Covid-19 Vaccine - Where, How & Costs

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Regarding human trials, there had better be a good reason. After that, fully informed consent. People have volunteered for worse. And this must always be a science first matter. Distribution and production have both been issues since delays and logistical problems occurred. Regardless, there was a time when no vaccine was available. Now, the only thing to be done is get things on track. As of today, 133 million doses have been given in the US. As long as that continues, the most vulnerable will be able to do more things and the country will continue to reopen various businesses, air travel has increased and cruise lines are advertising. The list goes on. So let us keep our eyes on the goal of full vaccination, or a minimum that will include treatments that are not vaccines. Worst case scenario: The virus, including variants, will become a treatable illness, and for those fully vaccinated, an ongoing problem, like the flu, which requires a booster shot every year. But, other treatments are coming with a new one in production in Israel at present.
 
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Who would ever think we would be in a position where we thought 30,000 people dying from a disease was a good result. It will find out those where the vaccine hasn’t worked or they’ve not been vaccinated. As it says in the article one of the biggest random factors in what happens next is people’s behaviour. Well if what I’ve seen round my way and what my friends have reported in shops round here is anything to go by we should be concerned. One friend told me after a period of not seeing people without masks in shops he says there has been an up kick of people not wearing masks of late, usually young guys who if asked by his local shopkeeper about it can get pretty threatening.

Covid: Why a third wave, if so many have been vaccinated? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56529712
 
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@Trident : you said :
the benefit of a superior negotiating agenda to the extreme emphasis on driving down price which the EU pursued (and, you have to admit, very successfully, even if it is a pyrrhic victory).
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This is absolutely a wrong thing to say and do. Price variation b/w non-Eu countries and EU were posted earlier and even with an exacerbated 50% difference to ease reader attention, there is no saving when it's daily that your economy is running Havoc.

What team Ursula has done is like putting cooking grade oil in the EU locomotive's engine on the precept that it costs less...

And sadly it seems this is the way team Ursula is driven, go down back to do complicated things when you are lost (like kids do with mathematics for example).
Boris fully understood that when he drop the fishery mess late into the negociations: French negociator and even the french president rushed to articulate complicated solution loosing their attention on subjects that matters.
 
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TomcatViP said:
Price variation b/w non-Eu countries and EU were posted earlier and even with an exacerbated 50% difference to ease reader attention, there is no saving when it's daily that your economy is running Havoc.

What team Ursula has done is like putting cooking grade oil in the EU locomotives engine on the precept that it costs less...
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Yup, no disagreement in that regard - that is pretty much what I meant. They achieved what they set out to do (drive down price), only this was an irrelevant and inappropriate goal. That's the aspect where I give credit to the UK negotiators.

But to sign an exclusivity agreement to the effective detriment of the EU and then turn round to lecture the aggrieved party that they should not take reciprocal measures but suffer quietly is... audacious, to put it mildly.* As is sugar-coating what appears to be bad planning to the point of liability on Astra-Zeneca's part. Much of the controversy about the efficacy and safety of its vaccine is overblown, but its contract execution toward the EU is unequivocally miserable, quite irrespective of the flaws inherent in said agreement.

Don't forget: the other two suppliers have long since got any delivery hiccups under control, so apparently the contract isn't as big an issue as it's made out to be. At this point, AZ is simply not delivering the goods - period. It's hard to blame any external cause when the other manufacturers manage to keep their promises.

* Had the UK not secured exclusivity, both it and the EU would be sharing the burden of Astra-Zeneca's production blunders. So the UK helped finance AZ's vaccine development and supply chain establishment to the tune of several hundred million pounds? Good on them, but Germany invested a similar sum in BioNTech to facilitate a vaccine which also made a significant contribution to the success of the UK vaccination campaign. I've yet to hear a convincing argument why it is fair that the EU should bear such a disproportionate share of AZ's repeated production failures. The contracts may say so, but frankly there is too much at stake here to worry about technicalities!
 
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Please do not forget that Astra-Zenaca had pledge to work without a profit. This could have had an impact on how they dealt with logistics after their longer R&D phase.

Perhaps there is something EU should do.
 
www.reuters.com

U.S. to distribute 11 million Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 shots next week - White House

The U.S. government will distribute 11 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine next week in its continued effort to get 200 million shots in people's arms in the first 100 days of President Joe Biden's term, the White House said on Friday.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

Ignore the ridiculous "first 100 days" shot target. Distribution varies by state and the age range receiving shots also varies.
 
Ekimwest said:
Isn’t this supposed to be none political? Am I the only one that finds this type of one sided rant very irritating? Can we rant about anything?
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For a non-political thread we are sure seeing an awful lot of politically one-sided news articles in it, either it's ok to comment and discuss or they have no place here to begin with. I'll gladly desist if we decide to make this a real-world vaccination advice (which was the original purpose, after all) and/or science-only thread - that would have been my preference anyhow.
 
He’s currently applying for further funding to continue its development.

A joint jab for Covid-19 and flu could be ready for use by the end of next year, according to one of Britain’s leading vaccine developers.

Professor Robin Shattock, of Imperial College London, said the combination jab “is in our sights” after successfully combining three existing vaccines into one shot using the RNA technology he is developing.

Tests of the three-in-one vaccine shot he created for Ebola, Marburg and Lassa fever produced the “same type of immune response” in mice as if they had been administered separately, he said.
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The Covid vaccine he is working on – that would make up part of the combination jab – is called nCoV saRNA. It is based on a fledgling technology known as self-ampflying RNA which uses bits of genetic code that carry instructions to make a protein on the outside of the virus called the spike protein.
Once injected into the muscle of the arm, the cells make this spike protein, enabling the immune system to generate defences against the virus.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “It may be the case the flu and coronavirus vaccine could be delivered together in a single shot in the future. We continue to keep this under review but it is too early to say when a joint vaccine will be developed or available for routine use on the NHS.”
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inews.co.uk

Joint jab for Covid-19 and flu could be ready next year, says top vaccine developer

Scientists at Imperial College London have demonstrated 'proof of principle' and hope to begin developing the joint vaccine later this year
inews.co.uk inews.co.uk
 
The sheer hell that is Brazil’s COVID crisis and the shocking complacency and indifference shown towards the country by the world as far as vaccinations are concerned with just 1.8% of the population vaccinated. The P1 variant is further mutating itself and showing itself more able to kill the young. Unless the world wakes up all the progress that has been made could be reversed.

www.wsj.com

Covid-19 Variant Rages in Brazil, Posing Global Risk

The P.1 variant is now responsible for the majority of new infections in Brazil, with many doctors saying they are seeing more young and otherwise healthy patients falling ill.
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com
 
Vaccination campaign, Germany:
Why did it goes so wrong?

“Whether you are dealing with a bleeding patient or with a pandemic: speed trumps perfection,” Dahmen told the Observer. “In Germany, we tried to reinvent the wheel with the vaccine rollout, to perfect a system before we put it into practice. That kind of thoroughness is now becoming self-defeating.”
The rationale behind running the programme solely through vaccine centres, Dahmen said, was partly that mRNA vaccines like BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna were thought to require high-tech storage facilities, but also out of a fear of too much decentralisation: family doctors, authorities worried, might have been tempted to stray from the priority order and administer precious jabs to private patients or friends instead.
Without using GPs, each German state has had to build its own system for finding the right people in the right age groups for a jab appointment, with some inviting patients by letter, while others rely on being contacted via overburdened hotlines and creaky online portals. In Lower Saxony, authorities used post office records to seek out candidates for the first round of jabs, guessing people’s ages on the basis of their first names.
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Heroes to zeros: how German perfectionism wrecked its Covid vaccine drive | Germany | The Guardian

The same thoroughness that made Angela Merkel’s government a pandemic role model is now holding it back
amp.theguardian.com amp.theguardian.com
 
With all the talk of more deadly mutations evolving, there were some suggestions a few months ago that lockdowns could be preventing less deadly mutations from evolving, is this a valid suggestion?
 
TomcatViP said:

Heroes to zeros: how German perfectionism wrecked its Covid vaccine drive | Germany | The Guardian

The same thoroughness that made Angela Merkel’s government a pandemic role model is now holding it back
amp.theguardian.com amp.theguardian.com
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Mostly accurate, though I would suggest that the root cause is possibly somewhat different (i.e. not the federal structure, or data protection laws). I suspect these are merely convenient scapegoats, the bigger issue seems to be the longstanding, shocking lack of IT utilization and connectivity. The federal structure alone is insufficient as an explanation - similar problems should then have affected the contact tracing effort in spring last year, or the US ought to have done a lot better than it did (state authorities overriding the Trump admin). There's no reason why delegating the notification system to the individual German states should per se go wrong, most of the schemes they came up with are fundamentally sound, only they are all hamstrung by the lack of IT in the agencies. In that regard Dahmen is right, leaving it up to decentralized actors who have the data anyway (that is to say GPs) would very likely improve matters.

At this point it is also worth mentioning that too much credit is given to the aforementioned tracing system here. Infrastructure duplication inherent in a federal system did mean a lot more man-power was available from a standing start, but its success was as much due to that as the fact that case numbers were never allowed to soar as high as they did elsewhere. During the second, worse wave in autumn, the identical contact tracing scheme was quickly overwhelmed due to the same lack of IT support - manual tracing simply didn't scale up to the required capacity!

Data protection? As the linked article about using the database of Deutsche Post notes, from a legal point of view accessing residency registers should not have been a problem. Rather, I suspect IT connectivity was once again unfit to handle sources spread around numerous locations, and the DP data was simply more convenient, because it is a single, contiguous data set.

As the dismal handling of the second and incipient third waves show, even the particular German federal structure can go either way in an effort to curb the spread.
 
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Some wrong assumptions. First, individuals affected all of this in the UK and US. In the last week I have seen cars with license plates from California, Colorado, Texas, Florida and New York in my state, among others. How does the virus travel? How do "variants" travel? In cars. In private parties in warehouses and other locations in the UK and US. How do people get around quarantine? How do people get or fake documents?

Contact tracing is/was a joke for the above reasons. Someone will always slip through. Can't or don't want to get on a plane? Drive to the location.

The media in the US has avoided good journalism practices for the most part. Their primary goal - scaring people daily. Putting out conflicting information at times. And lengthy discussions about trivia. If they were students, I would give them a failing grade.

Look out. As this crisis ends a new crisis must replace it to keep the fear going. Climate change will kill you. Buy an electric car.
 
BMJ blog on the shocking situation in Brazil.

blogs.bmj.com

Brazil, a country collapsing during the covid-19 pandemic - The BMJ

Brazil was the first Latin American country with covid-19 cases on 26 February 2020. At that time, reports from China, Italy, and other Asian and European countries were already abundant [...]More...
blogs.bmj.com

More on the Brazil situation.

www.google.co.uk

As daily deaths near 4,000, worst may lie ahead for Brazil

Brazil currently accounts for one-quarter of the entire world’s daily COVID-19 deaths, far more than any other single nation, and health experts are warning the nation is on the verge of even greater calamity
www.google.co.uk www.google.co.uk
 
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Picked off the HP&CA board

The EMA is looking into a potential explanation for the blood clot cases.

There’s a suspicion that those cases may stem from incorrect injection techniques.

The vaccine is supposed to be given into the shoulder musculature, and not in a blood vessel. Therefore, the injection is to be given with an aspiration technique, where the needle is inserted and the syringe mechanism is then pulled back. If blood moves into the syringe then the placement of the needle is wrong - in a blood vessel - and has to be inserted anew in a different location.

The suspicion is thus that some injections have incorrectly been done without aspiration, and it has therefore been missed that they have been given in a blood vessel.

This would disseminate the vaccine differently in the body, instead of gradually moving through the musculature and spreading slowly, it would instead have spread in a more concentrated fashion.

This may have caused the blood clots.
 
Fascinating insight. Thanks. Something everyone of us would closely watch now.
 
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ca.news.yahoo.com

Venezuela's Maduro proposes paying for coronavirus vaccines with oil

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday proposed paying for vaccines against the novel coronavirus with oil, though he provided few details about how such a scheme would work. The crisis-stricken OPEC nation's crude exports have plummeted to their lowest levels in decades since Washington...
ca.news.yahoo.com ca.news.yahoo.com
 
It sounds like a good opportunity for countries that would want to balance the hike in pump gas prices during the pandemic. For once.
 
PMN1 said:
The EMA is looking into a potential explanation for the blood clot cases.

There’s a suspicion that those cases may stem from incorrect injection techniques.
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Interesting - you'd expect that to have happened with BioNTech/Pfizer too though, especially in the EU where it has been administered more than twice as frequently as Astra-Zeneca. Of course, there might be something peculiar to the mRNA principle that makes such vaccines inherently less prone to triggering these clots even when given incorrectly. The good news in this would be that the already tiny risk with AZ's jab could be all but eliminated by the very simple expedient of urging nurses to be really diligent about the injection! As mentioned earlier, German researchers claim to have identified the process by which the thromboses are caused and have devised an effective treatment for *once they've formed*, but preventing this from happening in the first place would obviously be better still.
 
Covid-19 death toll, Mexico:
New fatalities count put Mexico at the second position behind the US.

A report published by Mexico's health ministry showed that by mid-February there had been just over 294,000 deaths "associated with COVID-19" – a nearly 60% increase from the originally published figure.

That figure has since risen by almost 27,000 more deaths through March, bringing the total to more than 321,000.
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Mexico revises coronavirus death toll up by 60%, suffering second-most deaths globally | Fox News

Total figure now stands at more than 321,000 deaths
www.foxnews.com www.foxnews.com

*Please keep also in mind that this heavy toll is burdened by the narco war fatalities amounting to a horrific ~30000 violent deaths.
 
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