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Possible vaccines/treatment(s) for Coronavirus


Surely debunking these idiot’s misinformation at every opportunity would be a better route rather than censorship?

It's a difficult one, trouble is debunking doesn't seem to work with these crazies, because they know the TROOF, and anything else is FAKE NEWS, so they just carry on spreading lies and sucking more people into their rabbit holes.

Starving them of the oxygen that allows them to do it is perhaps the only answer.
 
Why? They're useful descriptions if you're presenting to non-scientists, or scientists in a very different field. You don't want to spend your time explaining concepts or settling for people not following what you mean later on. The idea is to communicate! :p

What I think the problem is Is that what they are communicating is to a greater or lesser degree in the different cases wrong. Clear communication is science is very important I agree, and often not done well (to say to the least). But I think it’s important that as well as clear it is correct (possibly not complete, simplification is required of course, but the simplification shouldn’t actually break the message)

Now one might say that in this case it doesn’t matter if the information is actually correct, but that seems to me a bit perverse - you have an opportunity to convey some simple clear correct information to people about a subject that is going to be very important and interesting to anyone who has gone to the bother of reading these slides, so why not get it right?

A quick try at a fix for what I think are the two most misleading (bearing in mind I am not an immunology expert); in both (all in fact) cases the description can be followed by “injected into the body which triggers an immune response” as that’s how they all work

mRNA: instructions to the body’s cells to make coronavirus proteins

Protein/adjuvant: an engineered copy of a coronavirus protein mixed with an immune-stimulating chemical

The inactivated live virus description is more a description of the production method than the mode of action - and the word ‘killed’ is misleading, as implied by the word ‘live’ in the actual name of the vaccine; what actually is done is that the virus is treated so it can’t replicate (it’s poisoned, basically). So something like:

Inactivated live virus: coronavirus treated so that it cannot replicate [is injected into the body etc etc]

And the adenovirus description should just add that it’s a chimpanzee common cold virus, for accuracy (and why not while we’re at it replace ‘inside’ with ‘onto the surface of’, as that better describes how it works).

You might think that these differences are trivial so why do I care? But I do, for two reasons: one as above is that it is supposed to be transmitting information, so it might as well do it clearly and accurately (and I don’t think my suggestions above are any harder to understand than the ones they used? I could be wrong?); the other is an insidious problem in science communication - the risk that someone taking in the original descriptions is later presented with the more accurate one, and the contradiction or apparent hiding of information undermines trust in scientific messaging: “what, the virus isn’t dead, I though it had been killed?” Or “why didn’t you tell me you were injecting me with a chimpanzee virus?”

My original response was on the snide and unhelpful side, hopefully this is a better one.
 
What I think the problem is Is that what they are communicating is to a greater or lesser degree in the different cases wrong. Clear communication is science is very important I agree, and often not done well (to say to the least). But I think it’s important that as well as clear it is correct (possibly not complete, simplification is required of course, but the simplification shouldn’t actually break the message)

Now one might say that in this case it doesn’t matter if the information is actually correct, but that seems to me a bit perverse - you have an opportunity to convey some simple clear correct information to people about a subject that is going to be very important and interesting to anyone who has gone to the bother of reading these slides, so why not get it right?

A quick try at a fix for what I think are the two most misleading (bearing in mind I am not an immunology expert); in both (all in fact) cases the description can be followed by “injected into the body which triggers an immune response” as that’s how they all work

mRNA: instructions to the body’s cells to make coronavirus proteins

Protein/adjuvant: an engineered copy of a coronavirus protein mixed with an immune-stimulating chemical

The inactivated live virus description is more a description of the production method than the mode of action - and the word ‘killed’ is misleading, as implied by the word ‘live’ in the actual name of the vaccine; what actually is done is that the virus is treated so it can’t replicate (it’s poisoned, basically). So something like:

Inactivated live virus: coronavirus treated so that it cannot replicate [is injected into the body etc etc]

And the adenovirus description should just add that it’s a chimpanzee common cold virus, for accuracy (and why not while we’re at it replace ‘inside’ with ‘onto the surface of’, as that better describes how it works).

You might think that these differences are trivial so why do I care? But I do, for two reasons: one as above is that it is supposed to be transmitting information, so it might as well do it clearly and accurately (and I don’t think my suggestions above are any harder to understand than the ones they used? I could be wrong?); the other is an insidious problem in science communication - the risk that someone taking in the original descriptions is later presented with the more accurate one, and the contradiction or apparent hiding of information undermines trust in scientific messaging: “what, the virus isn’t dead, I though it had been killed?” Or “why didn’t you tell me you were injecting me with a chimpanzee virus?”

My original response was on the snide and unhelpful side, hopefully this is a better one.
Much better! :D

I completely agree with all of your reasoning there, and if I'd been writing the summaries, I'd have gone for accuracy first, too. Plain English shouldn't mean dumbing down. (But, tbh, I haven't actually read about each potential vaccine in any detail. Your versions do seem readable, though!)
 
Still hope the Oxford vaccine will be approved by Christmas, and could be our main weapon against covid, as storage is easier and the cost is a fraction of the Pfizer/BioNTech one.

I'm quite sceptical of the Mirror's report there, what with Oxford not having announced any Phase 3 trial results yet (unless I've missed something big? :confused: )

Saying that, Prof Pollard has been dropping several heavy hints recently about imminent announcements on effectiveness for the Oxford vaccine.
At least the above Mirror report reminds of several possible/potential advantages when/if it does come into use. Not least about storage not at minus 70C! :cool:
 
New scientist has a piece on the Pfizer vaccine:

Pfizer and its partner BioNTech say their coronavirus vaccine is 90 per cent effective in phase III trials. How excited should we be about the news, and what questions remain unanswered?

US drug maker Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech have today released some positive-looking results from a clinical trial of their experimental covid-19 vaccine BNT162b2.


The headline figure is “90 per cent effective”. But that may not be quite as good news as it first appears.


What did Pfizer and BioNTech find?


The results are from a phase III clinical trial, the final stage of testing whether a vaccine or drug is both safe and effective. The companies gave the vaccine or a placebo to 43,538 participants in a double-blinded study, meaning that about half were dosed with the real thing and half with the placebo but nobody knows who got what. They then waited until there were 94 confirmed cases of covid-19. As of 8 November, 38,955 participants had received two doses.


An independent committee then “unblinded” the study and found that about 90 per cent of the cases were in the placebo group. The raw numbers haven’t been released, but back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest 85 cases in the placebo group and nine in the vaccine group.


Does this mean we are on the brink of a successful vaccine?


Not yet. It is an interim verdict, not a final one. And the “end point” of this trial – the criterion against which success or failure is judged – is almost the bare minimum. It merely looks at whether people are protected from being infected by the virus, not whether the vaccine prevents severe illness or death.


Of course, people who don’t catch the virus cannot get very ill or die from it. But if 10 per cent of vaccinated people remain vulnerable, that could still add up to a lot of illness and death. The trial isn’t big enough to pick that up. “The studies do not have adequate numbers of patients in them to be able to reliably tell us if they prevent severe disease,” says Susanne Hodgson at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute, which researches vaccines, who spoke to New Scientist about covid-19 vaccine trials in general not Pfizer’s in particular. “We will need to give these vaccines to much larger populations in order to collect that kind of data.”


Hodgson has been working on the UK clinical trials of the SARS-CoV-2 candidate vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca but has no links to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.


Another thing to bear in mind, says Hodgson, is that vaccine effectiveness in the real world can be lower than found in clinical trials. That may be because vaccines don’t work very well in older people, but are usually tested in younger ones. Pfizer and BioNTech haven’t released specific details of the age profile of their study.


So we still have to wait for the final result?


Yes. The trial will go on until there have been 164 confirmed infections, with another interim assessment after 120 infections. But the chances of the result flipping are vanishingly small. A bit like vote counting in the US presidential election, the case numbers in the placebo group have already reached a level that cannot be surpassed by the vaccine group, and are approaching the threshold needed to “win”, at least according to criteria laid out by the Word Health Organization (WHO) in its official assessment of what would constitute a safe and effective covid-19 vaccine. That threshold is 50 per cent reduction of relative risk, which in this trial would mean no more than 54 cases in the vaccine group from a total of 164 across both groups.


Read more: What is a vaccine and how do they work? Find out in Science with Sam

When might we reach that end point?



Extrapolating from the study so far, quite soon. The trial began on 27 July and racked up 94 cases in around three months. It needs just 70 more to get to the magic number of 164. And with cases soaring in many parts of the world – the trial is global with many volunteers in the US – that could happen before Christmas.


What happens then?


If the numbers are still good, the companies could decide to apply to a regulator such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval, or what is technically called “licensure”. The FDA has said it won’t cut any corners. It hasn’t put an estimated timescale on the approval process, but says that it will adhere to standard procedure: review the data itself, seek advice from the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, and open up a period for public comment. It may ask for further data from the companies.


According to the World Economic Forum, vaccine approval usually takes one to two years. But the FDA has also said it will expedite the process without shortcutting it. “The FDA will not authorize or approve any COVID-19 vaccine before it has met the agency’s rigorous expectations for safety and effectiveness,” said FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn in a statement on 29 September.


And then we are home and dry?


No. Even if a regulator says yes, there are hurdles to overcome, not least limited supply. “We expect to produce globally up to 50 million vaccine doses in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021,” the companies said in a press release announcing the result. Around 14 billion doses are required to vaccinate everyone, allowing for inevitable wastage and the fact that each person would need two doses.


Vaccines also require careful post-licensure evaluation, often called phase IV trials, because adverse reactions may be too rare to be picked up in clinical trials but serious enough to make the vaccine unsuitable for widespread use, says Hodgson. Some adverse reactions may take months or even years to be detected, she says.


No serious safety concerns have been seen in the present trial, the companies said. But the vaccine is of a type that has never been approved before – it is an RNA vaccine that uses messenger RNA from the virus to elicit an immune response, rather than the usual attenuated virus or viral proteins – so there may yet be surprises. The companies say that trial participants will be monitored for two years after receiving their second dose.


Read more: How do vaccines work?

What about approval for emergency use?



That is a distinct possibility. The FDA has a procedure called emergency use authorisation (EUA), which can grant temporary approval to unproven medicines in an emergency situation. Pfizer and BioNTech say they intend to apply for one for their vaccine but don’t yet have enough safety data. They are gathering that data and could have enough in the third week of November. The FDA has already issued five EUAs for covid-19 therapies. The WHO also has an emergency use process, called emergency use listing criteria, though Pfizer and BioNTech haven’t announced plans to go through it.


Are there any other negatives?


Yes. The vaccine requires two doses, which the WHO regards as less than ideal. Single-shot vaccines are better because you need to make fewer doses and people cannot possibly miss the booster shot.


Another downside is that the results exclude people who have been infected with the virus before. A successful vaccine will inevitably be given to people who have had the disease, so we need to know its effect on them too. Again, the companies say they have data on this and will continue to investigate it as the trial runs on.


There is also the fact that the results were released by press release, not in a scientific paper, so the fine details are hard for scientists to evaluate. Pfizer and BioNTech say they will submit the data to a peer-reviewed journal.


We also don’t know at this stage how long any protection from the vaccine would last.


What is the state of play with other vaccines?


According to the WHO, there are currently 46 other candidate vaccines in clinical trials, seven of them in phase III.


But overall this is good news, right?


Yes. “Even a partially efficacious vaccine could have a really significant impact on the course of the pandemic,” says Hodgson.
 
Also:

Pfizer covid-19 vaccine may not need to be kept at -70°C after all

There may be no need to keep the Pfizer and BioNTech coronavirus vaccine and other similar vaccines at -70°C, potentially making it much easier to distribute them across the world. Two other teams using the same messenger RNA (mRNA) technology for their vaccines have found that they remain stable for at least three months in a normal fridge.


The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine candidate generated great excitement around the world this week when the companies announced that it appears to be more than 90 per cent effective based on early results. Yet concerns were raised about the fact that the vaccine needs to be stored at between -70°C and -80°C. This is far colder than standard freezers can manage and would greatly complicate the vaccine’s storage and distribution.


But two other vaccine candidates using the same mRNA technology as the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine can be stored at higher temperatures than this. Anna Blakney at Imperial College London has told New Scientist that the vaccine candidate being developed by her team is stable for months at 4°C, the same temperature as a standard fridge.


Another vaccine candidate developed by CureVac in Tübingen, Germany, remains stable for at least three months when stored at a standard refrigerator temperature, the company announced on 12 November.


The same should be true for the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, says Blakney. “I guarantee that they are doing the exact same studies.”



The mRNA vaccines consist of strands of RNA that code for the coronavirus spike protein, a key part of the virus that allows it to infect humans. When the RNAs from the vaccine enter human cells, the cells start making the spike protein, prompting an immune response without an infection.


Naked RNAs – those without anything protecting them – would be rapidly chewed up by enzymes in the blood. In the vaccines, they are packaged in tiny droplets of fat, called lipid nanoparticles or LNPs, which protect them and help them get into cells.


All three groups are using LNPs made by a company based in Vancouver, Canada, called Acuitas Therapeutics. The firm’s CEO, Thomas Madden, says the decision to store these vaccines at between -70°C and -80°C was made out of “an abundance of caution”.


“There’s no technical limit” currently on the temperature at which the vaccine should be stored, he says. The vaccines were just developed so fast that there was no time to do the necessary tests to establish how stable they are at higher temperatures, says Madden.


Once vaccine makers such as Pfizer and BioNTech have sufficient evidence of stability at higher temperatures, they can apply to regulators to change the conditions of approval. This evidence might need to include animal tests, but shouldn’t require more human ones, says Madden.


The findings of the Imperial and CureVac teams should apply to the Pfizer and BioNtech vaccine too, but regulators require stability to be established separately for each individual vaccine, he says.


New Scientist contacted Pfizer and BioNTech for comment but hadn’t received a response by the time of publication.
 
It's a difficult one, trouble is debunking doesn't seem to work with these crazies, because they know the TROOF, and anything else is FAKE NEWS, so they just carry on spreading lies and sucking more people into their rabbit holes.

Starving them of oxygen that allows them to do it is perhaps the only answer.


FFY.
;)

They're talking about this on LBC just now. Not that these facebook , shitweb, silo'd freaks probably watch it but there's a case for the BBC to do a proper informative documentary about vaccine development process, the safety tests, the where would civilisation be if we had not routinely vaccinated for XYZ. Talk to people who've taken part in trials etc.
 
Why then, when the news goes into hospitals now am I seeing people in far, far more PPE than that? Visors, N95s, those biohazard type suits... Better managed hospital in terms of acquisition of PPE? Do those working in ITU get priority over more stuff?
They'll be filming in itu if you see people wearing that (or in a respiratory hdu). Outside of those environments the PHE policy is that you don't need that level of ppe. I don't know of any hospitals that have gone outside that guidance
 
Am hoping Professor Sahin is just saying we won't be back to normal until next winter to avoid the situation where people assume that we have a vaccine now and they therefore don't need to take the same precautions.My mother will be ninety in January if things don't improve massively quite soon she has no chance.
 
Am hoping Professor Sahin is just saying we won't be back to normal until next winter to avoid the situation where people assume that we have a vaccine now and they therefore don't need to take the same precautions.My mother will be ninety in January if things don't improve massively quite soon she has no chance.

Plenty of experts have stated it'll be the 2nd or 3rd quarter of next year for enough people to have got vaccinated, and before we can start getting back to something like normal.
 
Am hoping Professor Sahin is just saying we won't be back to normal until next winter to avoid the situation where people assume that we have a vaccine now and they therefore don't need to take the same precautions.My mother will be ninety in January if things don't improve massively quite soon she has no chance.
Afraid that is pretty factual. Actually still pretty rapid for a vaccine to be signed off, produced and administered to a critical mass.
 
If it's not already obvious, don't rush vaccines.
The basic message of that article is fine - but the way it presents things feels questionable to me, as if it has absorbed some anti-vax messaging which it relays in a "just asking questions" kind of way.

It talks about the Cutter incident - something that happened 70 years ago in the early days of vaccine history. It doesn't talk about improvements in test procedures that were prompted by that and which have had many decades to evolve. It doesn't discuss the actual impact of that incident in the context of the health picture at the time (tens of thousands of Americans dying of polio every year). It doesn't talk about the difference between technologies that are newly developed and technologies that build upon many years of experience of how things work 'for real'.

Of course there should be great caution against rushing out stuff that's untested - but it also has to be balanced against the consequences of delay and the risks have to be meaningfully assessed. I don't like the tone of that article - I'm sure it will have been reposted on all the anti vax sites.
 
The basic message of that article is fine - but the way it presents things feels questionable to me, as if it has absorbed some anti-vax messaging which it relays in a "just asking questions" kind of way.

Its from September 1st after some stupid things had been said, and its written for an American audience whose prior sensibilities about vaccines and past mistakes are somewhat different to ours. They have different historical references and had different scares and real issues in the past. And they have a more direct approach to confronting some of those issues. In the UK the mainstream conversation seems invariably to involve mostly referencing past scares that had no apparent basis, such as MMR and before that Whooping Cough, even though the latter doesnt seem to be referenced much these days and may have gone down the memory hole somewhat.
 
Call me tinfoil hat if you like.
I won't be vaccinated, it's not that I don't believe in COVID I think the measures they are taking against it is about control. No gatherings, no protests, lockdowns knock on effects.
I wonder if the vaccine has microscopic nanobots in it, and what has Bill Gates got to do with inoculation?
 
Call me tinfoil hat if you like.
I won't be vaccinated, it's not that I don't believe in COVID I think the measures they are taking against it is about control. No gatherings, no protests, lockdowns knock on effects.
I wonder if the vaccine has microscopic nanobots in it, and what has Bill Gates got to do with inoculation?

Bolded bit : I'm highly tempted to call you tinfoil hat after your above post, yes! :hmm: :(
 
Call me tinfoil hat if you like.
I won't be vaccinated, it's not that I don't believe in COVID I think the measures they are taking against it is about control. No gatherings, no protests, lockdowns knock on effects.
I wonder if the vaccine has microscopic nanobots in it, and what has Bill Gates got to do with inoculation?

It is about control. Specifically, controlling the spread of the virus. The coronavirus cannot reproduce without human hosts, and so it was always inevitable that efforts to control the spread of the virus would also involve limits on human contact. Despite this, protests like Black Lives Matter have still been happening even with the pandemic going on as well. Businesses based on large gatherings of people have suffered, because most people think that going to a concert isn't as important as civil protest. So even if lockdowns and other pandemic measures did have some kind of sinister ulterior motive to suppress the civic spirit of the populace, it has manifestly failed in that objective, while devastating businesses.

If the kind of nanotechnology you're apparently referring to were to actually exist, the world would be a far different place. What makes you think that such a technology might currently exist? And wouldn't putting such bleeding-edge nanotechnology inside millions of people who aren't in on the conspiracy blow any notion of secrecy right into the stratosphere?

Bill Gates is a billionaire who wants to whitewash his legacy by attempting to be remembered as a philanthropist.
 
Call me tinfoil hat if you like.
I won't be vaccinated, it's not that I don't believe in COVID I think the measures they are taking against it is about control. No gatherings, no protests, lockdowns knock on effects.
I wonder if the vaccine has microscopic nanobots in it, and what has Bill Gates got to do with inoculation?

Yes, you are in serious tinfoil hat territory. :(

I can't add much to what NoXion has said, except to point out the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been funding vaccination programmes in poorer counties for years, saving many lives. The foundation has also contributed funding to develop a vaccine for Covid-19, but they are not directly involved in the manufacturing and distribution of any covid vaccine, beyond some funding for poorer counties again.

The nanobots nonsense is just that, nonsense, and only believed by conspiraloons.
 
Call me tinfoil hat if you like.
I won't be vaccinated, it's not that I don't believe in COVID I think the measures they are taking against it is about control. No gatherings, no protests, lockdowns knock on effects.
I wonder if the vaccine has microscopic nanobots in it, and what has Bill Gates got to do with inoculation?

Can I just echo the call for you to fuck off. Now on ignore, don't want to read any of your opinions.
 
The thing is about these conspiracies is if you wanted to create mass control there would be far easier, cheaper ways of doing it than engineering a virus/making up a virus that tanks your economy and totally fucks up everyone's lives. I mean, I bet if you said 'If you will upload an app your phone where the government tracks your every move, you can be in with a chance of winning £1000 every week' and gave one person using it £1000 each week, you'd have mass surveillance without fucking up your economy and society - voila!
 
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Mass servailence exists when govt policy's are leaked then tweaked based on twitter reactions and corporations keep tabs on our spending and online discussions. It's clichéd even to say it. It's banal in its insidious nature.
Oh and the covid vaccine definately has nanobot Bill Gates in it.
 
The thing is about these conspiracies is if you wanted to create mass control there would be far easier, cheaper ways of doing it than engineering a virus/making up a virus that tanks your economy and totally fucks up everyone's lives.
'I worry about mass surveillance and control', say people who have voluntarily decided to carry around a small device that is locatable 24/7 and upon which is a medium they obsessively use which communicates all manner of ill-conceived, half-baked ideas, some with the intent of nudging or outright manipulation, many planted in their heads by dubious groups, corporate interests and unaccountable government actors, if not the randomly unhinged.
 
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