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A vaccine with 90% effectiveness


Iamferalz

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This is exciting! Nice news to wake up to. this week other than the US election. They had no safety concerns during the trials on over 43,500 people worldwide 90% would be enough to achieve herd immunity, wouldn’t it?


https://www.smh.com.au/national/covid-19-vaccine-is-more-than-90-per-cent-effective-say-pfizer-biontech-20201109-p56d11.html

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It is very good news, though it still has to be peer reviewed.


On the herd immunity thing I think it depends a little on how long it is effective for, simmilar to how the flu vax is only effective for 6ish months per year which makes achieving a long term herd immunity challenging. Also while they have had few reactions so far they still have to test the vac on people with significant co-morbidities. So I am cautiously optimistic. I'm hopeful that there will actually be multiple successful vaccines that work via different methods which may enable quicker vaccination of a large number of people.

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  • 4 weeks later...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/02/pfizer-biontech-covid-vaccine-wins-licence-for-use-in-the-uk?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_b-gdnnews&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1606893186


Vaccine rolled out from next week in the UK (unclear to me from my brief reading around who it is that will be eligible for the first roll out).


Game changer!

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Actually, China's so-called vaccine diplomacy raises some interesting questions.


https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/01/asia/china-coronavirus-vaccine-diplomacy-intl-hnk/index.html


Would you feel safe traveling to a country where the population were vaccinated using the Chinese or Russian vaccines?

 

It's not just the vaccine, but also do you trust the reporting as well? Because they will most likely go hand in hand- oh, that's just a case of the normal influenza.


NZ just had some Russian sailors come down to man fishing boats over summer ( while it's winter over there ). They supposedly isolated for 2 weeks beforehand and tested twice before getting on a direct, specially chartered flight to NZ. Well guess what? 8 ended up being positive. So what hapoened? They didn't isolate prooerly? Or the tests are not totally good enough? Or did they have doctors falsify their tests?

They got paid while quarantining in NZ, so they didn't really care, they just wanted to get on the flight.

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tinselfoil hat

A vaccine with 90% effectiveness doesn’t necessarily mean herd immunity. Not everyone will be vaccinated - some by choice, some due to health conditions, being too young, old, pregnant. Chances are it’ll be significantly lower than 90% immunity in our population.

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A vaccine with 90% effectiveness doesn’t necessarily mean herd immunity. Not everyone will be vaccinated - some by choice, some due to health conditions, being too young, old, pregnant. Chances are it’ll be significantly lower than 90% immunity in our population.

 

We are getting vaccination rates of greater than 90% on the existing vaccination schedule for children. There are hundreds of vaccines still in development for COVID 19, including some designed for people in the categories you mention. The vaccination looks like being made a condition of overseas travel as well which will increase take up rates.


Also the herd immunity threshold for COVID is thought to be about 70%, so they don’t need 90% of the population to be vaccinated to get there.

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A vaccine with 90% effectiveness doesn’t necessarily mean herd immunity. Not everyone will be vaccinated - some by choice, some due to health conditions, being too young, old, pregnant. Chances are it’ll be significantly lower than 90% immunity in our population.

 

At this point I don't think it's even clear (data on this hasn't been released as far as I know, or they didn't look, I can't remember exactly) if the vaccine prevents transmission at all.


The 90% effectiveness is for reducing the chance of an infected person getting COVID-19 disease.


When I say game changer, I mean that this will save lives.


We are a ways off yet from knowing if any of the existing vaccines provide any level of protection for others or not (i.e. what impact they have on transmission). But, 90% reduction in severe disease and death is a game changer for sure.

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I am hanging out for the full results to be published. I think it's *likely* that the vaccines will also reduce transmission. But we just don't know that yet. I think that Astra Zeneca have intimated that theirs does, at least to some extent.

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A vaccine with 90% effectiveness doesn’t necessarily mean herd immunity. Not everyone will be vaccinated - some by choice, some due to health conditions, being too young, old, pregnant. Chances are it’ll be significantly lower than 90% immunity in our population.

 

At this point I don't think it's even clear (data on this hasn't been released as far as I know, or they didn't look, I can't remember exactly) if the vaccine prevents transmission at all.


The 90% effectiveness is for reducing the chance of an infected person getting COVID-19 disease.


When I say game changer, I mean that this will save lives.


We are a ways off yet from knowing if any of the existing vaccines provide any level of protection for others or not (i.e. what impact they have on transmission). But, 90% reduction in severe disease and death is a game changer for sure.

 

I wanted to ask you about this. Norman Swan has mentioned several times about it not being known if the vaccines will prevent transmission or just prevent the disease developing once they contract the virus. Is it only something they will fully learn once it's out there?


Will be interesting if it doesn't prevent transmission, I'm sure some of the anti-vaxxers think they'll be relying on other people getting it to protect them...

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I can sort of see why there might be a question of whether transmission is prevented when you consider how superspreaders are responsible for the majority of infections.

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I can sort of see why there might be a question of whether transmission is prevented when you consider how superspreaders are responsible for the majority of infections.

 

That would be the aim, but I don't think they know yet whether it is how they are working.


Apparently Coronacast will be doing an episode on it next week to explain it all.

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I can sort of see why there might be a question of whether transmission is prevented when you consider how superspreaders are responsible for the majority of infections.

 

That would be the aim, but I don't think they know yet whether it is how they are working.


Apparently Coronacast will be doing an episode on it next week to explain it all.

 

This will be a good listen. Swan and Taylor have been doing an excellent job so far, keeping this factual but communicated accessibly. And I really appreciate how open they are to being set straight when they get something a little wrong (rare and often nitpicky stuff, important to rectify but doesn't detract from the otherwise excellent coverage).


The problem with being able to determine if the vaccine prevents transmission or not is the HUGE amount of swabbing you'd have to do to confirm this. Because infections can be and frequently are asymptomatic AND you'd expect a higher percentage of infections that do occur after vaccination to be asymptomatic, you'd have to be testing people regularly by swabs. Like weekly perhaps.


30 000 people in a trial, weekly swabs for 6 months (just as an example, made up numbers): in the order of 720 000 tests. That's a lot of extra pressure to add to a testing system. And a huge cost. And a huge use of resources that are needed for surveillance and diagnosis testing.


I am lead to believe that there are some data on transmission but until the companies publish their full results it's hard to know.

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I love Coronacast, I've been listening since it started and they both do a good job.


I also love Dr Norman Swan but lets not go there..

 

Did you see the interview his son did with Trump (sorry if that's a silly question, as it was pretty widely shared). He's a superstar too! I want to have xmas lunch with that family!

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I love Coronacast, I've been listening since it started and they both do a good job.


I also love Dr Norman Swan but lets not go there..

 

Did you see the interview his son did with Trump (sorry if that's a silly question, as it was pretty widely shared). He's a superstar too! I want to have xmas lunch with that family!

 

Yes I saw it, it was excellent, his son is awesome!

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So does this mean once the vaccine is out, like it will be in the UK next year, that they will never have to really worry about cover ever again and there won't be lock downs etc?

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So does this mean once the vaccine is out, like it will be in the UK next year, that they will never have to really worry about cover ever again and there won't be lock downs etc?

 

Too early to say. We don’t know if this vaccine (or any of the others) prevent or even reduce transmission yet.


The way I see it, the only way we can go back to the old normal is if we have a vaccine that prevents transmission AND enough people have the vaccine to approach herd immunity. AND this happens globally.

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Thank you Lou-Bags. I always really value your insight and knowledge. You are greatly appreciated!

 

Thank you! Kind of you to say.


I do feel really pleased for the UK, and for everywhere else when vaccines start rolling out. It will be phenomenal to have places like nursing homes be able to provide some protection from severe disease to their staff and residents.


Thinking on it some more, I can just imagine that some of the ‘protect the vulnerable, don’t lock down’ types will push that line even harder once we have this much more credible way to actually do that (protect them). Not that I think it’s enough, of course, or a good idea at all to fully reopen without better control on transmission.

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There is also another vaccine that has just finished Phase 3 trials in the USA, Moderna, that initial results have indicated is 94.5% effective, without the need for the cold chain storage of the Pfizer vaccine,

https://abc11.com/moderna-vaccine-pfizer-covid/8021881/


The first doctor in this article is a friend of mine- one of my best friends from high school. I haven’t seen him since our 10 yr school reunion, but like to watch videos of him talk on Covid19. He is very polite when he explains to the media, for the trillionth time, why herd immunity is not the aim. He was also a subject in the Pfizer trials,

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