First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK

I'm hardly anti-vaxxer, but I'm going to wait this one out until a lot of people went head-first into it.

I take my vaccines like I take my software upgrades: no pre-releases of system-critical ones.

Oh well, if this one doesn't work, perhaps we can try again with the Oxford vaccine heh

Did you have one of the Tylenol XX formulations with other active ingredients mixed in, perhaps?

As for the cause of death, FullFact has this to say:

When completing a death certificate, the responsible medical professional is asked to determine which conditions may have contributed to death. They are also asked to determine “the disease or injury that initiated the train of events directly leading to death” and this is called the “underlying cause”.[0]

So deaths that were caused by COVID-19 will be reported as such, and that's different from the number of people that died with COVID-19.

Note also that it's a criminal offence to knowingly report an incorrect cause of death on a death certificate.

[0] https://fullfact.org/health/causes-of-death-october-2020/

1) Died within 28 days of a +ve test

2) Died within 60 days of a +ve test (in England, but not elsewhere)

3) Death certificate mentions covid

4) Excess deaths above that expected

Then there's the "date reported" and "date of death". The date reported is the day the notice reaches the death registrar. That can be within an hour or so of actual death, or can take months. Most are done within about 5 days.

For November, in the UK, there were an average

418 deaths occurred per day in the 28 day after a +ve test and 396 deaths reported

410 deaths per day on the death certificate

In England alone

28 days: 354 (occurred), 335 (reported)

60 days: 380 (occurred), 358 (reported)

Excess deaths: +251 (5 year average), +310 (vs minimum), +191 (vs maximum)

If the majority of those deaths were people being hit by a bus, you'd expect the 60 day number to be about double the 28 day number

You could, for example, read the story you linked, which states: "Despite health officials knowing the man died in a motorcycle crash, it is unclear whether or not his death was removed from the overall count in the state."

So it's a nothing story, with no statement of fact included at all. Just "unclear whether or not" against repeated statements by state officials that "not."

So I don't think those are really standard components, there are a lot of ways to create different systems here with different properties.

As a more general comment on this concern about additives, this is typically targeted at vaccines with adjuvants. Adjuvants are designed to create a stronger immune response, the lipids here are not adjuvants and as far as I understand the mRNA vaccines don't contain any adjuvants. I don't agree with the general concerns about adjuvants (though of course each vaccine has to prove safety in the studies on their own), but they are an additive with an inherently higher risk than something more inert. The immune system is extremely complex and highly dangerous.

Also the increased rate of narcolepsy was 0.005%. That's why it took several months before anyone noticed it.

Additionally the flu itself can cause the same kind of narcolepsy, which means that this vaccine was worse than other vaccines, but still potentially better than no vaccine at all.

This seems at odds with the gung-ho "it's 100% safe" rhetoric of our politicians.

I am by no means an anti-vaxxer, but I'm already finding it creepy the way any concerns are simply being dismissed. It's also just bad policy: it means that any unexpected side-effects that do emerge (even if very rare / not serious) will look much worse and immediately stink of a cover-up.

What's wrong with saying: "We are confident, to a reasonable degree of certainty, that the risk of taking this vaccine is lower than the risk of contracting Covid"? Not "This vaccine is definitely safe". I am sick of politicians treating the electorate as if they are morons who can't understand the slightest bit of nuance.

As you mention, vaccines can cause harm and have done in the past. Some degree of caution might be warranted.

Fauci had to walk back[0] comments about the UK "rushing" the approval, stating

"The point that I was really trying to make [...] in the United States there is such a considerable amount of tension of pushing back on the credibility of the safety and of the efficacy that if we in the United States had done it as quickly as the UK did [...] that if we had for example had approved it yesterday or tomorrow there would have been push-back on an already scrutinising society that has really in some respects in the United States too much scepticism about the process."

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55177948

I found a neat link a year ago about how the medical system happily pays for fabulously-expensive interventions, but won't pay for things patients actually need: "Which Interventions Can Be Paid For: The Explanatory Power of 'Prasad’s Law'"- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21728864

Otherwise all modern life would screech to a halt. For example, please stop using all new tech products developed in the last 10 years. And all the things developed with new materials science in the last 10 years.

We'd be back to the stone age. For these cases we measure short term effects and we extrapolate based on similar materials, structures, etc.

It's extremely rare for bridges to fail. I certainly wouldn't expect a bridge to fail given modern safety standards.

You might have marginally more confidence in the bridge after a few hundred thousand cars, but we have processes in place to be confident within reasonable doubt that things are safe before that.

No one is claiming that anything is "100% safe". That's an unachievable level of confidence. If everyone waited for a hundred thousand other people to do anything we'd never get anywhere.

It probably says something that neither of the ‘new medicines’ you cite (neither of which are or were vaccines) are >30 years old. Thalidomide was banned before most people on here were born.

There’s reason for scepticism in all things - but scepticism for its own sake, and without any evidence other than association is probably less than helpful.

I've been lurking here for at least 10 years and consider this to be the best place to discuss everything openly. But this sensivity to question anything related to vaccine is beyond ridiculous. Even asking what the side effects are like OP did gets you downvoted.

And by the way, I will take the vaccine asap because of my health issues, but this doesn't mean we can't even ask questions about it.

That is significant testing. It is correct that you might not see a 1 in 500,000 side-effect in testing, but a 1 in 500,000 adverse effect is probably a risk factor that most people could accept.

> And yes, these vaccines are doing something "magical". We've never had an mRNA vaccine rolled out to the general public before.

Our cells regularly process strands of mRNA by the billion. I don't believe the vaccine is doing anything particularly "magical". It's completely right that we should test that, but I don't think there's any reason to be more concerned than any other new type of treatment.

To compare, there were more than 70,000 excess deaths in the UK since start of pandemics. Around 60 times more deaths than, in the case of vaccine, those still living with side effects.

But these side effects were apparently the strongest in just a part of the population: 4-18, which is 11 million, resulting is estimated 200 people with side effects.

Covid-19 luckily affects exactly that part of population less, but even then I'd guess that Covid-19 already made more damage to more than 200 people in it.

And that small number of cases just can't be detected unless the trial covers enough of those affected. If the total effect is 200 cases in the whole population, a trial would have to be performed on at least one 20th of it: as much as 600,000 children would have to be a part of the trial to even detect that issue. Not to mention that it took two years to recognize the issue.

Now, for the trial to recognize the problem, half would have to be placebo group. That gives once all outside of the trial are counted 97.5% of people unprotected for two years.

In the case of whole population, and even waiting for only 10 months, there would still be 68,000 deaths more if that kind of trial would be a condition for the acceptance of vaccine.

mRNA vaccines had also (limited) human testing before these trials in the past years (mostly Phase 1).

That could be. Hopefully it's understandable that I didn't come to that conclusion because the article does not attribute those words to anyone.

> The vaccines would be a current and global talking point. It's natural that the first post-testing vaccines would be a significant moment, that someone involved would feel it was of historic note, and that a publication would use that phrasing to accentuate the story's weight.

Yeah, I suppose, but it's still weird to me. I don't care about the details of the first publicly administered dose. What really matters to me is that doses are now publicly available (kind of, depending on need for now).

Nothing about the "first" dose strikes me as being of historical note other than the timestamp and the milestone it represents. But I guess that's a matter of opinion and a lot of people seem to disagree with me.

The rates are in an excel file linked on this page. Visitors pay 150% of the published rate. https://improvement.nhs.uk/resources/national-tariff/

Can you imagine the shit storm if some wealth person got vaccinated ahead of the doctors treating dying Covid patients. Ain't gonna happen.

The comment says 'vaccines that aren't available in India' of which I'm sure there may well be plenty, just not necessarily the COVID one.

But does anyone actually know what these pre-sale contracts look like? They must have some wiggle room in case production doesn't go as well as planned... are there just penalties for late delivery to specific customers, or explicitly tied to total production, or did they literally sell places in the queue, or what?

There are 13555k millionaires outside of Europe and US. The 1.9 billion paid by the US government for 100million viles pales in front of what pfizer could earn by catering to the rich.

So, again, my question stands, why wouldn’t pfizer sell directly to customers? What binds them to just deal with governments alone? I ask this as a humble non-millionaire (just to clarify that I wouldn’t benefit from such a scheme in any way) :)

My fiancée's parent's can't get it until phase 3 in their state, but they could both get it in phase 1b in my parent's state.

Sure covid will probably continue to exist, just like H1N1 exists

Australia is also not even letting citizens leave the country without special permission. I don't see them loosening up until there's actual herd immunity via vaccination in the country.

It's possible. There is no rabies in the UK, for exactly this reason.

Victoria was swamped yet has not had a case for 30 days now. Cross-border travel varies depending on the status of each state, but is tracked and quarantine enforced at various levels if it's available.

Testing is freely available and fairly fast.

Nationwide, there is currently one locally acquired case over the last 7 days, and 74 from overseas in the same period.

Presumably we'll bubble with NZ at some point and carefully go from there, plus see how the availability of vaccines starts to change the equation beyond that. In my circles, people are keen to travel again, but everyone is pretty matter of fact about the situation and curious about timings rather than desperate to open up.

Why has it worked so well here? I don't know the full answer, but by and large people have been very responsible. The last time I was at an airport, back in early February, every single person was wearing a mask, and in lots of public places the majority of people continue to do so. Mask wearing has not been politicised here. Also every shopping mall and most restaurants/public places scan you for temperature on entry and have a book where you can (optionally) write down your name or register with an app to be notified if it is later discovered an infected person has been there the same day you were.

> Countries may gain time in the short-term as they limit travel to fight the new coronavirus pandemic, but the World Health Organization thinks overall that “it doesn't help to restrict movement," a top adviser to the U.N. health agency's chief said Thursday.

https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/13/world-health-organizatio...

In colloquial usage, asymptomatic encompasses presymptomatic. In technical usage, they are different.

If you develop symptoms, then when you were a carrier before then, you were presymptomatic, rather than asymptomatic.

We used to think true asymptomatic infections (never develop any symptoms but test positive) were ~50% of those infected. More recent research puts it at closer to ~20%. Again, some reporting bungled this by reporting studies from controlled populations (like a cruise ship) before they knew if cases were asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic, causing people to quote the number as the former, when it was really a mix.

COVID spreads like wildfire by pre-symptomatic people. There are mountains of evidence to support this. Spread by asymptomatic people is speculation.

> Of course, whether you go on to develop symptoms or not, its still highly pertinent information if asymptomatic spread is not a major driver of infection.

Not sure, but I think you may be using the word "asymptomatic" to denote pre-symptomatic in this sentence.

> As long as you self isolate upon symptom onset that should be enough.

It is not enough.

And the viral load is high two days before the symptoms onset. If you want a proper RCT about it, good luck approving it in an ethics committee.

The calculated R0 does not support this theory. Measles works this way. R0 for Measles is > 10

> that current public health interventions orientate around isolating individuals whether they are symptomatic, asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic

Everywhere, the restrictions are higher if you were tested and/or is suspected of having Covid. Of course a lot of people DNGAF about the restrictions, which is part of the problem.

Again, if your theory that people showing no symptoms do not transmit the disease then it should be super easy to go around and start finding people spreading it. But it isn.t

Exactly. I have occasionally runny nose combined with sporadic sneezes and coughs pretty much every winter. If someone like my had so "mild" COVID symptoms they would consider themselves asymptomatic (paucisymptomatic?), and rightfully so. (My actual COVID symptoms were not as mild, but not very serious either.)

It's remarkable the number of people anecdotally reporting similar symptoms - often out of character for otherwise robustly healthy individuals. I'm guessing some sort of psychosomatic response to the year's stresses.

That being said it seems the most specific symptom is loss of smell/taste so unless you have that it's probably something else (disclaimer: not a doctor and this is not medical advice)

Additionally, for the immune system to respond, the infection has to happen first -- the virus has to spread through the cells of your body. We already know that the people are indeed infectious before their immune system response makes the symptoms. The delay in response has to exist even among the vaccinated people.

So what is sought after is a proof of sterilizing immunity, and there's no such still. I've read that the UK plans to evaluate the evidence for that in the following months by tracking the people who get the vaccine, which sounds good.