28 ms·

Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine

595 points by mychaelangelo 6y ago

charliebrownau 6y ago
You dont need a magic tax cattle funded big phama ' vaccine" non needle cure exists since 27 March 2020
summerlight 6y ago
It's interesting to layman's eyes that the dosing regime using 1.5 doses is more effective than the one using 2 doses as I would expect the inverse; are there any plausible explanations for this?
- sanxiyn 6y ago
  One possibility is that 1.5 dosing regime reduces unwanted immune reaction against vector (not payload). Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are not vectored.
- codeulike 6y ago
  These stats are based on 130 people getting covid out of an experiment of 25,000 people. They dont give a breakdown of the stats (e.g. who was on placebo, who was on which dosing regimen ) but those are small nubmers. I think its possible that this is just noise. The difference between '60%' and '90%' might just be a handful of cases. They show that it works though, thats the main thing. edit: e.g. of those 130 cases lets assume half were in each regimen experiment. So 65 cases in the 'two full doses experiment' if they got 60% efficiacy then that means about 26 people with the vaccine got covid vs 39 with placebo. In the 'half dose then full dose' experiment if they got 90% efficacy then that means about 7 people with the vaccine got covid vs 58 with placebo. So the difference between 60% and 90% is 19 people. They show that the vaccine works but there is lots of uncertainty between the two dosing regimens. Edit: why the downvotes?
  - GhostVII 6y ago
    Only 2700 people were in the 1.5 dose variant.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - haltingproblem 6y ago
    +Gold for the numerical workout :)
- cuchoi 6y ago
  This comment seems like a reasonable hypothesis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25184877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25184877
- bart_spoon 6y ago
  One theory is that it's due to the vector. This utilizes an adenovirus (which has been used more commonly in vaccines previously, and is different from the novel mRNA viruses developed by Biontech/Pfizer/Moderna). The thought process is that with a larger initial dose of the vaccine, more immune resistance is built up by the body initially, which then neutralizes some of the booster when its given later.
- thehappypm 6y ago
  It's because of the way the AZ vaccine works. It uses a different virus to infect cells which then create the antigen to stimulate the immune response. These are a bit unstable, since the vaccine itself, being a virus, is an immune system trigger. The immune system might snuff out the vaccine itself after a huge first dose, then the second dose is wiped out. This is I think why the mRNA vaccines are doing better. They don't use a virus as a vector, they use a less convoluted vector of a more basic mRNA instruction set. They're also in a way more "scalable" in that a future disease or a mutation of Covid with a new spike protein could have a new vaccine made quickly by tweaking the mRNA sequence.
bigpumpkin 6y ago
"These preliminary data indicate that the vaccine is 70.4% effective, with tests on two different dose regimens showing that the vaccine was 90% effective if administered at a half dose and then at a full dose, or 62% effective if administered in two full doses."
- skrebbel 6y ago
  Does anyone here who understands vaccines know how starting with a smaller does can improve effectiveness? It goes against my intuition.
  - BillyTheKing 6y ago
    I wonder what the statistical significance is of those findings. I seems to me that they tried out various different approaches, so the sub-group that received this first-low-second-high treatment might be considerably smaller than the other groups combined leading to slightly less certainty in regards to the findings.
  - wbl 6y ago
    This vaccine is a viral vector vaccine. Immunity against the vector can be an issue, but this is moderately informed speculation.
    - ulfw 6y ago
      But it's a chimpanzee vector. Not a human one.
      - freeone3000 6y ago
        Humans can develop an immune response to things that are not infectious to humans.
- evandijk70 6y ago
  Isn't it more common to determine the dosing regime in Phase I/II trials, and use the Phase III trial as the final test for efficacy?
mcdowall 6y ago
The key differentiator here is the storage requirements (2-8c ‘normal refrigerator’). That’s much more accessible to developing / low GDP countries as opposed the cumbersome and expensive storage requirements of the other two.
- wereHamster 6y ago
  What are the storage requirements for the other two?
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    -80C for Pfizer, and below 0 for the other one (I forget exactly). -80C is really close to dry-ice temperatures. So I wonder if its actually -80C or if the researchers were just saying "Dry Ice".
    - _Wintermute 6y ago
      -80C is just a pretty standard cold storage temperature in science. I'd imagine they tested stability at 4C, -20C and liquid nitrogen as well.
      - sjwright 6y ago
        The notion of distributing a billion copies of a vaccine at -80°C to every corner of the planet seems rather resource intensive.
        andylynch 6y ago
        It is, especially for far flung places. This stable vaccine will be very useful in places like the pacific islands, where air transport isn’t always an option.
        MagnumOpus 6y ago
        Any island that doesn't have air transport doesn't really need the vaccine (if transit take weeks, infections on ships burn out before they get there). Realistically, every major population can be reached in 24 hours by modern transport, and the Pfizer 5000-dose transport package keeps the temperature for 5 days.
toshk 6y ago
The press release is interesting. Not the best way to present their data. Immediate conclusion of many newspapers is "oxford vaccine is less effective then...".
- dageshi 6y ago
  Better that than to be seen to overstate its effectiveness. The worst case scenario is people refuse to take it because they think they're being lied too or manipulated in some way.
  - toshk 6y ago
    Maybe. But it's also time to compete and current headlines are not working. If the public opinion is that it's far less effective then the other 2, what is happening now, you are putting the politicians in a difficult position that want to buy your vaccine. If you dig deeper you will find results for all vaccins are pretty similar. For instance even though one of the trials with Oxford vaccine had more people with Covid sypmtoms they had no severe cases, compared to one severe case with the Pfizer trial. And the total for both are too low to make definite conclusions.
    - dageshi 6y ago
      Headlines shouldn't be manipulated to make life easier for politicians... Also, the issue will not be which vaccine is chosen, but above a certain percentage of effectiveness who can even supply enough of their vaccine to meet demand?
  - tokamak-teapot 6y ago
    On the (BBC) radio news earlier only the 90% figure was mentioned, not the 70%. This differs from the BBC news website, which started with the 70% figure and mentioned the 90% afterwards.
    - toshk 6y ago
      Radio in the Netherlands didn't dive into the details, just saying why use this vaccine if Pfizer is better.
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
over 7 billion human population, a 90% effectiveness is what? alright? please enlighten me. does anyone know what was the effectiveness of the smallpox vaccine that we did actually manage to eradicate successfully?
- ilogik 6y ago
  this is different for each disease based on how quickly it transmits. for SARS-COV-2 you need around 70% immunity in the population to achieve herd immunity
  - kuu 6y ago
    > you need around 70% immunity in the population This is the required immunity of the population, but not the effectiveness of the vaccine. Inside the population there are groups that you cannot put the vaccine (smallest babies, immunosuppressed people, etc).
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  Dr Fauci stated earlier that he was hoping for 70% efficacy. So these results are still good, not just as good as the 94% seen earlier for Moderna's vaccine.
- Tomminn 6y ago
  The key point is that if you lower the replication rate-- the number of people each person with the virus goes on to infect-- below 1, the number of active cases exponentially decays to zero. The business-as-usual replication rate of covid appears to be somewhere around 4-6, meaning that if we have universal vaccination with something like 80% efficacy, the number of active cases will exponentially decay with no other measures taken (social distancing, masks, lockdowns, quarantines etc).
- _Microft 6y ago
  The disease will 'die out' (in quotes because it will not actually) if there are not enough targets that are susceptible to it. People infected by SARS-Cov2 seem to infect two to six other people [0]. Reduce this number by 90% and we are well below one infection per infected, so it is not sustained. This assumes that everyone would be vaccinated. Currently we are doing something similar: each measure like wearing a mask, social distancing, meeting fewer people, ventilating rooms, finding infected people before they can infect someone else ("contact tracing") contributes to reducing the number of follow-up infections a bit. (This is why "but masks do not really work" is an ill-informed argument. They do not have to because they are meant to be used together with other measures to achieve reduction in spread) A vaccine will protect us passively instead of requiring us to actively following these measures and will therefore be a lot more convenient. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
howlgarnish 6y ago
That headline is not quite correct. From the article: > Phase 3 interim analysis including 131 Covid-19 cases indicates that the vaccine is [on average] 70.4% effective when combining data from two dosing regimens ... In the two different dose regimens vaccine efficacy was 90% in one and 62% in the other And to be clear, it's not just one dose vs two: > tests on two different dose regimens showing that the vaccine was 90% effective if administered at a half dose and then at a full dose, or 62% effective if administered in two full doses. So "Oxford vaccine is up to 90% effective", perhaps?
- kjakm 6y ago
  Another article I read seemed to indicate they haven’t investigated the half dose regimen fully so it sounds like until more testing is done that’s not the recommended path (in which case the headline is being generous).
agd 6y ago
I think I read (and I may be wrong) that the costs for the vaccines per dose were roughly as follows: Moderna: £45, Pfizer: £20, Oxford: £3, The Oxford one is also easier to store and transport.
- threeseed 6y ago
  Oxford one is also going to be easier to manufacture given that it is based on existing technology. Many countries e.g. Australia are licensing the formula so this is an important aspect.
  - singingfish 6y ago
    the mRNA style viruses will probably decrease in cost exponentially the same way that DNA sequencing and computer technology have dropped in price.
    - starfallg 6y ago
      However, mRNA vaccines require low temperature storage and are in general harder to handle. This translates to additional cost in production, throughout the logistics chain and delivery.
      - singingfish 6y ago
        I think it's likely that they'll need to be distributed frozen, but there's a lot that can be done researching preservatives. The the moderna vaccine is higher temperature than the pfveizer one for this reason.
      - twic 6y ago
        Pfizer are also working on a lyophilised, aka freeze-dried, version of their vaccine, which would not need to be stored at -80 C. This is from July [1], not sure if there is any more news: > But we also hope to have, as we always do in life cycle management, a new lyophilized formulated vaccine by -- within maybe a year after initial delivery such as fourth quarter 2021 and the lyophilized formulation could be stored in refrigerator. [1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/317678438/files/PFE-USQ_Transcript_2020-07-01.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/317678438/files/PFE-USQ_Transcript_202...
jpxw 6y ago
From AstraZeneca: > One dosing regimen (n=2,741) showed vaccine efficacy of 90% when AZD1222 was given as a half dose, followed by a full dose at least one month apart, and another dosing regimen (n=8,895) showed 62% efficacy when given as two full doses at least one month apart. The combined analysis from both dosing regimens (n=11,636) resulted in an average efficacy of 70%. All results were statistically significant (p<=0.0001). Also: > and no hospitalisations or severe cases of the disease were reported in participants receiving the vaccine. https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020/azd1222hlr.html https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020...
- crx07 6y ago
  Wow, what a fascinating phenomenon. A weak first dose somehow primes the immune system better than a full one?
  - athriren 6y ago
    “The thing is, the immune system is very complicated.” quote from the link here, but for those who don’t want to click through (this article is fascinating though), it is told in the context of a joke which i will post below the link. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/covid-19-immunity-is-the-pandemics-central-mystery/614956/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/covid-19-... There’s a joke about immunology, which Jessica Metcalf of Princeton recently told me. An immunologist and a cardiologist are kidnapped. The kidnappers threaten to shoot one of them, but promise to spare whoever has made the greater contribution to humanity. The cardiologist says, “Well, I’ve identified drugs that have saved the lives of millions of people.” Impressed, the kidnappers turn to the immunologist. “What have you done?” they ask. The immunologist says, “The thing is, the immune system is very complicated…” And the cardiologist says, “Just shoot me now.”
  - m12k 6y ago
    IANAD but my guess is maybe a stronger immune response in the first dose makes the immune system respond so quickly to the second dose, that it doesn't have time to get anywhere and interact with enough of the body to have much of an effect. That way a weaker immunization in the first dose leaves more room for the second dose to have a refreshing/strengthening effect. Basically, 1 + 2 > 2 + 0
camkego 6y ago
This statement seems a big deal: "There were no hospitalised or severe cases in anyone who received the vaccine" Is that also true of the Pfizer and Moderna trials? Are the various trials measuring 'effectiveness' in the same way? Is there a standard for 'effectiveness' in these Covid-19 trials? It will take some digging and real effort to compare the risks and benefits of the various vaccines coming to market.
- threeseed 6y ago
  There were no hospitalisations or severe incidents for either the Pfizer and Moderna trials were was related to the vaccine. And it's pretty easy to compare the vaccines. It will mostly come down to price, ease of manufacture and ease of distribution i.e. temperature. Given that for the 3 viruses all have no risks associated with their use.
  - acqq 6y ago
    There was one vaccinated but then severe case in Pfizer trial out of 170 cases evaluated where placebo-then-ill cases are included, or 1 from total 8 vaccinated but then ill. “There were 10 severe cases of COVID-19 observed in the trial, with nine of the cases occurring in the placebo group and one in the BNT162b2 vaccinated group.” (1) “170 confirmed cases of COVID-19 were evaluated, with 162 observed in the placebo group versus 8 in the vaccine group.” 1) https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-conclude-phase-3-study-covid-19-vaccine https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Eh, I think speed to manufacture/distribute is more important. The cost of these is trivial compared to social distancing/lockdown.
    - jaynetics 6y ago
      Only in the richest countries. Due to the totally different age pyramid and thus few severe cases, vaccination might not be worth it for the poorest countries even at this lower price.
rusticpenn 6y ago
Correct me if I am wrong, Oxford uses traditional Vaccine design technique (using a weaker virus and adding spikes or something similar) while Biontech(Pfizer) and ModeRNA use MRNA which is completely new technique (messenger RNA). This is awesome for more than just vaccinations. Traditionally the groups allocating govt funding to science and industries are very risk averse and this could be one more example where taking risks can payoff.
- bawolff 6y ago
  I thought adenoviral vaccines were also relatively new. Not as new as mRNA which is bleeding edge, but still i think this would be the first time this technique would be approved for human use should it be approved.
  - pietjepuk88 6y ago
    If I remember correctly, the Ebola vaccine is the first approved vaccine to use another virus as a vector. The first one to be approved (by Merck) does not use an adenovirus, but the second approved one (by J&J) does. Note that approvals of these were late 2019 and the summer of this year. So still very new from an "approved on humans" point of view (although not _as_ new as mRNA-based vaccines). The techniques have both been in development for years and years of course, including determining their safety profiles.
    - Zenst 6y ago
      Would they be virus based vaccines or phage based ones as phage's are a form of virus as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
  - DennisP 6y ago
    The article says adenovirus vaccines have been "researched and used extensively for decades."
    - 6y ago
senectus1 6y ago
Is this the sort of Vaccine that protects against infection or against the disease?
- alkonaut 6y ago
  The tests are for disease. We hope it protects against infection/the ability to spread it. But that's not part of the testing I don't know how many existing vaccines fall into either category here, i.e. whether there are many vaccines that prevent disease but do not even reduce the ability to spread. Would be interesting to know.
m12k 6y ago
"There were no hospitalised or severe cases in anyone who received the vaccine" Does anyone know if there's data for this and the other vaccines, whether any of those that still end up infected under the trials have had any of the secondary symptoms such as missing sense of smell, reduced cognitive function, reduced bio-motor functions, cardiac damage and so on? Not dying from a lung infection is obviously the most important, but some of the other organ damage that corona-virus can cause is pretty scary too, and I'd like to know whether the vaccines seem to prevent this too.
ksec 6y ago
Incoming possible Silly, Stupid and Lazy Questions, 1. Are there any vaccine ( of any Disease ) that are 100% effective? Or do we operate ( as I would assume ) something like 5 Nines effective rate and call it 100%? 2. Across all type of Vaccine, what are the average or median effective rate? i.e Should we expect Vaccine to be 90%+ effective in the first place? Or is that a wrong expectation to make? 3. What happens in the case of 10% ineffective, do they take a third dose?
- dragontamer 6y ago
  > 2. Across all type of Vaccine, what are the average or median effective rate? i.e Should we expect Vaccine to be 90%+ effective in the first place? Or is that a wrong expectation to make? Sometimes, vaccines are only 30% or 40% effective, leading to terrible flu seasons. I don't really know the mean/median/mode, but 90% is really high for a vaccine. > 3. What happens in the case of 10% ineffective, do they take a third dose? How do you know if someone is one of those 10%?
  - ksec 6y ago
    >How do you know if someone is one of those 10%? I would assume everyone have the vaccine and they still get caught COVID afterwards? Or do I misunderstood what effective means?
    - austhrow743 6y ago
      If they already got Covid then a third dose of vaccine is pointless.
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      The point of a vaccine is to give you immunity WITHOUT getting the virus. Your immune system naturally becomes immune after it fights off an infection. But because of the risk of long-term effects and/or death when you're infected with COVID19, people want a safer solution that provides immunity. A vaccine provides immunity, but at a lesser rate than the actual virus. But 90% (or even 70%) effectiveness is a good thing: it means 90% to 70% people do NOT spread the virus anymore. You'd think that means 90% or 70% fewer deaths, but that's mistaken. That 70% is compounded over-and-over every generation. If everyone else is vaccinated: you infect 70% fewer people. Those people infect 70% fewer people, and those people infect 70% fewer people. After 3 generations, a 70% vaccine would wipe out 97.3% of possible infections. And a "generation" in COVID19 terms is roughly 1-week. --------- So yes, even a 70% vaccine (if everyone took it) is a very, very, very good thing. But the two vaccine trials that finished first were 90% effective, so I think people will prefer the higher-efficacy (at least, if they have access to Dry Ice / -80C storage).
jakozaur 6y ago
Title is misleading. They tested few configurations, we should use the most optimal one, not the average. Much better source: https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020/azd1222hlr.html https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020... Good: + likely 90% effective if we use optimal dosing + no significant side effective. Looks better than Pfizer or Moderna. + already pre-produced at huge scale, 3 Bln doses in 2021 + easy to store and administer, just regular fridge required + several times cheaper than mRNA + more traditional vaccine than novel mRNA, less tail risk in production and scaling up the process Not good: - two doses, efficient one month after first injection - likely public will be confused about efficiency due to dosing regime
- afterburner 6y ago
  The two existing mRNA vaccines touted earlier also require two doses.
  - tzs 6y ago
    I wonder what happens if you get two doses, but not of the same vaccine?
    - vmurthy 6y ago
      Can you share your thinking around why someone would want to do that given that a combination won't be tested (at-least rigorously). Are you seeing benefits from a logistics point-of-view?
      - tzs 6y ago
        I'm not thinking someone would want to do it. I'm thinking it's going to accidentally happen to some people, at least if there are facilities that offer more than one vaccine.
    - jakozaur 6y ago
      Hard to guess. Likely worth investigating, but as secondary priority: 1. You may end up just getting very short and weak immunity, making this approach ineffective. 2. You may get a combination of immunity which can have different efficiency. 3. For some vaccines of same type this works, but is rarely recommended. 4. Mixing partly mRNA and Adenovirus vaccines doesn't to be winning strategy. It is rather more likely to give another vaccine if after two doses you didn't get immunity.
usaphp 6y ago
Is that the same vaccine that was approved in Russia? I remember Russia was working with AstraZeneca on their vaccine, but not sure if it's the same one.
- fakedang 6y ago
  No, the Russian one that was released for public use was developed by one of the government institutes (which has a very shady history of falsifying data).
  - Tepix 6y ago
    > has a very shady history of falsifying data Source?
    - fakedang 6y ago
      https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/27/health/russia-coronavirus-vaccine-sputnik-v-reality-check/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/27/health/russia-coronavirus... I know it's CNN (what I could find with 5 mins of Googlefu) and they don't explicitly mention the falsified data part. But the Gamaleya Institute is well known in Russia for falsifying data both as a propaganda machine, as well as to obtain further funding from the federal government. I can't find another source I read earlier concerning a past instance of fraud perpetrated by the institute (it was in German).
andy_ppp 6y ago
I find it a bit weird that there are fewer asymptomatic cases with this vaccine? Is it somehow increasing the immune response to COVID-19?
- foota 6y ago
  Maybe the vaccine happens to work more effectively in people that would otherwise have had an asymptomatic infection?
- twic 6y ago
  The whole purpose of the vaccine is to increase the immune response to COVID-19.
- SamBam 6y ago
  That's exactly what a vaccine, any vaccine, does. A vaccine is something that primes the immune system, so that when the real virus enters the body it is attacked and destroyed quickly. This means that the virus can never start multiplying in the body and shedding to other people. I don't believe there is any modern vaccine that doesn't reduce or eliminate asymptomatic spreading of the disease.
  - mssundaram 6y ago
    Whooping cough. That vaccine causes suppressed symptoms and people can unknowingly spread the bacteria
    - SamBam 6y ago
      That's a good point. However, I believe that it is different between bacteria and viruses. From my understanding of the whooping cough studies, they found that some vaccinated baboons who were subsequently infected still had high levels of pertussis bacteria after five weeks. These bacteria couldn't cause widespread infections in the host, but had seemingly found pockets where they were safe from the immune system. A virus, however, can't find a "safe pocket" away from the immune system in which to survive and multiply. It needs to use the body's own cells and machinery to do so, and (outside of the blood-brain barriers) there aren't cells hidden from the immune system.
protoman3000 6y ago
While we now get the results from various COVID-19 vaccines I see a societal issue brewing up. How will we deal with the perceived uncertainty of the safety of these vaccines and the surrounding (dis-)infodemic? I read recently that in some European country (was it Germany?) the willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19 went down from 80% to 60%. With these numbers policy makers will have a hard time convincing the broad population that they can rely on a due process and be safe. In the meantime there is a proliferation of false information and fake news, while in the past there was not much media coverage of significant side effects from a rushed swine flu vaccine [1]. [1] https://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9047819/H1N1-pandemic-narcolepsy-Pandemrix https://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9047819/H1N1-pandemic-narcolep...
- prox 6y ago
  Just from a software perspective: never install the big version upgrade. Usually the X.0 versions still has bugs that only come out at huge roll outs. I am inclined to wait a few months to let early adaptors test the vaccine. Medicine is a bit different though and every country probably has institutes checking the vaccines independently. A lot of eyes are on this probably. No company wants to be the company that botched the corona vaccine.
  - protoman3000 6y ago
    That option might not be available in the short term. Spain for example aims to vaccinate almost the whole population until summer 2021. What are you going to do when you don’t think it’s version X.1 yet?
    - prox 6y ago
      Wait.
  - chippy 6y ago
    It's likely that the majority of people on HN are not going to be early adopters, and that other groups will get the jab first. It depends what's more effective, as these groups are all different: do you jab first those who can most easily spread it, those who would most easily get it, those who would most severely be impacted if they got it, or do you jab those who are most diligent, enthusiastic and first in the queue? I'd even wager that most healthy adults around the world will not be getting the vaccine (but that might be a negative story to run with) but that's at less odds than just healthy, enthusiastic, low risk people getting the jab first.
markvdb 6y ago
Why do they sabotaged their own messaging by using the 70% number? Reading further, it looks like the vaccine is 90% efficient. Also, "There were no hospitalised or severe cases in anyone who received the vaccine". Can we infer anything from that statement? They seem to be suggesting that the infection might be less serious in the vaccinated population...
- cinntaile 6y ago
  It would be a pretty lousy vaccine if the side-effects of the vaccine were as bad and as common as getting the actual disease. Why the downvotes? I'm answering the question that is being asked. The study is talking about the side-effects of receiving the vaccine. > "Also, "There were no hospitalised or severe cases in anyone who received the vaccine". Can we infer anything from that statement? They seem to be suggesting that the infection might be less serious in the vaccinated population... "
- cuchoi 6y ago
  The 70% is the combined data, so probably the most reliable estimate. For two high doses, they got 62% effectiveness and for one low and one high dose they got 90%. They don't know why the latter was more effective. 70% is still a great effectiveness rate, specially for a cheaper and easier to distribute vaccine.
  - yread 6y ago
    The problem with adenovirus vaccines is that body might build immunity against the adenovirus as well. So, you give one jab, adenovirus infects enough cells and creates enough antigens, immune systems notices and does something about it, but it also notices the adenovirus and makes antibodies against that, too. With the second jab those antibodies immediately neutralize the adenovirus so it can't infect enough cells and make enough of the COVID antigens so the protection is not that strong. The Russian vaccine avoids it by using two different strains of adenovirus for the two jabs
    - blueblisters 6y ago
rixrax 6y ago
Is there any research or early guestimates about risks (or benefits) of getting multiple different vaccines for Covid? E.g. What if one gets this, and then later moderna vaccine? Will they fight each other, or work together or is it unknown whats going to happen?
- kuu 6y ago
  >Will they fight each other, or work together I'm not a microbiologist, but this is not how vaccines work. The vaccines are going to put "something strange" in your body that "resembles" the virus, but it's not the virus (it's either a deactivated version of it, or some proteins which identify it...) and then is YOUR immune system the one which "attacks" this pseudo-virus. In this way, your immune system is learning how to defend to "this kind" of strange agents. In a future if your immune system sees the virus, will defend you. If you get the two kinds at the same time, maybe the two doses are too much for your immune system to handle it properly and the side effects may affect you (e.g. you can get fever because your immune system is under too heavy load).
  - FriendlyNormie 6y ago
    Thanks for shedding light on the subject by sharing your 3rd grade elementary school understanding of how vaccines work. What would we do without you and your brilliant insights.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    Most of the vaccines developed seem to work pretty much the same, by targeting the same spike protein. And I am also far from being a microbiologist either, but I do know that the immune system is very complex, so I would not rule anything out, when messing with it. In any case, getting the vaccination can (maybe) actually increase your risk of a severe Covid sickness, when you are exposed to real covid virus at the same time. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijcp.13795 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijcp.13795 And I have no data for it and I can imagine it being hard to get reliable data about it, but autoimmune sickness is on the rise. I am not sure a quickly hacked together vaccine can rule that possibility out.
ggm 6y ago
Contrary to some views here, I am very heartened by a press release which doesn't gild the lily. This restores a lot of faith in reporting.
- thomond 6y ago
  "gild the lily" = try to improve what is already beautiful or excellent.
  - ggm 6y ago
    70% efficacy at 2c-8c storage for $4 is indeed excellent but many comments here go to "but modena is 95% efficacy whyyyy" and "they're underselling it"
    - pja 6y ago
      They also tried 2 different dose regimens, one of which had 90% efficacy. The 70% figure is the weighted mean of the two I think.
      - ggm 6y ago
        I would far rather we report 70% and find its more effective than we report is up to 90% effective but in field deployment find its less. A 70% vaccine at wide scale release can keep R under 1.0 1/5th the price, and no need for freezers. This vaccine is huge. I pray for more like this.
        sambe 6y ago
        I would far rather we report with just the tiniest bit of nuance. They did distinct variations for a reason. Nobody is reporting all the other approaches that were less favourable.
        standardUser 6y ago
        "I would far rather we report 70%" That makes no sense since there are no tested regimes with 70% effectiveness. The reporting should say there is a vaccine regime with 90% effectiveness, and add a footnote that another regime that will not be used had a far lower rate of effectiveness.
brutus1213 6y ago
Does anyone have a pointer on how the mrna vaccine actually works? I understand basic genetics mechanisms and how mrna works inside cells. In shot form, I assume the modified mrna strands are floating through the blood stream. What happens after the injection? Btw .. I think public health needs to start educating people on how these things work in order to get high coverage. I am alarmed at the number of highly educated people I know who seem suspicious. This fear is just borne by a lack of understanding and can be corrected IMHO.
- te_chris 6y ago
  I liked this as a background https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/22/mrna-vaccines-covid-signal-new-era-disease-prevention-science https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/22/mrna-vaccines-.... This vaccine isn't mRNA though.
  - ufo 6y ago
    I kind of is, if you squint. The payload of the adenovirus vector is DNA.
  - brutus1213 6y ago
    Thx for the pointer. Yes, I was talking about mrna in the context of the Moderna and Pfizer+B vaccine. This was a good read on why we shouldn't fear reverse transcription. What I still don't get is how free floating mrna molecules in the bloodstream go through the same protein formation process as mrna inside cells. Will continue to search.
te_chris 6y ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/oxford-s-covid-19-vaccine-is-the-coronavirus-front-runner https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/oxford-s-... This is a great profile on one of the lead Oxford scientists.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
__warlord__ 6y ago
In general or specific to Covid-19 vaccines, does anyone knows what happens if you get vaccinated after you got the virus?
- ageitgey 6y ago
  On one hand, all of these vaccine trials excluded people who already had COVID, so we don't fully know what the effect would be in large numbers. However at least one person with COVID immunity accidentally got into the Oxford Phase 1/2 trial (according to earlier published results), so we at least know it didn't hurt them. On the other hand, it is generally thought that vaccines can trigger immune reactions that are often much stronger and longer lasting than just being infected, so you would expect there to be a benefit to getting vaccinated even if you already had it. But only time will tell for sure. No one really knows how long immunity of either type will last - we just have to wait and find out!
  - logicchains 6y ago
    >On the other hand, it is generally thought that vaccines can trigger immune reactions that are often much stronger and longer lasting than just being infected, so you would expect there to be a benefit to getting vaccinated even if you already had it. Interestingly the opposite is true for influenza: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870374/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870374/
- puzzlingcaptcha 6y ago
  I doubt it would help much, for similar reasons why you don't give a flu vaccine to someone already sick. A vaccine is meant to stimulate adaptive immunity which culminates in formation of memory cells - highly selected T and B lymphocytes which are very specific to the infectious agent. This process typically takes a couple days [1] and is rather involved. Once you have the memory cells, however, the next time you get in contact with the virus your memory cells will jump-start the immune response much more quickly, before the virus gets a chance to replicate. In a regular infection the same mechanisms of adaptive immunity are activated, but on top of that you already have the complications from the virus itself (cell death in lung epithelium, accumulation of excess fluid, hypoxia, cytokine storm etc). A vaccine dose won't necessarily speed it up, there are plenty of virus particles already stimulating the immune system - it's just picking up the slack a bit too late. There are other factors to consider but that's the general idea. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kinetics-of-CD8-T-cell-differentiation-following-viral-infection-Shown-is-a-typical_fig6_258857348 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kinetics-of-CD8-T-cell-d...
sgt101 6y ago
An important fact that I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is that 3m doses have been manufactured already and are available in the UK supply chain today. "All" that's required is the approval from the regulator - but I guess that is still a little way off. 3m would do a lot of good though - frontline staff, the most vulnerable, hotspots....
- anoncake 6y ago
  Were any doses produced yet of the other two vaccines?
  - est31 6y ago
    At least in the US, it seems so: > Currently, OWS is working with 11 drug manufacturing companies to produce 800 million doses of six different COVID-19 vaccines, five of which are in Phase III clinical trials. By prepurchasing and premanufacturing these vaccines prior to approval, the vaccine distribution plan can be activated and supplies delivered within 24 hours of any of the vaccines receiving FDA approval. https://college.acaai.org/updates-on-covid-19-vaccine-distribution/ https://college.acaai.org/updates-on-covid-19-vaccine-distri...
  - alleskleber 6y ago
    BioNTech/Pfizer plan to deliver 50 million doses by the end of the year. https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-details/pfizer-and-biontech-submit-emergency-use-authorization-request https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...
  - sgt101 6y ago
    I am not sure : I know the other vaccines must be stored at a very low temperature, but does anyone know how long they can be stored for at all?
    - lbeltrame 6y ago
      Up to six months.
christkv 6y ago
I really still hope mRNA vaccines work well and that we keep investing in them. The potential too rapidly create new vaccines and deploy them when needed without requiring a vector will be crucial to counter future pandemics. Once the oxford vaccine is deployed I suspect they will then have to create a new vector if they need to create another batch in the future as your body might have developed immunity to the vector virus itself making future doses ineffective.
arichard123 6y ago
Here [1] it says the vaccine was designed mostly over the weekend of 11th Jan 2020. Here we are 10 months later and we know it works. If our knowledge of vaccine design is so good experts can design a vaccine that works over a weekend, what new breakthroughs are required to reduce the time between then and now substantially? A lot of benefit could have been had if we'd been able to get along this path more quickly. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/23/coronavirus-scientists-developed-oxford-vaccine-at-breakneck-speed https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/23/coronavirus-sc...
- jimbokun 6y ago
  It would require forgoing any kind of serious trials to determine the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. It is the classic "make a baby in 9 months with 9 women" dilemma. There is no way around conducting a trial and waiting long enough until you see what happens to the participants.
- DennisP 6y ago
  The main bottleneck is getting a bunch of volunteers, vaccinating them, and seeing how many get the disease over the next few months. Kinda hard to speed that up, unless you're confident/desperate enough to just skip testing. Maybe if the disease were 10X more dangerous and you had a vaccine that was just a minor variation of a previous one, it'd be worth it. A little time could maybe be shaved off by speeding up production. The mRNA vaccines have an advantage here, you can basically use an RNA printer to churn out whatever RNA sequence you need.
  - triangleman 6y ago
    Wait isn't that exactly what they did?
- mrtksn 6y ago
  Definitely. It’s a similar situation with the aviation too. Unfortunately, rules in fields like medicine and aviation are written with blood. Someone gets too greedy or too comfortable and you have large numbers of people death or incapacitated. We already have large numbers of charlatans preying on the hopes of desperate people, must be very careful not to lower the barrier too much or these might jump too. Even worse, people might be targeted by slick psychopaths and coerced into extremely dangerous things, destroying communities when anything goes wrong. Hopefully though, some mountains might have been moved and some things might have gotten faster from now on.
ta8645 6y ago
I find it disheartening how many people speculate about possible long term side effects of exposure to Covid, even in asymptomatic cases. Yet those same people seemingly have no reservations about injecting a brand new drug into their veins.
- tboyd47 6y ago
  Especially when the "gold standard" PCR procedure has a 97% false positive rate.
  - orzig 6y ago
    This is asserting that the number of incorrectly positive results is equal to ALL truly negative test takers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_rate). >> Citation needed <<
    - tboyd47 6y ago
      Why bother giving citation if I am going to be downvoted anyway? But, here you go. https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/are-nc-s-coronavirus-case-numbers-inflated-some-scientists-say-so/19355130/ https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/are-nc-s-coronavirus-case-n... https://www.portugalresident.com/judges-in-portugal-highlight-more-than-debatable-reliability-of-covid-tests/ https://www.portugalresident.com/judges-in-portugal-highligh... (NYT) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin... https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20200429007051320 https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20200429007051320
      - mssundaram 6y ago
        Thank you for sharing
- hans1729 6y ago
  This goes both ways, there are plenty of people who don't take covid serious but fear the health-consequences of vaccines. There's probably a name for the phenomenon. If not, let me propose "The duality of Hans"
notwhereyouare 6y ago
Has anybody seen effectiveness numbers? Like if I get this vaccine, is it one and done? Or will it be like a yearly thing.
- christkv 6y ago
  I don't think we will know that until next winter.
- hobofan 6y ago
  Obviously we can only say it with high certainty for the duration that the pandemic has been ongoing, but there are strong indications that the immunity will more likely be on the timescale of many years (or even decades)[0]. That effect shouldn't significantly depend on which of the vaccines induced the immunity. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/health/coronavirus-immunity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/health/coronavirus-immuni...
jl2718 6y ago
In case anybody was wondering what this actually is: “The ChAdOx1 vaccine is a chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine vector.” They put a corona spike sequence into it. By comparison, the Moderna is making a RNA vaccine, and BioNTech an epitope vaccine (the actual protein). The ‘invasive’ effect is decreasing in that order. Oxford’s ChAdOx1 infects your cells to create RNA, then protein, then T-cell recognition/apoptosis, then epitopes trigger B-cell antibody production. Moderna RNA skips the infection part. BioNTech epitopes go right to B-cells. But, they also have deceasing stability and manufacturing scalability in that order.
- xuhu 6y ago
  Quite a typo in your last sentence.
  - jl2718 6y ago
    Ha! I’m leaving it.
- thehappypm 6y ago
  BioNTech / Pfizer is also mRNA.
- rrss 6y ago
  > BioNTech an epitope vaccine I think BioNTech's vaccine is also an mRNA vaccine. https://biontech.de/covid-19 https://biontech.de/covid-19 > Our vaccine consists of a short segment of genetic material, called messenger RNA, that provides instructions for a human cell to make a harmless version of a target protein, or immunogen, which activates the body’s immune response against the SARS-CoV-2 virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNT162b2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNT162b2
  - jl2718 6y ago
    Oh interesting. I’ve been following their cancer neo-epitope vaccine research and didn’t notice this was a different process.
- 6y ago
hikerclimb 6y ago
Hopefully this doesn’t work and people in us only die. I also hope death rate in u.s goes up...
datameta 6y ago
So important: "A key element of Oxford’s partnership with AstraZeneca is the joint commitment to provide the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis for the duration of the pandemic across the world, and in perpetuity to low- and middle-income countries."
jonplackett 6y ago
We (Britain) may have totally screwed up our general response to COVID. But at least we’re still pretty good at science. Thanks Oxford for saving the day.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  Tyler Cowen made this point a few months ago (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/which-country-has-had-the-best-response-to-the-coronavirus.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/wh...): the public health response has been "generally poor" but the UK was first on the mark with dexamethasone and has been among the first with the vaccines. He went as far as saying the UK has had the best response to COVID despite the public health response.
  - ddek 6y ago
    So, a member of my immediate family is senior management at Public Health England, the civil service institution that should have been planning for this. When the government announced they were shutting down PHE, in an attempt to copy the RKI (forgetting that PHE is far more than disease control, of course), the RKI wrote a letter to all senior management at PHE. This was quite a confused letter - the RKI didn’t understand why the UK gov were making this decision, when the RKI modelled their processes on PHE. I’ve read the letter. Add to this, daily squabbles between cabinet office and other branches of government. If there was good news, you’d hear back immediately and you’d be blocked from sharing it. Bad news, cabinet would stall sometimes for weeks. But ultimately all the guidance was irrelevant because the UK government are not interested in listening to it. When an adviser egregiously broke the rules, a story which dominated the headlines for weeks, they changed the rules. You see it now - the UK isn’t even on the downslope of wave 2, but apparently in 2 weeks we’ll have fans at football games and business as usual.
- twoslide 6y ago
  Also worth noting that we did this by having a board research base that was not tied to immediate returns. A year ago Sarah Gilbert was struggling to get funding for work on the MERS vaccine, which was seen as largely irrelevant.
Beggers1960 6y ago
Beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, with coroanvirus. Every positive announcement raises my spirits slightly.
mchusma 6y ago
I'm reposting some of my thoughts below to try and genuinely see is someone has an answer to the question: From a utilitarian perspective, why weren't these all approved for the elderly in Q2 2020? In other words, its May 2020 and you have the option to ban vaccines or allow vaccines for the elderly, what do you pick? We know the following about vaccines generally: -Vaccines have an extremely high success rate, 33% of vaccines make it through all trials to approval. 50% after phase 1 is complete. -The worst vaccine side effect ever is widely considered to be the swine flu vaccine from 60 years ago, where 1 in 100,000 got GBS, or Pandemrix, where 1 in 18400 got narcolepsy. (1)(2) -Vaccine candidates have 85% chance of making it from phase III to approved (phase III is supposed to be the efficacy check), in other words we expect about a 15% chance that the vaccine is not effective, most of the tests are about safety. We know the following about COVID: -Unknown long term side effects, reasonably likely to be worse than the worst vaccines ever, but unknown. -The IFR for those over 75 is about 4.6% now(1). Earlier in the pandemic it was about 11.6%(2). -If you assume that people have a 10% chance of contracting the disease, you can say that those over 75 would have approximately a 0.46% chance of dying (4.6 in 1,000 dead) if they don't get the vaccine. This seems to be a conservative estimate. So if you have to decide whether to ban a vaccine or not in May 2020, and you assume with 100% confidence that this vaccine was tied for the "worst side effects ever", for example it turns out to be as bad as Pandemrix, then you would expect 1 in 18400 to get something like narcolepsy if you give them the vaccine. Using the IFR and 10% number above, you assume that not giving the vaccine would leave 84.64 dead for the same population. (85x by volume). I don't know your opinion of "how much worse is death versus narcolepsy?". If you believe death is 10x worse than narcolepsy, then by severity and volume, taking a vaccine with the worst side effects ever would seem about 850x better than not taking it (in elderly populations). Earlier in the pandemic, when IFRs were over 2x as bad, this was well over 1,000x better. I mean, the numbers so dramatically favor vaccination that I don't get it at all. Why is this not approved already? Why does it take the FDA 3 weeks to even discuss the matter of approval when this made sense to approve in May? Why did all governments opt to ban the vaccines versus allow them? Sources: (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix (2) https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.... (3) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v7 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v... (4) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2
jliptzin 6y ago
How many different viruses are there that cause the common cold? About 200? If we can get an effective vaccine for this coronavirus in under a year why aren't we working on all the other coronaviruses and rhinoviruses? I know nothing about biology but let's say it costs $1 billion to develop and test a successful vaccine for a common cold virus, worldwide for $200 billion that isn't that much to not have to deal with colds anymore. Plus it seems like one vaccine might provide protection for multiple different viruses. Or do they mutate too quickly to keep up?
- leafmeal 6y ago
  I would guess that people just don't care enough about getting rid of the common cold. If you're in the vaccine making business, you might as well try and cure some diseases that are killing people. There's more than enough work there already. Also more money...
maxehmookau 6y ago
As a trial participant on this vaccine, I'm _very_ pleased by this outcome!
arisAlexis 6y ago
Moderna vaccine can be also refrigerated and the efficacy is higher. Something I don't get?
URfejk 6y ago
Big Pharma COVID "Vaccines" Are For SYMPTOMS Not The VIRUS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jEGizsmKLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jEGizsmKLg

595 points by mychaelangelo 6y ago

You dont need a magic tax cattle funded big phama ' vaccine" non needle cure exists since 27 March 2020

It's interesting to layman's eyes that the dosing regime using 1.5 doses is more effective than the one using 2 doses as I would expect the inverse; are there any plausible explanations for this?

sanxiyn 6y ago
One possibility is that 1.5 dosing regime reduces unwanted immune reaction against vector (not payload). Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are not vectored.
codeulike 6y ago
These stats are based on 130 people getting covid out of an experiment of 25,000 people. They dont give a breakdown of the stats (e.g. who was on placebo, who was on which dosing regimen ) but those are small nubmers. I think its possible that this is just noise. The difference between '60%' and '90%' might just be a handful of cases. They show that it works though, thats the main thing. edit: e.g. of those 130 cases lets assume half were in each regimen experiment. So 65 cases in the 'two full doses experiment' if they got 60% efficiacy then that means about 26 people with the vaccine got covid vs 39 with placebo. In the 'half dose then full dose' experiment if they got 90% efficacy then that means about 7 people with the vaccine got covid vs 58 with placebo. So the difference between 60% and 90% is 19 people. They show that the vaccine works but there is lots of uncertainty between the two dosing regimens. Edit: why the downvotes?
- GhostVII 6y ago
  Only 2700 people were in the 1.5 dose variant.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- haltingproblem 6y ago
  +Gold for the numerical workout :)
cuchoi 6y ago
This comment seems like a reasonable hypothesis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25184877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25184877
bart_spoon 6y ago
One theory is that it's due to the vector. This utilizes an adenovirus (which has been used more commonly in vaccines previously, and is different from the novel mRNA viruses developed by Biontech/Pfizer/Moderna). The thought process is that with a larger initial dose of the vaccine, more immune resistance is built up by the body initially, which then neutralizes some of the booster when its given later.
thehappypm 6y ago
It's because of the way the AZ vaccine works. It uses a different virus to infect cells which then create the antigen to stimulate the immune response. These are a bit unstable, since the vaccine itself, being a virus, is an immune system trigger. The immune system might snuff out the vaccine itself after a huge first dose, then the second dose is wiped out. This is I think why the mRNA vaccines are doing better. They don't use a virus as a vector, they use a less convoluted vector of a more basic mRNA instruction set. They're also in a way more "scalable" in that a future disease or a mutation of Covid with a new spike protein could have a new vaccine made quickly by tweaking the mRNA sequence.

bigpumpkin 6y ago

"These preliminary data indicate that the vaccine is 70.4% effective, with tests on two different dose regimens showing that the vaccine was 90% effective if administered at a half dose and then at a full dose, or 62% effective if administered in two full doses."

skrebbel 6y ago
Does anyone here who understands vaccines know how starting with a smaller does can improve effectiveness? It goes against my intuition.
- BillyTheKing 6y ago
  I wonder what the statistical significance is of those findings. I seems to me that they tried out various different approaches, so the sub-group that received this first-low-second-high treatment might be considerably smaller than the other groups combined leading to slightly less certainty in regards to the findings.
- wbl 6y ago
  This vaccine is a viral vector vaccine. Immunity against the vector can be an issue, but this is moderately informed speculation.
  - ulfw 6y ago
    But it's a chimpanzee vector. Not a human one.
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      Humans can develop an immune response to things that are not infectious to humans.
evandijk70 6y ago
Isn't it more common to determine the dosing regime in Phase I/II trials, and use the Phase III trial as the final test for efficacy?

mcdowall 6y ago

The key differentiator here is the storage requirements (2-8c ‘normal refrigerator’). That’s much more accessible to developing / low GDP countries as opposed the cumbersome and expensive storage requirements of the other two.

wereHamster 6y ago
What are the storage requirements for the other two?
- dragontamer 6y ago
  -80C for Pfizer, and below 0 for the other one (I forget exactly). -80C is really close to dry-ice temperatures. So I wonder if its actually -80C or if the researchers were just saying "Dry Ice".
  - _Wintermute 6y ago
    -80C is just a pretty standard cold storage temperature in science. I'd imagine they tested stability at 4C, -20C and liquid nitrogen as well.
    - sjwright 6y ago
      The notion of distributing a billion copies of a vaccine at -80°C to every corner of the planet seems rather resource intensive.
      - andylynch 6y ago
        It is, especially for far flung places. This stable vaccine will be very useful in places like the pacific islands, where air transport isn’t always an option.
        MagnumOpus 6y ago
        Any island that doesn't have air transport doesn't really need the vaccine (if transit take weeks, infections on ships burn out before they get there). Realistically, every major population can be reached in 24 hours by modern transport, and the Pfizer 5000-dose transport package keeps the temperature for 5 days.

toshk 6y ago

The press release is interesting. Not the best way to present their data. Immediate conclusion of many newspapers is "oxford vaccine is less effective then...".

dageshi 6y ago
Better that than to be seen to overstate its effectiveness. The worst case scenario is people refuse to take it because they think they're being lied too or manipulated in some way.
- toshk 6y ago
  Maybe. But it's also time to compete and current headlines are not working. If the public opinion is that it's far less effective then the other 2, what is happening now, you are putting the politicians in a difficult position that want to buy your vaccine. If you dig deeper you will find results for all vaccins are pretty similar. For instance even though one of the trials with Oxford vaccine had more people with Covid sypmtoms they had no severe cases, compared to one severe case with the Pfizer trial. And the total for both are too low to make definite conclusions.
  - dageshi 6y ago
    Headlines shouldn't be manipulated to make life easier for politicians... Also, the issue will not be which vaccine is chosen, but above a certain percentage of effectiveness who can even supply enough of their vaccine to meet demand?
- tokamak-teapot 6y ago
  On the (BBC) radio news earlier only the 90% figure was mentioned, not the 70%. This differs from the BBC news website, which started with the 70% figure and mentioned the 90% afterwards.
  - toshk 6y ago
    Radio in the Netherlands didn't dive into the details, just saying why use this vaccine if Pfizer is better.

2Gkashmiri 6y ago

over 7 billion human population, a 90% effectiveness is what? alright? please enlighten me. does anyone know what was the effectiveness of the smallpox vaccine that we did actually manage to eradicate successfully?

ilogik 6y ago
this is different for each disease based on how quickly it transmits. for SARS-COV-2 you need around 70% immunity in the population to achieve herd immunity
- kuu 6y ago
  > you need around 70% immunity in the population This is the required immunity of the population, but not the effectiveness of the vaccine. Inside the population there are groups that you cannot put the vaccine (smallest babies, immunosuppressed people, etc).
howlgarnish 6y ago
Dr Fauci stated earlier that he was hoping for 70% efficacy. So these results are still good, not just as good as the 94% seen earlier for Moderna's vaccine.
Tomminn 6y ago
The key point is that if you lower the replication rate-- the number of people each person with the virus goes on to infect-- below 1, the number of active cases exponentially decays to zero. The business-as-usual replication rate of covid appears to be somewhere around 4-6, meaning that if we have universal vaccination with something like 80% efficacy, the number of active cases will exponentially decay with no other measures taken (social distancing, masks, lockdowns, quarantines etc).
_Microft 6y ago
The disease will 'die out' (in quotes because it will not actually) if there are not enough targets that are susceptible to it. People infected by SARS-Cov2 seem to infect two to six other people [0]. Reduce this number by 90% and we are well below one infection per infected, so it is not sustained. This assumes that everyone would be vaccinated. Currently we are doing something similar: each measure like wearing a mask, social distancing, meeting fewer people, ventilating rooms, finding infected people before they can infect someone else ("contact tracing") contributes to reducing the number of follow-up infections a bit. (This is why "but masks do not really work" is an ill-informed argument. They do not have to because they are meant to be used together with other measures to achieve reduction in spread) A vaccine will protect us passively instead of requiring us to actively following these measures and will therefore be a lot more convenient. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number

howlgarnish 6y ago

That headline is not quite correct. From the article: > Phase 3 interim analysis including 131 Covid-19 cases indicates that the vaccine is [on average] 70.4% effective when combining data from two dosing regimens ... In the two different dose regimens vaccine efficacy was 90% in one and 62% in the other And to be clear, it's not just one dose vs two: > tests on two different dose regimens showing that the vaccine was 90% effective if administered at a half dose and then at a full dose, or 62% effective if administered in two full doses. So "Oxford vaccine is up to 90% effective", perhaps?

kjakm 6y ago
Another article I read seemed to indicate they haven’t investigated the half dose regimen fully so it sounds like until more testing is done that’s not the recommended path (in which case the headline is being generous).

agd 6y ago

I think I read (and I may be wrong) that the costs for the vaccines per dose were roughly as follows: Moderna: £45, Pfizer: £20, Oxford: £3, The Oxford one is also easier to store and transport.

threeseed 6y ago
Oxford one is also going to be easier to manufacture given that it is based on existing technology. Many countries e.g. Australia are licensing the formula so this is an important aspect.
- singingfish 6y ago
  the mRNA style viruses will probably decrease in cost exponentially the same way that DNA sequencing and computer technology have dropped in price.
  - starfallg 6y ago
    However, mRNA vaccines require low temperature storage and are in general harder to handle. This translates to additional cost in production, throughout the logistics chain and delivery.
    - singingfish 6y ago
      I think it's likely that they'll need to be distributed frozen, but there's a lot that can be done researching preservatives. The the moderna vaccine is higher temperature than the pfveizer one for this reason.
    - twic 6y ago
      Pfizer are also working on a lyophilised, aka freeze-dried, version of their vaccine, which would not need to be stored at -80 C. This is from July [1], not sure if there is any more news: > But we also hope to have, as we always do in life cycle management, a new lyophilized formulated vaccine by -- within maybe a year after initial delivery such as fourth quarter 2021 and the lyophilized formulation could be stored in refrigerator. [1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/317678438/files/PFE-USQ_Transcript_2020-07-01.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/317678438/files/PFE-USQ_Transcript_202...

jpxw 6y ago

From AstraZeneca: > One dosing regimen (n=2,741) showed vaccine efficacy of 90% when AZD1222 was given as a half dose, followed by a full dose at least one month apart, and another dosing regimen (n=8,895) showed 62% efficacy when given as two full doses at least one month apart. The combined analysis from both dosing regimens (n=11,636) resulted in an average efficacy of 70%. All results were statistically significant (p<=0.0001). Also: > and no hospitalisations or severe cases of the disease were reported in participants receiving the vaccine. https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020/azd1222hlr.html https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020...

crx07 6y ago
Wow, what a fascinating phenomenon. A weak first dose somehow primes the immune system better than a full one?
- athriren 6y ago
  “The thing is, the immune system is very complicated.” quote from the link here, but for those who don’t want to click through (this article is fascinating though), it is told in the context of a joke which i will post below the link. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/covid-19-immunity-is-the-pandemics-central-mystery/614956/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/covid-19-... There’s a joke about immunology, which Jessica Metcalf of Princeton recently told me. An immunologist and a cardiologist are kidnapped. The kidnappers threaten to shoot one of them, but promise to spare whoever has made the greater contribution to humanity. The cardiologist says, “Well, I’ve identified drugs that have saved the lives of millions of people.” Impressed, the kidnappers turn to the immunologist. “What have you done?” they ask. The immunologist says, “The thing is, the immune system is very complicated…” And the cardiologist says, “Just shoot me now.”
- m12k 6y ago
  IANAD but my guess is maybe a stronger immune response in the first dose makes the immune system respond so quickly to the second dose, that it doesn't have time to get anywhere and interact with enough of the body to have much of an effect. That way a weaker immunization in the first dose leaves more room for the second dose to have a refreshing/strengthening effect. Basically, 1 + 2 > 2 + 0

camkego 6y ago

This statement seems a big deal: "There were no hospitalised or severe cases in anyone who received the vaccine" Is that also true of the Pfizer and Moderna trials? Are the various trials measuring 'effectiveness' in the same way? Is there a standard for 'effectiveness' in these Covid-19 trials? It will take some digging and real effort to compare the risks and benefits of the various vaccines coming to market.

threeseed 6y ago
There were no hospitalisations or severe incidents for either the Pfizer and Moderna trials were was related to the vaccine. And it's pretty easy to compare the vaccines. It will mostly come down to price, ease of manufacture and ease of distribution i.e. temperature. Given that for the 3 viruses all have no risks associated with their use.
- acqq 6y ago
  There was one vaccinated but then severe case in Pfizer trial out of 170 cases evaluated where placebo-then-ill cases are included, or 1 from total 8 vaccinated but then ill. “There were 10 severe cases of COVID-19 observed in the trial, with nine of the cases occurring in the placebo group and one in the BNT162b2 vaccinated group.” (1) “170 confirmed cases of COVID-19 were evaluated, with 162 observed in the placebo group versus 8 in the vaccine group.” 1) https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-conclude-phase-3-study-covid-19-vaccine https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Eh, I think speed to manufacture/distribute is more important. The cost of these is trivial compared to social distancing/lockdown.
  - jaynetics 6y ago
    Only in the richest countries. Due to the totally different age pyramid and thus few severe cases, vaccination might not be worth it for the poorest countries even at this lower price.

rusticpenn 6y ago

Correct me if I am wrong, Oxford uses traditional Vaccine design technique (using a weaker virus and adding spikes or something similar) while Biontech(Pfizer) and ModeRNA use MRNA which is completely new technique (messenger RNA). This is awesome for more than just vaccinations. Traditionally the groups allocating govt funding to science and industries are very risk averse and this could be one more example where taking risks can payoff.

bawolff 6y ago
I thought adenoviral vaccines were also relatively new. Not as new as mRNA which is bleeding edge, but still i think this would be the first time this technique would be approved for human use should it be approved.
- pietjepuk88 6y ago
  If I remember correctly, the Ebola vaccine is the first approved vaccine to use another virus as a vector. The first one to be approved (by Merck) does not use an adenovirus, but the second approved one (by J&J) does. Note that approvals of these were late 2019 and the summer of this year. So still very new from an "approved on humans" point of view (although not _as_ new as mRNA-based vaccines). The techniques have both been in development for years and years of course, including determining their safety profiles.
  - Zenst 6y ago
    Would they be virus based vaccines or phage based ones as phage's are a form of virus as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
- DennisP 6y ago
  The article says adenovirus vaccines have been "researched and used extensively for decades."
  - 6y ago

senectus1 6y ago

Is this the sort of Vaccine that protects against infection or against the disease?

alkonaut 6y ago
The tests are for disease. We hope it protects against infection/the ability to spread it. But that's not part of the testing I don't know how many existing vaccines fall into either category here, i.e. whether there are many vaccines that prevent disease but do not even reduce the ability to spread. Would be interesting to know.

m12k 6y ago

"There were no hospitalised or severe cases in anyone who received the vaccine" Does anyone know if there's data for this and the other vaccines, whether any of those that still end up infected under the trials have had any of the secondary symptoms such as missing sense of smell, reduced cognitive function, reduced bio-motor functions, cardiac damage and so on? Not dying from a lung infection is obviously the most important, but some of the other organ damage that corona-virus can cause is pretty scary too, and I'd like to know whether the vaccines seem to prevent this too.

ksec 6y ago

Incoming possible Silly, Stupid and Lazy Questions, 1. Are there any vaccine ( of any Disease ) that are 100% effective? Or do we operate ( as I would assume ) something like 5 Nines effective rate and call it 100%? 2. Across all type of Vaccine, what are the average or median effective rate? i.e Should we expect Vaccine to be 90%+ effective in the first place? Or is that a wrong expectation to make? 3. What happens in the case of 10% ineffective, do they take a third dose?

dragontamer 6y ago
> 2. Across all type of Vaccine, what are the average or median effective rate? i.e Should we expect Vaccine to be 90%+ effective in the first place? Or is that a wrong expectation to make? Sometimes, vaccines are only 30% or 40% effective, leading to terrible flu seasons. I don't really know the mean/median/mode, but 90% is really high for a vaccine. > 3. What happens in the case of 10% ineffective, do they take a third dose? How do you know if someone is one of those 10%?
- ksec 6y ago
  >How do you know if someone is one of those 10%? I would assume everyone have the vaccine and they still get caught COVID afterwards? Or do I misunderstood what effective means?
  - austhrow743 6y ago
    If they already got Covid then a third dose of vaccine is pointless.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    The point of a vaccine is to give you immunity WITHOUT getting the virus. Your immune system naturally becomes immune after it fights off an infection. But because of the risk of long-term effects and/or death when you're infected with COVID19, people want a safer solution that provides immunity. A vaccine provides immunity, but at a lesser rate than the actual virus. But 90% (or even 70%) effectiveness is a good thing: it means 90% to 70% people do NOT spread the virus anymore. You'd think that means 90% or 70% fewer deaths, but that's mistaken. That 70% is compounded over-and-over every generation. If everyone else is vaccinated: you infect 70% fewer people. Those people infect 70% fewer people, and those people infect 70% fewer people. After 3 generations, a 70% vaccine would wipe out 97.3% of possible infections. And a "generation" in COVID19 terms is roughly 1-week. --------- So yes, even a 70% vaccine (if everyone took it) is a very, very, very good thing. But the two vaccine trials that finished first were 90% effective, so I think people will prefer the higher-efficacy (at least, if they have access to Dry Ice / -80C storage).

jakozaur 6y ago

Title is misleading. They tested few configurations, we should use the most optimal one, not the average. Much better source: https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020/azd1222hlr.html https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020... Good: + likely 90% effective if we use optimal dosing + no significant side effective. Looks better than Pfizer or Moderna. + already pre-produced at huge scale, 3 Bln doses in 2021 + easy to store and administer, just regular fridge required + several times cheaper than mRNA + more traditional vaccine than novel mRNA, less tail risk in production and scaling up the process Not good: - two doses, efficient one month after first injection - likely public will be confused about efficiency due to dosing regime

afterburner 6y ago
The two existing mRNA vaccines touted earlier also require two doses.
- tzs 6y ago
  I wonder what happens if you get two doses, but not of the same vaccine?
  - vmurthy 6y ago
    Can you share your thinking around why someone would want to do that given that a combination won't be tested (at-least rigorously). Are you seeing benefits from a logistics point-of-view?
    - tzs 6y ago
      I'm not thinking someone would want to do it. I'm thinking it's going to accidentally happen to some people, at least if there are facilities that offer more than one vaccine.
  - jakozaur 6y ago
    Hard to guess. Likely worth investigating, but as secondary priority: 1. You may end up just getting very short and weak immunity, making this approach ineffective. 2. You may get a combination of immunity which can have different efficiency. 3. For some vaccines of same type this works, but is rarely recommended. 4. Mixing partly mRNA and Adenovirus vaccines doesn't to be winning strategy. It is rather more likely to give another vaccine if after two doses you didn't get immunity.

usaphp 6y ago

Is that the same vaccine that was approved in Russia? I remember Russia was working with AstraZeneca on their vaccine, but not sure if it's the same one.

fakedang 6y ago
No, the Russian one that was released for public use was developed by one of the government institutes (which has a very shady history of falsifying data).
- Tepix 6y ago
  > has a very shady history of falsifying data Source?
  - fakedang 6y ago
    https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/27/health/russia-coronavirus-vaccine-sputnik-v-reality-check/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/27/health/russia-coronavirus... I know it's CNN (what I could find with 5 mins of Googlefu) and they don't explicitly mention the falsified data part. But the Gamaleya Institute is well known in Russia for falsifying data both as a propaganda machine, as well as to obtain further funding from the federal government. I can't find another source I read earlier concerning a past instance of fraud perpetrated by the institute (it was in German).

andy_ppp 6y ago

I find it a bit weird that there are fewer asymptomatic cases with this vaccine? Is it somehow increasing the immune response to COVID-19?

foota 6y ago
Maybe the vaccine happens to work more effectively in people that would otherwise have had an asymptomatic infection?
twic 6y ago
The whole purpose of the vaccine is to increase the immune response to COVID-19.
SamBam 6y ago
That's exactly what a vaccine, any vaccine, does. A vaccine is something that primes the immune system, so that when the real virus enters the body it is attacked and destroyed quickly. This means that the virus can never start multiplying in the body and shedding to other people. I don't believe there is any modern vaccine that doesn't reduce or eliminate asymptomatic spreading of the disease.
- mssundaram 6y ago
  Whooping cough. That vaccine causes suppressed symptoms and people can unknowingly spread the bacteria
  - SamBam 6y ago
    That's a good point. However, I believe that it is different between bacteria and viruses. From my understanding of the whooping cough studies, they found that some vaccinated baboons who were subsequently infected still had high levels of pertussis bacteria after five weeks. These bacteria couldn't cause widespread infections in the host, but had seemingly found pockets where they were safe from the immune system. A virus, however, can't find a "safe pocket" away from the immune system in which to survive and multiply. It needs to use the body's own cells and machinery to do so, and (outside of the blood-brain barriers) there aren't cells hidden from the immune system.

protoman3000 6y ago

While we now get the results from various COVID-19 vaccines I see a societal issue brewing up. How will we deal with the perceived uncertainty of the safety of these vaccines and the surrounding (dis-)infodemic? I read recently that in some European country (was it Germany?) the willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19 went down from 80% to 60%. With these numbers policy makers will have a hard time convincing the broad population that they can rely on a due process and be safe. In the meantime there is a proliferation of false information and fake news, while in the past there was not much media coverage of significant side effects from a rushed swine flu vaccine [1]. [1] https://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9047819/H1N1-pandemic-narcolepsy-Pandemrix https://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9047819/H1N1-pandemic-narcolep...

prox 6y ago
Just from a software perspective: never install the big version upgrade. Usually the X.0 versions still has bugs that only come out at huge roll outs. I am inclined to wait a few months to let early adaptors test the vaccine. Medicine is a bit different though and every country probably has institutes checking the vaccines independently. A lot of eyes are on this probably. No company wants to be the company that botched the corona vaccine.
- protoman3000 6y ago
  That option might not be available in the short term. Spain for example aims to vaccinate almost the whole population until summer 2021. What are you going to do when you don’t think it’s version X.1 yet?
  - prox 6y ago
    Wait.
- chippy 6y ago
  It's likely that the majority of people on HN are not going to be early adopters, and that other groups will get the jab first. It depends what's more effective, as these groups are all different: do you jab first those who can most easily spread it, those who would most easily get it, those who would most severely be impacted if they got it, or do you jab those who are most diligent, enthusiastic and first in the queue? I'd even wager that most healthy adults around the world will not be getting the vaccine (but that might be a negative story to run with) but that's at less odds than just healthy, enthusiastic, low risk people getting the jab first.

markvdb 6y ago

Why do they sabotaged their own messaging by using the 70% number? Reading further, it looks like the vaccine is 90% efficient. Also, "There were no hospitalised or severe cases in anyone who received the vaccine". Can we infer anything from that statement? They seem to be suggesting that the infection might be less serious in the vaccinated population...

cinntaile 6y ago
It would be a pretty lousy vaccine if the side-effects of the vaccine were as bad and as common as getting the actual disease. Why the downvotes? I'm answering the question that is being asked. The study is talking about the side-effects of receiving the vaccine. > "Also, "There were no hospitalised or severe cases in anyone who received the vaccine". Can we infer anything from that statement? They seem to be suggesting that the infection might be less serious in the vaccinated population... "
cuchoi 6y ago
The 70% is the combined data, so probably the most reliable estimate. For two high doses, they got 62% effectiveness and for one low and one high dose they got 90%. They don't know why the latter was more effective. 70% is still a great effectiveness rate, specially for a cheaper and easier to distribute vaccine.
- yread 6y ago
  The problem with adenovirus vaccines is that body might build immunity against the adenovirus as well. So, you give one jab, adenovirus infects enough cells and creates enough antigens, immune systems notices and does something about it, but it also notices the adenovirus and makes antibodies against that, too. With the second jab those antibodies immediately neutralize the adenovirus so it can't infect enough cells and make enough of the COVID antigens so the protection is not that strong. The Russian vaccine avoids it by using two different strains of adenovirus for the two jabs
  - blueblisters 6y ago

rixrax 6y ago

Is there any research or early guestimates about risks (or benefits) of getting multiple different vaccines for Covid? E.g. What if one gets this, and then later moderna vaccine? Will they fight each other, or work together or is it unknown whats going to happen?

kuu 6y ago
>Will they fight each other, or work together I'm not a microbiologist, but this is not how vaccines work. The vaccines are going to put "something strange" in your body that "resembles" the virus, but it's not the virus (it's either a deactivated version of it, or some proteins which identify it...) and then is YOUR immune system the one which "attacks" this pseudo-virus. In this way, your immune system is learning how to defend to "this kind" of strange agents. In a future if your immune system sees the virus, will defend you. If you get the two kinds at the same time, maybe the two doses are too much for your immune system to handle it properly and the side effects may affect you (e.g. you can get fever because your immune system is under too heavy load).
- FriendlyNormie 6y ago
  Thanks for shedding light on the subject by sharing your 3rd grade elementary school understanding of how vaccines work. What would we do without you and your brilliant insights.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  Most of the vaccines developed seem to work pretty much the same, by targeting the same spike protein. And I am also far from being a microbiologist either, but I do know that the immune system is very complex, so I would not rule anything out, when messing with it. In any case, getting the vaccination can (maybe) actually increase your risk of a severe Covid sickness, when you are exposed to real covid virus at the same time. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijcp.13795 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijcp.13795 And I have no data for it and I can imagine it being hard to get reliable data about it, but autoimmune sickness is on the rise. I am not sure a quickly hacked together vaccine can rule that possibility out.

ggm 6y ago

Contrary to some views here, I am very heartened by a press release which doesn't gild the lily. This restores a lot of faith in reporting.

thomond 6y ago
"gild the lily" = try to improve what is already beautiful or excellent.
- ggm 6y ago
  70% efficacy at 2c-8c storage for $4 is indeed excellent but many comments here go to "but modena is 95% efficacy whyyyy" and "they're underselling it"
  - pja 6y ago
    They also tried 2 different dose regimens, one of which had 90% efficacy. The 70% figure is the weighted mean of the two I think.
    - ggm 6y ago
      I would far rather we report 70% and find its more effective than we report is up to 90% effective but in field deployment find its less. A 70% vaccine at wide scale release can keep R under 1.0 1/5th the price, and no need for freezers. This vaccine is huge. I pray for more like this.
      - sambe 6y ago
        I would far rather we report with just the tiniest bit of nuance. They did distinct variations for a reason. Nobody is reporting all the other approaches that were less favourable.
      - standardUser 6y ago
        "I would far rather we report 70%" That makes no sense since there are no tested regimes with 70% effectiveness. The reporting should say there is a vaccine regime with 90% effectiveness, and add a footnote that another regime that will not be used had a far lower rate of effectiveness.

brutus1213 6y ago

Does anyone have a pointer on how the mrna vaccine actually works? I understand basic genetics mechanisms and how mrna works inside cells. In shot form, I assume the modified mrna strands are floating through the blood stream. What happens after the injection? Btw .. I think public health needs to start educating people on how these things work in order to get high coverage. I am alarmed at the number of highly educated people I know who seem suspicious. This fear is just borne by a lack of understanding and can be corrected IMHO.

te_chris 6y ago
I liked this as a background https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/22/mrna-vaccines-covid-signal-new-era-disease-prevention-science https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/22/mrna-vaccines-.... This vaccine isn't mRNA though.
- ufo 6y ago
  I kind of is, if you squint. The payload of the adenovirus vector is DNA.
- brutus1213 6y ago
  Thx for the pointer. Yes, I was talking about mrna in the context of the Moderna and Pfizer+B vaccine. This was a good read on why we shouldn't fear reverse transcription. What I still don't get is how free floating mrna molecules in the bloodstream go through the same protein formation process as mrna inside cells. Will continue to search.

te_chris 6y ago

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/oxford-s-covid-19-vaccine-is-the-coronavirus-front-runner https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/oxford-s-... This is a great profile on one of the lead Oxford scientists.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

__warlord__ 6y ago

In general or specific to Covid-19 vaccines, does anyone knows what happens if you get vaccinated after you got the virus?

ageitgey 6y ago
On one hand, all of these vaccine trials excluded people who already had COVID, so we don't fully know what the effect would be in large numbers. However at least one person with COVID immunity accidentally got into the Oxford Phase 1/2 trial (according to earlier published results), so we at least know it didn't hurt them. On the other hand, it is generally thought that vaccines can trigger immune reactions that are often much stronger and longer lasting than just being infected, so you would expect there to be a benefit to getting vaccinated even if you already had it. But only time will tell for sure. No one really knows how long immunity of either type will last - we just have to wait and find out!
- logicchains 6y ago
  >On the other hand, it is generally thought that vaccines can trigger immune reactions that are often much stronger and longer lasting than just being infected, so you would expect there to be a benefit to getting vaccinated even if you already had it. Interestingly the opposite is true for influenza: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870374/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870374/
puzzlingcaptcha 6y ago
I doubt it would help much, for similar reasons why you don't give a flu vaccine to someone already sick. A vaccine is meant to stimulate adaptive immunity which culminates in formation of memory cells - highly selected T and B lymphocytes which are very specific to the infectious agent. This process typically takes a couple days [1] and is rather involved. Once you have the memory cells, however, the next time you get in contact with the virus your memory cells will jump-start the immune response much more quickly, before the virus gets a chance to replicate. In a regular infection the same mechanisms of adaptive immunity are activated, but on top of that you already have the complications from the virus itself (cell death in lung epithelium, accumulation of excess fluid, hypoxia, cytokine storm etc). A vaccine dose won't necessarily speed it up, there are plenty of virus particles already stimulating the immune system - it's just picking up the slack a bit too late. There are other factors to consider but that's the general idea. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kinetics-of-CD8-T-cell-differentiation-following-viral-infection-Shown-is-a-typical_fig6_258857348 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kinetics-of-CD8-T-cell-d...

sgt101 6y ago

An important fact that I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is that 3m doses have been manufactured already and are available in the UK supply chain today. "All" that's required is the approval from the regulator - but I guess that is still a little way off. 3m would do a lot of good though - frontline staff, the most vulnerable, hotspots....

anoncake 6y ago
Were any doses produced yet of the other two vaccines?
- est31 6y ago
  At least in the US, it seems so: > Currently, OWS is working with 11 drug manufacturing companies to produce 800 million doses of six different COVID-19 vaccines, five of which are in Phase III clinical trials. By prepurchasing and premanufacturing these vaccines prior to approval, the vaccine distribution plan can be activated and supplies delivered within 24 hours of any of the vaccines receiving FDA approval. https://college.acaai.org/updates-on-covid-19-vaccine-distribution/ https://college.acaai.org/updates-on-covid-19-vaccine-distri...
- alleskleber 6y ago
  BioNTech/Pfizer plan to deliver 50 million doses by the end of the year. https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-details/pfizer-and-biontech-submit-emergency-use-authorization-request https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...
- sgt101 6y ago
  I am not sure : I know the other vaccines must be stored at a very low temperature, but does anyone know how long they can be stored for at all?
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    Up to six months.

christkv 6y ago

I really still hope mRNA vaccines work well and that we keep investing in them. The potential too rapidly create new vaccines and deploy them when needed without requiring a vector will be crucial to counter future pandemics. Once the oxford vaccine is deployed I suspect they will then have to create a new vector if they need to create another batch in the future as your body might have developed immunity to the vector virus itself making future doses ineffective.

arichard123 6y ago

Here [1] it says the vaccine was designed mostly over the weekend of 11th Jan 2020. Here we are 10 months later and we know it works. If our knowledge of vaccine design is so good experts can design a vaccine that works over a weekend, what new breakthroughs are required to reduce the time between then and now substantially? A lot of benefit could have been had if we'd been able to get along this path more quickly. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/23/coronavirus-scientists-developed-oxford-vaccine-at-breakneck-speed https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/23/coronavirus-sc...

jimbokun 6y ago
It would require forgoing any kind of serious trials to determine the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. It is the classic "make a baby in 9 months with 9 women" dilemma. There is no way around conducting a trial and waiting long enough until you see what happens to the participants.
DennisP 6y ago
The main bottleneck is getting a bunch of volunteers, vaccinating them, and seeing how many get the disease over the next few months. Kinda hard to speed that up, unless you're confident/desperate enough to just skip testing. Maybe if the disease were 10X more dangerous and you had a vaccine that was just a minor variation of a previous one, it'd be worth it. A little time could maybe be shaved off by speeding up production. The mRNA vaccines have an advantage here, you can basically use an RNA printer to churn out whatever RNA sequence you need.
- triangleman 6y ago
  Wait isn't that exactly what they did?
mrtksn 6y ago
Definitely. It’s a similar situation with the aviation too. Unfortunately, rules in fields like medicine and aviation are written with blood. Someone gets too greedy or too comfortable and you have large numbers of people death or incapacitated. We already have large numbers of charlatans preying on the hopes of desperate people, must be very careful not to lower the barrier too much or these might jump too. Even worse, people might be targeted by slick psychopaths and coerced into extremely dangerous things, destroying communities when anything goes wrong. Hopefully though, some mountains might have been moved and some things might have gotten faster from now on.

ta8645 6y ago

I find it disheartening how many people speculate about possible long term side effects of exposure to Covid, even in asymptomatic cases. Yet those same people seemingly have no reservations about injecting a brand new drug into their veins.

tboyd47 6y ago
Especially when the "gold standard" PCR procedure has a 97% false positive rate.
- orzig 6y ago
  This is asserting that the number of incorrectly positive results is equal to ALL truly negative test takers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_rate). >> Citation needed <<
  - tboyd47 6y ago
    Why bother giving citation if I am going to be downvoted anyway? But, here you go. https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/are-nc-s-coronavirus-case-numbers-inflated-some-scientists-say-so/19355130/ https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/are-nc-s-coronavirus-case-n... https://www.portugalresident.com/judges-in-portugal-highlight-more-than-debatable-reliability-of-covid-tests/ https://www.portugalresident.com/judges-in-portugal-highligh... (NYT) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin... https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20200429007051320 https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20200429007051320
    - mssundaram 6y ago
      Thank you for sharing
hans1729 6y ago
This goes both ways, there are plenty of people who don't take covid serious but fear the health-consequences of vaccines. There's probably a name for the phenomenon. If not, let me propose "The duality of Hans"

notwhereyouare 6y ago

Has anybody seen effectiveness numbers? Like if I get this vaccine, is it one and done? Or will it be like a yearly thing.

christkv 6y ago
I don't think we will know that until next winter.
hobofan 6y ago
Obviously we can only say it with high certainty for the duration that the pandemic has been ongoing, but there are strong indications that the immunity will more likely be on the timescale of many years (or even decades)[0]. That effect shouldn't significantly depend on which of the vaccines induced the immunity. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/health/coronavirus-immunity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/health/coronavirus-immuni...

jl2718 6y ago

In case anybody was wondering what this actually is: “The ChAdOx1 vaccine is a chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine vector.” They put a corona spike sequence into it. By comparison, the Moderna is making a RNA vaccine, and BioNTech an epitope vaccine (the actual protein). The ‘invasive’ effect is decreasing in that order. Oxford’s ChAdOx1 infects your cells to create RNA, then protein, then T-cell recognition/apoptosis, then epitopes trigger B-cell antibody production. Moderna RNA skips the infection part. BioNTech epitopes go right to B-cells. But, they also have deceasing stability and manufacturing scalability in that order.

xuhu 6y ago
Quite a typo in your last sentence.
- jl2718 6y ago
  Ha! I’m leaving it.
thehappypm 6y ago
BioNTech / Pfizer is also mRNA.
rrss 6y ago
> BioNTech an epitope vaccine I think BioNTech's vaccine is also an mRNA vaccine. https://biontech.de/covid-19 https://biontech.de/covid-19 > Our vaccine consists of a short segment of genetic material, called messenger RNA, that provides instructions for a human cell to make a harmless version of a target protein, or immunogen, which activates the body’s immune response against the SARS-CoV-2 virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNT162b2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNT162b2
- jl2718 6y ago
  Oh interesting. I’ve been following their cancer neo-epitope vaccine research and didn’t notice this was a different process.
6y ago

hikerclimb 6y ago

Hopefully this doesn’t work and people in us only die. I also hope death rate in u.s goes up...

datameta 6y ago

So important: "A key element of Oxford’s partnership with AstraZeneca is the joint commitment to provide the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis for the duration of the pandemic across the world, and in perpetuity to low- and middle-income countries."

jonplackett 6y ago

We (Britain) may have totally screwed up our general response to COVID. But at least we’re still pretty good at science. Thanks Oxford for saving the day.

Smaug123 6y ago
Tyler Cowen made this point a few months ago (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/which-country-has-had-the-best-response-to-the-coronavirus.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/wh...): the public health response has been "generally poor" but the UK was first on the mark with dexamethasone and has been among the first with the vaccines. He went as far as saying the UK has had the best response to COVID despite the public health response.
- ddek 6y ago
  So, a member of my immediate family is senior management at Public Health England, the civil service institution that should have been planning for this. When the government announced they were shutting down PHE, in an attempt to copy the RKI (forgetting that PHE is far more than disease control, of course), the RKI wrote a letter to all senior management at PHE. This was quite a confused letter - the RKI didn’t understand why the UK gov were making this decision, when the RKI modelled their processes on PHE. I’ve read the letter. Add to this, daily squabbles between cabinet office and other branches of government. If there was good news, you’d hear back immediately and you’d be blocked from sharing it. Bad news, cabinet would stall sometimes for weeks. But ultimately all the guidance was irrelevant because the UK government are not interested in listening to it. When an adviser egregiously broke the rules, a story which dominated the headlines for weeks, they changed the rules. You see it now - the UK isn’t even on the downslope of wave 2, but apparently in 2 weeks we’ll have fans at football games and business as usual.
twoslide 6y ago
Also worth noting that we did this by having a board research base that was not tied to immediate returns. A year ago Sarah Gilbert was struggling to get funding for work on the MERS vaccine, which was seen as largely irrelevant.

Beggers1960 6y ago

Beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, with coroanvirus. Every positive announcement raises my spirits slightly.

mchusma 6y ago

I'm reposting some of my thoughts below to try and genuinely see is someone has an answer to the question: From a utilitarian perspective, why weren't these all approved for the elderly in Q2 2020? In other words, its May 2020 and you have the option to ban vaccines or allow vaccines for the elderly, what do you pick? We know the following about vaccines generally: -Vaccines have an extremely high success rate, 33% of vaccines make it through all trials to approval. 50% after phase 1 is complete. -The worst vaccine side effect ever is widely considered to be the swine flu vaccine from 60 years ago, where 1 in 100,000 got GBS, or Pandemrix, where 1 in 18400 got narcolepsy. (1)(2) -Vaccine candidates have 85% chance of making it from phase III to approved (phase III is supposed to be the efficacy check), in other words we expect about a 15% chance that the vaccine is not effective, most of the tests are about safety. We know the following about COVID: -Unknown long term side effects, reasonably likely to be worse than the worst vaccines ever, but unknown. -The IFR for those over 75 is about 4.6% now(1). Earlier in the pandemic it was about 11.6%(2). -If you assume that people have a 10% chance of contracting the disease, you can say that those over 75 would have approximately a 0.46% chance of dying (4.6 in 1,000 dead) if they don't get the vaccine. This seems to be a conservative estimate. So if you have to decide whether to ban a vaccine or not in May 2020, and you assume with 100% confidence that this vaccine was tied for the "worst side effects ever", for example it turns out to be as bad as Pandemrix, then you would expect 1 in 18400 to get something like narcolepsy if you give them the vaccine. Using the IFR and 10% number above, you assume that not giving the vaccine would leave 84.64 dead for the same population. (85x by volume). I don't know your opinion of "how much worse is death versus narcolepsy?". If you believe death is 10x worse than narcolepsy, then by severity and volume, taking a vaccine with the worst side effects ever would seem about 850x better than not taking it (in elderly populations). Earlier in the pandemic, when IFRs were over 2x as bad, this was well over 1,000x better. I mean, the numbers so dramatically favor vaccination that I don't get it at all. Why is this not approved already? Why does it take the FDA 3 weeks to even discuss the matter of approval when this made sense to approve in May? Why did all governments opt to ban the vaccines versus allow them? Sources: (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix (2) https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.... (3) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v7 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v... (4) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2

jliptzin 6y ago

How many different viruses are there that cause the common cold? About 200? If we can get an effective vaccine for this coronavirus in under a year why aren't we working on all the other coronaviruses and rhinoviruses? I know nothing about biology but let's say it costs $1 billion to develop and test a successful vaccine for a common cold virus, worldwide for $200 billion that isn't that much to not have to deal with colds anymore. Plus it seems like one vaccine might provide protection for multiple different viruses. Or do they mutate too quickly to keep up?

leafmeal 6y ago
I would guess that people just don't care enough about getting rid of the common cold. If you're in the vaccine making business, you might as well try and cure some diseases that are killing people. There's more than enough work there already. Also more money...

maxehmookau 6y ago

As a trial participant on this vaccine, I'm _very_ pleased by this outcome!

arisAlexis 6y ago

Moderna vaccine can be also refrigerated and the efficacy is higher. Something I don't get?

URfejk 6y ago

Big Pharma COVID "Vaccines" Are For SYMPTOMS Not The VIRUS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jEGizsmKLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jEGizsmKLg