RSS
From Science:
With more data on its COVID-19 vaccine, Russian institute offers new evidence of success
By Kai Kupferschmidt Nov. 24, 2020 , 1:00 PM
Joining the flood of press releases announcing positive results from COVID-19 vaccine trials, developers of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine today reported 91.4% efficacy from a second interim analysis of more than 18,000 people, bolstering a claim the team made on 11 November with scant evidence.
Whereas the initial report rested on a mere 20 cases of COVID-19, with no details on how they were split between vaccinated and placebo groups, the new analysis is based on 39 cases total, eight among the vaccinated group versus 31 in the much smaller placebo arm. …
About 75% got the vaccine, 25% the placebo.
The Sputnik V vaccine, made by the Gamaleya Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, uses adenovirus (Ad) “vectors” to deliver a gene that codes for the surface protein, spike, of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The two-dose scheme begins with an Ad26-spike vaccine and is followed by a booster shot 21 days later that contains Ad5 spike. Gamaleya chose two different adenoviruses because of concerns that immune responses to the same vector could lower the impact of the booster shot.
Another adenovirus vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, reported efficacy data yesterday of 70%. It uses the same adenovirus vector for both the prime and the booster shot. “At the moment, the data released today on the Sputnik vaccine looks to be the best in the field of the adeno-vectored vaccines,” says Ian Jones, a virologist at the University of Reading. The Chinese company CanSino Biologics and pharma giant Johnson & Johnson both also have adenovirus vaccines against COVID-19 in efficacy trials.
Sputnik V is happy to share one of its two human adenoviral vectors with @AstraZeneca to increase the efficacy of AstraZeneca vaccine. Using two different vectors for two vaccine shots will result in higher efficacy than using the same vector for two shots. #SputnikV
— Sputnik V (@sputnikvaccine) November 23, 2020
From iSteve commenter 415 Reasons:
My point is not that the Russian vaccine effort was obviously successful at the time they approved it—clearly the Russian approval was akin to a phase III trial and did not have the same evidentiary bar as FDA approval. But, the Russian vaccine designers made a decision based on this foreseeable outcome to use two different vectors for their prime/boost. The mopes at Oxford/AZ chose not to. There are logistical and other considerations that would lead you to use a single vector, but it turns out those should have been outweighed by considerations of efficacy. That oversight is definitely arrogant! The head of the academic group, Sarah Gilbert, is quoted in the Guardian article, and she still didn’t catch on to the fact that by far the most likely explanation is that they had generated too many anti-vector antibodies for the boost to work. Go back and read her quotes in many hagiographic articles about their vaccine over the spring and summer. These people screwed the pooch! And it seems like their bacon was only saved by a separate logistical mistake they made where they literally administered a mischaracterized drug product to thousands of human volunteers!
Here is one such example but there are many.
Back to Science:
The Russian results presented today are an interim analysis from 18,794 participants 7 days after they received their booster dose. (Only one out of every four received the placebo.)
OK, I’m confused, how long did they wait to see if the vaccine is working?
“Whilst the [COVID-19] case numbers remain small, this is highly effective,” Azra Ghani, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Imperial College London, told the Science Media Centre. The ongoing trial will conduct its next interim analysis after 78 confirmed COVID-19 cases. Overall, trial organizers expect to enroll 40,000 participants.
The new report allays the concerns raised by many vaccine researchers and public health experts when the Sputnik V team made the earlier efficacy claims, according to Jones. “I think the numbers are now significant and I think they do give credence to what they say,” he says. …
One benefit of adenovirus vaccines is they can be stored in standard refrigerators, rather than needing freezers. Charlotte Houldcroft, a virologist at the University of Cambridge, cautions that the latest Russian announcement is yet another instance of “science by press release,” but, she adds, “If the figures are as good as they appear, that’s really promising because this needs a standard cold chain to be rolled out rather than an ultracold chain like the RNA vaccines, and that’s a big plus.”
… Dmitriev said partners in India, South Korea, China, and Brazil are producing the vaccine, which could cost less than $10 a shot. Current agreements would allow for the production of 1 billion doses in 2021, with first doses delivered internationally in January.
So, it sounds like the Russians have a smarter dosing regimen than the similar Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which the Russians are willing to share with the Brits.
And here’s a new Science article on the Chinese vaccine efforts, which mostly use an old technology. No clinical trial data has been released yet, but lots of people in China have been innoculated.
“(Russians) use two different vectors for their prime/boost. The mopes at Oxford/AZ chose not to.”
I recall reading safety data on some Chinese vaccines candidates that said side effects go up and efficacy goes down the more times you use a particular vaccine vector. It was enough of an issue they divided the test subjects into two groups, one that had prior exposure the other naive.
I don’t know if this consideration applies here, but if it does, it suggests using the Russian two type vaccine has a drawback in that you’ve now had two initial exposures to vectors and may react worse to more vaccines on the future.
“ OK, I’m confused, how long did they wait to see if the vaccine is working?”
Putin didn’t wait long to have the top officials take it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8615179/Russia-registers-virus-vaccine-Putins-daughter-given-it.html
Some people are squawking like this is "unproven technology" and it's like asking someone to step into the new teletransportation booth.
They've fiddled the spike protein DNA into well known adenoviruses through by now, very well worn DNA manipulation. Yeah, maybe the vaccine could make you ill ... but we know the Xi virus from a Chinese lab last year can make you sick.
Good for the Russkis for zipping through the work and moving ahead.
~~~
As i've noted a few times before being ready to squash a pandemic--an obvious "benefit" of globalization which everyone who bothered to think about it knew was coming--is something that should be a top ten bullet item on any nationalist agenda.
-- Be ready to slam closed your border and hard secure quarantine sickies and--separately--exposed.
and
-- Have continual on-going subsidized vaccine research/productive--they can work on "the common cold"--so that when a new bug pops they are all up to speed, can get it sequenced, figure out the target, develop the vaccine and slap it into production in short order.
The Xi virus is ho-hum. A few oddball cases but mostly a geezer killer. (As a geezer ... i care, but not the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it.) But the next virus might be a real ass kicker.
Michelle Malkin describes aspects of the Stakhanovite coal quota — I mean, the miracle cure which will enable pharma profits like hydroxychloroquine cannot — being not only worrying but So The Current Year:
— The patients were not random or volunteer but fellow clubmember establishment journalists.
— They did exactly what a CNN denizen would do in such a situation: they discussed the trials on social media with other people also on the trials, who were of the same odious milieu.
— They then tried to find a way to make sure they were not in the placebo group. They were assisted in this by the doctors.
Believe the science!
https://vdare.com/articles/michelle-malkin-covidgate-part-two-clinical-trials-and-crusader-bias
Recruiting media folks for trials almost certainly violates FDA rules requiring (somewhat) randomized recruiting of test subjects.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/25/politics/kamala-harris-senate-seat-california-democrats/index.htmlReplies: @bomag
I recall reading safety data on some Chinese vaccines candidates that said side effects go up and efficacy goes down the more times you use a particular vaccine vector. It was enough of an issue they divided the test subjects into two groups, one that had prior exposure the other naive.
I don’t know if this consideration applies here, but if it does, it suggests using the Russian two type vaccine has a drawback in that you’ve now had two initial exposures to vectors and may react worse to more vaccines on the future.
“ OK, I’m confused, how long did they wait to see if the vaccine is working?”
Putin didn’t wait long to have the top officials take it.Replies: @Cortes, @AnotherDad
One of Lord Sauron’s daughters took part in the trials:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8615179/Russia-registers-virus-vaccine-Putins-daughter-given-it.html
BLM spokesperson killed during carjacking:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8979467/Breonna-Taylor-protest-leader-shot-dead-carjacking-near-University-Louisville-campus.html
His features look vaguely semitic, and the name is vaguely North African. A quick Google search yielded a news item complete with mug shot:
https://www.thenewsenterprise.com/news/crime_and_courts/two-hardinsburg-teens-charged-in-etown-break-ins/article_61045764-a153-11e8-abc7-1fe6f3013e2e.html
Bottom line – the intuition that BLM has been hijacked by white progressives who have spent time in a tanning booth may not be too far off. This guy looks whiter than Ben Jealous, who looks whiter than Andrew Cuomo (who could play a Planet of the Apes extra without critter makeup, not because he looks like a black person, but because he looks somewhat simian).
Nagdy is a mostly Egyptian surname but found in other Arab nations.
A man who is likely his father or uncle was arrested for cracking his wife’s skull with a flashlight.
https://www.wlky.com/article/arrest-made-after-woman-shows-up-at-hospital-covered-in-blood/7014124
From an article about the young Celto-Egyptian Carjackvictim**:
“I’m an ex-foster kid, I’m a felon and I don’t have my GED. I spent three years or four years, not consecutively, incarcerated. And next week I’m flying to New York with Until Freedom. I’m having lunch with a state representative. I got people asking me to lead marches,” Nagdy said back in October.
**Couldn’t help myself -
https://www.britannica.com/place/Anglo-Egyptian-CondominiumReplies: @Johann Ricke
Note:
Russia invented baseball.
I’ve always said that the Russian Sputnik is the best hope for the human race. Not only is the vector used the safest, but it is the only vaccine proven to generate SARS-COVID2 antibodies “in vivo” in as little as 48 hours in well more than 90% of volunteers.
Russia might be a Third World country, but they’ve always displayed some awesome scientific/technological capabilities. The previous Russian Sputniz did beat the U.S in putting the first man in Space, despite the fact that Russia suffered massive structural damage in WW2 while the U.S came out unscathed, and despite the fact that the U.S got most of the tier-1 German rocket scientists.
Russia is an extremely formidable country, despite it’s shortcomings.
It produces first class scientists in all the disciplines, but, to use the most appropriate word, its "translational" capabilities are lacking. Plus smart people who feel constrained professionally either get out or are working to get out. See Lex Fridman. Once guys like him leave, they are never going back. And why should they?
Pharma may be one of its better hopes in helping to extricate itself from its current economic malaise, but you can't build a first world nation economy on one or two industries.
Russia remains at bottom a raw materials producer. Stephen Kotkin, who knows as much about contemporary Russia as he does historical Russia, is worth listening too on that score.
Couple that with Russia's obvious and cultural tendency to have an oligarchical structure, and you have a recipe for stagnation.
Dostoevsky would totally get it.
https://historyshots.com/collections/space/products/race-to-the-moon
The Lockheed C-5 was surpassed by the Antonov AN 225, just for bragging rights:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-5_Galaxy#/media/File:USAF_C-5_Galaxy_in_flight.jpg
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8979467/Breonna-Taylor-protest-leader-shot-dead-carjacking-near-University-Louisville-campus.html
His features look vaguely semitic, and the name is vaguely North African. A quick Google search yielded a news item complete with mug shot:
https://www.thenewsenterprise.com/news/crime_and_courts/two-hardinsburg-teens-charged-in-etown-break-ins/article_61045764-a153-11e8-abc7-1fe6f3013e2e.html
Bottom line - the intuition that BLM has been hijacked by white progressives who have spent time in a tanning booth may not be too far off. This guy looks whiter than Ben Jealous, who looks whiter than Andrew Cuomo (who could play a Planet of the Apes extra without critter makeup, not because he looks like a black person, but because he looks somewhat simian).Replies: @Lot, @AnotherDad
His mother has the very rare Irish surname Muimneach.
Nagdy is a mostly Egyptian surname but found in other Arab nations.
A man who is likely his father or uncle was arrested for cracking his wife’s skull with a flashlight.
https://www.wlky.com/article/arrest-made-after-woman-shows-up-at-hospital-covered-in-blood/7014124
From an article about the young Celto-Egyptian Carjackvictim**:
“I’m an ex-foster kid, I’m a felon and I don’t have my GED. I spent three years or four years, not consecutively, incarcerated. And next week I’m flying to New York with Until Freedom. I’m having lunch with a state representative. I got people asking me to lead marches,” Nagdy said back in October.
**Couldn’t help myself –
https://www.britannica.com/place/Anglo-Egyptian-Condominium
Russia might be a Third World country, but they've always displayed some awesome scientific/technological capabilities. The previous Russian Sputniz did beat the U.S in putting the first man in Space, despite the fact that Russia suffered massive structural damage in WW2 while the U.S came out unscathed, and despite the fact that the U.S got most of the tier-1 German rocket scientists.
Russia is an extremely formidable country, despite it's shortcomings.Replies: @Jack D, @kpkinsunnyphiladelphia, @petit bourgeois
Russia has always been a place of incredible contrasts – incredible wealth (for a few) side by side with incredible poverty (for many). Space satellites viewed from the ground by peasants plowing their fields with horses. Russia is capable of producing incredible technological feats at the same time that it is incapable of providing the majority of its citizens with a decent standard of living.
https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/russias-alfa-class-was-the-terrifying-hot-rod-sub-of-th-1637540064
Maybe because a certain ethnic group stole everything of value.Replies: @Jack D
Nagdy is a mostly Egyptian surname but found in other Arab nations.
A man who is likely his father or uncle was arrested for cracking his wife’s skull with a flashlight.
https://www.wlky.com/article/arrest-made-after-woman-shows-up-at-hospital-covered-in-blood/7014124
From an article about the young Celto-Egyptian Carjackvictim**:
“I’m an ex-foster kid, I’m a felon and I don’t have my GED. I spent three years or four years, not consecutively, incarcerated. And next week I’m flying to New York with Until Freedom. I’m having lunch with a state representative. I got people asking me to lead marches,” Nagdy said back in October.
**Couldn’t help myself -
https://www.britannica.com/place/Anglo-Egyptian-CondominiumReplies: @Johann Ricke
In his case, the B in BLM obviously refers to the young gentleman’s hair color. You know how the “dark” in “tall, dark and handsome” refers to hair color? Same idea.
-- The patients were not random or volunteer but fellow clubmember establishment journalists.
-- They did exactly what a CNN denizen would do in such a situation: they discussed the trials on social media with other people also on the trials, who were of the same odious milieu.
-- They then tried to find a way to make sure they were not in the placebo group. They were assisted in this by the doctors.
Believe the science!
https://vdare.com/articles/michelle-malkin-covidgate-part-two-clinical-trials-and-crusader-biasReplies: @Jack D, @Eagle Eye, @AndrewR
I don’t see how any of this affected the trial results. 90 to 95% of the covid positive results were in the placebo arm. There were thousands of participants. If a few of them blabbed on the internet this has no effect on the validity of the trial. Probably half of the people who are “sure” that they got the real vaccine didn’t. Yes, the gossips are foul and obnoxious people but what they did does not change the results of the trials one iota.
This is worth noting. While the Chinese government and their apologists (perhaps one and the same) are always parroting the cliche about “transparency” in things scientific, we read here that no clinical trial data has been released.
Yet they are inoculating people already. I guess the Chinese are on the “trust us” model of transparency. Can you imagine if a Western nation did this? Or Trump?
But what the Chinese govt. does to their population is of no interest to the Woke, or even the NYT.
There may be nothing sinister about this, but the typical Chinese blackout of important data seems suspicious. I thought actual science wanted results of experiments to be publicly verified and even replicated.
The Chinese govt. is now also claiming that they have “wiped out” extreme poverty. Huh? Yes a big propaganda campaign and all. Where are WaPo and NYT “journalists” on that big story? Probably the same people who are ignoring the story about mass inoculations before test results are released publicly.
I’m pretty certain that our Internet Overlords (Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) have failed to put those silly labels on these China news items. “Warning: this may be false” etc. The election is over so never mind.
Don’t you think that if actual news reporters were at hand (even other Asian or Europeans) that someone might find a few examples of “extreme poverty” in a land of over a billion people? You’d think those details might be important to learn.
I guess Will Duranty was also right about the Ukraine famine and those fair Moscow show trials. Ignorance is Strength and all.
18794 participants, 25% or 4699 got placebo. Of those that got the placebo 31 were said to be ‘cases’. As to how ‘cases’ were confirmed and the symptoms if any and their severity I see no comment. The age distribution of participants is also missing.
31/4699 = 0.0066 or 0.66% at minimum met the definition of ‘case’.
Is a vaccine really necessary for such low %s. Are lockdowns justified?
I guess since the vaccine express is unstoppable, how about a test on as many 70+ participants as they have vaccine. And then publish the mortality stats for the vaccinated group compared to other 70+ individuals in the general population. That might blunt some of my internet troll quibbles.
If you want to be less of one, add the time dimension to your calculations, you'll have to use more than your calculator though. For Sputnik V, Wikipedia says Phase 3 participant recruiting began on September 10th. In setting up the problem, add the interval between the two doses plus a week for the booster to have taken full effect.
That is to say your case calculations are bogus, they're equivalent to saying that people who don't get a vaccine stop rolling the dice for getting a "case" as soon as a set of results are reported. They are not contributing anything to the discussion.Replies: @George
So the choice is between a Trump vaccine and a Putin vaccine.
Bad day for the Woke.
91.4% is FANTASTIC news! That’s like a batting average of .9140. AMAZING!!!!!!1!!1!!!!!
And, but, yet, still, again, once more, my immune system is batting .9998 against the Coronasniffles, meaning my immune system is 43 TIMES more effective than the vaccine.
Innumerate imbeciles (viz Ron Unz) might see 91.4 and 99.98 and burp: ‘Dem der numbers is be almost da same! O lordy we is be saved!’
Get back with us when a vax can even remotely approach the human immune system
These discussions have been some weird variant of the Gell-Man Amnesia Effect concept, where those who have some domain knowledge of the field are forcefully reminded that so many people who have mastered English including spelling and working a comment widget are totally incapable of clear thought about a life and death subject. Maybe I should get around to reading Camus' relevant novel.Replies: @BenKenobi, @HA, @RVS
You keep telling us we should get down on our hands and knees and thank Trump for the american vaccines. What should we be doing about all these foreign ones?
31/4699 = 0.0066 or 0.66% at minimum met the definition of 'case'.
Is a vaccine really necessary for such low %s. Are lockdowns justified?
I guess since the vaccine express is unstoppable, how about a test on as many 70+ participants as they have vaccine. And then publish the mortality stats for the vaccinated group compared to other 70+ individuals in the general population. That might blunt some of my internet troll quibbles.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
Well, at least you admit you’re a troll.
If you want to be less of one, add the time dimension to your calculations, you’ll have to use more than your calculator though. For Sputnik V, Wikipedia says Phase 3 participant recruiting began on September 10th. In setting up the problem, add the interval between the two doses plus a week for the booster to have taken full effect.
That is to say your case calculations are bogus, they’re equivalent to saying that people who don’t get a vaccine stop rolling the dice for getting a “case” as soon as a set of results are reported. They are not contributing anything to the discussion.
How many dead will result from this wedding:
Covid-19 Hasidic Wedding in NYC.
https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=9GZ9Z_1606182353
Trigger Warning: Likely ignorance and even antisemitism in the comment section.
Sturgis 2020 came and went without an impressive body count, and surprisingly from the test test test crowd, no one attempted to use the super spreader event for scientific data collection.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
And, but, yet, still, again, once more, my immune system is batting .9998 against the Coronasniffles, meaning my immune system is 43 TIMES more effective than the vaccine.
Innumerate imbeciles (viz Ron Unz) might see 91.4 and 99.98 and burp: 'Dem der numbers is be almost da same! O lordy we is be saved!'
Get back with us when a vax can even remotely approach the human immune systemReplies: @That Would Be Telling, @Je Suis Omar Mateen
This counts as the single most inane comment I’ve yet read on the iSteve vaccine discussions. I guess you are unaware that vaccines simulate Corona-chan attacking you to stimulate your adaptive (antibody making) immune system to make a response? That some fraction of those for whom a good vaccine doesn’t work will also find their response to the wild type virus failing, and thus die (and that’s why we want to protect them with herd immunity)? Or that you’re comparing a population of people to a population of one person, yourself?
These discussions have been some weird variant of the Gell-Man Amnesia Effect concept, where those who have some domain knowledge of the field are forcefully reminded that so many people who have mastered English including spelling and working a comment widget are totally incapable of clear thought about a life and death subject. Maybe I should get around to reading Camus’ relevant novel.
I recall reading safety data on some Chinese vaccines candidates that said side effects go up and efficacy goes down the more times you use a particular vaccine vector. It was enough of an issue they divided the test subjects into two groups, one that had prior exposure the other naive.
I don’t know if this consideration applies here, but if it does, it suggests using the Russian two type vaccine has a drawback in that you’ve now had two initial exposures to vectors and may react worse to more vaccines on the future.
“ OK, I’m confused, how long did they wait to see if the vaccine is working?”
Putin didn’t wait long to have the top officials take it.Replies: @Cortes, @AnotherDad
And why not?
Some people are squawking like this is “unproven technology” and it’s like asking someone to step into the new teletransportation booth.
They’ve fiddled the spike protein DNA into well known adenoviruses through by now, very well worn DNA manipulation. Yeah, maybe the vaccine could make you ill … but we know the Xi virus from a Chinese lab last year can make you sick.
Good for the Russkis for zipping through the work and moving ahead.
~~~
As i’ve noted a few times before being ready to squash a pandemic–an obvious “benefit” of globalization which everyone who bothered to think about it knew was coming–is something that should be a top ten bullet item on any nationalist agenda.
— Be ready to slam closed your border and hard secure quarantine sickies and–separately–exposed.
and
— Have continual on-going subsidized vaccine research/productive–they can work on “the common cold”–so that when a new bug pops they are all up to speed, can get it sequenced, figure out the target, develop the vaccine and slap it into production in short order.
The Xi virus is ho-hum. A few oddball cases but mostly a geezer killer. (As a geezer … i care, but not the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it.) But the next virus might be a real ass kicker.
The Alfa class submarine says hello!
https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/russias-alfa-class-was-the-terrifying-hot-rod-sub-of-th-1637540064
Four weeks. Which represents a peak immune response from the priming immunization, aided moderately by a one week old booster shot. Waiting a bit longer is expected to further raise neutralizing titers, leading to increased efficiency. Which is exactly what they reported:
https://sputnikvaccine.com/newsroom/pressreleases/second-interim-analysis-of-clinical-trial-data-showed-a-91-4-efficacy-for-the-sputnik-v-vaccine-on-d/
The thing is, 91 vs 95% does not really matter that much provided a mass immunization is done. Potential problems down the road exist: With strong immune response to the vector itself, of the immunization needs to be annual/biannual, the efficiency is likely to drop a lot. However, with cellular memory potentially established, future years vaccinations might good enough with peptide (Russians are already testing it: “EpiVacCorona” it is called) or protein vaccines (Novavax’ vaccine sounds very promising in the light of the spectacular ease at which anti-coronavirus vaccines can be developed).
AZ has access to >20-fold larger manufacturing capacity than Russians currently do, so, really, an ideal case would be if AZ and J&J were to start churning out Sputnik V for the entire world instead of sticking to their own versions (J&J’s single shot is exactly the same as first stage of Sputnik V).
I’m waiting for a vaccine with 104 or more per cent efficacy.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8979467/Breonna-Taylor-protest-leader-shot-dead-carjacking-near-University-Louisville-campus.html
His features look vaguely semitic, and the name is vaguely North African. A quick Google search yielded a news item complete with mug shot:
https://www.thenewsenterprise.com/news/crime_and_courts/two-hardinsburg-teens-charged-in-etown-break-ins/article_61045764-a153-11e8-abc7-1fe6f3013e2e.html
Bottom line - the intuition that BLM has been hijacked by white progressives who have spent time in a tanning booth may not be too far off. This guy looks whiter than Ben Jealous, who looks whiter than Andrew Cuomo (who could play a Planet of the Apes extra without critter makeup, not because he looks like a black person, but because he looks somewhat simian).Replies: @Lot, @AnotherDad
LOL.
I generally don’t wish people ill. I’ve been a lifelong Christian friend-to-all “nice guy” type. But in the last five or ten years, finally realizing–slow learner–how absolutely nasty are all these minoritarian a*holes wishing destruction upon me and my people of pallor, i’ve liberated myself to accept this is war, and these bastards richly deserve what they wish upon me.
No more warmth of human kindness for lying minoritarian creeps from me. May they all die and rot in hell.
So i’ll pour myself a little shot of Southern Comfort and celebrate the delicious irony. Cheers!
How is “Sputnik V” to be pronounced?
Like the singer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_V ?
Or like the British monarch (and Shakespeare play) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_V_of_England ?
When Roman numerals are used, it is normal to pronounce them according to the number represented, as for example on the face of a clock using Roman numerals, you would say 3 o'clock when the small hand points to III, or five o'clock when it points to V.
The word Sputnik of course is pronounced about the same in all languages, all those exact quantity given to the vowel 'u' may vary a little bit.
I don’t trust any of these gov’t clowns.
“Pandemic is Over” – Former Pfizer Chief Science Officer Says “Second Wave” Faked On False-Positive COVID Tests
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/pandemic-over-former-pfizer-chief-science-officer-says-second-wave-faked-false-positive?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+zerohedge%2Ffeed+%28zero+hedge+-+on+a+long+enough+timeline%2C+the+survival+rate+for+everyone+drops+to+zero%29
The thing is, 91 vs 95% does not really matter that much provided a mass immunization is done. Potential problems down the road exist: With strong immune response to the vector itself, of the immunization needs to be annual/biannual, the efficiency is likely to drop a lot. However, with cellular memory potentially established, future years vaccinations might good enough with peptide (Russians are already testing it: "EpiVacCorona" it is called) or protein vaccines (Novavax' vaccine sounds very promising in the light of the spectacular ease at which anti-coronavirus vaccines can be developed).
AZ has access to >20-fold larger manufacturing capacity than Russians currently do, so, really, an ideal case would be if AZ and J&J were to start churning out Sputnik V for the entire world instead of sticking to their own versions (J&J's single shot is exactly the same as first stage of Sputnik V).Replies: @Steve Sailer
Thanks.
Given that all five of the first vaccines worked, how soon could they have been mass produced and distributed without testing?
How many have died or suffered serious injuries as a result of waiting for testing and evaluation?
And, thanks to the remarkable stability of adenoviruses, the Russians are already beginning to make lyophilized version of Sputnik V:
https://sputnikvaccine.com/newsroom/pressreleases/the-cost-of-one-dose-will-be-less-than-10-for-international-markets/
That thing would be stable for a year in a regular fridge and suffer only a minor degradation when exposed to ambient temperature for a week or two. Ideal for the developing world.
But, my VA hospital already has an array of -80C freezers waiting for the mRNA vaccines. mRNA does have an advantage that an immune response to it can be largely muted, making it more suitable for annual administrations of needed.
You fool, how are American pharmaceutical companies supposed to profit from vaccines they don’t own? Those alien vaccines are as evil and harmful and unscience as “hydroxychloroquine plus zinc” or “not being eighty-five years old.”
“ Russia is capable of producing incredible technological feats at the same time that it is incapable of providing the majority of its citizens with a decent standard of living.”
Maybe because a certain ethnic group stole everything of value.
These discussions have been some weird variant of the Gell-Man Amnesia Effect concept, where those who have some domain knowledge of the field are forcefully reminded that so many people who have mastered English including spelling and working a comment widget are totally incapable of clear thought about a life and death subject. Maybe I should get around to reading Camus' relevant novel.Replies: @BenKenobi, @HA, @RVS
JSoM is a saint! His iconoclasm has been an oasis of sanity in the sea of covid hysteria.
Remind me again why we need a vaccine for a virus that hardly kills anyone at all?
The flu kills 80k people in a bad year and that's with only ~50-60% of people getting vaccines and absolutely no shutdowns (i.e. travel, concerts, conventions at full blast)Replies: @The Alarmist
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/26/health/us-coronavirus-thursday/index.html
All the vaccines showing better than 90% efficacy makes me skeptical. I think they all picked healthy subjects and measured success as not getting infected. That leaves out the most important question not well answered: does it prevent death among the most vulnerable i.e. those with preexisting comorbidities? Looks like we will get the answer only when they vaccinate the first 10 or 20 millions. If the daily death rate falls below 300 (1 per million) for 30 days or so, we can say the vaccines are working.
Russia might be a Third World country, but they've always displayed some awesome scientific/technological capabilities. The previous Russian Sputniz did beat the U.S in putting the first man in Space, despite the fact that Russia suffered massive structural damage in WW2 while the U.S came out unscathed, and despite the fact that the U.S got most of the tier-1 German rocket scientists.
Russia is an extremely formidable country, despite it's shortcomings.Replies: @Jack D, @kpkinsunnyphiladelphia, @petit bourgeois
But, alas, formidable in limited ways.
It produces first class scientists in all the disciplines, but, to use the most appropriate word, its “translational” capabilities are lacking. Plus smart people who feel constrained professionally either get out or are working to get out. See Lex Fridman. Once guys like him leave, they are never going back. And why should they?
Pharma may be one of its better hopes in helping to extricate itself from its current economic malaise, but you can’t build a first world nation economy on one or two industries.
Russia remains at bottom a raw materials producer. Stephen Kotkin, who knows as much about contemporary Russia as he does historical Russia, is worth listening too on that score.
Couple that with Russia’s obvious and cultural tendency to have an oligarchical structure, and you have a recipe for stagnation.
Dostoevsky would totally get it.
Russia might be a Third World country, but they've always displayed some awesome scientific/technological capabilities. The previous Russian Sputniz did beat the U.S in putting the first man in Space, despite the fact that Russia suffered massive structural damage in WW2 while the U.S came out unscathed, and despite the fact that the U.S got most of the tier-1 German rocket scientists.
Russia is an extremely formidable country, despite it's shortcomings.Replies: @Jack D, @kpkinsunnyphiladelphia, @petit bourgeois
Agreed. The space race was particularly telling when they beat us a few times:
https://historyshots.com/collections/space/products/race-to-the-moon
The Lockheed C-5 was surpassed by the Antonov AN 225, just for bragging rights:
Norway outlaws hate speech against trans people
https://news.trust.org/item/20201125142808-81qgv
When are they going to go ahead and add the "P"? They should put it in front, since pedophiles are objectively more hated than any of the other groups.
These discussions have been some weird variant of the Gell-Man Amnesia Effect concept, where those who have some domain knowledge of the field are forcefully reminded that so many people who have mastered English including spelling and working a comment widget are totally incapable of clear thought about a life and death subject. Maybe I should get around to reading Camus' relevant novel.Replies: @BenKenobi, @HA, @RVS
“This counts as the single most inane comment I’ve yet read on the iSteve vaccine discussions.”
You’re clearly unfamiliar with the picaresque musings of Je Suis Omar Mateen, and consider yourself lucky for that. This has actually been one of his better weeks, but that’s because he’s still trying to figure a way to drunkenly thrash and stagger his way out of the hole he dug for himself (one of many) by insisting over and over that a COVID vaccine was never ever going to happen — it was “unobtainium”, as he put it. He told us that the very mention of it would set him to fuming.
So of course, when it DOES happen, he decides to pretend that he’s completely unimpressed. Yeah, it’s pathetic, but still, one of his less embarrassing weeks.
The people must be afraid, very afraid, and locked up! See a therapist.Replies: @HA
So the choice is between a Trump vaccine and a Putin vaccine.
Bad day for the Woke.
After January 20th, the press will hail it as the Biden Vaccine. Problem solved for the Woke.
-- The patients were not random or volunteer but fellow clubmember establishment journalists.
-- They did exactly what a CNN denizen would do in such a situation: they discussed the trials on social media with other people also on the trials, who were of the same odious milieu.
-- They then tried to find a way to make sure they were not in the placebo group. They were assisted in this by the doctors.
Believe the science!
https://vdare.com/articles/michelle-malkin-covidgate-part-two-clinical-trials-and-crusader-biasReplies: @Jack D, @Eagle Eye, @AndrewR
Michelle Malkin seems to have missed the significance of this little vignette she quotes:
In a properly run double-blinded trial, BOTH subjects and doctors are supposed to be ignorant of any patient’s placebo vs. vaccine status. A doctor “divulging” this detail is an indication that both principles were violated.
Recruiting media folks for trials almost certainly violates FDA rules requiring (somewhat) randomized recruiting of test subjects.
OT
I was reading Wikipedia on the British honors system. It’s incredibly transphobic and colonial!
For instance, you could be a knight or a dame, but there is no queer or non-binary option. And there’s a slogan of “For God and Empire.”
The Michelle Malkin article makes me wonder how so many journalists and influencers managed to be included in these trials. I know I never received an invitation. Who took the initiative here, the journalists, who somehow figured out how to get included in these trials, or the Pharma companies, who reached out to recruit such people figuring they would help with publicity? Either way, it stinks. It doesn’t invalidate the efficacy math. It just stinks.
Why would anyone under 75 who is healthy take this vaccine just yet? If you are vulnerable, sure. Flu shots, yes. But why would a 30 year old healthy person want it since you have a 99.99% of having no problems?
By the way, it’s odd that everyone said the same thing at the start of this boondoggle: we need a 2 week lockdown to protect your poor old grandpa/uncle who might flop over dead if you keep being so selfish!
They all said some version of that. Groupthink?
-- The patients were not random or volunteer but fellow clubmember establishment journalists.
-- They did exactly what a CNN denizen would do in such a situation: they discussed the trials on social media with other people also on the trials, who were of the same odious milieu.
-- They then tried to find a way to make sure they were not in the placebo group. They were assisted in this by the doctors.
Believe the science!
https://vdare.com/articles/michelle-malkin-covidgate-part-two-clinical-trials-and-crusader-biasReplies: @Jack D, @Eagle Eye, @AndrewR
Speaking of CNN, they detail the multicultural catfight over whom Newsom should appoint to replace “the only Black woman in the Senate”
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/25/politics/kamala-harris-senate-seat-california-democrats/index.html
"People were upset, it was a terrible process," said one member of the CHC, who asked for anonymity to detail the private discussions. The member added that there was "a lot of heartburn" since "Latinas were not even considered" and "Latinas were not even consulted."
LOL
Chinese disease is 100% efficacious at replacing barbarian leader, and showing that Xi has the mandate of heaven.
It’s very important to you that there be no dissent on Endless Lockdowns, isn’t it?
The people must be afraid, very afraid, and locked up! See a therapist.
In 2017 a Muslim jogger murdered three whites in Fresno in an openly racist murder spree.
One of those victims – Zack Randall – had, as his Facebook cover photo, a photo of Richard Spencer being sucker punched, with “We Punch Nazis” superimposed over it.
Whoops!
I would also remind you of Mollie Tibbetts, a white girl who openly expressed her hatred of white people on social media. She was murdered by a very not-white illegal immigrant named… Cristhian.
Cristhian Bahena Rivera.
The bitter fruit of Diversity tastes a little bit better with the Schadenfreude of its advocates getting what they asked for.
This dishonest framing implies that “LGBT+” people have some panoply of God-given rights from which only an evil bigot would seek to deprive them.
When are they going to go ahead and add the “P”? They should put it in front, since pedophiles are objectively more hated than any of the other groups.
I don’t know what adenoviruses the Russian vaccine uses, but pre-existing antibodies to multiple adenovirus serotypes are common, and vary regionally. Much like using the same vector for a first dose and booster, pre-existing antibodies prior to the first dose can reduce the response to the desired antigen.
I’m also not sure if two adenovirus vectors are dissimilar enough to avoid antigenic original sin.
On the other hand, when you get a small pox vaccine, for example, you produce antibodies to dozens, if not hundreds, of antigens. But that is a live attenuated vaccine, which works better.
I was wondering the other day, if vector capacity and stability were not issues, how many vaccines could be given in a single (or + booster) shot? There must be a limit. Is it like a hundred? A thousand? With subunit or inactivated vaccines the amount of antigen required sets a limit. They can’t give you a 1000 mL shot. But with attenuated or vectored vaccines that replicate, adjuvanting themselves and increasing the amount of antigen in situ, the limit might be much higher than we’ve tried.
I’d actually really like to see a study that tried to vaccinate, say, ferrets, for a dozen or more strains of the flu at once.
I’ll bet for live attenuated vaccines we could give a lot more at once than we’ve tried.
It is a shame the dumbs are so retarded about vaccines.
Basically, the future is bright: SARS-2 is not going nearly as big a seasonal problem is flu. And the prospect of monster flu, the kind that propagates between humans as easily as H1N1 but is as deadly as H5N1, remain the biggest known potential threat. Maybe one day a universal flu vaccine or treatment will be found. We can hope.
Your proposal of "all vaccines at once" is complicated. One, it can only be achieved by mixing individual vaccines (vector capacity is very limited). Two, for most diseases effective protection requires more than just one antigenic protein. Three, the burden of testing is high because things can get pretty complicated if it turns out that there is unexpected cross-reactivity.
That said, limited combination vaccines are pretty common: measles+mumps+rubella+varicella, polio+diphtheria+tetanus+pertussis+hepB, just to give two examples.Replies: @Rob
There has been plenty of hate for the Chinese vaccine, but Brazil is coming up with trial cases.FWIW, India has a vaccine also in the works. Also J&J.
It’s killed ~300k people in the US and that’s with shutdowns. We’re not even a year in yet.. Hospitals are getting overwhelmed.
The flu kills 80k people in a bad year and that’s with only ~50-60% of people getting vaccines and absolutely no shutdowns (i.e. travel, concerts, conventions at full blast)
99%+ of surviving not 99% no symptoms..
The vaccines “work” because the “virus” isn’t a big deal. It’s a fake vaccine for a fake virus. It seems that, besides the gloomy dystopian dreams of some megabillionaires, the scandemic is mostly about money: destroy small business and syphon the customers to Amazon and online entertainment; pay some peanuts to people in the form of corona-help or UBI while stealing billions; profit from fear and then make some more billions selling fake vaccines. Is it a coincidence that people in Big Tech are the same ones pushing vaccines or working also for Big Pharma? (Gates being only the more obvious name, but there are many others, check)
Two weeks? Try a whole year, almost.
Also, in what way grandpa or uncle is “protected” by not allowing him to see his nephews, isolating him, leaving him no social or cultural options and nothing to do since he’s retired. Most grandpas and uncles were not protected in any way by this stupid and criminal lockdown.
Source: https://mises.org/wire/what-covid-vaccine-hype-fails-mention
Maybe they're really good with their N95 masks and general infectious disease control, but they're still rolling dice on the principle of First do no harm with worse odds than if they take a vaccine. The only counter for their selfish reasoning (and libertarians are nothing if not selfish) is that mRNA vaccines are brand new, we're depending on their in theory being the most safe ever, which can only be proven with time. A dimension of the whole process the article studiously ignores when demanding a number of answers today. While, you know, 1,500 thousand people are dying every day in the US (see here for 7 day averages, exceeded 1,000 Nov 11, has increased 50% since then with no dips). And as I've previously noted, my region helps explain this, it's increasingly getting out of control here, and that can explain why they added a purple color after the previous top level of red.Replies: @The Alarmist, @utu
The flu kills 80k people in a bad year and that's with only ~50-60% of people getting vaccines and absolutely no shutdowns (i.e. travel, concerts, conventions at full blast)Replies: @The Alarmist
Hospital ICU beds allocated specifically for COVID-19 treatment are reaching capacity. Hospital ICU beds in general are not. Hospital beds in total are far from capacity. Your statement might apply to a handful of hospitals that were near overwhelmed on a weekend night prior to COVID-19, but is wrong on hospitals in general in the US.
'Catastrophic loss of medical care' possible if Washington's COVID-19 numbers skyrocket
https://katu.com/news/local/catastrophic-loss-of-medical-care-possible-if-washingtons-covid-19-numbers-skyrocketReplies: @The Alarmist
I haven’t paid attention. Did JSOM change his opinion from ‘unobtainium’ to ‘hopium’, or are we beyond that?
Like the singer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_V ?
Or like the British monarch (and Shakespeare play) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_V_of_England ?Replies: @Jonathan Mason
As with Apollo 7, the number would be pronounced in whatever way that numeral is pronounced in your language.
When Roman numerals are used, it is normal to pronounce them according to the number represented, as for example on the face of a clock using Roman numerals, you would say 3 o’clock when the small hand points to III, or five o’clock when it points to V.
The word Sputnik of course is pronounced about the same in all languages, all those exact quantity given to the vowel ‘u’ may vary a little bit.
I was reading Wikipedia on the British honors system. It's incredibly transphobic and colonial!
For instance, you could be a knight or a dame, but there is no queer or non-binary option. And there's a slogan of "For God and Empire."Replies: @Cortes
Superb! Many thanks. I shall steal/liberate/borrow.
Sputnik V seems like a great vaccine.
It could not have been developed without the help of Mr Trump, who informed his lieutenant President Putin that a vaccine was needed quickly, even if rules needed to be broken and red tape slashed.
Putin was quick to follow up on the idea which only a genius like Trump could have thought of.
This follows Trump’s success in personally launching the first satellite in space, the first man in space, and of course the first woman in space, Melania Tereshkova, and in eradicating smallpox, inventing the internet, and in reforming the American system of birth certificates, which is well known to be fraud riddled.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/25/politics/kamala-harris-senate-seat-california-democrats/index.htmlReplies: @bomag
Thanks.
“People were upset, it was a terrible process,” said one member of the CHC, who asked for anonymity to detail the private discussions. The member added that there was “a lot of heartburn” since “Latinas were not even considered” and “Latinas were not even consulted.”
LOL
On its face, that’s worth looking into. I’d suggest checking out the efficacy of existing live virus vaccines, attenuated or vector (just checked smallpox was 95%, and oral polio is 95% for two doses). Then note the AZ/Oxford number that’s in that range is based on a fraction of the number of test subjects compared to the others, like only 1,800 from memory, compared to the mRNA vaccines and Sputnik V which are getting full scale testing at their intended from the beginning dosing, and that mRNA is new technology which for example we expect will avoid the two full doses AZ/Oxford outcome which is in the 60% range.
Another factor: since 95% keeps popping up in so many places, that could be the ceiling for vaccines, the variations in human beings means some have immune systems that will just not respond. Which is what herd immunity is all about, reach that and it becomes very unlikely the unprotected 5% will ever get infected as long as they stay in the herd, for example, don’t travel to places that haven’t reached herd immunity levels. More evidence can be found in how we’ve eradicated smallpox and rinderpest from the earth, and polio is perhaps in its final stages (note this only works when you don’t have an animal reservoir, or you also clear that out as well).
You’re pedantically ignoring the point, hospital capacity in many areas for COVID-19 patients is getting “overwhelmed.” It is for 150 miles in all direction from my home town, more details on request, but two which are also digging deeply into their total all patients capacity is that a lot of their staff is out sick with COVID-19, or quarantined after an exposure, and normal patients spend an average of four and a half days days in them, it’s two weeks for their COVID-19 patients.
Bad day for the Woke.Replies: @tyrone
Both of these GREAT men love their people …..which bodes well .
This is a blatant lie, as this article generally is, when it’s not just demonstrating gross ignorance or bias.
That might have something to do with the first approval step being an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
As has been much noted for years, we aren’t making doctors like we used to. These “resident physicians and faculty physicians” per this report aren’t weighing the indeed incompletely known risks they’re being asked to take with vaccines with only two months of Phase 3 safety data from 1/2 the vaccine arm (7,500 to 10,750), vs. their potential to give COVID-19 to their patients.
Maybe they’re really good with their N95 masks and general infectious disease control, but they’re still rolling dice on the principle of First do no harm with worse odds than if they take a vaccine. The only counter for their selfish reasoning (and libertarians are nothing if not selfish) is that mRNA vaccines are brand new, we’re depending on their in theory being the most safe ever, which can only be proven with time. A dimension of the whole process the article studiously ignores when demanding a number of answers today. While, you know, 1,500 thousand people are dying every day in the US (see here for 7 day averages, exceeded 1,000 Nov 11, has increased 50% since then with no dips). And as I’ve previously noted, my region helps explain this, it’s increasingly getting out of control here, and that can explain why they added a purple color after the previous top level of red.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/russian-vaccine-claims-91-4-efficacy/#comment-4307091"For all practical purposes, the covid-19 epidemic is over in Sweden. Almost certainly herd immunity has been achieved in Sweden irrespective of any antibody test results. ""The lockdown appears to have made more deaths from covid-19 in Illinois than would have occurred without it. ""The data suggest that lockdowns have not prevented any deaths from covid-19. ""The only way we can learn how best to cope with covid-19 is to let individuals manage their own risk, observe the outcomes, and learn from mistakes. "
One of the reasons that the FDA is delaying their approval until mid December is they want to wait 60 days after the last injections in the trial. From past experience with vaccines, 90% of side effects appear within 45 days. There is a small chance that there will be later occurring side effects but only a small one. Nothing is risk free but if you compare that risk to the risk of dying from Covid, it’s a no brainer. If you are over 70, the risk of dying from Covid if you get it is comparable to the risk of climbing Mount Everest.
Did you mean the risk of dying while climbing Everest in general, the risk of someone over 70 climbing Everest, or the risk of someone over 70 dying while climbing Everest?
The 5% probably fall in a couple of different categories – people with weak immune systems who don’t respond to the vaccine but also people to whom the vaccine was not properly administered – they received a dose that was not properly handled and lost its potency. As you say, the nice thing about vaccinating (almost) everyone is that you get herd immunity so the fact that it doesn’t “take” for a few people makes no difference. Even a few anti-vax idiots make no difference. It’s only when you get a LOT of anti-vaxxers that it’s a problem.
Nit: to submit an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) application to the FDA, it is demanding safety data from half of the vaccine arm trial participants, two months after the second (booster) dose. This ended up being the gate for Pfizer/BioNTech (submitted) and Moderna (not quite there yet I think), despite efficacy being nondeterministic, having to wait on ~170 trial participants getting symptomatic COVID-19 (again, just to apply for an EUA, getting one is not approval for the general population).
And this is why I’m making this reply. This matches up with my very vague memory of this sort of thing; any pointers to sources? A search just now found this quote from Saint Fauci:
It’s credible, but then again, it’s from Fauci.
Yes, that Fauci quote was my exact source. I heard him on the radio saying this yesterday. I realize that not everyone around here loves Fauci but he has been the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 so I suspect that he actually knows something about this subject. Even if he had been sweeping the floors there since 1984 he would have picked up some knowledge by now.
Maybe they're really good with their N95 masks and general infectious disease control, but they're still rolling dice on the principle of First do no harm with worse odds than if they take a vaccine. The only counter for their selfish reasoning (and libertarians are nothing if not selfish) is that mRNA vaccines are brand new, we're depending on their in theory being the most safe ever, which can only be proven with time. A dimension of the whole process the article studiously ignores when demanding a number of answers today. While, you know, 1,500 thousand people are dying every day in the US (see here for 7 day averages, exceeded 1,000 Nov 11, has increased 50% since then with no dips). And as I've previously noted, my region helps explain this, it's increasingly getting out of control here, and that can explain why they added a purple color after the previous top level of red.Replies: @The Alarmist, @utu
You might want to expand on that. In any case, there are quite a few moving parts here.
CDC stats for 2018 show that 2,839,205 deaths were recorded, or roughly 7,780 deaths per day, for all causes: Of those, 59,120 were attributed to Influenza and Pneumonia, 159,486 were attributed to Chronic lower respiratory diseases, 84,946 were attributed to Diabetes, and 122,019 were attributed to Alzheimer’s disease. Looking past influenza to the other leading causes, you see a huge number of deaths that have been prevalent comorbidities among the vast majority of deaths where COVID-19 was shown as being present at death.
If you step back from the weekly stats, you start to realise there isn’t enough data to say this is a great killer. We won’t know for some time if COVID-19 really resulted in “excess deaths” or if it simply culled a bit earlier and in a shorter time-frame people who would have found their way to the hospital and eventual death from the comorbidities. Further, the anecdotal evidence on flu deaths reducing this year suggests that what otherwise might have been classified a flu death last year is in 2020 a COVID death because it was present.
I’ll grant that where hospitals were already taxed in “normal times,” they would be overwhelmed now, but that is not so much the product of a pandemic as it is the product of a healthcare system designed to profit by building only enough capacity to handle an average case load with some margin for prudence and little more. It also doesn’t help that the predatory medical system is designed to empty senior’s bank accounts or plunder the Medicare trust fund in their final few months, and it really doesn’t help that COVID is now such a political hot-potato that hospitals are richly reimbursed for each case they treat with the most invasive procedures.
To paraphrase Barack Obama during the healthcare discussions, give granny a pill to ease the pain, because we can’t afford to build the capacity to treat everyone indefinitely, and the old are past their prime.
But I suppose it's not surprising when you have such a Manichean world view, in which there's no possibility the US healthcare system actually cares about improving people's lives. You also have no idea about the abilities hospitals maintain to surge for emergencies of the mass trauma variety. I know that for a fact, two incidents, and know they also prepare for pandemics like this one (although of course never enough).
If you want to be less of one, add the time dimension to your calculations, you'll have to use more than your calculator though. For Sputnik V, Wikipedia says Phase 3 participant recruiting began on September 10th. In setting up the problem, add the interval between the two doses plus a week for the booster to have taken full effect.
That is to say your case calculations are bogus, they're equivalent to saying that people who don't get a vaccine stop rolling the dice for getting a "case" as soon as a set of results are reported. They are not contributing anything to the discussion.Replies: @George
Worth noting is no actual ‘scientific’ documents are being published, just press releases.
How many dead will result from this wedding:
Covid-19 Hasidic Wedding in NYC.
https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=9GZ9Z_1606182353
Trigger Warning: Likely ignorance and even antisemitism in the comment section.
Sturgis 2020 came and went without an impressive body count, and surprisingly from the test test test crowd, no one attempted to use the super spreader event for scientific data collection.
A human being vs. a troll might also realize that the scientists are completely prioritizing the EUA application and then I'm sure answering the FDA's questions over submissions to journals, seeing as the former will save lots of lives at a time 1,500/day are dying with the curve continuing its upwards trend. My two major hospital complexes are now losing more than one person per day on average.
The rest of your post is entirely speculative. You would get further, and maybe even shed some of your troll status, if you actually replied to the points I made. Or at least asked for help in trying to model the problem as I outlined it by adding the time dimension.
I am not an epidemiologist nor an MD, so I can’t evaluate the data professionally. I only know that Russians and Chinese published their data and protocols, whereas there is nothing comparable from Moderna, AstraZeneca, or Pfizer. I also know that after Pfizer announced its vaccine, its share price went up, and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla sold 60% of his Pfizer shares, making $5.6 million (e.g., https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/pfizer-ceo-sold-stock-6-million-30-percent-compensation-vaccine-2020-11-1029798146 and numerous other sites). I think that’s all we need to know about Pfizer vaccine.
Russia was infamous for not releasing its data, but maybe that's changed, surely you can back up your claim by linking to the equivalents of the above. I don't know about the PRC vaccines, the most advanced is a killed virus one and it's less likely to provide a good immune system response than the mRNA and viral vector ones, but might have a better side effect profile.Read the article, the stock sale was prearranged months earlier as they always are for people at his level. And if this one bit of data is enough to tell you that a vaccine developed in Germany by a completely separate company is not safe and effective, I'm not sure how you muster the courage to get out of bed every morning.
These discussions have been some weird variant of the Gell-Man Amnesia Effect concept, where those who have some domain knowledge of the field are forcefully reminded that so many people who have mastered English including spelling and working a comment widget are totally incapable of clear thought about a life and death subject. Maybe I should get around to reading Camus' relevant novel.Replies: @BenKenobi, @HA, @RVS
Here are reasons why it is you who is inane. First, it is impossible to measure the long-term side effects of a trial vaccine in a couple of months. Vaccines are not 100% benefit with no risk. The risks could exceed the benefit. For people who have little risk from Covid19, it is rational for them to prefer a ‘wild’ exposure instead of a vaccine. Second, the immunity conferred from a wild exposure is superior to a vaccine induced exposure because the immune system responds the the entire virus, not a fragment. Third, the vaccine trials offer no proof that vaccination reduces the risk of death if administered to old, sick people, because these people are not in the trials. To which you might respond that the vaccine could protect them through herd immunity if everyone else took the vaccine. This is not necessarily true. Fourth, the vaccine trials offer no proof that vaccination blocks transmission of the disease. The trials only establish that the vaccine reduces the number of people who show symptoms, not that asymptomatic transmission is reduced.
I received the vaccine. I suspected as much from the effects of the second injection (101.3 fever for four days, chills and joint aches for two days) and confirmed it with an antibodies test at an independent lab.
Am I immune? Who knows? But I am now living life again; church, shopping, indoor gun range, babysitting grandkids, etc.
Maybe you don’t consider me old or sick (immune comprised) but most people would.
either 90% or 95% effective means it basically works. At preventing systematic cases. But the reduction in death would logically be much higher. Simply because you have to have a symptomatic case before you can die of it.
So there is very likely a substantial reduction in disease severity for the 5% or 10% of cases where a vaccinated person gets it. In fact, the trials found no severe cases in the test group.
To the extent that is the case, then it is highly effective in preventing serious illness from covid. Everyone over 30 can benefit from eliminating the 5 or 10% chance of getting really sick for a while.
I’m also not sure if two adenovirus vectors are dissimilar enough to avoid antigenic original sin.
On the other hand, when you get a small pox vaccine, for example, you produce antibodies to dozens, if not hundreds, of antigens. But that is a live attenuated vaccine, which works better.
I was wondering the other day, if vector capacity and stability were not issues, how many vaccines could be given in a single (or + booster) shot? There must be a limit. Is it like a hundred? A thousand? With subunit or inactivated vaccines the amount of antigen required sets a limit. They can’t give you a 1000 mL shot. But with attenuated or vectored vaccines that replicate, adjuvanting themselves and increasing the amount of antigen in situ, the limit might be much higher than we’ve tried.
I’d actually really like to see a study that tried to vaccinate, say, ferrets, for a dozen or more strains of the flu at once.
I’ll bet for live attenuated vaccines we could give a lot more at once than we’ve tried.
It is a shame the dumbs are so retarded about vaccines.Replies: @Anonymous
Sputnik V uses Ad26 serotype as a primary immunization and Ad5 as a boost. The Ad26 prevalence in most countries is about 15%, Ad5 over 70%. Still available option is Ad35. For subsequent vaccinations, inactivated or live attenuated virus, as well as protein vaccine all have very good chance of working.
Basically, the future is bright: SARS-2 is not going nearly as big a seasonal problem is flu. And the prospect of monster flu, the kind that propagates between humans as easily as H1N1 but is as deadly as H5N1, remain the biggest known potential threat. Maybe one day a universal flu vaccine or treatment will be found. We can hope.
Your proposal of “all vaccines at once” is complicated. One, it can only be achieved by mixing individual vaccines (vector capacity is very limited). Two, for most diseases effective protection requires more than just one antigenic protein. Three, the burden of testing is high because things can get pretty complicated if it turns out that there is unexpected cross-reactivity.
That said, limited combination vaccines are pretty common: measles+mumps+rubella+varicella, polio+diphtheria+tetanus+pertussis+hepB, just to give two examples.
Personally, I am a big fan of live attenuated vaccines, and saw a cool way to do a DNA vaccine to live attenuated. They take an attenuated +RNA virus, and put it in a plasmid with an E. coli origin and eukaryotic promoter that can drive expression of the entire genome in a person. Then produce the plasmid in bacteria, so it is both cheaper than eggs/cell culture, the DNA has a lower mutation rate than the RNA genome would have had, and there is no adaptation to the culture or reversion. Then it’s injected into the recipient like a ‘regular’ DNA vaccine, whereupon the attenuated virus ‘boots’ from the plasmid, and then acts like a regular attenuated vaccine. It’s called iDNA, for infectious DNA. Because it’s a live virus after booting, it is much more immunogenic than a DNA vaccine, and requires fewer plasmids. Plasmids are easier to store and transport than live viruses, too.
So far they’ve only tried positive sense, monopartite viruses, but with some alterations there is a good chance it could be used for segmented or even negative or dsRNA viruses. It is not an attenuation method, so the pussy-ass virus has to come from somewhere. Many different viruses can be grown in the same culture conditions, fewer production bottlenecks... Hell, use compatible plasmids, and multiple vaccines can be grown in the very same cells. Potentially much cheaper and easier way of doing vaccines.
The people must be afraid, very afraid, and locked up! See a therapist.Replies: @HA
“It’s very important to you that there be no dissent on Endless Lockdowns,”
No, sad little troll with creepy masculinty insecurities who cowers in fear that “technocrats” and “intellectuals” (i.e. anyone in the 99% of the population that isn’t as dumb as you) are getting the upper hand. I’m agnostic about what lockdowns and other grand health measures amount to in the long run. Historically, they’ve saved millions of lives (e.g. the Rockefeller study that led to the eradication of hookwork and other parasites in the south), and that’s indisputable, and anyone who argues to the contrary deserves to be smacked down.
However, the same proponents of these sweeping measures, who also forced us to strap on seat belts and cut down on cigarettes, were historically the very same people who gave us Prohibition and eugenics. The imagery of “social health” and “eradicating disease” was incorporated by both murderous Nazis (with regard to “parastic groups” like Jews and gypsies) and murderous Communists (who went after “parasitic classes” like kulaks and “intellectuals” in ways you at this point can only dream about). Finally, the “hygiene hypothesis” is more than just a hypothesis at this point, so that (as with our long war against famine which is rapidly transitioning into a war on obesity) our fight against germs and diseases has left us with too few stressors in our collective biodomes and that has disastrous long-term consequences. With social health, it always seems to be one step forward, two steps back.
So no, I’m not in favor of endless lockdowns. What I’m actually against is the Dunning-Kruger level of stupidity that makes someone who one assured us that even 5,000 COVID deaths was ridiculous fearmongering (and that would be you) keep endlessly prattling on as if there’s anything left for him to say. THAT is something we should all be able to agree on by now. At this point, every single comment you make reminds me of the “may God have mercy on your soul” line from Happy Gilmore. Let me repeat that: Next to you, even a goofy dumb Adam Sandler movie comes off as profoundly relevant.
As far "intellectuals", Eric Hoffer already addressed those silly and destructive people.Replies: @HA
“I expect that the daily death rate will double in the next 10 days,” he said. “We’ll be seeing close to 4,000 deaths a day.”
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/26/health/us-coronavirus-thursday/index.html
“Did JSOM change his opinion from ‘unobtainium’ to ‘hopium’, or are we beyond that?”
I’m not sure at what point and in what stages reality was able to finally glimmer through to him (I suspect in his case, it comes and goes), but I do know that the moment there’s any hint that COVID might at some point evolve resistance to the current set of vaccines, his current “color me unimpressed” shtick will immediately revert back to “See? — what’d I always tell you?”.
I’ll admit that COVID still has the capacity to surprise me, but at this point I don’t need a Farrington Flexible quasi-Poisson regression to figure out where JSOM is going to end up, and the current forecast is not a rosy one.
Thanks for your comment/explanation 415.
I was too ignorant/uninsightful to figure out the Oxford-AZ differential results, so assumed random error.
I was wrong. Your explanation makes perfect sense. Thanks.
One of the things that makes the new Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit" so unrealistic is that they make the protagonist a female. Not just a female but a hot sexy female with great fashion sense in addition to being a chess genius. There's a reason why only 1% of the top ranked players are female (female chess players have their own tournaments just like female athletes because it's usually hopeless for them to compete on the same field as men - they would get smashed and that's no fun). While on paper men and women have similar IQ averages, the distribution is different with more men out at the tails.Replies: @utu
I was too ignorant/uninsightful to figure out the Oxford-AZ differential results, so assumed random error.
I was wrong. Your explanation makes perfect sense. Thanks.Replies: @Jack D
I had a comment a few pages back to the effect that we in the West now have the worst leadership class in history and it is now seeping into the “hard” sciences as well. It’s no accident that the head of the mediocre Oxford vaccine team was a female. There was a quote in the paper from Sarah Gilbert about how she almost left science because it forces you to focus one small field and she preferred to have a broader perspective on life. Maybe this makes her a better human being but it doesn’t make her a better scientist. Having a ‘spergy guy who is “overly” focused on one thing is exactly how the modern sciences advance. You’ve got to sweat the details. You have to live and breath your little niche. Guys like this are getting pushed out of the sciences because they sometimes don’t have the social skills to keep their mouth shut and they let “racist” truths slip out of their mouths like some AI bot. There’s a reason why “Watsoned” is now a verb. And they are being replaced by “diverse” and female mediocrities who are good at the human relations and PR aspects of science but not the science aspect of science.
One of the things that makes the new Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” so unrealistic is that they make the protagonist a female. Not just a female but a hot sexy female with great fashion sense in addition to being a chess genius. There’s a reason why only 1% of the top ranked players are female (female chess players have their own tournaments just like female athletes because it’s usually hopeless for them to compete on the same field as men – they would get smashed and that’s no fun). While on paper men and women have similar IQ averages, the distribution is different with more men out at the tails.
Always on topic: Golf.
Golf related obituary: Bill Murray’s brother who caddied at the age of 10 has died. He was a major inspiration for Caddyshack.
https://dailycaller.com/2020/11/25/bill-murray-ed-murray-inspiration-caddyshack-death/
Link to the Instagram note
https://www.instagram.com/p/CH9dQFODNgi/?utm_source=ig_embed
This is my neck of the woods:
‘Catastrophic loss of medical care’ possible if Washington’s COVID-19 numbers skyrocket
https://katu.com/news/local/catastrophic-loss-of-medical-care-possible-if-washingtons-covid-19-numbers-skyrocket
Basically, the future is bright: SARS-2 is not going nearly as big a seasonal problem is flu. And the prospect of monster flu, the kind that propagates between humans as easily as H1N1 but is as deadly as H5N1, remain the biggest known potential threat. Maybe one day a universal flu vaccine or treatment will be found. We can hope.
Your proposal of "all vaccines at once" is complicated. One, it can only be achieved by mixing individual vaccines (vector capacity is very limited). Two, for most diseases effective protection requires more than just one antigenic protein. Three, the burden of testing is high because things can get pretty complicated if it turns out that there is unexpected cross-reactivity.
That said, limited combination vaccines are pretty common: measles+mumps+rubella+varicella, polio+diphtheria+tetanus+pertussis+hepB, just to give two examples.Replies: @Rob
The old trivalent flu vaccine worked pretty well, and the newer quadrivalent vaccine is much less effective. I’m not sure if the reasons why are known. I don’t have much hope for a universal flu vaccine per se. Even the stalk haemaglutinin domain that does not vary much is not just subdominant, but it could vary. Innoculations against it lead to selection on the virus to vary and escape. Possibly the current stalk is the ‘best’, but it has quite a bit of room to evolve once pressure is on it. But if n strains can be vaccinated against at once, we wouldn’t have to guess at this years strain.
Personally, I am a big fan of live attenuated vaccines, and saw a cool way to do a DNA vaccine to live attenuated. They take an attenuated +RNA virus, and put it in a plasmid with an E. coli origin and eukaryotic promoter that can drive expression of the entire genome in a person. Then produce the plasmid in bacteria, so it is both cheaper than eggs/cell culture, the DNA has a lower mutation rate than the RNA genome would have had, and there is no adaptation to the culture or reversion. Then it’s injected into the recipient like a ‘regular’ DNA vaccine, whereupon the attenuated virus ‘boots’ from the plasmid, and then acts like a regular attenuated vaccine. It’s called iDNA, for infectious DNA. Because it’s a live virus after booting, it is much more immunogenic than a DNA vaccine, and requires fewer plasmids. Plasmids are easier to store and transport than live viruses, too.
So far they’ve only tried positive sense, monopartite viruses, but with some alterations there is a good chance it could be used for segmented or even negative or dsRNA viruses. It is not an attenuation method, so the pussy-ass virus has to come from somewhere. Many different viruses can be grown in the same culture conditions, fewer production bottlenecks… Hell, use compatible plasmids, and multiple vaccines can be grown in the very same cells. Potentially much cheaper and easier way of doing vaccines.
That’s not a comforting statement with a weasel word like “great,” and an unknown time frame to end the deaths. It’s already twice as great as either of the last two flu pandemics.
Here you jump right to murderous psychopathy, of the sort that conceivably cost Trump the election, and legitimately so. Your Logan’s Run ethos ignores our developing ability to vaccinate granny, and enough of the rest of the population to achieve herd immunity for those of all ages who don’t response to the vaccines.
But I suppose it’s not surprising when you have such a Manichean world view, in which there’s no possibility the US healthcare system actually cares about improving people’s lives. You also have no idea about the abilities hospitals maintain to surge for emergencies of the mass trauma variety. I know that for a fact, two incidents, and know they also prepare for pandemics like this one (although of course never enough).
How many dead will result from this wedding:
Covid-19 Hasidic Wedding in NYC.
https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=9GZ9Z_1606182353
Trigger Warning: Likely ignorance and even antisemitism in the comment section.
Sturgis 2020 came and went without an impressive body count, and surprisingly from the test test test crowd, no one attempted to use the super spreader event for scientific data collection.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
About what? I can’t see a line of reasoning here, is this about our previous topic of COVID-19 cases in vaccine trials, in which case it’s too early for “‘scientific’ documents, but they will come in due time. Although to the extent they’re published (there are potentially trade secrets in the manufacturing section) the EUA applications and the FDA’s review of them count a hell of a lot more than your normal “peer reviewed” science paper as ‘scientific’ documents.
A human being vs. a troll might also realize that the scientists are completely prioritizing the EUA application and then I’m sure answering the FDA’s questions over submissions to journals, seeing as the former will save lots of lives at a time 1,500/day are dying with the curve continuing its upwards trend. My two major hospital complexes are now losing more than one person per day on average.
The rest of your post is entirely speculative. You would get further, and maybe even shed some of your troll status, if you actually replied to the points I made. Or at least asked for help in trying to model the problem as I outlined it by adding the time dimension.
That may well be true of AZ, but here’s Moderna’s Phase 3 protocol and their first scientific paper on their Phase 1 trial. I stumbled on the latter today, but it’s been well publicized Moderna and Pfizer have published their Phase 3 protocols, and all it took with Bing was “moderna phase 3 trial protocol” to find it. Took a bit more effort to find Pfizer’s, here it is.
Russia was infamous for not releasing its data, but maybe that’s changed, surely you can back up your claim by linking to the equivalents of the above. I don’t know about the PRC vaccines, the most advanced is a killed virus one and it’s less likely to provide a good immune system response than the mRNA and viral vector ones, but might have a better side effect profile.
Read the article, the stock sale was prearranged months earlier as they always are for people at his level. And if this one bit of data is enough to tell you that a vaccine developed in Germany by a completely separate company is not safe and effective, I’m not sure how you muster the courage to get out of bed every morning.
Maybe because a certain ethnic group stole everything of value.Replies: @Jack D
This is the same complaint that black people have in America and has the same validity. Sometimes you have to look in the mirror and quit looking for scapegoats.
The risk of anyone dying while climbing Everest.
I participated in the Pfizer trial. I am 70 years old. I am overweight but not obese (BMI 27.4). I have high blood pressure that is controlled with Lisinopril. I have elevated A1C but am not diabetic although I am taking Metformin.
I received the vaccine. I suspected as much from the effects of the second injection (101.3 fever for four days, chills and joint aches for two days) and confirmed it with an antibodies test at an independent lab.
Am I immune? Who knows? But I am now living life again; church, shopping, indoor gun range, babysitting grandkids, etc.
Maybe you don’t consider me old or sick (immune comprised) but most people would.
As previously discussed, it’s enough to get a very good idea. And two months is only good enough to get you an FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), more time and data will be required before it’s OKed for the general population.
Ah, we have a Right wing sociopath here, does not give a damn about any other people in his society. It’ll be a shame if that attitude is reciprocated some day….
Maybe, only time will tell. Wild type immune responses do include antibodies to the nucleocapsid protein.
Blatant lie. [You then piss on herd immunity.]
Yep, it’s too early for that sort of data. Perhaps you missed the world Emergency above??
"Blatant lie" About half the deaths across the US have been nursing home residents. Were they in the vaccine trials? Another block of deaths have been people with a weak or compromised immune system. Were they in the vaccine trials? I doubt it on both counts.
My opinion is the vaccine trials were designed to report 'success' without ever proving that the vaccine reduces the death rate of the people who are at greatest risk from the disease.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
Doctor: No need to cancel Christmas dinners
“We’ve learned. If we use confirmations as an example. First we postponed them, then we had them, and they did not result in a new virus outbreak.”– Dr. Bjarni á Steig
Gleðilig Dýri biðidagur / Tussiarfissuaq pilluaritsi!
I did Mt. Blanc in my ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. I can’t wait for the next ascent in my ’60s. I didn’t notice the difference between’30s and ’40s, but I had to take it easier in my (late) ’50s, though it didn’t kill me because I am still in reasonably good shape. COVID is to flu what Everest is to Mt. Blanc.
'Catastrophic loss of medical care' possible if Washington's COVID-19 numbers skyrocket
https://katu.com/news/local/catastrophic-loss-of-medical-care-possible-if-washingtons-covid-19-numbers-skyrocketReplies: @The Alarmist
They’ve clearly lost a grip on what matters. In wartime or times of crisis, triage is a necessity. There is no good reason to deny intensive care to a 30-yo so that an 80-yo can be treated.
Let’s be real: 30-yo’s that need that ICU bed are not much more qualified than an 80-yo to deserve that bed , but the assumption is they might still have something of value to contribute.
We’ve condemned millions to penury and misery so that a few thousands can live a few months longer while providing little tangible benefit to the benefit of the larger society.
One of the things that makes the new Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit" so unrealistic is that they make the protagonist a female. Not just a female but a hot sexy female with great fashion sense in addition to being a chess genius. There's a reason why only 1% of the top ranked players are female (female chess players have their own tournaments just like female athletes because it's usually hopeless for them to compete on the same field as men - they would get smashed and that's no fun). While on paper men and women have similar IQ averages, the distribution is different with more men out at the tails.Replies: @utu
You should look at positive sides of the “The Queen’s Gambit”. They could have made her Jewish who triumphs over the anti-Semitic nuns and the pedophile priest who run the orphanage. I am sure it was very tempting but somehow they managed to resits.
There has been one really high ranked female chess player - Judit Polgár of Hungary. She was not raised in an orphanage. Rather her chess career was (like Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters) the result of a conscious plan by her parents to try to raise a champion. Guess what her religion is?
You don’t think it’s a little neurotic to keep a running record of everyone’s posts you disagreed with?
As far “intellectuals”, Eric Hoffer already addressed those silly and destructive people.
And, but, yet, still, again, once more, my immune system is batting .9998 against the Coronasniffles, meaning my immune system is 43 TIMES more effective than the vaccine.
Innumerate imbeciles (viz Ron Unz) might see 91.4 and 99.98 and burp: 'Dem der numbers is be almost da same! O lordy we is be saved!'
Get back with us when a vax can even remotely approach the human immune systemReplies: @That Would Be Telling, @Je Suis Omar Mateen
To continue the analogy: a slugger batting .9140 would strike out or otherwise fail to reach base, on average, every other game or about twice a week, assuming five at-bats per game.
An ultra-slugger batting .9998 would strike out, etc every six years. You’d be lucky to get him out twice IN A DECADE, never mind twice a week.
This is the immense chasm betwixt 91.4% and 99.98% – i.e., the chasm betwixt a fake vaccine and your average GenX immune system. I hope this helps the sportsball-obsessed innumerates round here grok just how lame and laughable 91.4% success rate is.
Also, I'm getting the impression the best vaccines hit 95%, which for the purposes of this discussion, if you can call it that, is a lot better than ~91% (I seriously doubt any of these figures are today truly precise to three digits).
Chances are that any vaccines that are approved will work for the vast majority of those who get them, and the ones they don’t work on are in the same boat they would be in if they hadn’t gotten the vaccine. Which is likely to be a rickety boat, else the vaccine would have worked.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
Maybe they're really good with their N95 masks and general infectious disease control, but they're still rolling dice on the principle of First do no harm with worse odds than if they take a vaccine. The only counter for their selfish reasoning (and libertarians are nothing if not selfish) is that mRNA vaccines are brand new, we're depending on their in theory being the most safe ever, which can only be proven with time. A dimension of the whole process the article studiously ignores when demanding a number of answers today. While, you know, 1,500 thousand people are dying every day in the US (see here for 7 day averages, exceeded 1,000 Nov 11, has increased 50% since then with no dips). And as I've previously noted, my region helps explain this, it's increasingly getting out of control here, and that can explain why they added a purple color after the previous top level of red.Replies: @The Alarmist, @utu
They is Gilbert Berdine, MD who seems to be a libertarian kook from Texas who writes for Mises cult organ for goldbugs and low IQ dentists.
August 15, 2020
https://www.unz.com/isteve/russian-vaccine-claims-91-4-efficacy/#comment-4307091
“For all practical purposes, the covid-19 epidemic is over in Sweden. Almost certainly herd immunity has been achieved in Sweden irrespective of any antibody test results. ”
“The lockdown appears to have made more deaths from covid-19 in Illinois than would have occurred without it. ”
“The data suggest that lockdowns have not prevented any deaths from covid-19. ”
“The only way we can learn how best to cope with covid-19 is to let individuals manage their own risk, observe the outcomes, and learn from mistakes. ”
That just makes the show even more unrealistic. (She is also taught chess by the janitor of the orphanage – we all know how popular chess is among Kentucky janitors).
There has been one really high ranked female chess player – Judit Polgár of Hungary. She was not raised in an orphanage. Rather her chess career was (like Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters) the result of a conscious plan by her parents to try to raise a champion. Guess what her religion is?
OK, whomever was judging the most inane commentators at least has a point. This is ludicrous, because by definition a vaccine does not challenge a person’s body hardly as much as getting the actual disease. That is the whole point of a vaccine, after all!!!
Also, I’m getting the impression the best vaccines hit 95%, which for the purposes of this discussion, if you can call it that, is a lot better than ~91% (I seriously doubt any of these figures are today truly precise to three digits).
To continue the comparison, if the vaccine does not work at all on someone, and he gets COVID, then he is in the same position as someone who did not take the vaccine, and his immune system has same the 99.x chance of fighting off the disease,
Chances are that any vaccines that are approved will work for the vast majority of those who get them, and the ones they don’t work on are in the same boat they would be in if they hadn’t gotten the vaccine. Which is likely to be a rickety boat, else the vaccine would have worked.
I think medical profession is very uncomfortable to verbalize such logic. But I suspect, it is happening behind the scenes. The evidence seems to be a sharp rise in deaths once the daily death rate reaches about 2000. It seems to very quickly jump up after that knee point suggesting they are running out of resources, mostly skilled nursing staff.
Same goes for HCQ versus the more exotic therapeutics. It certainly helps when a Trump endorsement of anything is not given a knee-jerk treatment of a kiss of death.
In Europe several countries were very clear that treatment for over-60s would be limited to conserve precious resources.
In the first wave, they didn’t have enough skilled ventilator techs, so the effort to mass-produce ventilators was doomed from the start, and even more so when someone realized they were killing people with ventilators. KISS goes for so many things in life, including COVID. It helps a great deal when therapy is based on appropriate and easily used resources, like oxygen masks or nasal cannula instead of ventilators, which are indicated more for a failure of lung muscles rather than treating hypoxia.
Same goes for HCQ versus the more exotic therapeutics. It certainly helps when a Trump endorsement of anything is not given a knee-jerk treatment of a kiss of death.
In Europe several countries were very clear that treatment for over-60s would be limited to conserve precious resources.
Chances are that any vaccines that are approved will work for the vast majority of those who get them, and the ones they don’t work on are in the same boat they would be in if they hadn’t gotten the vaccine. Which is likely to be a rickety boat, else the vaccine would have worked.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
There’s one exception to the rickety boat that’s in the mix of partial to total vaccination failures: when something went wrong up to the point of getting vaccinated. Like a vial being kept too long outside its required temperature pattern. These people will hopefully be protected by herd immunity, and if not, they still tend to have good odds, even the elderly.
As far "intellectuals", Eric Hoffer already addressed those silly and destructive people.Replies: @HA
“You don’t think it’s a little neurotic to keep a running record of everyone’s posts you disagreed with?”
Oh, do try and keep your megalomania in check, if at all possible. I do my very best to ignore your worthless, sad whining about how tragic it is that white people are unwilling to acknowledge your genius. Eventually, like Hitler in the bunker cursing the German race for being unworthy of him, there’s not much in the way of an uplifting ending there, and looking away would probably be the wiser choice.
That being said, I do indeed keep a running record of many of the things I’ve posted, and that means, alas, remembering the posts that prompted me to write, no matter how forgettable they were. You clearly don’t bother keeping track of what you’ve written, but I do, and I don’t apologize for that.
And when someone who has been so colossally stupid as you have been throughout this epidemic just keeps yammering on as if everyone else on this forum is as memory-impaired as you are, and as if your boners — or the abject ignorance from which they sprang — are in no way disqualifying, then like the proverbial trainwreck, I confess there is indeed an element of fascination there, even though it involves giving you farmore attention than you deserve.
Do I worry about where the likes of Fauci are leading this society? Of course I do. But if you or people like you are setting yourselves up as the alternative to him or to those intellectuals you so despise, well, that makes my choice a lot easier. I suspect the same goes for that sycophantic and spineless white race that you keep muttering about. To the extent they’re not listening to you as much as you think you deserve, you have only yourself to blame for that.
“we have a Right wing sociopath here” What? The end game is to achieve herd immunity, either through wild or vaccine exposure. An individual who chooses the wild exposure path to personal immunity in no way puts anybody else at risk. I’m 60 years old and I’d choose inoculation with the wild virus over an experimental vaccine. Other people might judge their relative risk differently. With absolute certainty I assert no healthy child should be given the vaccine because his risk from Covid19 is zero.
“Blatant lie” About half the deaths across the US have been nursing home residents. Were they in the vaccine trials? Another block of deaths have been people with a weak or compromised immune system. Were they in the vaccine trials? I doubt it on both counts.
My opinion is the vaccine trials were designed to report ‘success’ without ever proving that the vaccine reduces the death rate of the people who are at greatest risk from the disease.
"Blatant lie" About half the deaths across the US have been nursing home residents. Were they in the vaccine trials? Another block of deaths have been people with a weak or compromised immune system. Were they in the vaccine trials? I doubt it on both counts.
My opinion is the vaccine trials were designed to report 'success' without ever proving that the vaccine reduces the death rate of the people who are at greatest risk from the disease.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
A great deal of nonsense in your reply, but this point is enough:
How are you failing to incorporate in your modeling that COVID-19 is an infectious respiratory disease???
SARS-2 is a vascular disease that is spread via the respiratory route. The difference is not trivial.
Here is the explanation. I get inoculated with the wild virus. (1)Like 60-80% of people I have no infection because I have pre-existing immunity via T-cells or previous exposure to an earlier related cold virus. I am not infectious. (2) I have no pre-existing immunity. I contract symptomatic disease. As a rational person I stay home and avoid contact with other people until I have completely recovered. At that point I am immune and not infectious. (3) I contract asymptomatic disease and inadvertently infect other people. According to the latest research, this case does not exist.
https://www.rt.com/news/507402-wuhan-asymptomatic-cases-coronavirus-study/
Hence, in no case do I put anyone else at risk.
How are you failing to incorporate in your modeling that COVID-19 is an infectious respiratory disease???
SARS-2 is a vascular disease that is spread via the respiratory route. The difference is not trivial.
“How are you failing to incorporate in your modeling that COVID-19 is an infectious respiratory disease???”
Here is the explanation. I get inoculated with the wild virus. (1)Like 60-80% of people I have no infection because I have pre-existing immunity via T-cells or previous exposure to an earlier related cold virus. I am not infectious. (2) I have no pre-existing immunity. I contract symptomatic disease. As a rational person I stay home and avoid contact with other people until I have completely recovered. At that point I am immune and not infectious. (3) I contract asymptomatic disease and inadvertently infect other people. According to the latest research, this case does not exist.
https://www.rt.com/news/507402-wuhan-asymptomatic-cases-coronavirus-study/
Hence, in no case do I put anyone else at risk.