At the time of writing (2020-11-09 12:04 UTC) the article uses "90% of people" and "90% protection" interchangeably. I assume it means "90% of individuals achieve immunity", rather than "individuals achieve 90% immunity".
EDIT: See child comment re: Pfizer press release.
EDIT 2: See [1] for said press release, which has more detailed information than the BBC article.
If new pfizer's vaccine has similar numbers, e.g. 90% after two shots and 80% after one shot, can it be more efficient to just use one shot, considering current race with time since we need to deliver vaccine to billions of people? Are there numbers for protection level after one shot somewhere? I couldn't find it at first glance.
I think the parent is asking (if 1 shot of this vaccine confers 80% immunity) would it not be better (for the purposes of curbing transmission) to give everyone a single injection now for 80% immunity among a broader population rather than giving half the number of people two doses for 90% immunity. The implicit constraint is that it will take a relatively long time to scale up production and distribution to the extent that we can get two doses to everyone.
I am sure I misunderstood something, but what does that 80% mean, and how does it differ from "the data we currently have shows that one shot of this vaccine is not likely to convey a decent amount of protection."?
Yep, maybe they had some data about protection level rising since first shot, fewer people getting sick already etc.
It's hard to understand from just the Figure 4 how much of that increase is booster shot and how much is just level rising with time, too bad they didn't investigate this. Having top level protection vaccine with 2 shots is of course great and may be what you would be aiming for in "normal" times, but when it's race against the time trading several efficiency percents for quicker population coverage may be worth it.
Yep, J&J one is the only candidate requiring one shot. Hopefully it will show some good results soon as well.
Out of 45,000 people, only 86ish people got infected in the trial arm? Isn't that too few? Even for the control arm, that's still only 774 people infected.
That's not true, population size absolutely 'enters into the math'. 9 vs. 85 does not give the same result independently of whether N=94, 200, 2k, or 2B.
It affects confidence, and potentially the result of the test entirely. I won't be more specific because stats was never a strong suit and my memory's hazy, but I remember enough to know it matters!
I'm thinking that 85/21,750 or 0.4% of the controls developed the disease (vs 0.04% of those who received vaccine).
It does seem low for the US where you have 3% of the population had disease already in 2020. Perhaps more data came from Germany? Or it could be they measure not just PCR +ve results, but antibody levels and/or severe symptoms?
No, it's probabilistic, about the 'amount of protection' from or 'decrease in likelihood' of contracting it, which is why generally people are happy / would have been happy even for a much lower percentage - protecting ~everyone a bit is higher impact than protecting a few people a lot.
It's the same as 'herd immunity', where each member is '90% immune' and as a result the herd is 'more immune' than if only 10% of its members were 100% immune.
The variations are enough to have differences in infectiousness and to allow us to trace the spread a bit, but as far as we know immunity to any of them is immunity to all of them.
I think someone should clarify the strands vs. genetic variations here.
Because the reports from Denmarks Mink fiasco indicated that antibodies were not as effective on the mutation that appeared there short time ago. This would contradict the one-fits-all immunity argument.
Maybe there is a slight semantic misunderstanding here, but in fact a "re-infection" is defined as such:
A patient must present a infection and the particular virus must be sequenced, and then present with an infection later on where the virus is again sequenced and identified as sufficiently different from the first sample. Otherwise it cannot be deemed a re-infection.
If these small differences in the genomic sequence are already a different strand, I don't know, not an expert.
But all 5 (?) cases known so far had a different sequence identified the second time.
> The genomes of the patient’s virus samples from April and June displayed significant genetic differences between them, suggesting that the patient was infected twice by 2 distinct COVID-19 infections.
I’d read of known second infections that are from different strains, but scientists also question lasting immunity from COVID-19 infection because other coronaviruses are seasonal.
My take is that this is a "correlation does not imply causality" case.
It was possible to positively identify a reinfection because the two infections were due to different strains. That was just the means of positively and objectively identify a reinfection. However, nothing was asserted regarding if the patient was immune to the first strain the first time around. In fact, it seems that the hallmark of reinfections is that they are far more critical than first infections. This also means that the first infections is far milder than the second one. Well, the thing about the immune system is that it is able to fight mild infections without developing immunity if they are too mild to trigger a full response from the immune system.
"Hard lockdown" has drastic socio-economic implications.
"No lockdown" has dramatic/catastrophic socio-economic implications. The easiest to understand: In very short time the ICUs are overrun and people die. A lot of people die.
"Soft lockdown" depends on the people to play along. Which seems more difficult than the people in charge thought it would be (and some still don't believe).
Notably I am not arguing here for what the "right" choice is. It is simply not that easy.
With no intervention, healthy people start to die because they cannot receive medical care. There is a lot of COVID care going on in hospitals other than ventilation. Ventilators are somewhat of a last resort.
We are on track for COVID to have 10x the deaths of the seasonal flu, and that is after the effects of the significant interventions that have happened here and around the globe.
This is incorrect. When hospitals are overrun, healthy people can't be treated and die. The old and obese die in higher proportions even when receiving treatment, but healthy young people often need treatment to survive.
> but as far as we know immunity to any of them is immunity to all of them.
OK. The longevity of the immunity is also an issue perhaps; at least they have written articles about people becoming re-infected; so even the people who do become immune may not stay that way forever...
> so even the people who do become immune may not stay that way forever...
In my country there have been hundreds of thousands of confirmed Covid infections. There have been <100 confirmed re-infections.
It's very early to draw the conclusion that people in general don't build up lasting immunity, and there is more than enough data to support that most people do build up immunity of several months at least. If the latter wasn't true you'd see much more re-infections.
The reporting on reinfection is actually a pretty positive sign. If 10% or even 1% of people could be reinfected, you’d expect to see huge numbers of reinfections, so the fact that the news is still reporting individual cases of reinfection suggests it won’t be a practical concern.
Perhaps its something like "90% percent of the individuals' immune system are successful in quick eliminating covid without any symptoms or adverse reactions".
I admit I know very little on how immunity to diseases work, but I imagine that with viruses there is a chance it'll progress to a full blown infection even if you are vaccinated in some cases.
I would assume something like with the influenza vaccine, where you have immunity to i think around 70% of currently available virus mutations, if the vaccine works.
That's a percentage on a different axis. Influenza is a diverse family of related viruses and strains vary much more than those of SARS-COV-2. No surprise given the very different time since taking foot in humans, and in addition to that (I think, working on weak knowledge here) that influenza is even part of a group of viruses that is prone to create mashup versions of itself when two strains meet in the same host. Think Dangermouse, Grey Album.
The way these studies (most of the big trials finishing up soon, and this one too) are set up is that they measure the percentage of people that will not get symptomatic covid-19, so the only thing that is measured is whether they get symptoms or not. So the result is that 90% (within a confidence interval) of people who are given this vaccine will not develop any covid symptoms. Transmission may be impacted, and the data will reveal hints about this, but it's impossible to draw hard statistical conclusions about that, and in general a different type of vaccine technology will be needed to end transmission and thus the pandemic. This will save countless lives though, and may end lockdowns, so a great day nonetheless.
Unfortunately, there's yet another property of vaccine performance: some prevent the virus from reaching any level of footing in the host, others only make the body's eventual response stronger, preventing initial footing to cause heavy illness. SARS2-COV is rather peculiar in how its transmission performance is particularly strong in early, mostly presymptomatic stages, so it's perfectly possible to end up with a vaccine that reliably protects carriers from disease, but does not remove them from the spread equations at all, or only very little.
Neither of those. It means you don't get sick if you get in contact with the virus.
Whether that means you're immune (i.e. not spreading the virus to others) is a different question that apparently hasn't been answered by this preliminary data yet. (And I can see this is more difficult to study.)
There's no such thing as "Covid infection". There's SARS-CoV-2 infection, which often causes CoVID-19 disease.
Pfizer is saying that their vaccine is effective at protecting against CoVID-19 disease. They haven't said anything about preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection yet, as far as I can see. The difference is important, because there are vaccines (such as the Salk polio vaccine) that only protect against disease, but not against infection. People get infected and pass on the virus without ever getting sick, so there's no herd immunity.
Pretty confident it's the former, which if the case, essentially ends the pandemic in a month after it's distributed, given that the R0 would drop precipitously.
The challenge will be reconciling this with the antivax crowd given that as the vaccine rolls out the rate of infection will come down correspondingly among the whole population (including the unvaccinated). They'll immediately claim that the virus is "going away on it's own" as opposed to the truth, which is that potential spreaders are being steadily removed from the susceptible population due to the vaccine.
While true, the approach they took is extremely similar to several other vaccine candidates which is a good sign that the approach works and other vaccines will be equally effective.
Not withstanding the rather enormous caveat of antivaxxers. They have grown significantly in number during this pandemic what with all the wild conspiracy theories. It’s worth checking that out.
Which is completely sufficient to vaccinate the elderly, teachers, immunocompromised, and healthcare workers in the Western world, and probably anyone else who really wants it.
There's no need to completely eliminate COVID - we don't aim for the same for regular influenza. We should aim to reopen economies as soon as possible instead.
Why aren’t we using _all_ the factories to make as many doses as possible? There should not be “companies” making these to their capacity. This should be a public effort
I would guess that a lot of the factories that are capable of producing these type vaccines also produce a lot of other important drugs and vaccines that we can't just put on the back-shelf without even greater harm.
You first: why aren't you making this in your garage right now?
For the most part the same answer as to why you aren't making it yourself also apply to most factories in the world. Only a few have the equipment, supplies, and experience to make it.
We should be clear about the goalposts. Reducing the transmission rate to a manageable level will be very easy with even just some fraction of the population being vaccinated. What exact percentage is unclear, but it's a lot less than 100%. No realistic number of anti-vaxxers can change that.
Eradicating the virus is a whole different goal, and there could be lots of different impediments to that. After all, we still get vaccinated for a large numbers of illnesses that we haven't eradicated but are just very rare. That's not a terrible endgame for COVID.
Letting this thing circulate seems dangerous given it introduces the possibility of a vaccine-resistant mutation. If anything it drives the evolution of the virus towards vaccine resistance similar to what happened with MRSA bacteria and antibiotics.
Note that they provided 'Confirmed COVID-19 in Phase 2/3 participants without evidence of infection before vaccination [ Time Frame: From 7 days after the second dose of study intervention to the end of the study, up to 2 years ]'
as their primary outcome in their study registration
EDIT: See child comment re: Pfizer press release.
EDIT 2: See [1] for said press release, which has more detailed information than the BBC article.
[1] https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-det...