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Oxford vaccine shows sustained protection of 76% in 3-month gap til second dose

176 points by timthorn 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
simonswords82 6y ago
It just gets better and better for the UK - which is a relief because early January had some grim sickness and death numbers. Check out the data on the UK Gov dashboard if you've not seen it: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ Also - we are all in lockdown, which helps.
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  Not sure why you're being down voted. It's not like you said anything incorrect or controversial. Anyway I agree with you.
  - CodeGlitch 6y ago
    Now I'm being downvoted? Wtf HN
    - lucb1e 6y ago
      I don't see anything in particular to agree or disagree about. Dashboard link, saying lockdown helps against the pandemic, things looking up for the UK... yeah I'd also be curious how this is objectionable. The trouble is that talking about votes is discouraged in the guidelines. Not sure I agree, but that discussion is pretty meta, so we'll just have to keep guessing until someone provides the reason why this was deemed harmful to the thread.
    - dang 6y ago
      You were breaking the site guidelines, so the downvotes are correct. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (note the second-last). Comments like the two you posted here are particularly off-topic because once users have fixed the situation with corrective upvotes, such complaints become uncollected garbage. That is, they linger on, even though they're false in addition to off-topic. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=uncollected https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
  - simonswords82 6y ago
    Yeah I keep meaning to ask dang why I get pummeled with down votes whenever I comment on something.
    - jariel 6y ago
      The majority of votes on HN I believe are instinctive - someone liked or didn't like what you said, or the tone or whatever and that's it. Often there isn't much rhyme or reason. Clearly there are low/high value comments, or flame-wars but generally that's not it. Apparently, PG himself was fond of voting for disagreement/agreement, but even he I don't think quite has seen the degree of arbitrary voting. You will notice that people in the moments after your comment are much more likely to hate on it arbitrarily than later on when you might see some upswing. If you comment on anything even remotely controversial, that even hints at something like Brexit, EU nationalism, Transgender etc. - expect to see a lot of volatility. It's really quite an interesting phenom to see. Frankly it's pointless to meander about it and after much speculation I would say just don't worry about it - and - don't put too much stock in any kind of 'points system' it really doesn't matter that much at all. The Oxford vaccine is doing well, the UK is way ahead due to the locality of it all, which is great, because they need the help what with having a considerably higher death reate. I would recommend you see here [1] for a really good breakdown of vaccination and other COVID data. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
- nine_zeros 6y ago
  That's pretty good. Is the vaccination drive going on in full speed?
  - pityJuke 6y ago
    Very much so, the UK is currently only behind the UAE and Israel in vaccine rollout per 100 residents* [1]. * for major countries (incidentally, the UK territory Gibraltar is 2nd in the world if you include minor countries), and only considering the first dosage, which in fairness, appears to be the correct for this specific vaccine. [1]: https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker/ https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker/
  - mprovost 6y ago
    Yes, there have been over 10 million vaccinations so far. They did over 900,000 last weekend alone.
- sterlind 6y ago
  That R number is pretty good. I hope it holds up!
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  "Better" is doing a lot of work here. The UK (in particular, England) is currently reporting the second highest new death rate per capita in the world, still higher than it was at any point in 2020. It continues to report 1000+ unnecessary deaths per day. And, is it still the case that the UK has 50% more excess deaths than it is reporting in the daily coronavirus figures? A mystery...
  - twoslide 6y ago
    Agreed, important to keep in mind the UK has highest per capita mortality of any large country. But this is good news for the government’s gamble to increase spacing between doses to 3 months
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Note that deaths are very lagging. It can be a couple months between being exposed to COVID and death, maybe even more as medical science has learned about treating COVID over time. It is reasonable to assume that everyone dieing today got COVID before there was a vaccine, though there have been a few deaths by now that could have been prevented if the first vaccines were not given to someone else (if that person who got it would have got COVID and died instead is not something we can answer) Deaths will start to stop soon, COVID infections are already dropping in many countries, with vaccines being part of the reason (but only part - again we cannot know how much)
    - fy20 6y ago
      The UK only treats deaths within 28 days of a positive test as a 'COVID death'.
      - bluGill 6y ago
        Interesting. I know that in my community the spike in covid deaths lags the new positive count by almost 2 months. I'm not sure how they decide something is a COVID death, I just watch the daily new positive and daily deaths numbers.
  - 6y ago
- harry8 6y ago
  Here's another way of framing it: Having messed this up so very badly doing idiotically risky things from the start the latest big risk taken by the UK government didn't actually backfire as badly as the previous ones. Others have pointed at the current per-capita deaths. This completely ignores the long-term effects to survivors accross the population. It can be a challenge to see how the UK government could have dealt with this worse. It's a highly educated population that has put the brakes on the most destructive policies from the very start. I really hope the wider population comes to an appreciation of "asymmetric risk" from this the way "metal fatigue" entered popular usage with the aeroplane disasters of I think the DC-10.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    To be fair to the UK government, their vaccine strategy has been spot on: lot's of investment and early. They've messed up basically every else, and still are. But I think they do deserve some credit for that.
    - harry8 6y ago
      >to be fair ...taking a flyer on an utterly unproven vaccination strategy was a huge, huge risk and had it not come off there would be no vaccination strategy. Relying on being lucky doesn't seem like a "spot on" strategy to me. "We gambled everything on red it and came up so we deserve credit for the strategy." edit: This is in relation to the additional time between first and second jabs that was untested in the strategy - for which this result suggests we no longer need to be concerned that the vaccination might be reduced in protection as we were before this data came in.
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        When they do badly you say it's because of their incompetence. When they do well you still say it's because of their incompetence. At every turn they’ve had credible expert advice telling them to do contradictory things. They’ve had to use judgement. If only they had the sense to use hindsight, like you.
- Traster 6y ago
  I'm sorry but "better and better" is a pretty ridiculous way to characterize the situation in the UK. We're under pretty much the most strict lockdown conditions, and deaths peaked to a ridiculous level in a totally predictable and preventable way due to the christmas fuck up.
dhbradshaw 6y ago
What exactly does "percent protection" mean in these announcements? Can we use the definition to derive a percent protection associated with having been through the virus? Is there a percent protection associated with your age / gender / race profile? It feels like the number doesn't mean much without having a similar number for the null cases.
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  It is a reduction of the risk of symptomatic disease by 76% once vaccinated. But more importantly, there were no hospitalizations or deaths in the vaccinated people. This is a point the media often overlooks.
  - nmca 6y ago
    Because the "no hospitalisations or deaths" claim from the first Oxford paper was comparing n=2 to n=0 and thus was miles from significance. If the new paper has updated data on this happy to be corrected.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Tbh, the reductions in hospitalisations has been super high for almost all the vaccines, which is great news.
    - lbeltrame 6y ago
      It is a constant in any vaccine, including the "lowest" performers from Sinovac and Sinopharm. At this point, I'm inclined to believe that any resonably effective vaccine will have this effect.
  - adamc 6y ago
    It's huge. On the whole, avoiding hospitalizations is far more important than whether people had mild cases.
    - renaudg 6y ago
mchusma 6y ago
Hopefully this additional data will get the US to act the way they should have in November. Lift the ban on Astrazeneca. It's been given safely to millions now, with zero deaths from covid in the vaccinated (+14 days). The FDAs failure to approve Astrazeneca is the most horrifying government agency failure I have ever seen.
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  I was thinking the other day whether whether the world-wide effort to vaccinate as many people as possible will be a major blow to the anti-vax movement - in that once it is shown that there's no negative consequences of so many people taking a vaccine. E.g. no increase in autism rates. Fingers crossed.
  - pb7 6y ago
    I think you'll find that data or lack thereof wasn't what was driving anti-vaxxers. :)
  - fweespeech 6y ago
    You cannot reason people out of a position they did not reason themselves into. These people are not thinking logically and reacting to facts, they are reacting to what influencers in their sphere say and accepting that appeal to authority as fact.
  - macintux 6y ago
    7 billion people taking a vaccine; some percentage of them will die or experience significant illness after. Even if the two events aren’t related, the anti-vaxxers will seize on the timing and blame the vaccine.
    - carlmr 6y ago
      Exactly, that's also where anti-vaxx started. Kids get diagnosed with autism usually just after getting their last childhood vaccines. Correlation is enough.
the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
It’s interesting how the Astra Zeneca vaccine is such an emotional topic. In the UK it’s seen as the greatest weapon against the pandemic, in the US it is not playing much of a role and in the EU public perception is super negative.
- caffeine 6y ago
  My perception of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is that their credibility is compromised. I take claims of its efficacy with a similar dose of salt to claims about the Russian and Chinese vaccines. Reason is that early on they were rushing data and approvals on grounds of national pride, in a very similar way to the Chinese and Russian authorities. Pfizer and Moderna seem to have been more thorough.
  - LawnGnome 6y ago
    Interestingly, the interim Sputnik results were published in the Lancet today, and they're good: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00234-8/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... I don't disagree about the process, though.
  - orra 6y ago
    This is nonsense. It's not about national pride. The UK authorised Pfizer first. We knew back in December how effective just one dose[1] of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is, at stopping death. See figure 2 on page 28. [1] https://www.fda.gov/media/144434/download https://www.fda.gov/media/144434/download
    - caffeine 6y ago
      The link you posted is about the Moderna vaccine, not AstraZeneca. I have no qualms with the Moderna vaccine, I consider it and the Pfizer to be the most effective and least questionable.
      - orra 6y ago
ummonk 6y ago
The case for a one-dose first strategy gets stronger and stronger, but due to slavish proceduralism, the FDA wouldn’t consider it.
- thehappypm 6y ago
  There is 0 data that any of the vaccines approved by the FDA are efficacious with a single dose. There is 0 data to support that a delayed dose is efficacious. The FDA is making a very, very valid choice so far.
  - endgame 6y ago
    There is also minimal data that parachutes are better than placebo for people who jump out of planes. This situation needs wartime thinking, not peacetime proceduralism. What you're saying is that we must assume the worst case, that the FDA-approved vaccines are like 2-pack epoxies: that first doses give 0% immunity, and all the efficacy comes from applying the second. That seems completely absurd.
  - gojomo 6y ago
    Your claim of "0 data" is completely wrong. The original phase 3 trials already showed limited support for partial one-dose efficacy. (They even broke it down in their writeups! That's non-zero data!) Observational reports so far on the tens of millions additional doses given (compared to a mere ~15-20K in phase 3 trials) is also suggestive of 1-dose efficiency. (Most recently, a retrospective study in Israel – the nation with the highest proportion of its population immunized – found 51% efficacy against "confirmed COVID" looking at just days 13-24 after a single dose – and that's in a world with far more variants than the original mRNA studies. It's reasonable to conjecture from other results that the efficacy would be even better later, and better against "severe disease".) Plus, there's everything we can reason about from similar diseases & vaccines. The reason to wait for 2nd-dose-plus-7d in study "primary endpoints" is to have a singular, legible, stark readout for rather-simpleminded regulatory processes. But smart people who live in the real world know the actual mechanisms are far more fluid/incremental, with immune processes starting immediately from one dose, then accelerating over weeks (even without a booster).
jaynetics 6y ago
Even more consequential than the fact from the headline is the preliminary result that a spacing of 12 weeks does not seem to reduce efficiency. I wish my country and others would take note and give priority to handing out as many first doses as possible, but my hope for such quick adoption of scientific findings has been rather diminished by the whole event.
- xvedejas 6y ago
  The first dose prevents hospitalization. Right now, for every second dose we give, that's a decision to deny someone a life-saving dose in favor of someone already protected. What a strange prioritization to make. The bright side is that, if the rate of vaccination continues to increase, those denied the first dose now should still get the first dose soon after. Let's hope we don't hit some manufacturing bottleneck.
  - strstr 6y ago
    The problem is the lack of certainty. Most suspect that you won't lose protection by waiting longer than the suggested timeline, but what you really don't want to do is sleep-walk into throwing away the currently administered doses. Frustratingly, I'm guessing the timelines for a study on the durability of single dose moderna/pfizer would take about as long as it will take to ramp up production.
    - ummonk 6y ago
      That's not how the immune system works though; you aren't "throwing away" the currently administered doses if you wait until after immunity declines to give the booster dose. Unless this virus is magically different from every other virus we create a vaccine for, waiting longer for the booster will create a better / longer-lasting immunity afterwards.
      - ineedasername 6y ago
        No, some vaccines wear off relatively quickly: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/how-long-do-vaccines-last-surprising-answers-may-help-protect-people-longer https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/how-long-do-vaccines... So it's very important to follow the protocol here as much as possible until we know otherwise.
krzyk 6y ago
How that compares to the announcement from https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ema-recommends-covid-19-vaccine-astrazeneca-authorisation-eu https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ema-recommends-covid-19-va... where they state the the efficacy is 59.5%? Is it a different dose or different timeline?
- mrtksn 6y ago
  “The initial data from Astra and Oxford last month appeared positive but raised concern over how much protection the shot would offer after the trials produced two different results from two dosing regimens. The partners said their vaccine was 90% effective when a half-dose was given before a full-dose booster, and that two full doses showed an efficacy of 62%.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-08/astra-vaccine-is-effective-but-leaves-questions-in-older-ages https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-08/astra-vac... Turks also find that the Sinovac vaccine is %91 effective when others reported less. I guess it depends on the variant, on what do you understand by “protected” or on how much you want it to work.
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  The data the EMA (at least, the public stuff) is from the first "lock" of the data for analysis - November 4th. The current preprint from Oxford is from about one month later.
- sgt101 6y ago
  I think that the early oxford trials reported infections from day 1 of the shot, later reports are talking about what happens after 21 days.
password321 6y ago
Strangely, this news went under the radar: https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n149 https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n149 23 deaths in Norway, possibly from vaccine.
- Veen 6y ago
  First, it was 33 people out of around 50,000 elderly and vulnerable people who were vaccinated. Your source is outdated. Second, it went under the radar because it's probably not attributable to the vaccine. The people who died were over 80 and already extremely frail with pre-existing conditions. They either died from those conditions or from their inability to cope with the mild side-effects of the vaccine, which everyone already knows about. Death rates in Norway are well within the historical range, so it's fairly likely that there were no excess deaths caused by the vaccine at all. Their dying after having the vaccine does not mean they died because of the vaccine.
  - jmorse2 6y ago
    To reinforce this, one of the statistics that the beeb have wheeled out is that in the most vulnerable group being vaccinated (in the UK), aged 80+, one in ten of them will die regardless of covid in the next year. Quoted from "How to vaccinate the world -- Vaccine Hesitancy" [0] from 12 minutes in to 15 minutes. (And because it's BBC sounds, for some reason it randomly skips episodes when I load the page). The entire series is well worth a listen, data driven and statistics heavy. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000qblw https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000qblw Edit - because the beeb want registration, alternate link: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/vaccine-hesitancy/id1540300666?i=1000502330987 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/vaccine-hesitancy/id15...
    - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
      > the beeb Never heard this term. From context I'm assuming it's slang for the BBC?
      - 6y ago
andred14 6y ago
Stay away from these untested drugs. The satan1c ped0phile eugenicists that made them are trying to kill you. Please learn about these dangerous new vacc1nes: https://www.bitchute.com/video/KAzUeDrgijM3/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/KAzUeDrgijM3/
Fjolsvith 6y ago
https://www.bitchute.com/video/GYQJTJ7Vdhud/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/GYQJTJ7Vdhud/ Second dose sends victim into anaphylaxis shock. Every doctor and nurse who administers the vaccine will be tried as a war criminal.

176 points by timthorn 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

It just gets better and better for the UK - which is a relief because early January had some grim sickness and death numbers. Check out the data on the UK Gov dashboard if you've not seen it: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ Also - we are all in lockdown, which helps.

CodeGlitch 6y ago
Not sure why you're being down voted. It's not like you said anything incorrect or controversial. Anyway I agree with you.
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  Now I'm being downvoted? Wtf HN
  - lucb1e 6y ago
    I don't see anything in particular to agree or disagree about. Dashboard link, saying lockdown helps against the pandemic, things looking up for the UK... yeah I'd also be curious how this is objectionable. The trouble is that talking about votes is discouraged in the guidelines. Not sure I agree, but that discussion is pretty meta, so we'll just have to keep guessing until someone provides the reason why this was deemed harmful to the thread.
  - dang 6y ago
    You were breaking the site guidelines, so the downvotes are correct. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (note the second-last). Comments like the two you posted here are particularly off-topic because once users have fixed the situation with corrective upvotes, such complaints become uncollected garbage. That is, they linger on, even though they're false in addition to off-topic. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=uncollected https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- simonswords82 6y ago
  Yeah I keep meaning to ask dang why I get pummeled with down votes whenever I comment on something.
  - jariel 6y ago
    The majority of votes on HN I believe are instinctive - someone liked or didn't like what you said, or the tone or whatever and that's it. Often there isn't much rhyme or reason. Clearly there are low/high value comments, or flame-wars but generally that's not it. Apparently, PG himself was fond of voting for disagreement/agreement, but even he I don't think quite has seen the degree of arbitrary voting. You will notice that people in the moments after your comment are much more likely to hate on it arbitrarily than later on when you might see some upswing. If you comment on anything even remotely controversial, that even hints at something like Brexit, EU nationalism, Transgender etc. - expect to see a lot of volatility. It's really quite an interesting phenom to see. Frankly it's pointless to meander about it and after much speculation I would say just don't worry about it - and - don't put too much stock in any kind of 'points system' it really doesn't matter that much at all. The Oxford vaccine is doing well, the UK is way ahead due to the locality of it all, which is great, because they need the help what with having a considerably higher death reate. I would recommend you see here [1] for a really good breakdown of vaccination and other COVID data. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
nine_zeros 6y ago
That's pretty good. Is the vaccination drive going on in full speed?
- pityJuke 6y ago
  Very much so, the UK is currently only behind the UAE and Israel in vaccine rollout per 100 residents* [1]. * for major countries (incidentally, the UK territory Gibraltar is 2nd in the world if you include minor countries), and only considering the first dosage, which in fairness, appears to be the correct for this specific vaccine. [1]: https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker/ https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker/
- mprovost 6y ago
  Yes, there have been over 10 million vaccinations so far. They did over 900,000 last weekend alone.
sterlind 6y ago
That R number is pretty good. I hope it holds up!
throwaway2245 6y ago
"Better" is doing a lot of work here. The UK (in particular, England) is currently reporting the second highest new death rate per capita in the world, still higher than it was at any point in 2020. It continues to report 1000+ unnecessary deaths per day. And, is it still the case that the UK has 50% more excess deaths than it is reporting in the daily coronavirus figures? A mystery...
- twoslide 6y ago
  Agreed, important to keep in mind the UK has highest per capita mortality of any large country. But this is good news for the government’s gamble to increase spacing between doses to 3 months
- bluGill 6y ago
  Note that deaths are very lagging. It can be a couple months between being exposed to COVID and death, maybe even more as medical science has learned about treating COVID over time. It is reasonable to assume that everyone dieing today got COVID before there was a vaccine, though there have been a few deaths by now that could have been prevented if the first vaccines were not given to someone else (if that person who got it would have got COVID and died instead is not something we can answer) Deaths will start to stop soon, COVID infections are already dropping in many countries, with vaccines being part of the reason (but only part - again we cannot know how much)
  - fy20 6y ago
    The UK only treats deaths within 28 days of a positive test as a 'COVID death'.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Interesting. I know that in my community the spike in covid deaths lags the new positive count by almost 2 months. I'm not sure how they decide something is a COVID death, I just watch the daily new positive and daily deaths numbers.
- 6y ago
harry8 6y ago
Here's another way of framing it: Having messed this up so very badly doing idiotically risky things from the start the latest big risk taken by the UK government didn't actually backfire as badly as the previous ones. Others have pointed at the current per-capita deaths. This completely ignores the long-term effects to survivors accross the population. It can be a challenge to see how the UK government could have dealt with this worse. It's a highly educated population that has put the brakes on the most destructive policies from the very start. I really hope the wider population comes to an appreciation of "asymmetric risk" from this the way "metal fatigue" entered popular usage with the aeroplane disasters of I think the DC-10.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  To be fair to the UK government, their vaccine strategy has been spot on: lot's of investment and early. They've messed up basically every else, and still are. But I think they do deserve some credit for that.
  - harry8 6y ago
    >to be fair ...taking a flyer on an utterly unproven vaccination strategy was a huge, huge risk and had it not come off there would be no vaccination strategy. Relying on being lucky doesn't seem like a "spot on" strategy to me. "We gambled everything on red it and came up so we deserve credit for the strategy." edit: This is in relation to the additional time between first and second jabs that was untested in the strategy - for which this result suggests we no longer need to be concerned that the vaccination might be reduced in protection as we were before this data came in.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      When they do badly you say it's because of their incompetence. When they do well you still say it's because of their incompetence. At every turn they’ve had credible expert advice telling them to do contradictory things. They’ve had to use judgement. If only they had the sense to use hindsight, like you.
Traster 6y ago
I'm sorry but "better and better" is a pretty ridiculous way to characterize the situation in the UK. We're under pretty much the most strict lockdown conditions, and deaths peaked to a ridiculous level in a totally predictable and preventable way due to the christmas fuck up.

dhbradshaw 6y ago

What exactly does "percent protection" mean in these announcements? Can we use the definition to derive a percent protection associated with having been through the virus? Is there a percent protection associated with your age / gender / race profile? It feels like the number doesn't mean much without having a similar number for the null cases.

lbeltrame 6y ago
It is a reduction of the risk of symptomatic disease by 76% once vaccinated. But more importantly, there were no hospitalizations or deaths in the vaccinated people. This is a point the media often overlooks.
- nmca 6y ago
  Because the "no hospitalisations or deaths" claim from the first Oxford paper was comparing n=2 to n=0 and thus was miles from significance. If the new paper has updated data on this happy to be corrected.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Tbh, the reductions in hospitalisations has been super high for almost all the vaccines, which is great news.
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    It is a constant in any vaccine, including the "lowest" performers from Sinovac and Sinopharm. At this point, I'm inclined to believe that any resonably effective vaccine will have this effect.
- adamc 6y ago
  It's huge. On the whole, avoiding hospitalizations is far more important than whether people had mild cases.
  - renaudg 6y ago

mchusma 6y ago

Hopefully this additional data will get the US to act the way they should have in November. Lift the ban on Astrazeneca. It's been given safely to millions now, with zero deaths from covid in the vaccinated (+14 days). The FDAs failure to approve Astrazeneca is the most horrifying government agency failure I have ever seen.

CodeGlitch 6y ago
I was thinking the other day whether whether the world-wide effort to vaccinate as many people as possible will be a major blow to the anti-vax movement - in that once it is shown that there's no negative consequences of so many people taking a vaccine. E.g. no increase in autism rates. Fingers crossed.
- pb7 6y ago
  I think you'll find that data or lack thereof wasn't what was driving anti-vaxxers. :)
- fweespeech 6y ago
  You cannot reason people out of a position they did not reason themselves into. These people are not thinking logically and reacting to facts, they are reacting to what influencers in their sphere say and accepting that appeal to authority as fact.
- macintux 6y ago
  7 billion people taking a vaccine; some percentage of them will die or experience significant illness after. Even if the two events aren’t related, the anti-vaxxers will seize on the timing and blame the vaccine.
  - carlmr 6y ago
    Exactly, that's also where anti-vaxx started. Kids get diagnosed with autism usually just after getting their last childhood vaccines. Correlation is enough.

the_mitsuhiko 6y ago

It’s interesting how the Astra Zeneca vaccine is such an emotional topic. In the UK it’s seen as the greatest weapon against the pandemic, in the US it is not playing much of a role and in the EU public perception is super negative.

caffeine 6y ago
My perception of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is that their credibility is compromised. I take claims of its efficacy with a similar dose of salt to claims about the Russian and Chinese vaccines. Reason is that early on they were rushing data and approvals on grounds of national pride, in a very similar way to the Chinese and Russian authorities. Pfizer and Moderna seem to have been more thorough.
- LawnGnome 6y ago
  Interestingly, the interim Sputnik results were published in the Lancet today, and they're good: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00234-8/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... I don't disagree about the process, though.
- orra 6y ago
  This is nonsense. It's not about national pride. The UK authorised Pfizer first. We knew back in December how effective just one dose[1] of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is, at stopping death. See figure 2 on page 28. [1] https://www.fda.gov/media/144434/download https://www.fda.gov/media/144434/download
  - caffeine 6y ago
    The link you posted is about the Moderna vaccine, not AstraZeneca. I have no qualms with the Moderna vaccine, I consider it and the Pfizer to be the most effective and least questionable.
    - orra 6y ago

ummonk 6y ago

The case for a one-dose first strategy gets stronger and stronger, but due to slavish proceduralism, the FDA wouldn’t consider it.

thehappypm 6y ago
There is 0 data that any of the vaccines approved by the FDA are efficacious with a single dose. There is 0 data to support that a delayed dose is efficacious. The FDA is making a very, very valid choice so far.
- endgame 6y ago
  There is also minimal data that parachutes are better than placebo for people who jump out of planes. This situation needs wartime thinking, not peacetime proceduralism. What you're saying is that we must assume the worst case, that the FDA-approved vaccines are like 2-pack epoxies: that first doses give 0% immunity, and all the efficacy comes from applying the second. That seems completely absurd.
- gojomo 6y ago
  Your claim of "0 data" is completely wrong. The original phase 3 trials already showed limited support for partial one-dose efficacy. (They even broke it down in their writeups! That's non-zero data!) Observational reports so far on the tens of millions additional doses given (compared to a mere ~15-20K in phase 3 trials) is also suggestive of 1-dose efficiency. (Most recently, a retrospective study in Israel – the nation with the highest proportion of its population immunized – found 51% efficacy against "confirmed COVID" looking at just days 13-24 after a single dose – and that's in a world with far more variants than the original mRNA studies. It's reasonable to conjecture from other results that the efficacy would be even better later, and better against "severe disease".) Plus, there's everything we can reason about from similar diseases & vaccines. The reason to wait for 2nd-dose-plus-7d in study "primary endpoints" is to have a singular, legible, stark readout for rather-simpleminded regulatory processes. But smart people who live in the real world know the actual mechanisms are far more fluid/incremental, with immune processes starting immediately from one dose, then accelerating over weeks (even without a booster).

jaynetics 6y ago

Even more consequential than the fact from the headline is the preliminary result that a spacing of 12 weeks does not seem to reduce efficiency. I wish my country and others would take note and give priority to handing out as many first doses as possible, but my hope for such quick adoption of scientific findings has been rather diminished by the whole event.

xvedejas 6y ago
The first dose prevents hospitalization. Right now, for every second dose we give, that's a decision to deny someone a life-saving dose in favor of someone already protected. What a strange prioritization to make. The bright side is that, if the rate of vaccination continues to increase, those denied the first dose now should still get the first dose soon after. Let's hope we don't hit some manufacturing bottleneck.
- strstr 6y ago
  The problem is the lack of certainty. Most suspect that you won't lose protection by waiting longer than the suggested timeline, but what you really don't want to do is sleep-walk into throwing away the currently administered doses. Frustratingly, I'm guessing the timelines for a study on the durability of single dose moderna/pfizer would take about as long as it will take to ramp up production.
  - ummonk 6y ago
    That's not how the immune system works though; you aren't "throwing away" the currently administered doses if you wait until after immunity declines to give the booster dose. Unless this virus is magically different from every other virus we create a vaccine for, waiting longer for the booster will create a better / longer-lasting immunity afterwards.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      No, some vaccines wear off relatively quickly: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/how-long-do-vaccines-last-surprising-answers-may-help-protect-people-longer https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/how-long-do-vaccines... So it's very important to follow the protocol here as much as possible until we know otherwise.

krzyk 6y ago

How that compares to the announcement from https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ema-recommends-covid-19-vaccine-astrazeneca-authorisation-eu https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ema-recommends-covid-19-va... where they state the the efficacy is 59.5%? Is it a different dose or different timeline?

mrtksn 6y ago
“The initial data from Astra and Oxford last month appeared positive but raised concern over how much protection the shot would offer after the trials produced two different results from two dosing regimens. The partners said their vaccine was 90% effective when a half-dose was given before a full-dose booster, and that two full doses showed an efficacy of 62%.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-08/astra-vaccine-is-effective-but-leaves-questions-in-older-ages https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-08/astra-vac... Turks also find that the Sinovac vaccine is %91 effective when others reported less. I guess it depends on the variant, on what do you understand by “protected” or on how much you want it to work.
lbeltrame 6y ago
The data the EMA (at least, the public stuff) is from the first "lock" of the data for analysis - November 4th. The current preprint from Oxford is from about one month later.
sgt101 6y ago
I think that the early oxford trials reported infections from day 1 of the shot, later reports are talking about what happens after 21 days.

password321 6y ago

Strangely, this news went under the radar: https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n149 https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n149 23 deaths in Norway, possibly from vaccine.

Veen 6y ago
First, it was 33 people out of around 50,000 elderly and vulnerable people who were vaccinated. Your source is outdated. Second, it went under the radar because it's probably not attributable to the vaccine. The people who died were over 80 and already extremely frail with pre-existing conditions. They either died from those conditions or from their inability to cope with the mild side-effects of the vaccine, which everyone already knows about. Death rates in Norway are well within the historical range, so it's fairly likely that there were no excess deaths caused by the vaccine at all. Their dying after having the vaccine does not mean they died because of the vaccine.
- jmorse2 6y ago
  To reinforce this, one of the statistics that the beeb have wheeled out is that in the most vulnerable group being vaccinated (in the UK), aged 80+, one in ten of them will die regardless of covid in the next year. Quoted from "How to vaccinate the world -- Vaccine Hesitancy" [0] from 12 minutes in to 15 minutes. (And because it's BBC sounds, for some reason it randomly skips episodes when I load the page). The entire series is well worth a listen, data driven and statistics heavy. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000qblw https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000qblw Edit - because the beeb want registration, alternate link: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/vaccine-hesitancy/id1540300666?i=1000502330987 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/vaccine-hesitancy/id15...
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    > the beeb Never heard this term. From context I'm assuming it's slang for the BBC?
    - 6y ago

andred14 6y ago

Stay away from these untested drugs. The satan1c ped0phile eugenicists that made them are trying to kill you. Please learn about these dangerous new vacc1nes: https://www.bitchute.com/video/KAzUeDrgijM3/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/KAzUeDrgijM3/

Fjolsvith 6y ago

https://www.bitchute.com/video/GYQJTJ7Vdhud/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/GYQJTJ7Vdhud/ Second dose sends victim into anaphylaxis shock. Every doctor and nurse who administers the vaccine will be tried as a war criminal.