Covid-19 Vaccine - Where, How & Costs

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Grey Havoc said:
Flyaway said:
The SinoVac one got the WHO emergency stamp of approval the other day.
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Given that the Chinese government still has more than a bit of influence over the WHO brass, that was not unexpected.
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Bullcrap. The Chinese vaccines have proven adequate time and time again in multiple studies, the largest with over a million subjects.

Old fashioned inactivated vaccines may be less effective than the new mRNA or adenoviral vaccines with their stunning efficacies, but they pretty clearly cut down on deaths by four-fifths and infections by half to two-thirds. The double dose gives protection in the ballpark of a single flu vaccine dose (seasonal flu shots based on the same tech are about 50% effective), so it could be better, but that's why the regimen is two doses and not one. Cut the old tech some slack.

Sure, once they roll out 14 billion doses of Pfizer, they'll be obsolete, but we won't have 14 billion doses of Pfizer until maybe 2022, 2023. Until then, any vaccine is better than no vaccine.
 
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Grey Havoc said:
Situations like what happened in the Seychelles do not engender confidence:

www.bbc.co.uk

Covid: Why has Seychelles seen rising case numbers?

It's the most vaccinated country in the world, but infections have risen in the island nation.
www.bbc.co.uk
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Read the article.

One third of the people sick have been vaccinated.

Two thirds of the population is vaccinated.

If the vaccine wasn't working, you'd expect two thirds of the infected to be vaccinated, no?

The vaccine is working. My math is rusty, but this suggests a protection of about 75%. The unvaccinated are four times more likely to get COVID.

If this is insufficient for herd immunity at 2/3rds coverage, then AZ or JnJ, with 75%ish efficacies, won't necessarily help all that much either.
 
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An inside look at Hollywood’s anti-vaxxers. Running from people who should know better in well educated jobs in accountancy with actors accountants believing every kind of nonsense to actors happy to inject any kind of rubbish into their faces to look younger yet they refuse to get vaccinated as they believe vaccines are a government plot, or they will have health effects on them like altering their DNA. I would laugh if it wasn’t all so serious.

www.hollywoodreporter.com

The Tangled Logic of Hollywood Anti-Vaxxers (Guest Column)

Actress Shira Scott Astrof writes that seeing L.A. peers who refuse to get COVID-19 vaccines is "something I’m not sure I can quite forgive."
www.hollywoodreporter.com www.hollywoodreporter.com
 
Chile has detected its first case of black fungus but this article explains very well what’s going on. It’s more a case of media scaremongering than some actually new issue.

www.google.co.uk

'Black fungus’ is creating a whole other health emergency for Covid-stricken India | Ian Schwartz and Arunaloke Chakrabarti

Rates of mucormycosis were high even before the pandemic, and now the country is running out of antifungal drugs, say global expert Prof Arunaloke Chakrabarti and infectious diseases doctor Ilan Schwartz
www.google.co.uk www.google.co.uk
 
chimeric oncogene said:
Read the article.

One third of the people sick have been vaccinated.

Two thirds of the population is vaccinated.

If the vaccine wasn't working, you'd expect two thirds of the infected to be vaccinated, no?

The vaccine is working. My math is rusty, but this suggests a protection of about 75%. The unvaccinated are four times more likely to get COVID.

If this is insufficient for herd immunity at 2/3rds coverage, then AZ or JnJ, with 75%ish efficacies, won't necessarily help all that much either.
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I'm not sure if that calculation holds up though, especially given that most of the population was originally primarily given the Sinopharm vaccine, only for hasty re-vaccinations with other vaccines being carried out where possible on an ongoing basis when it became clear just how ineffective it was (40% effectiveness at best). To be fair though, that dire performance may have possibly been down to manufacturing defects rather than an inherent design flaw, which would make the WHO's just announced emergency certification a little bit more explicable.
 
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Grey Havoc said:
hasty re-vaccinations with other vaccines being carried out
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Yeah, the revaccinations are relatively new. The reporting on 1/3 of patients being vaccinated is at least a month old. I commented on it last month.

If you want to say that Sinopharm is inadequate to provide herd immunity against currently circulating strains at a 2/3 population uptake, that's clearly supportable. But the vaccines work as advertised - that is, modestly. Because the Chinese decided not to take risks and adopt better technologies.

If both the new technologies had by a stroke of insanely bad luck turned out screwy (AZ was a close shave as it was), the Chinese vaccines would have backstopped the world vaccination effort. As it stands, they are inefficient Little Boys in a world of superior implosion warheads. Doesn't mean they're bad.

*to expand on the analogy, if the mRNA vaccines are Ivy Mike, the inactivated vaccines are Ivy King, and AZ and JnJ appear to be Alarm Clock. All the current vaccines are Emergency Capability devices, ECs, not Mks or Ws - they weren't optimized, have barebones PALS, and were rushed out into the field at warp speed. Sure, a 500-kiloton Mk-18 can't really kill a hardened airfield like a 7-megaton TX-16 can, but you know, WWIII's on full blast, we have ten times more targets than bombs right now (and we need to double up), and so we're going to be sending out B-47s loaded with as many Mk-18s as the old factories can crank out, creaky boron wire or no.

www.google.com

Canterbury surge tests after Indian coronavirus variant outbreak - BBC News

Cases are low in the city compared with hotspots such as Bolton, but officials want to act quickly.
www.google.com www.google.com

The UK isn't a mecca of herd immunity either. Nor is the US yet, apparently infection rates remain as high as ever if you just count the unvaccinated.
 
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One should not lose sight over how the data is collected and evaluated. Testing has been spotty in my state. Then, a dedicated test center suddenly appeared. And unlike the earlier version which appeared and disappeared, it looks like this one will stay until "all restrictions are now lifted day." Sporadic, short-term testing gives incomplete results. A dedicated, long-term site gives different results. That does not include those who decided not to be tested.

The information available about the mRNA vaccines shows they were in development for a decade. Then the brakes were put on other research as pharmaceutical companies were tasked with getting something done. The virus (and later variants) was sequenced, a candidate protein bit was chosen, and the vaccines were formulated and entered testing. During that time, the mainstream media showed its resistance to reality as it reported that it didn't know if the vaccines "worked." What was being tested? Nothing? Early results included the phrase "strong immune response."
 
www.reuters.com

Biden outlines plan to quickly share 25 mln COVID-19 vaccines with world

The White House laid out a plan for the United States to share 25 million surplus COVID-19 vaccine doses to the world, with the first shots shipping as soon as Thursday, and said it would ease other countries' access to U.S.-made supplies for vaccine production.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

www.reuters.com

France donates 184,000 AstraZeneca doses to Senegal via COVAX

France has donated 184,000 doses of AstraZeneca's (AZN.L) COVID-19 vaccine to Senegal through the COVAX vaccine-sharing facility, the programme's sponsors said in a statement on Thursday.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
 
edwest2 said:
apnews.com

Slow to start, China now vaccinating at a staggering pace

After a slow start, China is now doing what virtually no other country in the world can: leveraging the power and all-encompassing reach of its one-party system and a maturing domestic vaccine industry to administer shots at a staggering pace.
apnews.com apnews.com
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The Chinese are prepping their own mRNA vaccine to revaccinate/booster shot their population in 2022.

In the interim, I would give the recent outbreaks in Taiwan and Guangdong a bit more credit in spurring vaccinations. People are spooked by Taiwan in particular, which is racking up several hundred cases a day.
 
japantoday.com

Japan donates more than 1 million AstraZeneca doses to Taiwan

Tokyo is donating more than one million doses of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccines to Taiwan, Japan's foreign minister announced Friday, as Taipei struggles to secure jabs, accusing China of interference. The move is likely to stir controversy with Beijing, which views democratic and...
japantoday.com japantoday.com
 
https://g1.globo.com/bemestar/vacina/noticia/2021/06/04/anvisa-covaxin-sputnik-v.ghtml [in portuguese]

Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (FDA-like agency) approved the import and restricted use of Sputnik V (Russia) and Covaxin (India) vaccines. This release stems from Brazilian legislation that allows internal use of vaccines approved by foreign agencies.

Detail: patients must be informed that these vaccines are not evaluated by the regulatory agency regarding quality, efficacy and safety criteria.
 
One conclusion it comes to is that bio-security of labs handling such viruses should be equivalent to the security at nuclear facilities. I’d argue the security full stop should be as high, I believe Porton Down has incredibly high security but then that’s not your ordinary research lab.

qz.com

There’s a clear lesson in the Covid-19 lab leak theory

It's time to question our safety protocols on experimenting with dangerous viruses.
qz.com qz.com
 
Well the Delta variant really is a step up over the Alpha variant as it’s 40% more transmissible. This darn virus doesn’t believe in small evolutionary leaps does it. Meaning the 21st re-opening is ‘more difficult’. Also that you must have both vaccinations, not surprising in the circumstances. Furthermore, the link between cases and hospitalisation has been severed but not broken.

news.sky.com

COVID-19: Coronavirus link to serious illness 'severed', but India variant makes June 21 easing difficult, Health Secretary Matt Hancock says

Health Secretary Matt Hancock says the link between rising coronavirus cases and hospitalisations is "severed but not broken".
news.sky.com news.sky.com
 
More on the new sub-variant of the Delta variant. Hasty decision making really does risk things like this increasingly happening.

www.independent.co.uk

23 cases of new Covid Nepal variant detected in UK

‘Nothing in data currently’ to require delay to 21 June easing of lockdown restrictions, says prime minister’s spokesperson
www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk
 
Yikes!!!

They’ve hit a wall of highly resistant to vaccination individuals where even incentives and full FDA approval vaccines will only have marginal gains. Looks like the anti-vaxxers have done their wretched work to well for the public health of the US.


arstechnica.com

US may miss July 4 vaccination target as number of daily doses plummets

Biden aimed to have 70% of adults immunized by July 4. The country may fall short.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com
 
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news.yahoo.com

U.S. report concluded COVID-19 may have leaked from Wuhan lab - WSJ

The study was prepared in May 2020 by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and was referred to by the State Department when it conducted an inquiry into the pandemic's origins during the final months of the Trump administration, the WSJ report https://on.wsj.com/3pw8T5F said...
news.yahoo.com news.yahoo.com

www.wsj.com

U.S. Report Found It Plausible Covid-19 Leaked From Wuhan Lab

Report by a government national laboratory concluded that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab deserves further investigation.
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com
 
I reiterate that "three lab workers in a largish laboratory are hospitalized for flu-like symptoms in flu season" is very flimsy evidence.

"Visiting a hospital" in China can mean anything from a jaunt to the emergency room to see a GP for a sick note (because emergency rooms are exploited like clinics in many bits of the world) to being observed for a few days to being intubated. Lab workers aren't all spring chickens either - for a 60-year old diabetic, flu can be a big deal. Get vaccinated for seasonal flu, people!

The evidence cited has been floating around for over a year. If there was a smoking gun, it would have been picked up on far earlier.
 
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