Coronavirus: Putin says vaccine has been approved for use | Hacker News Reader

Coronavirus: Putin says vaccine has been approved for use

bbc.com

23 pointsamai16 comments

This reminds me a lot about the Moscow theatre siege (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisi...): they thought they had the best stuff, and ended up killing so many.

Basically, Putin just renamed what we usually consider to be a Phase 3 trial to "general availability", while knowing that availability will most likely be seriously constrained anyway in the next months, effectively limiting the deployment of this vaccine to some tens of thousands of hand-selected people, which - there's the catch - is very much in the ballpark of how many participants proper Phase 3 studies also have.

This gives him a quick propaganda win, because it looks like Russia was somehow further along in the race for getting a vaccine broadly available, while they actually aren't - they're just jeopardizing their citizens' health for that quick win, because I bet the early adopters of this "approved vaccine" will not be monitored as well as participants in a proper Phase 3 study commonly are. Also, with no control group inoculated with a placebo, the results are not going to be as conclusive as those of a real study.

This is all based on my assumption that Russia will be unable to snap their fingers and have millions of doses of this vaccine ready within weeks. Unfortunately I haven't seen any reliable information regarding the production constraints and timetable of this particular vaccine. Does anyone know more about that?

Some countries may be realizing that they can’t afford to drag along for ‘just a few more months’ while their economy is tanking. There is some risk here but it avoids other risks.

The thing is that just "approving" a vaccine doesn't actually avoid anything, especially not economic slowdowns.

Actually having a vaccine widely available at scale and having it injected into a significant proportion of the population is what allows you to avoid all the direct negative effects of COVID-19 (with the economic angle being in large parts actually an indirect effect, since any country is dependent on the world economy and not just whether its own citizens are susceptible to COVID-19 or not). That's why I asked whether there's any tangible information regarding production timetable and availability schedules of this particular vaccine, which are in my opinion much more important to its impact than whether Putin - or anyone else really - signs off on it or not.

> Officials have said they plan to start mass vaccination in October.

Sounds like a better timetable than the wests ever shifting promise that now seems to be scheduled for ‘as soon as mid-2021’.

Better how?

"Vladimir Putin, the country's president, announced one of his daughters has already been inoculated."

https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/11/vladimir-putin-claims-da...

I get the sense that the US regulatory pipeline is seriously slow - approvals take indefensibly long, killing innovation and progress in medicine, treatments, etc. that would help people that can't wait around because they're dying.

But this seems to be the opposite.

Russia Covid-19 Vaccine Release Could Put People at Risk, Industry Body Warns - Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-10/russian-c...

Putin is holding up the propaganda mirror. The vaccine is called Sputnik 5 and the syringe-race is called.

Wow. Putin is basically making Russia a test bed for the rest of the world. Imagine if they start inoculating people en masse and it just plain works. Would the rest of the world follow?

Imagine if people die en masse 6 months later?

or even if they don't die, they could develop many kinds of problems; that's why testing vaccines must take time and procedure, it doesn't seem to be the case here..

I'm not a doctor, but I'm curious how likely that is? It seems to me that with a vaccine most problems would show up quickly after receiving the vaccine, but I imagine we do testing the way we do for a reason. Does anyone know of examples of failed vaccines that caused problems months after receiving it?

Edit: Found some: https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/here-s-why-we-can-t-rush-...

Although some of these seem to be production errors.

There was for example research not so long ago about an H1N1 vaccine and cases of narcolepsy: it seems it was finally determined that the vaccine is not a cause, but it was important to verify (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix#Narcolepsy_investiga...)

No, the Pandemrix vaccine was almost certainly the cause of the narcolepsy epidemic in Finland and Sweden in 2009-2013. The case seems to have been a very unfortunate coincidence of a specific booster used in this vaccine (squalene), genetic susceptibility of the population (large incidence of a specific autoimmunity mutation), and one protein in this specific vaccine evoking an autoimmune reaction against orexin-producing neurons in the brain. Orexin is a naturally occurring hormone in our bodies that regulates wakefulness, and the lack of which is the cause of type I narcolepsy.

My understanding is had any one of these three unfortunate factors (the bad booster, the bad population genetics, or the bad protein) been removed, the vaccine would have likely been safe. Further, only children and adolescents were ever susceptible to the harmful side effect.

The specific vaccine (Pandemrix) was not used in the United States, as the CDC notes.

One of the risk is Antibody-dependent enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement

> ADE has been observed in both severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) animal models allowing the respective viruses to enter cells expressing Fc𝛾R including myeloid lineage cells.

Those virus are similar enough to be cautious, and test the covid-19 vaccine carefully.

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