Coronavirus: Oxford vaccine triggers immune response
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It's important to remember that vaccines for previous coronaviruses (SARS/MERS) had reports of generating anitbodies, but also causing immunopathic responses or immune enhancement syndrome:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/15/8218
>Is it safe?
It's really really to early to say yes or no, and the fact that the article tries to make a claim either way, is worrying. Vaccines for new families of viruses traditionally take years or decades to develop. We still don't have vaccines for retroviruses like HIV/Herpes (and it may not be possible due to the nature of those viruses).
I've had all my vaccinations; I'm not an anti-vaxer. But I do have concerns on trying to push out any novel vaccine in less than two years without adequate testing.
Although this virus has killed many, the risk factor for it is nowhere near high enough to warrant an emergency vaccine. There are trials underway for inhaled steroids that look very promising, and there's a good chance this virus will burn out in our population long before a truly safe vaccine comes to market.
Having a viable treatment option seems much more valuable and safer than vaccinations in this particular case.
The on-going Phase 2/3 trials in the UK, South Africa and Brazil are designed to establish the efficacy of the vaccine under viral challenge. The idea is that you vaccinate a bunch of people (and an equally-sized control group) and wait around until a subset of them test positive for the virus. Then you unblind the groups and make sure that the people who got sick were in the control group. You also check for ADE (antibody dependent enhancement) to make sure the vaccine doesn't amplify the strength of the virus.
All your questions are valid, but this study doesn't claim to answer them. Those results are still forthcoming. Additionally, the risk of ADE is well understood and carefully considered in the design of these trials.
(Disclaimer - I'm a participant in the UK Phase 2/3 trial)
The OP did not claim that the study sought to answer the questions posed. The article does answer the question 'Is it safe?' with the word 'Yes' so I believe you are actually in agreement with the OP and the OP did understand that it is really early to say that, hence the critique.
Sure reads to me like the OP is attacking the idea of developing a vaccine, not the media coverage.
I have always thought those medical trials are conducted under an NDA against the patient, meaning you do not only not know what group you are in, you are not even allowed to tell you are being observed in such a study (to prevent accidental unblinding).
The one thing we agreed to do was not to get an antibody test as that would unblind ourselves.
I think your perception of the numbers are a little off here. In the UK, we were loosing 1100 people a day entirely through covid (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/) That was most from a few hot spots like london. (less than 10% of the population.) We were very close to overwhelming hospitals. when a hospital system is overwhelmed you get a very large spike in deaths, because stuff that's treatable isn't treated
without lockdown, those deaths would have grown exponentially. Something like 200-400k preventable deaths.
so, if we want to get out of lockdown, we need to have something to reduce the spread of the virus. One way is heard immunity (thats what the US is doing, and its not going very well) another is vaccine.
Now, given the UK example, if the vaccine causes 10 deaths, and 1000 severe reactions(ie hospitalised) thats still better than the 200k deaths and close to a million cases with complications
Deaths arn't the whole picture, its the people that recover with life altering injuries as well.
>COVID-19 associated UK deaths
>Deaths of people who have had a positive test result
These are people who died who tested positive for the the virus not people who died as a result of having the virus. Not very useful numbers since the virus spreads in hospitals.
Under this definition COVID-19 is a terminal disease from which nobody ever recovers. If it hadn't been noticed, the English death toll would eventually have matched the case count.
Matt Hancock was apparently furious when he found out, now a review of PHE has been triggered as they've been serving the UK with bogus stats for months. Notethe coviddata site says PHE wasn't even deduplicating tests until 2nd July. So "case count" before then was also misleading. 30,000 positive cases vanished overnight and that assumes they did the deduplication correctly, but the government is so bad at data handling that at this point it's unclear if any stats can be trusted.
This stuff is really important and it's clear a lot of people on HN are in denial about it, because each time it gets brought up a torrent of downvotes follows. The COVID stats are wrong. They're not even just useless, they're actively misleading. They lead to beliefs like this one:
In the UK, we were loosing 1100 people a day entirely through covid
which is not true and has never been true. It's a belief based on assuming the stats are measuring what actually matters/what people want to know. In reality the stats are measuring what's easy to measure. It leads to huge over-reaction to what is in reality an extremely mild virus.
I am referencing the ONS when I say 1100 people a day, why? because the ONS stats can be compared to many years previous. PHE ones are collected by some consultancy company and are trash.
The average daily death rate is found here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
> In reality the stats are measuring what's easy to measure. It leads to huge over-reaction to what is in reality an extremely mild virus.
The stats are measuring how many deaths are occurring above the normal average death rate for that period. _something_ caused an extra 1100 deaths a day.
Sure you can say covid is a _very_ mild virus. It might be for some, but out of my friends that have had it (as in tested positive) 1 desaturated to 88% every night. 1 had a fever for 14 days(as in bedbound) 3 had a week long fever, 5 were asymptomatic 3 had epic shits for a weeks. All of these people are < 40. of the people that were > 40 and tested positive, all 3 died. However that's because at the time they were only testing inpatients.
So, with the greatest of respect, you can take your "mild virus" and "its really not 1100 extra deaths a day" and shove it up your arse.
Excess deaths is an entirely different statistic. We can assume total mortality is correct, but that says nothing about what causes it. For example, many excess deaths are clearly not caused by COVID because COVID isn't mentioned on the death certificate, but rather some other problem, even with the ultra-lax reporting and suddenly changed death certificate standards that the UK has introduced.
In reality lock down has caused some deaths. The virus has caused some - or slightly accelerated some, it's not really clear how much life-years reduction has really taken place given the absolutely on-average mortality profile.
I'm very sorry to hear about your friends, but bear in mind "epic shits" aren't even a recognised symptom of COVID. It's a respiratory disease. There's a lot of conflation going on where people are reporting things that aren't COVID as if it was some new but hitherto unknown side effect of the virus. In reality, other kinds of illness didn't stop because a new virus turned up and people can still get sick with the flu or many other diseases - as they do every year - even though COVID is more well known by this point.
In about 60 years or so.
>> In the UK, we were loosing 1100 people a day entirely through covid
> which is not true and has never been true.
Excess death stats (all cause deaths over and above the average for the time of year) are available[1] and peak at 12000 in a week or about 1700 a day. I'd say you deserve your downvotes in this case.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/htgq14/oc_...
Excess deaths is not the same thing as "deaths caused by COVID". This conflation relies on the assumption that you can virtually empty hospitals out and have no effect on mortality at all, which is absurd. What are all those surgeons doing, exactly?
If COVID is so deadly, why do some countries show no difference in excess deaths vs previous years?
The anti vaccination optics, of a vaccine killing people, would be so bad the resulting vaccination resistance could lead to millions of deaths.
Yes, statistics maybe say that it would be a good deal now. But if you assume it fuels the antivac fire and decreases measles vaccination by 10% for the next 10 years, then we are looking at a death toll 10-100 times larger than COVID in the future, from that disease alone.
Measles also only infects a person once. Preliminary data is pointing toward covid immunity lasting for only a few months.
Other coronaviruses typically do have reinfection about a year after first infection: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.20086439v... - with antibody reduction occurring after about six months.
I know there have been a few people who appeared to clear the virus but subsequently tested positive again - I don't know enough about the details here. Vox article with more links: https://www.vox.com/2020/7/12/21321653/getting-covid-19-twic...
I hope that reinfection with this virus is less likely, but I don't think we yet have any data to suggest that it is much different than existing coronaviruses.
As far as I know, that's not true at all.
A King's College study has shown that the level of B cells in former patients blood declinened quickly after a few months. Still there has yet to be a study on T cells level and T cells seem to play a more important role than B cells in covid immunity.
That doesn't counter your point, but we'll need up to phase 3, to have enough coverage to make sure your statistics hold. But indeed, the risk seems to be balanced against 5 years waiting for any long term symptoms to show.
Without a vaccine - wouldn't herd immunity just be letting the virus spread and then let Darwin take over, more or less?
It was the approach taken initially by the UK, and it is the one currently being taken by sweden.
Good thing this isn't a retrovirus.
>But I do have concerns on trying to push out any novel vaccine in less than two years without adequate testing.
They started on this vaccine about 9 years ago, originally for the first SARS/MERS. They just gave it to 1,077 people and all 100% produced the desired effect, and the worst symptom reported was fatigue/headache that resolved on its own within 24 hours, or sooner if taken Tylenol/paracetamol. We're losing ~150,000 people worldwide EVERY MONTH to this virus, how many more months/deaths should we wait until we're sufficiently satisfied that it's safe?
That's a good start. But for example, how many of them were pregnant, and at what stages? I would guess none. That would be the most famous way to get this wrong.
I hope they are thinking hard about the optimal roll-out strategy, though. It should surely be faster than in normal times. It might well be that you should run very very large not-quite-trials as the first stage of general distribution, and watch their evidence in real-time.
Of course we're gonna test this on the healthiest, least-likely-to-accidentally-die humans, what's the point?
They explicitly did a pregnancy test on everyone who can be pregnant to preclude the possibility, just in case.
I don't understand anything about biology/vaccines or anything else relevant - but there have been several stories in history of medicine that was thought to have no side effect, that ended up being taken off the shelves because it was more dangerous than first thought.
If we're going to inject a few hundred million (if not a few billion) people with something, we need to be really really sure it won't harm then, and considering the fact that COVID has a mortality rate of 1%-ish, the vaccine has a huge burden of proof.
And more importantly to anything that I say as a non-expert - most experts on these issues seem to think you need at least ~10 months of human trials, if not more.
That’s the entire point of a Phase one trial. Vaccine studies may be a little different in their numbering, but the intent of a phase one trial is to figure out if the treatment is safe. The effectiveness is a separate question.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/infographics/journey-of...
Before vaccinating 7 billion people with a vaccine done in a year we should think at least twice, Darwin Award in global scale and all. Let them vaccinate 80+ year olds or people with one foot already in the grave, but be very careful before doing it in a massive scale.
However we're going to try dozens of vaccines on probably 500k-1m people in total globally before deploying them in an increasingly broad way. The next stage of the Pfizer-BioNTech trial is going to be 30,000 in July/August.
We need to ensure that the vaccine is extraordinarily safe. "But it saves more people than it kills" is not an argument people accept, unfortunately. If this vaccine kills anyone, the antivax fallout could be worse in the long run than just letting the virus run its course.
Come on now, we gotta start somewhere
For context: That is 0.0002% of the world's population.
per capita numbers are useful context but sometimes the total number is also important context that is worth worrying about. In this case a tiny percentage of a very large number results in a large enough number to cause concern.
Traditionally many things used to take an awful lot longer than it does now (e.g. gene sequencing). Technology advances.
Also, this vaccine was based on an earlier one developed for MERS so they weren't starting from scratch.
> We still don't have vaccines for retroviruses like HIV/Herpes
That's completely irrelevant because they're very different viruses. Vaccination for a coronavirus should be a lot easier.
> But I do have concerns on trying to push out any novel vaccine in less than two years without adequate testing
It is undergoing extensive testing. Tens of thousands of people are currently being given the vaccine. The timeline is not really relevant; what counts is the testing that is carried out.
I'm sure the Oxford University team has given proper consideration to safety.
This may be true with chips and gene sequencing, but is not true for vaccines. The waiting period for vaccines is mainly for safety and efficacy, not waiting on technology like the other two.
We may become more certain some vaccines are safer given intrinsic properties, but that probably won't result in any statistically noticeable difference because it's very hard to tell how a vaccine will behave without actually trying it as far as I understand it.
Why is that? Uneducated guess: because of the rapid mutations of those viruses and the way they go dormant and hide?
The trouble with HIV is during the infection process, it has an reverse transcriptase enzyme and an integrase enzyme, the two of which allow it to build DNA sequences and alter the host DNA. It permanently alters the host, allowing the virus to continue reproducing.
There are some people for which this modification does nothing (long term non-progressives), but the for the majority of human beings, their immune system collapses within a few months or years (without treatment).
To get back on topic, I'd really like someone to explain in some way that makes sense to me (because I've heard none--maybe I'm just incorrigible, thought) how a mandatory vaccine is justifiable for a disease with an extremely high survival rate that elderly people who've already exceeded the average life expectancy are disproportionately at risk for.
Lastly, consider all of the people who have "recovered" but haven't really recovered, this includes the young 20-30 yr old crowds. There's hundreds of support groups now focused on post-corona-syndrome where people are 100+ days into the recovery but still have symptoms, including brain damage, neurological issues, strokes, kidney failures, shortness of breath, etc. It seems as if the older people are dying, and the younger patients are surviving, but with long-term damage.
0.66% of NYC residents have been hospitalized (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page). Antibody tests show that at least 20% of NYC was infected, and that's likely an underestimate (antibodies take weeks to show up and may soon drop to undetectable levels). So the hospitalization rate is at most around 3%.
Once we run out of hospital resources, the death rate will jump 5-10x. If that happens, you're talking 20+ million deaths in the U.S
That's just not going to happen. There was essentially uncontrolled spread in NYC, and the hospitals were strained but not overwhelmed. The hospitalization and death rates in currently hard-hit states are much lower than peak NYC, and may already be at a plateau.
It seems as if the older people are dying, and the younger patients are surviving, but with long-term damage.
This is a real concern, but I'd like data rather than anecdotes.
This shows clear counter evidence to the claim of hospitalization rate being ~20% for all age groups. This CDC data shows a steep increase in the hospitalization rate as age increases.
Not sure where you are getting your information.
Why not build more hospitals?
> there's a good chance this virus will burn out in our population long before a truly safe vaccine comes to market.
That's the reason for the down-votes, and for once I think it's actually appropriate. The rest of the post was fine, but those are some wildly controversial - if not completely incorrect and reckless - assumptions to make. For one, it's too early to make definitive statements like these. As far as I know, public health experts have made it well known the risk factor is enormously high and so it's worth being proactive than reactive. Clearly there's an enormous amount of effort in getting an emergency vaccine out and I would think for good reason. Nobody on HN is qualified to make statements on this, especially if they're not actively studying this disease or they're not a public health expert.
Where did the "mandatory" come from?
If a vaccine is promising but unproven, the sensible thing is to make it available to those who want to take the risk.
I agree that for a mandatory vaccine, you want a high level of certainty.
(What is possible is that schools and even workplaces require proof of vaccination once one is widely available if there is still a widespread virus risk. That could arguably be fairly coercive but it's important to distinguish from being "mandatory.")
> elderly people who've already exceeded the average life expectancy
Letting hundreds of thousands of people (in the US alone) with easily a decade left to live die of a preventable disease is not ethical. What you're writing sounds extremely callous.
Also the numbers of Covid-19 are mainly following a Gompertz model - like a seasonal virus that starts big and then fizzles. The high R-Values people talked about in the beginning aren't a real thing.
Michael Levitt in the beginning already calculated the outbreak in China perfectly. He made good Videos to explain the basic math. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCgPf1SuPNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw2ZTaiN97k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aHrx68IT7o
Maybe take a look at some f'/f in a logchart... It's easy to do - just look at death per day/total.
Some countries are easy to model (e.g. Germany) - US is difficult with policies and outbreaks coming from different sides, ... - but some states are not that difficult to understand)
According to Johns Hopkins in the UK more than 15% of those who get it die, for the US it is 3.7%. The link says those numbers were updated this morning so they are current.
HIV is so fundamentally different that it doesn't make sense to include it as a comparison here.
> there's a good chance this virus will burn out in our population long before a truly safe vaccine comes to market.
The virus isn't just going to "burn out" anytime soon. 143k deaths in the US already, and we likely haven't even hit 10% of the population being infected yet.
Treatments will help pull the death rate downwards, but without a vaccine we're likely looking at multiple hundreds of thousands more deaths.
Coronaviruses are very different. We've rarely had any this deadly before. All vaccines are different; they're not one blanket thing. Smallpox vaccines are attenuated virus (a virus that has mutated to be benign in humans; in the case of Smallpox, the first vaccine by Jenner was injecting people with Horsepox).
Most Influenza vaccines are heat treated/inactivated virus.
In all cases, vaccines try to produce antibodies and force our immune systems to develop a memory for a virus we haven't actually been exposed to. As shown in the links above, this might not work at all for coronavirus.
To some extent, the actual interactions of vaccines, are somewhat opaque. This In A Nutshell video shows a very small part of the adaptive immune system, greatly simplified:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSypUV6QUNw
> The virus isn't just going to "burn out" anytime soon
Exponential growth doesn't go on forever. It has to hit an inflection point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg
The more deadly a virus is, the faster it does burn out. It runs out of hosts to infect or everyone develops an immunity. SARS/MERS may have had lower outbreaks because of how much more dangerous they were.
If you graph fatalities on a logarithmic scale, you'll see we're already well past the inflection point in the US:
https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?data=deaths
The cases are going up, but the fatalities are not, indicating there may be a lot of over-counting. Keep in mind people who test positive but die of a car wreck are counted as COVID19. All these people getting surgery after 3 months are required to get tested just for their surgery, and a positive antibody test counts as an active case, even if they're not sick or have the virus at all.
It's so bad in the UK they've stopped reporting fatality numbers due to issues with the data.
> The more deadly a virus is, the faster it does burn out. It runs out of hosts to infect or everyone develops an immunity. SARS/MERS may have had lower outbreaks because of how much more dangerous they were.
At what point is the virus going to "run out of hosts to infect" or reach a point where "everyone develops an immunity"? Everything I've read from epidemiologists seems to indicate we're a long ways away from that. We're not going to get a free pass from herd immunity anytime soon (https://covid19-projections.com/us estimates that the US is at 8.4% total infection so far), and we can't count on it just burning itself out. It's a bad combination, where it's not deadly enough to quickly burn itself out like SARS/MERS, but has a death rate higher than something like the flu, and is very transmissible.
> The cases are going up, but the fatalities are not, indicating there may be a lot of over-counting
I'm very skeptical of the over-counting claim, without evidence. And I don't think it's quite true to claim that fatalities are not going up. The 7-day rolling average of deaths in the US has been climbing since around July 5th.
SARS and MERS.
> Keep in mind people who test positive but die of a car wreck are counted as COVID19.
I'd like to see evidence that this has happened, that's it's not some freak outlier, and that it has any meaningful impact on the reported death toll. Looking at excess mortality, it looks like deaths have been under-reported, if anything. It's getting tiresome to see people trotting out the anecdote about someone getting in a car wreck and being counted as a CoVID-19 death.
See https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06... for excess mortality in a few countries. Many victims are not counted.
If the UK where really serious about the actual covid death toll they should address the huge discrepancy between the reported covid deaths and the excess mortality during the pandemic. Not a good look for the UK.
The Oxford/AZ (https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/20/ne...) and the Pfizer team (https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/20/mo...) have both reported T Cell responses induced by their vaccines.
Robus T Cell responses should be protective, but we are still mapping that out for SARS-CoV-2 (https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/15/ne...).
They were reported again today. They weren't stopped because they were bad but because there were descrepencies between the counting for each nation of the UK.
This simply isn't true.
I don't think we can wait until the risk is zero, after all the risk of allowing the virus to continue is far from zero. You talk about unknowns, we don't know the long-term impact of the disease either. Damage to the heart and lungs, oxygen deprivation of the brain, the impact extends beyond a boolean live or die.
> There are also calls to perform "challenge trials"[1] in which vaccinated people are deliberately infected with coronavirus. However, there are ethical concerns due to a lack of treatments.
There might be a benefit in pushing it out to over 75s who are at severe risk from the virus (IFR 19%), or even over 65s (3%). Agree that it's not worth the risk of a barely understood vaccine on kids.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[2] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.093195v1
Herpes is not retrovirus. It just have a latent phase where inactive viral DNA is in the cytoplasm of infected neurons.
This sounds like how you get zombies. I’ve seen this movie before.
I strongly disagree with this sentiment. In the ideal world we would have both a treatment and a vaccine, but a vaccine is much preferable: even if it grants immunity for only a year it still allows for better logistics than a treatment. A treatment is also an unknown cost while the cost of producing a vaccine is fairly well know. Also there are loads of people who are at high risk and cannot survive COVID if they got it. Herd immunity and actual immunity from a vaccine is their only option for staying alive. Lastly, your comment makes it sound like steps are being skipped here. They are not. This vaccine along with others is undergoing the same three phase study approach as any other candidate for any other virus. The difference is that sometimes phase 1 and 2 are combined which puts the people in those trials at risk, but based on your comment I don’t see that as being one of your concerns (based on the part about how well yeah a lot of people died but it doesn’t warrant an emergency vaccine). It does not cause risk to anyone else and for successful phase 1 & 2 trials you can assume the vaccine is safe for the populations tested in phase 3. Once all three are cleared, the vaccine is just as safe as any other.
I know to a lot of people it may feel like corners are being cut but I have seen zero evidence for that. We are saving time by doing things like combining phase 1 & 2, expediting review and paperwork by prioritizing these candidates over other drugs, and in this particular case by manufacturing the vaccine while it’s still in trials, gambling that it will actually work. So far the Oxford vaccine looks to be the most promising of all so I would say it’s a good gamble, but then again only a small portion of that $1.2b is mine (coming from US tax dollars and AstraZenica coffers).
A true emergency vaccine is the only one that’s currently approved for use: it’s been approved as an experimental vaccine by the Chinese military for use by the military for one year. That particular vaccine doesn’t have phase 2 or 3 results actually published and the preliminary data from phase 2 doesn’t look as good as the Oxford one. That is the kind of thing I would personally hold off on, but not something that’s gone through all three phases and been independently reviewed.
For me, the things being developed are not 'vaccines' but are a different thing entirely with a similar intended purpose.
>It's really really to early to say yes or no, and the fact that the article tries to make a claim either way, is worrying.
This is exactly what the phase 1 trial (the result which were just released) tries to establish -
>Phase I trials were formerly referred to as “first-in-man studies” but the field generally moved to the gender-neutral language phrase "first-in-humans" in the 1990s;[5] these trials are the first stage of testing in human subjects.[6] They are designed to test the safety, side effects, best dose, and formulation method for the drug.[7] Phase I trials are not randomized, and thus are vulnerable to selection bias.[8]
https://marlin-prod.literatumonline.com/pb-assets/Lancet/pdf...
If I didn't have the context of 2020 and this article, I would swear that was an auto-generated random password.
Seems pretty well-named.
We just don't normally hear about pre-market drugs in mainstream media.
It has been heavily modified, first so it cannot cause infections in people and also to make it "look" more like coronavirus. Scientists did this by transferring the genetic instructions for the coronavirus's "spike protein" - the crucial tool it uses to invade our cells - to the vaccine they were developing.
Assuming everybody got the vaccine in the same instant, which they would not.
> We should still shelter in place, but even turning active cases into carries would reduce loss of life (presuming we continue regular testing so people can KNOW if they are a carrier)
We've all seen how people are behaving right now: "Oh I'm young, forget about grandma". How do you think they'd behave knowing that they've been vaccinated? It's important to consider the sociological conditions in which an intervention is deployed. Unfortunately, our present society has a very large number of self-centred individuals.
The more people take the vaccine, the less society bothers to social distance and other low-tech things, the more dangerous not taking the vaccine becomes.
Amusingly, lives would probably be saved if they had kept the base virus used for vaccination infectious. It's just the common cold, and the side effects are currently only a headache and fever, so getting the vaccination virus secondhand would be better than getting coronavirus, and you'd be protected after.
It would also matter for eradicating the virus. If it keeps circulating, and vaccines only provide protection for less than a lifetime, then we will have to keep vaccinating just about everyone in the world indefinitely. Any place that falls into civil strife could also expect a virus outbreak eventually.
It would still be great to have vaccine that merely made the virus without effect! But eradication would be better.
Which is to say, it'll be like the seasonal flu and not a pandemic. Yeah, we can tolerate that.
Current flu vaccine coverage is 24-50% depending on jurisdiction, once per year. So, aiming at, say, 80% coverage twice per year would be 3-6x the current level of flu vaccination effort.
Not awful, but tiresome.
Are any epidemiologists talking about possibly eliminating it completely? Seems like the toothpaste is out of the tube for that.
We have only eliminated one virus globally (smallpox) but plenty of others have been eliminated nationally. Then to travel to those countries from a country where the disease is endemic you generally need proof of vaccination.
There are also many countries that have basically eliminated the virus at present. They’re not going to want to import the virus just because other countries failed.
Once you have two things the probable future becomes clear: a vaccine, and very fast tests. Combined, they will make it fairly easy for a well governed country to eliminate the virus.
Then, any entering traveler from an endemic country would require proof of vaccination and a quick test at customs to confirm. That would keep the virus out of eliminated countries.
After that it would be a global effort to eradicate the virus country by country, just like we’ve been doing with other diseases such as polio.
A key feature of sars-cov-2 is that it is not like the flu. Coronavirus spreads in clusters and this is containable.
> Although the magnitude of neutralizing antibody (nAb) responses correlated with disease severity, there was a rapid decline in nAb titres in most patients within 3 months after onset of symptoms. [...] However, the consequences on secondary immune responses and their ability to prevent reinfection remain to be determined.
I don't think it's possible to say a yes or no answer if somebody has immunity using a lab test today.
Though, the vaccine is only needed to last long enough to eradicate the virus. If mass application of vaccine can plunge the r-factor well below 1, it should be more than ok if its protection only lasts 3-4 months.
If it's really down to a single company not being able to manufacture enough then it's time to open up the vaccine to licensing and let other companies pile in.
The world is facing a few problems like this, where the structures of the economy are getting in the way of doing real work. Climate change is another one. If cost wasn't an issue, and everyone was paid by some infinite coffer, we'd have switched to green energy years ago and it wouldn't have been controversial at all. Only now that it's cost effective are we switching en masse to green energy, and we're having to drag economies kicking and screaming away from coal even still.
The community seems to be second to capitalism at every turn, and whilst I know it's not a new thought, it's becoming more and more prevalent that we've made societies devoid of the capacity for community effort.
Edit: Thought I'd clarify, my point is that our governments are meant to supply the community capacity through paying for work with our taxes, but often structures that benefit private businesses win out.
More specifically, you're hopeful that the company manufacturing the vaccine would actually open up to licensing, but they don't have to, and the US has consistently shown it's disdain for compulsory licensing. It would be an exception for them to force the company to license a vaccine, and it's not like pharmaceutical companies have an ethical track record in the US. If it came down to money vs community health, I would absolutely expect money to win out in the US. It already does. Worse yet, the US has bullied other countries into tightening their own compulsory licensing laws, in order to protect US pharmaceutical companies.
Either they were symptomless or with good discipline and PPE you can limit its spread quite successfully.
To be clear, higher than in other cruise ships and other meat packing plants.
If the each contaminated person transmits it to two other people, you'll need to keep half of the people immune to each at any single time. If you are doing this by vaccines, you'll need to give it to half of the people on that immunity window.
And you must also syncronize it internationally.
Then you need to administer something like 300 doses per second globally, if you have 1B doses.
This is also assuming the virus doesn’t mutate during that time (it mutates very slowly but it could still happen).
The vaccine really needs to give multi-year protection otherwise it won’t be viable in the long run.
Source: Live in Lansing MI where the nutty politicization of this issue is out of hand and there are redneck “anti-mask” protests seemingly once a month.
[1]: https://cen.acs.org/business/outsourcing/Moderna-picks-Lonza...
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-finalizes-desi...
Moderna has plans to be able to manufacturer 1 billion doses a year. AstraZeneca has announced plans to manufacturer 2 billion doses a year, with plans to produce 300 million doses by the end of 2020. The Chinese firms Sinopharm and Sinovac are ramping up their production right now, and will produce 200-300 million doses by the end of 2020. With all the other firms developing a vaccine it seems highly likely we could produce enough vaccine to vaccinate the entire population of the Earth in a single year. Now distributing and administering that much vaccine is another story, but manufacturing will not likely be the bottle neck.
But, as an alternative to synchronization, you could also require vaccinations for everyone who travels.
If a country gets it under control within its borders, it could require visitors to show proof they either (1) have tested positive for the disease and then recovered or (2) have been vaccinated recently enough (but not too recently) and also tested negative for the disease.
That way, you'd know they do not have it and have some degree of protection against picking it up while traveling to your country.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications...
It's not impossible for countries with a small population, but AFAIK the flu is the largest scale vaccination in the world, and we are talking about something 4 times larger (than those countries that vaccinate the most - how are China and India numbers?).
But then, this seems to be the worst case with a reasonable likelihood. Things will probably be better.
COVID is much scarier than flu, which should encourage people.
Thankfully the R0 of SARS-COV-2 seem to be around 1.4–2.5 (meaning you need ~30% to ~60% recovered), so a vaccine would be actually very effective. I highly suspect "Travel to Europe" (i.e. international travel) may still be delayed for a long bit until we've gotten around to ~50-60% immunized, but it's tough to say.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/52/7/911/299077 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...
He vaguely remembers the case as something from the 50's or the 60's and todya we have better technology all around. But yes, I understand that most labs working on vaccines do take into account the potential difficulties in production.
That will be a really interesting question for the modellers, because vaccinating those who pose the highest danger of spreading the disease might have a much greater impact. If side effects turn out big you might even end up wanting to vaccinate everybody but the elderly.
Governments essentially said "If you can demonstrate reasonable efficacy and safety, go ahead and start mass production. If your Phase III trials fail, we'll make you whole and dump the doses in a landfill."
Otherwise, you had to wait the entire Phase III duration before even starting production, whereas now you'll essentially have viable vaccine on Day 0 when the Phase III trail concludes.
Is anyone optimistic about that?
The "r-factor" (also called R_0, or attack rate), described the rate at which people once exposed to the virus move from S->I. The proportion of patients in (R) should not fundamentally change the r-factor.
That said, I do think your fundamental assessment in that moving more people from (S) directly to (R) would decrease the rate at which the disease spreads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...
It being artificially reduction is kind of given as it a vaccine, but as the basic reproduction number is being used to measure the number of reproductions from each [known] infected person within population groups it seems like THE measure of a vaccine's impact.
You seem to be talking about something else entirely.
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/coronavirus/article24377546...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-fauci-...
I still haven't wrapped my head around antivax...
I mean, isn't that the product of poor education and lack of mandatory vaccination programs?
Where I'm from, you can't even sign-up children in school if they don't have the proper mandatory vaccinations - and school is mandatory, which makes it impossible to evade.
If they don't get the parents because they didn't take their child for vaccines (which is almost impossible because you're assigned a family doctor and he would flag it), they will get them when they'll sign them up for school. If they don't sign them up, social services all over them by then.
I know there are antivax people here, but they basically just avoid taking flu shot, all the rest they had to have them at some point. Hell if they cut themselves and need stitches, they will get a tetanus shot.
It's a tough one in some ways, but more gets down to how you define what an antivaxer is.
I have a friend who will never have another flu shot and be weary of this vaccine - WHY, well he had his first ever flu jab a few years back, which had bad side effects for him and he lost hearing due to it in one ear. Hence, he's very weary of such vaccines now and yet, some people would label him an antivaxer! I don't think he is as he is basing his opinion on self education and more so, experience as well as he don't push his choice decisions onto others.
See medicines and vaccines have side effects, most people won't get any, some will get a few and a very few will have adverse effects.
My worry is those who have had bad experiences and maybe more prone to side effects in some medicines due to genetics etc, get labeled as antivaxers and their very real personal experience is overlooked and they are viewed as crackpots when talking to medical advisers in the future, let alone society.
But then for me an antivaxer is somebody who actively promotes the non-use for everybody period and run with that. Now I don't know anybody like that, but can see how some may of come about via a few edge cases and propergating that onto the whole. That is a case of needing education.
If some people want to make an informed choice about individual vaccines based upon their medical concerns that are real and not anxieties - well, that's how it should work. Though if they actively promote their choice onto others, well, that's not right and what I would class as an antivaxer.
Me, I sent email to to the research folks offering to be a human lab rat if it helped speed up vaccine development, not that i'd call myself a provaxer - just case of the maths made sense and as spoke said - the lives of the many outway the lives of the few. Besides I'm still here :-). But I can respect an informed choice made by some, as long as they don't feel the right to impose that free choice of theirs onto others.
The media has totally blown antivaxers out of proportion. On top of that, there are many people who are very much for MMR, Polio and most of our standard vaccinations, but are weary of newer vaccines like HPV (and get thrown in with all antivaxers).
Some vaccines aren't very effective. I was turning in my vaccination records for school once and I was missing my 3rd Hep B shot. You have to have 3 of those in a few months, and if you miss one, you have to start over. A biologist I knew said it only had a 60% take rate, and was one of the most common vaccines that had to be taken again for hospital staff (who are given antibody tests to see which vaccines they need).
And on top of all of that, look at what happens when a vaccine is rushed. In the 1970s, 60 Minutes did a documentary on the rush to make a Swing Flu vaccine. Millions were vaccinated with no ill effects, but there were healthy adults that did have long term, permanent neurological damage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMUeZ4vz6cU
I had to stop getting flu shots because they'd make the entire side of my body on the injection arm, hurt for days. I'd get extreme fatigue and soreness. It wasn't as bad as the flu of course, but it was painful enough I decided to stop getting them. I had an asshole friend tell me it was psychosomatic (all in my head). I get all my other shots (including Typhoid and Meningitis when travelling abroad) and had no adverse reaction.
So I make an active choice that I'm not going to do flu vaccines.
This entire situation is dangerous because we're talking about personal autonomy vs some ideological concept of communal good; and we're not discussing it with the delicate discussion and nuance it deserves. You can throw around terms like "antivax" and "antiscience" and it's a religious statement at that point, because you're not addressing the very real ethical concerns people have.
Hep B is effective and the effectiveness window is being extended as time goes on. When I took Hep A/B vaccine I was told that it would last for 10 years. Right now the estimate is at 30 years.
This also affects recommended vaccinations, like HPV. In Denmark, media coverage of alleged side effects led to a substantial drop (or delay) in vaccination against HPV (Hansen et. al, 2018).
They were talking about long term protection. Realistically it only needs to last a year or so. After all the flu vaccine is only valid for a year because it evolves so quickly.
As for safety, that's the entire point of these three phases of trials. seeing if its effective is a nice bonus, but in reality to see if there are any problems like there were with the dengue fever jab.
I commented on that part. And yes, it seems to be safe in healthy subjects (Phase I). The OP wants to move from Phase I to production immediately. I take an exception to that approach and I agree with you that there is a point in doing the three phases. The later of which actually focus on effectiveness as well.
Shipping something that's not effective is counterproductive. Being vaccinated would affect people's behaviour, if you told them that they should not change their behaviour back to pre c19, you would be just faced with questions on what's the point of vaccination.
We can ship placebo right now.
This was just a Phase I (healthy subjects) and most of drugs/vaccines are successful at this stage.
Drugs are not software, you cannot ship a broken product and then fix it. Even if it is safe, but not effective, it would do more harm than no vaccination, as vaccinated people would change their behaviour.
If this turns out to work in the short run, we should deploy it. Not wait 2 years while the pandemic rages to produce the perfect science paper.
We said that before, and we got Pandemrix.
Vaccination is safe. It's important we get as many people vaccinated as possible, and one of the ways we do that is by maintaining the safety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix
https://www.narcolepsy.org.uk/resources/pandemrix-narcolepsy
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
That is obviously much better than the current Covid situation.
Somewhere in the middle things would get iffy and ethically interesting. The front-line medical worker is probably well-compensated. The essential workers at the grocery stores and warehouses are not.
Hopefully the vaccines are safe and effective and all of this remains a hypothetical.
I may not have articulated my point well.
You may have misunderstood my point.
The death toll from COVID lockdown is so much higher - from excess suicides, poverty, crime and violence - that anything we can do to alleviate the panic and get back to normal life is worth it.
That's the same false dichotomy we've been hearing since the pandemic began.
I mean, in an ideal population set where people acted rationally, it might be. In the real world, where fear motivates counterproductive behavior, it’s hard to imagine a different scenario where you don’t slow the economy (associated harms) while trying to mitigate the virus.
We know that many people do not have comorbidities.
The mean age of patients admitted to ICU is 60.6 years (white people), 55.4 years (non-white).
88% / 93% of people were able to live without assistance in daily activities before admission.
How much more can we expect if things simply “get back to normal”. Hard to say but obviously a gigantic loss. I’m also highly skeptical of claims that #1 suicide, crime, violence have increased significantly. Source? Poverty/economic disruption is obviously a massive damage that cannot be understated either.
But I’m highly highly skeptical that countries who try to ignore the problem like Brazil, USA will end up economically more successful than countries with strong countermeasures like South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, and many others. Beat the virus to fix the economy.
At some point there is an inflection point where it makes sense to “give up” and accept that countermeasures are more costly than the benefit they provide. Clearly every day we delay and have high rates of infection, and the longer the vaccine takes, we move closer to the “give up” side of the calculation. I’m not at all convinced we’ve reached that point yet and we certainly hadn’t reached it at the point the federal administration gave up.
https://mobile.twitter.com/erictopol/status/1276153119492186...
Except those people don't pay with money, they pay with blood.
Sure, there have been rumours about the Lancet paper for a few days, maybe these were priced in already - and AstraZeneca has promised to manufacture it at cost or near cost. Still weird the market reacted this way
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/astrazeneca-...
https://www.ig.com/en/trading-strategies/-buy-the-rumour--se...
And some bioteh companies with mRNA vaccines in phase 1/2 trials like Moderna and Biontech, or protein treatment like Synairgen have seen share prices skyrocket.
I guess the assumption is they will be collecting fees from the IP and/or future contracts for other drugs if this works out.
As a result, we should expect that most companies will only make a token effort.
If all goes well, we should be looking at major relief by this year's end.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-oxford...
While the news is encouraging, I think we need to pump the brakes a bit. It is very common for vaccine candidates to show promising cellular results (formation of neutralizing antibodies) and then utterly fall apart during actual efficacy testing (not actually prevent infection in people, or even actually make the infection worse when it happens). This is why most vaccines take 10-15 years to develop.
The paper (I'm sure it's been posted somewhere in thread). Surprisingly readable (if you have a basic understanding of immunology and Google), go check it out.
The TL;DR is they administered the vaccine to many people and compared the immune response, as measured by various immunology assays, and it elicited a noticeable response for every assay very close to the same responses from actual COVID patients. There were plenty of mild to moderate side effects, but they were reduced quite a bit using paracetamol (Tylenol, basically)
”Is it safe?
Yes, but there are side-effects. There were no dangerous side-effects from taking the vaccine, however, 70% of people on the trial developed either fever or headache. The researchers say this could be managed with paracetamol.”
This sounds like really good news, anyone with medical background disseminate this further?
Edit: here is the lancet article posted on /r/COVID19 sub and extract
https://www.thelancet.com/lancet/article/s0140-6736(20)31604...
Background:
The pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) might be curtailed by vaccination. We assessed the safety, reactogenicity, and immunogenicity of a viral vectored coronavirus vaccine that expresses the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2.
Methods
We did a phase 1/2, single-blind, randomised controlled trial in five trial sites in the UK of a chimpanzee adenovirus-vectored vaccine (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) expressing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein compared with a meningococcal conjugate vaccine (MenACWY) as control. Healthy adults aged 18–55 years with no history of laboratory confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection or of COVID-19-like symptoms were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 at a dose of 5×10¹⁰ viral particles or MenACWY as a single intramuscular injection. A protocol amendment in two of the five sites allowed prophylactic paracetamol to be administered before vaccination. Ten participants assigned to a non-randomised, unblinded ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 prime-boost group received a two-dose schedule, with the booster vaccine administered 28 days after the first dose. Humoral responses at baseline and following vaccination were assessed using a standardised total IgG ELISA against trimeric SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, a muliplexed immunoassay, three live SARS-CoV-2 neutralisation assays (a 50% plaque reduction neutralisation assay [PRNT50]; a microneutralisation assay [MNA50, MNA80, and MNA90]; and Marburg VN), and a pseudovirus neutralisation assay. Cellular responses were assessed using an ex-vivo interferon-γ enzyme-linked immunospot assay. The co-primary outcomes are to assess efficacy, as measured by cases of symptomatic virologically confirmed COVID-19, and safety, as measured by the occurrence of serious adverse events. Analyses were done by group allocation in participants who received the vaccine. Safety was assessed over 28 days after vaccination. Here, we report the preliminary findings on safety, reactogenicity, and cellular and humoral immune responses. The study is ongoing, and was registered at ISRCTN, 15281137, and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04324606.
Findings
Between April 23 and May 21, 2020, 1077 participants were enrolled and assigned to receive either ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (n=543) or MenACWY (n=534), ten of whom were enrolled in the non-randomised ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 prime-boost group. Local and systemic reactions were more common in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group and many were reduced by use of prophylactic paracetamol, including pain, feeling feverish, chills, muscle ache, headache, and malaise (all p<0·05). There were no serious adverse events related to ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. In the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group, spike-specific T-cell responses peaked on day 14 (median 856 spot-forming cells per million peripheral blood mononuclear cells, IQR 493–1802; n=43). Anti-spike IgG responses rose by day 28 (median 157 ELISA units [EU], 96–317; n=127), and were boosted following a second dose (639 EU, 360–792; n=10). Neutralising antibody responses against SARS-CoV-2 were detected in 32 (91%) of 35 participants after a single dose when measured in MNA80 and in 35 (100%) participants when measured in PRNT50. After a booster dose, all participants had neutralising activity (nine of nine in MNA80 at day 42 and ten of ten in Marburg VN on day 56). Neutralising antibody responses correlated strongly with antibody levels measured by ELISA (R²=0·67 by Marburg VN; p<0·001).
Interpretation
ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 showed an acceptable safety profile, and homologous boosting increased antibody responses. These results, together with the induction of both humoral and cellular immune responses, support largescale evaluation of this candidate vaccine in an ongoing phase 3 programme.
So the idea is that the vaccine would still be potentially useful to those who have already had the disease.
It is not known how long immunity from having covid-19 lasts, and there have already been a few cases of apparent re-infection.
So yes, they would likely benefit from a vaccine.
https://www.vox.com/2020/7/12/21321653/getting-covid-19-twic...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-doctor-diagnosed-with-...
This is not yet known about covid-19. But the claim that you can get it again "three months later" is eye-catching in how short a period that is, and hopefully is quite rare.
I am curious to know whether the immunity to covid-19 will become stronger or weaker if those people who've already recovered from covid-19 get a vaccine.
Even in those that do develop antibodies, they are finding those antibodies are undetectable after some short time period.
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/features/treating-disease-wit...
The article says none are currently available as treatments for any infectious disease.
It's highly dependent on the disease, how it spreads, etc. But it is a thing.
edited with some references
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-vaccin...
In a very limited test of a small number of monkeys who were directly injected with high levels of the virus, those monkeys still had the virus in their noses and might have been able to pass it on (in theory).
That has very little value in telling us what the vaccine will do in humans in the real world. No one will know until the Phase 3 trials are complete. It's still possible that the vaccine will be totally effective, partially effective or completely ineffective in protecting humans. That's why we need the Phase 3 trial results to know if this vaccine "works".
Honestly I'm just guessing here. I suspect this is not a real concern.
> However, all these approaches are at the absolute boundary of science and have not been proven to work before. More traditional methods of vaccine development are also being investigated. The company Valneva is taking the whole coronavirus, inactivating it and then inject it.
One name for approaches "at the absolute boundary of science" is research. Only one company is named as developing an actual vaccine. We need new category names for the many competing treatments which are still in research phases, including those which utilize genetic engineering.
I understand that tons of resources are being poured into making a vaccine, which will make developing this vaccine a lot faster.
However, this still makes me worry that the media ( and the UK government in part ) is showing false potential false hopes to people that read this article. Yes, we might get a vaccine next year, but we might never get a vaccine either.
One in six people (in the UK) said they'd refuse a vaccine if it became available, and another one in six weren't sure. (YouGov poll)
It might make distribution to reach herd immunity difficult.
Remember hydrochloroquine?
That said, mass availability of anything by November is probably optimistic.
There's a big difference between the hydroxychloroquine fiasco and a developed vaccine. Hydroxychloroquine was something that showed early promise and seized upon by one political side but when it didn't live up to the hype it was seized upon by the other political side.
A vaccine is developed over time and the results released for all to see at each stage in the development. It's much harder to over-hype a vaccine and I think politicians learned their lesson.
IMO, in the US at least, if you refuse the vaccine then insurance should require cost of Covid19 treatment to be 100% patient paid.
That would be the most unfortunate irrational, anti-science behaviour that people could have, especially given the criticism of the same administration as anti-scientific.
I distinctly remember reading something that said 60% was the minimum threshold required to ensure that the virus spread as a greatly reduced rate.
HTT targets for influenza is 40% while SARS requires 80%.
Workplaces are going to require people to have the vaccine come back to work if only for liability reasons. I haven't run into workplaces requiring a flu shot and I've worked food service my whole life.
The rest of us will be fine, right?
On the other hand, Covid19 is affecting the economy and we're not having any of that in the US after the shutdown devastation so maybe a law requiring a vaccine is in the cards.
edit: thinking about it for a second, i don't see a law requiring it working. The lunatics would go crazy, there would be states refusing to enforce the law. Maybe some sort of incentive would work better, like a federal tax credit for proof of vaccination or something.
1. This vaccine race seems like "first one gets eternal glory" scenario, which might pressurise scientists to take shortcuts, which may be bad.
2. Even with successful vaccine trials, wouldn't take atleast an year to setup supply chain capable of distribution?
3. Virus mutates very fast, is it possible that all these early vaccine trials resulting in super virus which can't be killed by any kind of immune system.
2. No. Google around for this; there's plenty of info on how this can be done more quickly. Also, "even if we find a vaccine it will take a year or more to produce it at scale" is no reason not to develop one or to celebrate progress in such development.
3. Possible? Uh, sure, yeah, most things are possible. Probable? I'm not aware of any evidence suggesting that "early vaccine trials result in super virus" is a remotely probable scenario. If you are aware of any such evidence, please post it here because I'd like to read it and update my view accordingly.
My understanding is that at least some of the vaccines are being produced at scale while the trials are still ongoing, in the hopes that they will be successful and a huge supply will be needed.
The reality is, no vaccine is 100% effective (immune response isn't a binary thing), and the are lots of people that can't be vaccinated for medical reasons. Every person who is not vaccinated by choice is wilfully exposing others to risk.
Why is COVID-19 different where the expectation is that one vaccine will prove a panacea. The virus has already shown that it can mutate similar to the flu vaccine.
This should be compared more to something like the H1N1 outbreak, which was a single influenza virus that was particularly deadly for some subset of people. That was just one type of influenza.
if that makes any sense?
the yearly flu vaccines are tweaks to an already understood vaccine, (minor releases) Sometimes there are major releases but thats for a jab that targets a different class of flu (h5n1 vs h1n2)
this is an entirely new vaccine, for a virus that has never had a vaccine, so its more like a v1.0 release on a new platform.
[quote]
Is it safe?
Yes, but there are side-effects.
There were no dangerous side-effects from taking the vaccine, however, 70% of people on the trial developed either fever or headache.
The researchers say this could be managed with paracetamol.
[/quote]
Unrelated PS: What's the deal with these one-sentence "paragraphs", BBC? I think I know the answer: it is the "modern medicine" for lack of attention spans. (What about the side effects to this...)
Unrelated PS-2: I didn't notice that someone else here has already quoted the above part. Sorry for the duplication.
Obviously, the concern would be that these might not be the _only_ side effects, and this is why vaccines are subject to extensive testing. But if this is all that emerges, that's really good news.
This sort of thing is a common side effect of the seasonal flu vaccine, too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/articles/art201310101127407...
> The vaccine - called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 - is being developed at unprecedented speed.
Seriously? Did they ask a 9 year old to pick a nickname?
the 'nickname' follows a standard nomenclature for this kind of thing.
Chadox does sound like a new brand of underarm deodorant though
Philosophy of French '60s cartoon birds eerily similar to modern software development methodologies