The big problems with the EU's AZ purchase is that they bought less of it relative to their population than the UK (so had a commensurately reduced amount of production capacity allocated to them), signed the contract later (meaning less time to fix yield issues), and completely failed to grasp that signing a "best effort" contract for X units of a never-mass-produced vaccine on timescale Y didn't guarantee they'd be delivered on time. Like, the UK apparently only got something like a third the amount of AZ vaccine as expected by now in the initial contract and is more dependent on it than the EU, but you wouldn't even know there was a problem because the publicly-announced schedule was based on actual production numbers - and the UK contract had clauses with teeth to make sure AZ provided the information needed to make that possible. Not only that, the initial plans were ambitious enough that even after the main vaccine supplier underperformed hugely, the UK still ended up ahead of the EU despite most of their vaccines coming from suppliers who did perform as expected.
> Like, the UK apparently only got something like a third the amount of AZ vaccine as expected
So just how far behind the expected production is AZ? The UK only got a third, the EU is months behind schedule and half a dozen other countries are just around the corner waiting to have their contracts fulfilled.
> and the UK contract had clauses with teeth
Yeah, that would require halfway competent politicians, not something you find in the EU.
I got my first AZ shot it and I'm thankful it exists and really hope it works against the new variants. Maybe this is a chance for poorer countries like Ukraine, Moldova, the former Yugoslav republics and Albania to get their citizens vaccinated. Western Europe should probably donate part of their stocks to these countries through the Covax mechanism instead of letting it go to waste.
Around 16% if you count first dose vaccinations (which evidently you do). Doesn't change your major point, though.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
So far no statistically significant adverse events have occured for either pfizer or moderna vaccines. I follow them closely.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....
I'm not trying to cast doubt on the efficacy of the vaccines that have been approved. Rather, I'm simply pointing out we don't have much data on the long term effects on humans.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/multimedia-article/were-be...
This seems to be at least partially supported by the current risks in regards to currently available non-mRNA vaccines (such as AZ).
Also I'm not really sure what saying "we don't know the long term effect are" accomplishes. It's not really adding much to the conversation.
It doesn't seem like it really matters if adenovirus vector vaccines is an "old idea" - after all, the idea of using MRNA has also been around for a long time. But if we've only started actually using them recently, how different is our knowledge of long-term effects?
The fact that it is an "old idea" is indeed unimportant, but what is very, very important is that large scale study over long periods has already been performed on that vaccination platform so we really do know a lot about it.
That means that the similarity to mRNA is a good thing in terms of any worries about unexpected consequences. Of course it also means that we know that the risk of any unexpected consequences for adenovirus vaccines is also very low.
You are making the claim that there may not be any long term effects to the vaccine, but the information you cite has nothing to do with mRNA-based vaccines. I'm simply suggesting we don't have the data yet to make such claims.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/new-drugs-found-c...
Your supposition about likelihood bears no resemblance to reality. It's almost as if you're misleading people on purpose. I certainly hope that's not the case.
Fully 1/3 of all medications approved by the FDA turn out to have serious, and some life-threatening, side effects YEARS after the medication was approved.
______
You realize that this new 'vaccine' bears no resemblance whatsoever to any prior vaccinations?
This new Covid Vaccine is not a true vaccine. This is a drug that modifies the inner workings of cells.
That is not a vaccine but a 'new drug'.
I repeat: 1/3 of all new drugs have serious, and sometimes life threatening, reactions attributed to them between 1-5 years after the drug's approval and release to the public.
1/3...
That is not an insignificant number, and it is HIGHLY LIKELY that this new drug will have similar issues.
The very rare and very serious side effects are tracked closely, and it's likely that for a vast number of medications, even though the very rare side effects are written on the packaging, there actually is no causal connection with the medication whatsoever.
Vaccines are behaving differently from drugs. Once they took effect, and your immune system reacted, it is over. And with millions of people vaccinated by now, for months, any adverse effects would have shown. That's why we discuss blood clots, under normal circumstances these rare cases would have gone unnoticed for quite a while.
Roughly the immune system says "OK, let's attack things this shape" - which is why it's so useful for defending us against a wide variety of viruses - but alas, the shape it's picking in some patients happens to also match Platelet Factor 4, so now they are mounting an immune defence against their own blood clotting mechanism which is bad.
I don't know (perhaps if I read more papers about this I'd find out) whether it is suspected that the immune system makes this bad matching choice based on the spike protein (which we want it to match because of this coronavirus killing millions of people) or the adenovirus (which even if it could replicate in humans, which it can't, basically gives you the common cold so who cares) which is delivering it. If it's the latter, that's showing an advantage to the mRNA vaccines, since they don't need a viral delivery mechanism at all.
As I understand, the required teratogenicity study in rats with Pfizer is ongoing as of two weeks ago [1]. It’s rather optimistic to claim we’ve seen everything when even animal studies haven’t completed. Vaccine science itself is rapidly developing. Now I don’t think there will be issues with this drug, but surprises may lurk still.
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/regulatory-approv...
Why would this be any different?
> This new Covid Vaccine is not a true vaccine. This is a drug that modifies the inner workings of cells.
Flagged as misinformation. Complete nonsense.
It's clear with statements like "This new Covid Vaccine is not a true vaccine" that you are just parroting anti-vax talking points. Nobody changed the definition of vaccines and mRNA vaccines fit the definition no matter how you describe them
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-latest-antivax-false-cl...
I know that kind of fear personally, I’m on meds with risks orders of magnitude worse than that vaccines and that have been (and still is) a struggle for me. I can do the math, and I understand the risks, but taking an active risk is just hard.
Hopefully, as more people get vaccinated, it will become somewhat normalised (in communities that aren't actively against it). If all your mates did it, it's probably fine. (no sarcasm)
There's studies dating back many years showing that adenoviruses can cause clots and thrombocytopenia in rodents.
The lesson might end up being, surprisingly, that mRNA vaccines are both safer and more effective than traditional vaccines
I will still get vaccinated with it if it's available in our country for me as I think the risk is worth it in my case. But if I was a woman under 60 and especially under 40 I would be hesitant to get vaccinated with AZ and probably wait for other vaccine.
I've had the AZ vaccine 1st dose 3 weeks ago now and I keep getting very concerned by the ever changing picture; is it 1 in a million or 1 in 40000, or did these people have conditions that made this situation more likely... will we see an increase in the rate as we get more data too over the coming weeks a lot like we did with COVID.
All very unclear right now. I wish the case reports of all the people with blood clots were made available so everyone could review if they match the groups who have had the problems.
As to the difference, maybe they first vaccinated health professionals with AZ and UK mostly vaccinated older people with it, so different issues became apparent? It affects mostly younger women, so it would manifest pretty clearly with female nurses.
Everyone is jumping to focus on young females/genetics but it could really just be occupation related, most of these nurses will have their vacine shot on-site and continue their daily shift afterwards (where they stand orthostatic for several hours).
Also the mechanism which causes this seems to be better understood now - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104840
"Vaccination with ChAdOx1 nCov-19 can result in the rare development of immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia mediated by platelet-activating antibodies against PF4, which clinically mimics autoimmune heparin-induced thrombocytopenia."
A 1:1M chance is much different to me if you give it to 3 people or 2 Billion
At those low %s what are the chances the actual clot rate say doubles, quadruples as we keep getting larger audiences.
With such low numbers random chance would not likely show up in small studies.
So what are for instance the statistical chances of seeing a 10x increase in clotting going to 250mm population?
If you're giving a chemotherapy drug to patients with advanced cancer, 1 in 10⁶ is perfectly acceptable. But it's acceptable because the do-nothing course is probably worse. Even serious, chronic pain relief I'd consider 1 in 10⁶ to be a good tradeoff.
With vaccines, you're taking healthy people with no acute condition and exposing them so the do-nothing course is much better than the cancer case.
Those differences of course drive the "do we give it to 3 people or 2 Billion people?" decision, but it's not directly the breadth but the underlying reason for the breadth that make me think differently about the acceptable risk level. If 2 Billion people had cancer or serious, chronic pain, I'd be in favor of giving them a drug which would cure 999,999 of them for every 1 that it killed.
This is blatantly untrue. Here is a US study: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04516746 . The US NIH is reporting 78.9% efficacy against symptomatic disease and 100% efficacy in preventing severe or critical disease and hospitalization: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/investigationa...
If you are looking for 95% significance and you test something ineffective 20 times, you should expect to get one significant result.
AZ and the Oxford team openly did this this prior to this trial and actually admitted to it in a press conference. In fact they not only released data only from some trials but they only released some of the data from some of the trials.
In the real world, where you look at results from any trial in the context of other trials and available data, these results are not credible.
The AZ, PFE and MRNA vaccines were designed to combat the original virus. PFE and MRNA were over 95% effective in trials where they were tested against only the original strain but only about 90% effective against a mix of the new strains and the old strain that exists now. PFE and MRNA and all vaccines in general are somewhat less effective in over 65s. AZ was only 65% effective against the original strain in a population which included no over 65s in the original trials and the data from these trials were p-hacked and so almost certainly overstated effectiveness. AZ would have you believe that their vaccine is now magically 10% more effective in an environment where the variants are circulating and the 20% of the tested population is over 65. This when, real-world large scale population level data in populations where it's been widely used shows an effectiveness nowhere near that.
Also remember, this is in a context where they have openly, in a press conference admitted to p-hacking. The head of the Oxford team actually, for real, insisted that if the vaccine efficacy is seems significant in a sub-sample of the tested population at any point before the trial endpoint, it's effective even if it's not significant in the entire population at any point or not significant at the endpoint. There is something like a 70% chance that if you used his criteria, a saline injection would seem to be effective.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-safric...
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2102214?query=fe...
Not to mention being constantly immersed in an environment of fear. It's a misattribution to associate side effects of weight gain, isolation, depression with the Covid illness.
* https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-covid-15-if-only-this-...
> It's what happens when you stay at home too much and don't get enough exercise and have a poor diet
While both are risk factors for a wide range of illnesses, last time I checked, neither of those cause lung damage visible on a chest x-ray.
Yesterday I met a woman whose husband has lost his sense of smell for 4+ months and still has not regained it. My lungs still hurt sometimes on deep breaths 6 months later.
Losing your sense of smell, even permanently, is a known side-effect of Influenza infection:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23948436/
The same is true for many inflammatory conditions, such as myocarditis.
As for diffuse symptoms that are most likely psychosomatic: Look into ME/CFS. These are patients which may have a very real perception of debilitating symptoms that have no tangible underlying physical cause. There's a lot of misguided activism surrounding the topic, because people don't want to be perceived as having a mental disorder, due to the associated stigma.
A popular media narrative has arisen, claiming that COVID poses some unique health risks that weren't already facts of life to some degree. This is then used for justifying endless interventions, re-arranging our whole lives around this one new illness.
This can cause panic among the psychologically vulnerable population, causing the very symptoms that are now attributed to "long COVID". I wouldn't phrase it quite as polemically as my flagged cousin, but there is truth to what they are saying.
> You seem to be working from a position of motivated reasoning, so I'm going to opt out of trying to convince you.
I don't even know what you would want convince me of. We probably agree for the most part. Sars-CoV2 isn't Influenza and (in aggregate) it is more dangerous than Influenza. It made everyday life riskier.
We may or may not agree on what an appropriate response to this new risk is. Either way, we both are susceptible to motivated reasoning. That shouldn't prevent us from having a conversation.
[0] unfortunately I only have a French source on this https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2021/03/22/epuisemen...
"Long COVID" is a thing, but is it something unique and specific? Probably not:
https://www.vox.com/22298751/long-term-side-effects-covid-19...
As for ME/CFS being psychosomatic, that's a bit more controversial, with doctors on either side. Nothing is proven either way. Still, symptoms such as fatigue and brain fog are consistent with ME/CFS.
We like to dismiss such symptoms when it is convenient, e.g. when it occurs as a side-effect of a vaccine, while taking it rather serious when it occurs after some hyped-up new illness such as COVID. In either cases, it could simply be the Nocebo effect at work.
I note that your link astablishes that long covid is the thing, which the parent comment denies.
There's nothing wrong with not being American. You should apologize for being French.
> ...and the press in my country costing money.
Indeed, it's absurd to charge money for articles written in French. They should pay you for reading them.
> I note that your link astablishes that long covid is the thing, which the parent comment denies.
Nobody in this thread denies that it exists. We're talking about what it is and is not.
Surely this means that "long covid" is not caused by the coronavirus infection itself, but by staying at home too much and a poor diet and not enough exercise. Is that not what this meant?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/these-patients-tested-ne...
It is also true that staying at home and listening to media dramatizations causes stress, which can cause the aforementioned symptoms.
So, if you put two and two together, you may come to the conclusion that many or even most "long covid" cases are psychosomatic and not caused by the virus itself, even in those people who actually were infected.
Like I said, this needs to be differentiated from symptoms that are clinically verifiable long-term effects of respiratory illness and viral infection.
My friend described to me how hard it was for him to make a grilled chese sandwich and how it required him to take breaks in between taking the things out of the fridge and beginning the grilling. He also described to me how he couldn't even listen to music until recently because he couldn't focus on it.
It is only recently that he can talk to me on the phone for 30 minutes without getting completely exhausted from the mental energy of it.
Secondly, the only thing that has helped was my first dose of pfizer, which made me very sick for a week but since then helped with my symptoms significantly. Its very, very clearly linked to the actual virus and how our immune system reacts to it and I'm guessing things like the vaccine may help our immune system recalibrate itself or help our bodies fight off resident infections we just can't beat.
Thirdly, post-viral effects are well studied. We see them in all sorts of infections like Lyme, SARS, or EBV. This isn't necessarily new, its just different per virus family. Doctors usually can't help because there's no real treatment, and write people up like me as CFS/ME and hope it goes away (which so far thankfully there are a lot of reports of lc going away after a 2nd dose of the vaccine). Lesser so, people without lc still have chronic issues with their lungs, heart, sense of smell, tinitus, etc. Its really all a matter of degree. This isn't the common cold where you just beat it and go back to normal. For many people normal doesnt come back for a long time and how bad it is in the meantime is the big question.
Lastly, I think calling people hysterical from your comfy armchair where you're enjoying good health is tasteless, rude, and ignorant. I hope you never get lc or have to help a loved one with it. I hope you also stay out of the medical field if you have such an ungenerous and anti-compassionate attitude towards sick people.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/chronic-lyme-disease-anothe... https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/fake-diagnoses-not-fake-dis...
Question: Do you feel more fatigued over the past year?
Common Answer: Yes.
Question: Are you having a harder time concentrating or focusing?
Common Answer: Yes.
Today I learned I must have fatigue and brain fog...
What delusionally contrived nonsense.
To paraphrase, your thesis is "there is no significant difference in physical and mental health between covid patients and people that have only been suffering the social/economic effects of a quarantine but not contracted covid".
This thesis seems highly verifiable/falsifiable in an empirical way.
I've read that they are doing gene analysis to try and determine why these cases appear - is it gender, age, cross-reactions with other meds, ...? And recall that some of these conditions appear without obvious causes. If they're due to an overly aggressive immune response, recall that the cytokine storm caused by covid in such cases is what attacks the lungs (why immunosuppressants are used as treatments).
And nobody understands Long Covid.