Covid-19 Vaccine - Where, How & Costs

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From today's Barron's:

Why Wall Street Isn’t Freaking Out Over Omicron​




By
Bill Alpert
Dec. 15, 2021 3:30 am ET


The Omicron variant has appeared at an inconvenient time for investors, just as they’re positioning themselves for a new year. But that’s how Wall Street seems to regard the new Covid-19 virus variant: as an inconvenience, and not much more. We’ll resume wearing masks at the office and shopping mall, while carrying on with the business of economic recovery.

In the weeks since Omicron’s Thanksgiving appearance, U.S. equity strategist Lori Calvasina and her colleagues at RBC Capital Markets have had many meetings with investors...
 
Look the blunt fact we cannot get out of this pandemic is down to people. Covid isn’t a magic virus it’s being allowed to remain a problem by idiots who won’t get vaccinated or take any precautions, and the fact that huge chunks of the world population still haven’t had their first dose of vaccination let alone third. As long as this remains a fact the longer this pandemic will drag out.
 
From today's Barron's:

Novavax Covid Vaccine Gets Emergency-Use Approval From WHO​




By
Karishma Vanjani
Dec. 17, 2021 12:09 pm ET

Novavax shares were rising Friday after the vaccine maker and the Serum Institute of India were issued an emergency use authorization for their Covid-19 vaccine by the World Health Organization on Friday.

The WHO granted emergency-use status for Covovax, which is manufactured and marketed by the Serum Institute for India and certain other developing countries.
 
My bolding below.
Over the last week, headlines across the internet suggested that Omicron might cause a milder form of illness compared to previous COVID variants. Many of the stories stemmed from a recent report from Discovery Health, a large healthcare and insurance system in South Africa. The reportfound that based on a 200,000-person study, adults were 29 percent less likely to be hospitalized now than they were during the first wave of the pandemic.

But COVID researchers continue to say that findings like these don’t necessarily mean that Omicron is intrinsically milder. In fact, they might suggest that vaccines combined with prior infection might simply be preventing deadly outcomes, as they were intended to do. The Discovery researchers themselves note that, given a 35 percent adult vaccination rate and a population that has already recovered from other COVID variants, it’s hard to estimate Omicron’s “true severity.”

In South Africa, cases in the Omicron wave have already begun peaking after three weeks, but deaths haven’t climbed as quickly as in previous waves. “We believe it might not necessarily just be that Omicron is less virulent, but coverage of vaccination [and] natural immunity … also adding to the protection,” Joe Phaahla, the country’s health minister, told Britain’s the Times.
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The result, they wrote, suggest “the true risk of severe infection will be systematically underestimated.”

Darryl Falzarano, a vaccine researcher at the University of Saskatchewan, says that estimating severity becomes harder as time goes on. “How many infections did we miss that are asymptomatic, or never ended up getting diagnosed?” he says. “If those people now get infected with Omicron, you would expect severity to be lower… Pulling that apart and knowing if it’s truly a naive Omicron infection”—in someone who’s never been infected or vaccinated—makes assessing severity difficult.”

“I think that there is more data beginning to suggest that this reduced virulence may in fact hold true across more global regions BUT we’re waiting for data to substantiate that,” says Jason Kindrachuk, a virologist at the University of Manitoba who has written on COVID’s pathogenicity, in an email to Popular Science. “And the crux of all of this is that the transmissibility and movement of Omicron through global populations is outpacing our ability to acquire enough data to answer this question.”
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Why exactly fewer people are getting very sick from Omicron doesn’t matter so much for understanding its impacts. A mild variant, whether via immunity or intrinsic qualities, still poses profound challenges.

“I would say that everything so far has been reassuring to say this is not a virus that is scarier than the first, in terms of how sick it makes people,” says Permar. “Whereas two years ago we were overwhelmed with sick people needing ventilators… now it’s going to be complicating our staffing.” COVID positive healthcare providers can’t work. Meanwhile, hospitalizations in the United States are rising because of Delta. There are national nursing shortages, driven by burnout and pay issues after two years of managing a crisis.
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www.popsci.com

It's too early to dismiss Omicron as a mild COVID variant

A mild variant, whether via immunity or intrinsic qualities, still poses profound challenges for the world.
www.popsci.com www.popsci.com
 
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