Germans are turning down Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine
thetimes.co.uk
thetimes.co.uk
They should have emphasized that they are making sure everybody can get it and that it is the norm to get it, like with a measles vaccination. I also think there should be a "yes I am vaccinated" campaign, and they should give away a certain amount of doses in a lottery. The vaccination is not something to fear, but to be excited about. I think the current strategy is a psychological fail.
Not sure why you got down-voted. Yes, the government PR somehow completely failed on the vaccination part. But then, this is really in line with most of it's actions over the last 12 months. Seeing how the current "lockdown" turns out, it's a miracle we got it right in March 2020.
For me, what I find even worse than the vaccination PR disaster is the seemingly total lack of efficiency on the public health front. Reports from the field still are delayed 3-4 days. That's stuff that could have been fixed with appropriate software within a couple of months. Also there still seems to be no concerted effort to collect a statistically sound random sample to learn about the real infection rates.
I’m not sure if it’s true but it has always made me chuckle.
I think EU is in for a rude awakening about the extent of Russian hybrid warfare in these countries and whole Balkans.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)31866-3/full...
https://www.politico.eu/article/mystery-deepens-over-russian...
"Between Sept 7 and Nov 24, 2020, 21 977 adults were randomly assigned to the vaccine group (n=16 501) or the placebo group (n=5476)."
Aside from this the politicians really bungled the marketing. First it was claimed it doesn't work in the elderly (which wasn't true, just illiteracy), then they said the younger people will only get this vaccine, not the other ones. It's bound to make people suspicious.
Maybe they should learn from Frederick the Great of Prussia: "Trying a less direct approach to encourage his subjects to begin planting potatoes, Frederick used a bit of reverse psychology: he planted a royal field of potato plants and stationed a heavy guard to protect this field from thieves. Nearby peasants naturally assumed that anything worth guarding was worth stealing, and so snuck into the field and snatched the plants for their home gardens. Of course, this was entirely in line with Frederick's wishes." [1]
Quick search yields
> “Between 10% and 15% of those vaccinated may have side-effects from this vaccination, but it is only a feverish state, fevers, nausea and within 12 hours it goes away.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-europe-as...
https://m.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/corona-impfung-von-...
It's in German, the doctor still recommends getting vaccinated.
They seem to be mostly effective, albeit still giving less of an immune response than would be possible.
Also Curevac is working together with GSK on a multi mutant mRNA vaccine. Since the mRNA approach seems to be flexible it's reasonable to assume this will allow quick adaptations like this.
https://www.curevac.com/en/2021/02/03/gsk-and-curevac-to-dev...
I don't think that plays much if any role in German public perception. There is no negative association with the British there.
The problem is that a major newspaper misunderstood the efficacy statistics, and now you've got many, many people who believe AZ has barely an effect.
Obviously this is a hugely popular opinion with the "Querdenker" who are a loose mishmash of covid deniers and "I want my kid to go to school, let those old people die".
I don't know how well you can actually compare these 2 numbers and if those are even the most important numbers, but that's part of the problem: Most people only look at these numbers and that's why they would prefer the Moderna vaccine.
In addition the pro-EU/German press have been telling people for years that the UK will wither outside the EU and even that there would be medicine shortages in the UK. Now immediately after leaving, the UK is drastically ahead in its vaccination programme. Some European politicians reacted to the UK buying up the supplies in advance by spuriously claiming that the vaccine doesn't work. As a consequence there's now quite some shock in German society about this state of affairs.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/28/best-advertiseme...
One important thing, though, is that the amount of information in a comment makes a huge difference. Information (that is, new information that people haven't already heard many times) acts as flame retardant. If the GP comment had contained that, I wouldn't have posted a moderation reply.
By contrast, when a comment brings up an inflammatory topic in a one-liner sort of way, it leaves a lot more scope for people to project their own interpretation onto the comment, and what drives such projections are often their own strong feelings about the divisive topic. You can see this in the flamewar direction the thread took here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26229255.
The main thing to consider in terms of comment quality is the expected value of its future subthread. Having more information in the root comment increases this. Low-information comments about inflammatory topics have low expected value. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Yes, because the public conversation about vaccine effectiveness is very simplistic. The first-approved vaccine, the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, was developed in Germany and the development subsidized with >$400mio German government money. Its success got a heap of media attention, owing also to easy access to the BioNTech founders and their human interest potential (the company was founded by Turkish immigrants, Germany's largest ethnic minority).
"95% effective" is the gold standard everyone knows now, and accepting anything less, to people, feels like they will miss out on their only chance to get "the good one". They want to feel safe, not 70% safe. The latter sounds like Russian Roulette - 30% chance to get sick just the same anyway?
The reality of course is different - it's not a binary will get sick/won't get sick, but also a "how sick". My own understanding of the medicine is also limited (I would love if this prompts an insightful comment explaining efficacy!), but AIUI almost anyone would be far safer wrt/ getting seriously sick on AZ than remaining unvaccinated.
- Even less efficiency with mutant viruses that of course will spread as widely as the first one did, it's just a matter of time.
- Reportedly more frequent side effects.
This is all of course tentative and based on the latest media reports, the public opinion might change in the future as there is more data - but that's what we've got now. Also the German government reserves Pfizer to the most vulnerable groups which creates an impression that AZ vaccine is somewhat flawed in comparison to Pfizer.
Edited to add: in circumstances such as these, journalists have a solemn duty to get the story right. They need to be educated in science and proficient in science communication. A retraction later is not good enough; silently updating your story without retraction is tantamount to corporate manslaughter in my opinion. As we know from battling online disinformation, people will still be quoting from the original baseless story decades from now.
Get it right or GTFO.
Moderna made sure that enough old people were included in their trials, even if they lost some time with it.
Pfitzer/BioNTech proved itself by vaccinating old people in Israel, so they clearly have enough data.
Preprint data on hospital admissions seems pretty encouraging for AZD-1222: https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n523
I'll look at the details, as I have to advise my parents about which vaccine to accept, which is a very difficult decision for me.
Right now they don't trust the Chinese/Russian vaccines, only vaccines approved by the EU, and I also prefer them to wait a few more months in their apartments.
The problem is that once they accept a vaccine, they can't get another type, as only one type of vaccine is allowed per person because of the current vaccine shortage in the world.
There is no reason that response to a vaccine would fall off a cliff above a certain numerical age – the human body just doesn’t work like that. Yes, as people get older their immune responses to vaccines may weaken – but this will be unpredictable in a large group, and likely dependent on far more factors than just chronological age.
If by chance the study hadn’t recruited anybody who was 51 years old, would you have felt uncomfortable extrapolating responses from 50 and 52-year-olds?
I bought them big screen TV, new furniture and elliptic machine so they can spend their time in the apartment while still working out.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/22/one-vaccine-pr...
The study that all these "simplified" horror-stories in the press are based upon is not giving the full picture.
- The timing cannot show how good the effects possibly are (we know that vector-vaccines take longer to create a sufficient protection) - The sample is tiny - It only talks about mild and semi-severe cases. Nothing in the study about severe cases (there were none in both groups)
AstraZeneca has a huge PR-Problem. Since they were running this in cooperation with research (Oxford), a lot of smaller results were published early, which was taken up by the press out-of-context, simplified further and further when going down the ladder to the boulevard-press.
Further, Germany had at least one politician state ridiculous numbers (8% efficacy above age 65 or 75) since he misunderstood something (only 8% of the participants were in this group) and simply had no idea what he was talking about.
And now it is too late, you can't kill these false-hoods once they circle.
Actually AstraZeneca has some nice properties the mRNA vaccines have not, e.g. etter T-Cell response.
I am surprised the Germans are so much influenced by the misinformation campaign from the European commission.
Sure they did, they publicly try to shame them on not delivering on their contract. Turns out the commission has a hard time negotiotating and understanding contracts.
> The "closing" of the Irish border is a result of Brexit, you know the thing UK voters voted on.
The EU tried to close the border to Northern-Ireland to try and prevent allegedly export of vaccines.
Almost everybody agreed it was an irresponsible act, cleary lacking any diplomatical tact and sense of history. At least that was turned around quickly.
All in all quite a shameful episode. At least we can vote for the parliament.
What is your point?
It was highly reckless given the sensitivity of NI politics.
I have no ill will towards the EU, but they messed up badly with that one.
You obviously don't have much experience of NI politics.
There are plenty who are just waiting for the opportunity to make it a big deal of it. In fact, this is exactly happening at the moment, with a very hard Unionist party (TUV) making significant gains at the expense of moderates, using it as collateral.
It is why the Irish PM was one of the first to contact von der Leyen about it. No British involvement there. The Irish know all too well what happens when you kick the wasps' nest.
I have a suspicion they are trying to make the vaccine desirable by making it faux scarce - Tom Hanks get it, crooked CEO gets it, but you little people don’t get it yet. I’m not falling for it.