The Lemon Fool

JVT was on the Downing Street conference this evening and although he was cautious he also said that he did not think there would be any need for social distancing or mask wearing later next summer. I have never heard him quite so optimistic and he has been very cautious up to now. I value his views more than some of them I must say. He also said that it is likely that some people will of course eamin cautious about such things and there is of course nothing wrong with that.

Dod

absolutezero wrote:But I am wondering whether this jab will be worth the small chance of me being severely affected by a disease that has a 99.4% survival rate.

interesting question

looking purely at the effect on your own chances of disease - for a 99.4% survival rate you'd be ~55years old
- so you could give it 5 years and see?

-sd

servodude wrote:

absolutezero wrote:But I am wondering whether this jab will be worth the small chance of me being severely affected by a disease that has a 99.4% survival rate.

interesting question

looking purely at the effect on your own chances of disease - for a 99.4% survival rate you'd be ~55years old
- so you could give it 5 years and see?

-sd

Underlying point: the benefits are greater the older you are. A healthy 40-year-old, mid-life and at negligible risk from the lurgy, is a different story to a pensioner with dicky heart and lungs.

What happens now if other health regulators reject it, and give good reasons for doing so? That would put anti-vax on steroids here. I hope they read all the smallprint when they ticked the boxes.

@absolutezero If you don't get vaccinated, are you prepared to self-isolate until the pandemic dies out completely? Every person who chooses not to vaccinate, and keeps active in society will keep the R number that bit higher. This will delay the end of the pandemic, kill more people and inflict more economic damage.

Just listening to discussion of it on The World Tonight (Radio 4 news).

Criticism from some who think it's been rushed. Reply: this is an emergency, can't wait.

Hmmm. Isn't that a case of double-standards when set against what our medical folks said of Russian rapid deployment of their Sputnik vaccine?

How are the Russians going to deploy their vaccine - spray it on peoples door knobs ?

scrumpyjack wrote:But reports I have read, for those who did get Covid, it wasn't severe.

I do wonder if that statement is statistically significant though? There were only 8 people who caught the virus in the vaccine group, and the fatality ratio is, what?, 0.5%? So you really wouldn't expect to have seen a death from 8 people having caught it.

Will be interesting to see what happens once we vaccinate a few million people.

jfgw wrote:Personally, I would like to see some priority given to people in public-facing roles such as shop and pub staff, and bus and taxi drivers.

Julian F. G. W.

Given they would likely be the "super spreaders" that seems to make sense for society as a whole

absolutezero wrote:But I am wondering whether this jab will be worth the small chance of me being severely affected by a disease that has a 99.4% survival rate.

Where do people get these crazy numbers from?

The general rate of severe reaction to vaccines is in the order of 1 in a million for most mainstream vaccines - but around 3% (60k deaths from 1.66m confirmed case - really at least 90k actual deaths by excess mortality v probably 2 million actual cases) of those who test positive for Covid-19 die and double that get lasting effects or quite severe cases.

And the key thing, which you are ignoring is the fact that for the country, and maybe you or someone you know, is it is NOT about the actual mortality rate, it is about the hospitalisation rate, which is way, way higher than the mortality rate. Every one of the people hospitalised for Covid takes a bed that would otherwise have been free at this time of the year. Every ICU patient takes 5+ staff round the clock. You live in an area with high Covid hospitalisations and have a heart attack - there may not be an ICU bed, or you may have your cancer treatment delayed, or your op cancelled.

A 99.4% survival rate (at a certain age group) misses the point that this is not about you. It is not about me. It is about everyone. If you get, you'll survive, almost certain. But who will you pass it to? And who will they pass it to? Maybe nobody. But maybe your dad, your mum, your gran, the old boy at the pub, the kid down the road who's mum is on dialysis.

And by the way, if the case survival rate was indeed 99.4%, if everyone in the country caught Covid that would mean 402,000 deaths.

UncleEbenezer wrote:Just listening to discussion of it on The World Tonight (Radio 4 news).

Criticism from some who think it's been rushed. Reply: this is an emergency, can't wait.

Hmmm. Isn't that a case of double-standards when set against what our medical folks said of Russian rapid deployment of their Sputnik vaccine?

Of course, it is not surprising some people would be concerned about the speed of development and testing, and yes the stage 3 testing has been much faster than normal. But actually the majority of the speed has come from the one key thing the drugs companies have not had to worry about - money.

Governments around the world have underwritten the development and manufacturing costs of these vaccines at an unprecedented level, while at the same time running parallel regulatory processes. On the Pfizer vaccine for example the UK and US regulators have been working on the data since May and June, as opposed to the usual practice of getting all the data (thousands of pages of it) at the end of the process. Pfizer, Moderna and AZN all did parallel Stage 2 and Stage 3 trials as soon as Stage 1 was passed with nobody dying from the jabs (which is what Stage 1 is essentially there for).

The UK, US and EU Governments bought over a billion doses of the various most promising vaccines (the UK alone has bought over 350 million) thus entirely derisking any costs to the drugs companies who would usually go much slower for fear of wasting their own money.

These financial and regulatory acceleration measures all but guaranteed a drastic reduction in the time to develop, let alone the technology now available, with almost no extra risk to safety. I would hope (but not too mochas we humans never learn!) that this sort of mass focus on very important drugs and vaccines could carry forward and we could get a cold vaccine, a better flu vaccine and much better targeted treatments or vaccines for say malaria off the back of this sort of effort and success. It is widely acknowledged in the pharma world that as drugs companies make little profit from vaccines they don't really push the boat out to develop them, and it is a sad fact that as malaria largely only affects poor Africans the rest of the world does not really care to make the effort. If we threw the same effort and money at Malaria as we have at Covid I am pretty sure there would be a solution in quite short order.

That said, of course it is impossible to do 5 years of safety testing in 1 year, but the fact is this length of testing is not usually needed. Drugs trials for really invasive, experimental drugs do need long studies (though even they are often granted emergency use for otherwise terminal patients, and yes, I acknowledge that very long term issues do occasionally crop up, but that will always be the case as you can't test drugs for decades, and certainly not ones that could save millions of lives in the meantime. This testing is called Stage 4) but most drugs and certainly most vaccines do not.

Which brings us to the technology part - vaccines are tried and tested, and most of the vaccines (to be fair the Pfizer and modern vaccines are a bit different!) are based on killed virus being injected, stimulating the immune system while not actually infecting. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use the same general idea, but via a new technology called mRNA. This technique does not even inject the virus, but rather a road map for the immune system to recognise the virus via a manufactured copy of the virus structure but no actual virus. These vaccines are new but based on technology that has been tested for many years and proven to be benign. The great thing about these is if they work they are easy to modify for future virus mutations and deploy easily. The Moderna vaccine was ready to go 2 DAYS after the genome of the Coronavirus was posted back in January. After that it was "just" that pesky testing and regulatory sign off.

seekingbalance wrote:to be fair the Pfizer and modern vaccines are a bit different!

- and that's the part that needs addressed in a clear and informative way (and I'd say it's for big values of "a bit")

People should understand that and how they are different, why that doesn't matter and how they've proven they are safe
- which in the current environment feels like a tricky job

-sd

seekingbalance wrote:

UncleEbenezer wrote:Just listening to discussion of it on The World Tonight (Radio 4 news).

Criticism from some who think it's been rushed. Reply: this is an emergency, can't wait.

Hmmm. Isn't that a case of double-standards when set against what our medical folks said of Russian rapid deployment of their Sputnik vaccine?

Of course, it is not surprising some people would be concerned about the speed of development and testing, and yes the stage 3 testing has been much faster than normal. But actually the majority of the speed has come from the one key thing the drugs companies have not had to worry about - money.

Yes, I understand that, and that the drugs companies were building on what they already had. My point was about double-standards.

I could have made further points. Like the commercial pressures arising out of the way governments paid (and even more out of lockdown), in the light of two stories with developments in the past week or so of such commercial pressures, corner-cutting and ineffective regulation leading to disasters[1]. Or like the spinning of brexit. Or even of the personalities concerned: a track record of world-beating fiascos and of purging critics. Or indeed, the clampdown on anti-vax that will surely take down any prospective whistleblower if there is a serious side-effect we're not being told about.

But I didn't make any of those points in that post. Just the one about double standards.

And for the record, I expect to get vaccinated if and when they offer it.

[1] Those stories being the Boeing 737 Max and the Grenfell Tower.

UncleEbenezer wrote:

seekingbalance wrote:

UncleEbenezer wrote:Just listening to discussion of it on The World Tonight (Radio 4 news).

Criticism from some who think it's been rushed. Reply: this is an emergency, can't wait.

Hmmm. Isn't that a case of double-standards when set against what our medical folks said of Russian rapid deployment of their Sputnik vaccine?

Of course, it is not surprising some people would be concerned about the speed of development and testing, and yes the stage 3 testing has been much faster than normal. But actually the majority of the speed has come from the one key thing the drugs companies have not had to worry about - money.

Yes, I understand that, and that the drugs companies were building on what they already had. My point was about double-standards.

I could have made further points. Like the commercial pressures arising out of the way governments paid (and even more out of lockdown), in the light of two stories with developments in the past week or so of such commercial pressures, corner-cutting and ineffective regulation leading to disasters[1]. Or like the spinning of brexit. Or even of the personalities concerned: a track record of world-beating fiascos and of purging critics. Or indeed, the clampdown on anti-vax that will surely take down any prospective whistleblower if there is a serious side-effect we're not being told about.

But I didn't make any of those points in that post. Just the one about double standards.

And for the record, I expect to get vaccinated if and when they offer it.

[1] Those stories being the Boeing 737 Max and the Grenfell Tower.

I think there's enough eyes on these that issues won't be brushed aside easily
- consider how the story about the "serendipitous" dosing of the Oxford-AstraZeneca spread as quickly as it did

and yes there are double standards at play in the way the roll outs have been reported; but that was when "they" had a vaccine and "we" didn't
- if a bit of misplaced pride helps take up it's probably not too bad a thing

- sd

absolutezero wrote:

scrumpyjack wrote:

JohnB wrote:I've come across people fly-posting anti-vaxer sentiments and offering covid-dissing leaflets in SE London/NW Kent. Does anyone know if this is widespread, or do I just have a local loon? 4-5 different bits of material, professionally produced.

Apparently there are quite a lot of such idiots, but fortunately you can think of this as just being part of 'natural selection'. People stupid enough to think this way will have a higher propensity to get wiped out by diseases and so a lower probability of begetting more such idiots. This is the way evolution works!

My problem with this vaccine is that is may well have passed all regulatory safety checks - but it isn't tested by time. It's been produced very quickly.

We don't know that in 5 years time everyone who has been jabbed won't get liver failure or turn blue.
None have so far. But who knows what will happen after a few years?



Other vaccines have been around for years (even the flu jab but they just alter the strain rather than starting from scratch each year) and are time tested.

I'm 40. I have my flu jab every year. I have the full battery of jabs when I go abroad to odd places.
I am not anti vaxx.
But I am wondering whether this jab will be worth the small chance of me being severely affected by a disease that has a 99.4% survival rate.

Yep, we should all wait 40 years so we know it's safe for the longer term. Except it won't because there won't be any long termers cos no one will have had it. All new products have to start somewhere without long term histories. You can only check so much anyway. If fact all those holiday jabs you have had also cause death in the longer term. I saw a study that after 150 years it had a 100% death rate. So I would advise never going on holiday.

Dod101 wrote:Yes I am aware of that which was issued some time ago. My question though is if we oldies have been given both our jabs at which time the bulk of the population will not have been vaccinated, does that mean those who have can resume normal activity in the knowledge that they are protected (if they really are to say 70% or whatever) ?

Dod

No, the same rules will still apply to those who have been vaccinated as to those who haven't for some time yet. In the same way that those who have already had the virus are not exempt at the moment from following the rules .

John

[quote="gryffron"][quote="Mike4"]AIUI, one's immunity will have fully developed six weeks after the second injection.
If it develops at all that is. Bear in mind for 1 in 20 people, it doesn't work.[/quote]
I thought the failure rate was far higher than that? But more importantly it doesn't HAVE to work for everyone. That's not the point at all. The point is that if it works for [i]enough[/i] people, then it drives the R rate below 1 and the disease dies out. The point of this vaccine is to protect society, not the individual. Which does mean that all this talk of "immunity" and "vaccination passports" is pretty rubbish, but as long as it persuades people to get vaccinated it isn't really a problem.

Normal winter flu vaccines are often as low as 50% effective. Still [i]enough[/i] to significantly reduce spread.

Gryff[/quote]

You and I both know this, but this isn't how the majority of people see it.

You only have to read the other posts in this and the other vaccine threads to see how most posters focus on the protection a vaccine give them personally. This is why I pointed out that '95% effective" means to those people who might want the vaccine for personal protection against infection, it only delivers that protection in 19 out of 20 patients so having the vaccine does not GUARANTEE they won't catch COVID-19.

I think!

Mike4 wrote: This is why I pointed out that '95% effective" means to those people who might want the vaccine for personal protection against infection, it only delivers that protection in 19 out of 20 patients so having the vaccine does not GUARANTEE they won't catch COVID-19.

No that's not true.

It provides protection to 19 out of 20 people that "catch it". But the very fact that it will be rolled out to an ever increasing number of the population (19 out of 20 of whom won't develop symptoms and be infectious) vastly reduces the chances of someone catching it. So the combination of a much reduced likelihood of being exposed, together with a 19/20 chance of the vaccine working, makes this a much more effective than the 95% figure.

dealtn wrote:

Mike4 wrote: This is why I pointed out that '95% effective" means to those people who might want the vaccine for personal protection against infection, it only delivers that protection in 19 out of 20 patients so having the vaccine does not GUARANTEE they won't catch COVID-19.

No that's not true.

It provides protection to 19 out of 20 people that "catch it". But the very fact that it will be rolled out to an ever increasing number of the population (19 out of 20 of whom won't develop symptoms and be infectious) vastly reduces the chances of someone catching it. So the combination of a much reduced likelihood of being exposed, together with a 19/20 chance of the vaccine working, makes this a much more effective than the 95% figure.

But Sir, Sir, what do you mean by "catch it", please Sir?

Does catching it mean developing symptoms of COVID-19?

Or does catching it also mean a positive PCR test with no symptoms, as many here have held counts as having COVID-19?

JohnB wrote:@absolutezero If you don't get vaccinated, are you prepared to self-isolate until the pandemic dies out completely? Every person who chooses not to vaccinate, and keeps active in society will keep the R number that bit higher. This will delay the end of the pandemic, kill more people and inflict more economic damage.

Evidence required for this scenario.

You are talking about the political R number that is estimated by a committee and doesn't actually have any calculation or transparency behind it, then I would not be basing my decisions around that.
Find out how it is calculated (details please) and then feed back to the rest of us.

To answer your question. No. The vulnerable should make their own decision about whether they wish to be vaccinated and the rest of us go about our business as normal.
If those at risk are vaccinated then there is no danger to them as individuals from the unvaccinated.

Also worth pointing out. The virus has not caused any economic damage at all. The Government's response is the cause of all the economic damage.

servodude wrote:

absolutezero wrote:But I am wondering whether this jab will be worth the small chance of me being severely affected by a disease that has a 99.4% survival rate.

interesting question

looking purely at the effect on your own chances of disease - for a 99.4% survival rate you'd be ~55years old
- so you could give it 5 years and see?

-sd

45!
My Dad on the other hand is 76 and he has already said he will take it as "I've got 10 years left at best so if something nasty was to happen then it's not like you taking it at 40".