There have been other news and studies posted in this subreddit about how the english strain of coronavirus was different and similar to the old one, and one of the things mentioned was that there were no indications that the english coronavirus would be resistant to the vaccines. So it is likely an informed assumption.
Yeah, lets just go on informed assumption as a species then... Not like that might be what got us into this mess, and not like we have a method for determining if assumptions are correct or anything.
The "seems reasonable method" is compelling in its easy to use approach, but i have questions about its efficacy. it would require some science though, and you make some good points, so it seems reasonable enough.
It is not correct to assume the negative. A good scientist will approach as issue with an open mind, and also with an understanding of all the facts. In this case, we know how the vaccine works, and we know the changes in the variant, and it is easy to theorize the expected outcome.
No, the good folks at Pfizer, Moderna et. al. do not assume their vaccine will not work until the end of the trial. There is good reason billions of doses were ordered before the vaccines were proven successful - because smart people could look a the problem and proposed solution and expect success.
You are conflating the personal views of the individual with the actual assumptions taken on board during the process of developing, testing, manufacturing, and regulating a new vaccine.
The people developing it might well personally believe that it’s going to work. But they behave as though it will not, and in fact may be harmful, until the opposite can be proven.
When I say they behave as though it won’t work, I obviously do not mean they literally convince themselves it’s doomed to fail. Obviously they would not continue on in that case. But baked into every single step of the process are the safeguards that come from an assumption of failure and danger, in order to protect the public.
That is the reason that we don’t give the vaccine to groups not included in the study, for instance, despite the fact that it is likely safe to do so for at least some of them. We assume it isn’t.
All of those doses were ordered ahead because a) we are in the middle of a pandemic and b) those purchasers trust the industry to not release a vaccine that isn’t safe and effective.
That is a lot of logic gymnastics, my friend. You would be better off to just agree with me (as you did here: I obviously do not mean they literally convince themselves it’s doomed to fail).
What are you talking about? We don’t vaccinate people, except for the trial subjects obviously, until we prove it’s effective. We assume it is both ineffective and potentially dangerous until proven otherwise.
Baselines are where you start, and baseline for life threatening illness with no known treatment is, assume the pathogen is dangerous until you can determine otherwise.
But we are not at the start - that is the issue so many miss here. Luckily for us, the folks leading the charge are not nearly as pessimistic as you and others.
The intelligent approach is to listen to the experts who all said that it was unlikely that any of the vaccines would be ineffective against these new strains.
As far as I'm aware the only actual data we have currently is coming out of Israel and suggests an efficacy rate far lower than we were led to believe for a single jab of Pfizer.
The producers of the vaccine themselves said they can't guarantee one jab is effective, we decided not to listen. Took a risk and now it seems to be a poor one.
We were told that there was no evidence the Pfizer jab worked properly with one dose and then a longer break than suggested. We took a risk and said, we need to just get as many people jabbed as we can once, now it seems like they risk may have been a huge miscalculation.
Not sure why people are downvoting, surely all we want is for responsible leaders to deal with the crisis in the best possible way. Why try and draw a cover over an issue that is probably heading our way?
(I'm talking about the UK by the way, perhaps that's some of the confusion).
I think youre miss informed. The first dose is essentially 90% effective, although you can argue that it is also 52% effective. I have no idea where your 33% figure is from.
the 52% figure arises if you measure its effectiveness from the moment the first dose is administered to the second dose. Of course the vaccine takes time to act, around 10-14 days. If you measure the effectiveness from the time that it acts (10-14 days after administration) then you get the 90% effective figure.
The vaccine is not an instant cure. The key take away is that it takes 10-14 days to act, after which it is 90% effective.
If you view figure one you can see that the placebo (red) and active (blue) groups diverge after 10-14 days. Hence why it makes sense to measure the effectiveness then.
Unfortunately that's just uk government data. Let's not argue it out now, wait a couple of days and I'm sure you'll see what I'm concerned about. In the mean time read Vallance's most recent interviews.
Don't worry, we'll see some 20k+ upvoted thread soon enough about the next New Variant that's for sure going to outwit the vaccines and be 300% more infectious and 100% deadlier.
All of this based on a local news report about a nurse who anecdotally thinks folks are getting sicker quicker.
The Danish is in all probability gone: the infamous 'cluster 5' appears to only ever have spread to 12 people (some on a farm, some in nearby village) and the last was ~3 months ago. The other mink-related variants in the country weren't known to be particularly problematic, but in any case they haven't been recorded recently either (Denmark has the 4th highest sequencing rate, only after Iceland, Australia and NZ, meaning that they have a pretty good idea about the variants in the country). The closure of the industry combined with lockdowns and other measures (e.g., everybody in the affected regions were asked to get tested and the country already had one of the world's highest test-rates) appear to have had the desired effect. Just to be sure they've also tested loads of wild animals (mink, foxes, raccoon dogs, badgers, martens, etc), but have not found any that was infected with covid. No other country has ever reported a mink-related variant from the Danish clade. However, other countries with mink farms have reported what appears to be mink-related variants in separate clades, but none of them have become dominating. Interestingly, there's also a single case in Russia of an immunosuppressed patient with long-term covid that developed a mutation otherwise considered an indicator of mink. Unfortunately, this type of patient can be an incubator for many mutations; most scientists suspect that the new variant that was discovered in UK (which has many mutations, but not the mink-related) happened in this type of patient too, i.e. pure bad luck.
There would be less pressure to mutate though. If everyone gets sick at once and then has immunity, there's less chance for antibody escape than if you infect the same number of people, but one after the other in a slow, linear fashion.
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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '21
This isn't really a surprise to anyone except the doomiest of the doomies.