What does this have to do with Dexamethasone?
They might have made that mistake. Humans make mistakes. afair 30% of all human death in hospital are caused by incompetence or a mistake.
They might have made that mistake. Humans make mistakes. afair 30% of all human death in hospital are caused by incompetence or a mistake.
That genuinely is the goal. The current aim is October I believe. A quote from their website says "deliveries starting by the end of 2020".
https://www.ovg.ox.ac.uk/news/astrazeneca-to-supply-europe-w...
That assumes everything goes well, which is a big if, but seems possible. The fact we've had no bad news so far despite the advanced trials is good news.
We've had no bad news because it's a simple design that bets on robust immune response doing the job. It's in contractors' interest to push ferocious timetables regardless of whether this vaccine strategy is viable: if it isn't, payouts are still secured prior to evidence of this coming to light, so they don't get stuck holding the bag. If it is, they're getting to market by next flu season.
https://www.precisionvaccinations.com/vaccines/azd1222-sars-...
The vaccine is being produced at no-profit: https://www.precisionvaccinations.com/400-million-coronaviru...
> We've had no bad news because it's a simple design
That makes no sense. We will have news if it fails to stop people getting badly ill, in which case they'd have to go back to the drawing board.
That means greater surveillance time, because so little has been established about activity thresholds that might be deemed properly immunizing. Greater reliance on strong immune response than more complex designs means greater uncertainty with respect to each step of the trials, including projecting general population results from challenge trial results.
So the bad news can't come as fast as it might for other designs. So far, the main worry has been poor activity in monkey challenge testing. But that's not enough to call "bad news" yet. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.13.093195
There's no downside to proceeding with manufacturing at full speed provided the financing is secured, yes. That's what I was getting at. "Produced at no-profit" still comes with significant opportunities for contractors and liabilities if they haven't been paid yet. It would be a nightmare for a public-private partnership to fall apart with manufacturing costs left uncovered because a vaccine platform has fallen out of favor. At the scale of multinationals, even issues like brexit having been pseudo-postponed until the end of 2020 right before all of this stuff hit might have something to do with how they're trying to structure delivery timetables. It's hard to say how any particular firm structures multiple deals with billion dollar pricetags.
Manufacture of this promising candidate in advance of full trials and approval probably isn't the craziest thing to do, but my understanding was that there was a significant risk that it would never be approved, never mind by October.
One big issue is that the rate of the virus is the community is dropping quickly in the UK. We are down to less than 1 in ~1,700 having it. So with a trial size of 10-20k people, you can see that the whole trial hangs on a single digit number of people who will be exposed, hence the constant testing to flag those people.
To increase the chances of getting a result, they have stood up a new wing of the trial in Brazil where the virus is more prevalent now.
- Shared personnel are hot on the heels of a deeply dubious result and attempted damage control that has involved an outlandish claim of misrepresentation in an interview.
- This has all the right smells so far to expect further questionable research practices.
- A press release was prioritized over a preprint, even though the authors absolutely know that readily-available drugs will be taken up as primary treatment methods as soon as this news meme spreads. They have given the research community zero time to double-check.
- Wildly sensationalist claims made to the press.
>They might have made that mistake.
This wasn't a simple mistake. Look at ice9's exploration on twitter (see [2]). The whole thing's quite damning.