNA vaccine took what, ~10 years? It's about how long it takes to develop the printing press vs. how long does it take to print a book.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Oh yes, pandemic. I feel like I was forgetting something. That’s good news at least.

johndoe42377 6y ago

Why should it be not? It will be effective as long as the core protein against which the immune system response is to be triggered will remain the same.

lrossi 6y ago
This is like saying that your input schema has changed a little, but you still want to push the code to production without retesting it.
- rimliu 6y ago
  It is nothing like that.

zelly 6y ago

Why does the vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 work so well but there was no vaccine at all and still isn't for SARS?

CorrectHorseBat 6y ago
Hard to test the efficacy of a vaccine on an eradicated disease.
hobofan 6y ago
Because mRNA tech for rapid vaccine development wasn't available back then and it didn't spread so far that there was political pressure for expedited trials. Now it is eradicated anyway.
QuesnayJr 6y ago
Part of why these vaccines were developed so quickly is that much of the preliminary work was done for SARS.
bluGill 6y ago
The is/was several SARS vaccines. They never got to phase 3 trials, because of various problems. We learned enough from them to skip all the issues this time around.
bagacrap 6y ago
what's the incentive to work on a sars vaccine? the outbreak was contained before a vaccine was approved so they stopped work.

jonplackett 6y ago

Pfizer have said it will only take a few weeks to tweak their Rna vaccine, if it does need to be changed. Anyone know how long it would take AstraZeneca with a more traditional vaccine?

phreeza 6y ago
Will a tweaked vaccine have to go through the full approval process again?
- lame-robot-hoax 6y ago
  I believe only phase 1 and phase 2.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    How long do phase 1/2 take? I wonder if, under some potential circumstances (eg. the virus turns out to escape current vaccine & be much more contagious) exceptions will be made.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      A few months. Though we don't have enough understanding of mRNA to skip phase 3 yet. That dull take time. How much time is a question of tradeoffs.
libertine 6y ago
The problem is that we're turning this into a cat and mouse - Pfizer has nowhere near the capacity to ramp up production to make a positive impact after all. If we enter a cycle of new variants every 9-6 months that require new vacines, simply because the volume of people infect allows the virus to have enough diversity, then it's pointless. It's basically a "weird flex" from Pfizer, because what they should say is: even though we can make a new vaccine easily, we will have nowhere near the production capacity to make a difference, so global governments need to get their shit together.

phreeza 6y ago

What I haven't seen widely discussed regarding the new variant is whether the higher infectiousness means herd immunity will be achieved later. From my amateur understanding of the SIR model, this should be the case. So ultimately we may not achieve herd immunity except with mandatory vaccination campaigns.

7OVO7 6y ago

good for all those suppressed people

GistNoesis 6y ago

What worries me is that there doesn't seem to be some global coordination in the distribution of the vaccines. It looks more like an individual race, than a synchronized collective effort. In the scenario where only the old accept to get vaccinated, and the vaccine doesn't reach the required threshold to stomp the virus. The virus become manageable, the economy reopen but the virus run rampant in the asymptotic population slowly mutating over-time until it finds a variant that is resistant to the vaccine by successfully infecting a vaccinated person. And it just needs for this to happen in a large population cluster where the vaccination doesn't reach the threshold, either because they do not have access to the vaccine yet or because some fraction of the population decide to not get vaccinated, for everyone to get screwed-up again. Then we get a new vaccine every year.

Thorentis 6y ago
Congratulations, you discovered the flu.
- GistNoesis 6y ago
  Touché ! What is so sad is that it can still be avoided. But the current situation where we simultaneously have a high number of active case and high number of vaccinated people over a sufficiently long time because of slow vaccination schedule, is a recipe for creating vaccine resistant variants. As soon as we start vaccinating we are giving the virus opportunities to pressure-select against the vaccine. The more active case we have and the longer it takes the better for the virus. I'm no epidemiologist, but with the apparition in a short amount of time of 2 variants which affects the spike protein, it seems the current level of active case we are entering a red-zone, where the virus is given too many opportunities to mutate. And we should try to contain it via the current measures (masks, tracking and lock-downs), before sabotaging our best card.
deleted 6y ago
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AhmedHassan2027 6y ago

Thanks to pfizer to take affective medicine to open the world

allendoerfer 6y ago
Also thanks to BioNtech for developing said medicine.

anonthinker 6y ago

I know some of you are following this closely and I have some questions I haven't seen any proper answer. I am hoping one of you can shine some light. How long will the mod-RNA express the spike proteins? (where is the actual 'protein expression'/time plot?) The poly(A) tail isn't just A (which would give a mechanic answer to my first question?), there is also a 10-nucleotide linker (GCAΨAΨGACΨ). I wonder if this could be there to trigger some sort of self-amplification. Can someone point me to the relevant paper?

UltimateBallR 6y ago

Extremely good news!

luikore 6y ago

We still need Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment in vaccine development.

jimbokun 6y ago
The question is whether or not we're confident enough to administer the latest vaccine variants without clinical trials.

williesleg 6y ago

Calm down, it's a cold virus.

Capira 6y ago

I hope it isn't mandatory?

m3kw9 6y ago

How effective is it to use one of those molecular simulation tools to quickly calculate if the antigens created still have high affinity to bind to the mutated spike?

jakub_jo 6y ago

It's not the "Pfizer" vaccine. It's either the "Biontech" vaccine or the "Biontech/Pfizer" vaccine. Please fix the title.

mseidl 6y ago
AFAIK, Biontech developed the vaccine and had successful tests in mice/monkeys, then they asked Pfizer help for bigger scaled testing/manufacturing?

TexasfoldsEm 6y ago

If you believe this you need to research mRNA vaccine and the antibodies they are attempting to make and the other findings in the blood of those who really take it unlike Fauci who faked it on TV. Had shot of probably saline in his left arm then next day on TV aid no side effects just my arm is sore as he held his sore RIGHT ARM! This is copletely a different nefarious global event. Why are the not reporting on all the deaths already occurring and Bells Palsy. Even removing the videos of healthcare workers from the sick platforms such as Twitter and Youtube whom have played the part to divide this nation using this fake two party fight. People we must unite in order to fend off what is coming. SEEK FOR YOURSELVES. You can even use Google Earth to find staging areas in rural locations of hundreds of thousands of UN armored vehicles. Wonder what those are for?