The Lemon Fool

vagrantbrain wrote:Generally companies perform a risk-reward analysis before investing in a new product, and I don't think Pfizer or BioNtech are going to invest tens of millions of dollars in creating and mass manufacturing a new vaccine if they're unlikely to be able to sell it...

If it's merely tens of millions there is a strong "just in case" argument that this should be funded flat out, either by governments or philanthropy*. They might call it off in a month or so when we know more, but right now some of the awful scenarios have not been completely ruled out.

Even if it's not needed spending tens of millions on a dress rehearsal for Omega (or MERS-2, ... ) is far from the worst use of government money we will see this week.

OTOH if the cost is few tens of billions the decision is more difficult.

* Perhaps including philanthropy by Pfizer or BioNtech.

pje16 wrote:so let's ignore the 11m then
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/over ... Dup%20jabs.
and since when was it a business case????

That press release is already more than a month out of date!

OK that mean it's even more then
You do pick on my posts don't you

pje16 wrote:OK that mean it's even more then
You do pick on my posts don't you

You can stop the unnecessary insulting emoji's thank you.

My intervention was to make exactly that point, which wouldn't have been needed if you had sourced an even more up to date reference. It seems you think that's my fault.

I am sorry my link was a few weeks old
Someone had made the point that there wasn't much point with the booster as most of the world will have already had it by March so saying there were 11m who had already had it was done to show that lots had already had, ok I didn't notice the article was a month old but that proves the case even more.

You do have a history of going against a lot of my posts, that is your right, but you do it far more the anyone else here and it does get a bit tiresome, so it is my right to respond how I see fit

pje16 wrote:I am sorry my link was a few weeks old
Someone had made the point that there wasn't much point with the booster as most of the world will have already had it by March so saying there were 11m who had already had it was done to show that lots had already had, ok I didn't notice the article was a month old but that proves the case even more.

You do have a history of going against a lot of my posts, that is your right, but you do it far more the anyone else here and it does get a bit tiresome, so it is my right to respond how I see fit

But there aren't 11m who've had an omicron booster vaccine, it's not been made yet! And unlikely to be available for anyone until easter at the earliest according to the link that was posted, which means probably late summer before a meaningful proportion of the population would have received it. Given the pace it's spreading that would be about 6 months after most of the planet would have already had it and either died or recovered.

Whoops my mistake
Sorry.....

9873210 wrote:Even if it's not needed spending tens of millions on a dress rehearsal for Omega (or MERS-2, ... ) is far from the worst use of government money we will see this week.

The great thing about this new generation of vaccines is that actually creating a new one is trivial - it's not much more than typing different letters into a computer. Working out which letters to type into the computer is a bit more difficult, but potentially not much more than a few days work. And whilst manufactuing is inherently the same, there would be some minor issues on the logistics side having two SKUs rather than one. The bottleneck is trials and approval. With flu there's a fairly well-established process that once the basic principle of a vaccine is established, the annual variants get an accelerated trial process. We've not done that before with this new generation of vaccines, but AIUI a framework has been established in principle.

So it's been a fairly trivial process to make new vaccines against new variants, and to answer the above thread - there have been trials with Alpha, Beta, Delta & Alpha/Delta-mix vaccines. The real issue is whether you want to use them if the "classic" vaccine is good enough. The classic vaccines are the best understood as they have been given to billions of people, and logistically it's a lot easier if you just have one kind of vaccine to worry about inventory management for, which is important if you're trying to vax as rapidly as possible. Also T cell epitopes seem to be pretty highly conserved in this virus so far. So you need a good reason to not use the classic jab.

Which is where the concept of mapping antigen space comes in. For the last 18 months the virus has been pushing against the boundaries of antigenic space but not getting very far from the original virus, which is why the original jabs still work well. Omicron is the first variant that sounds like it might have escaped a bit from that original space, but the experts are still debating whether it's worth rolling out a new omicron vaccine.

One reason for that is that SARS2, like flu, shows signs of "original antigenic sin" or immune imprinting, where your immune response is forever shaped by the variant that you are first exposed to. So for instance, an Imperial/QMUL study found that people who got alpha ("Kent") first had stronger responses to delta and weaker responses to beta than people whose first exposure was to the original Wuhan variant.

So...it's complicated, and it's too soon to say for sure.

Antigen mapping pre-omicron : https://www.science.org/content/article ... us-do-next
Layman's version of the imprinting study : https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232396/ ... rotection/