carlmr · 5 years ago

Considering Denmark is also one of the richest countries on earth we can neither expect other countries to a) detect such a mutation early and b) handle the issue promptly.

So I think it's somewhat likely that we'll see mutations emerge all over the world.

Whether this vaccine works depends on how early we get most people vaccinated. It may only be a short term patch, which we will see once it's rolled out, you can't really predict the long term without any measurements.

aphextron · 5 years ago

>I remember that in March somebody posted here an entry saying that mutation of the virus will make vaccinations only useful in the short term. Were these concerns already addressed at this stage?

Regardless of whether the mutations are significant enough to affect vaccine efficacy, it won't likely be a problem. These new mRNA vaccines have a development/production time measured in weeks and months, not years. It changes vaccines from a hardware problem to a software problem. Once the underlying delivery technology is proven safe and effective, reacting to new strains will be as swift as patching a codebase. It's hard to overstate what a massive advance in vaccine tech is happening here.

Wintamute · 5 years ago

Coronaviruses like SARS-COV-2 mutate relatively slowly and minimally compared to others. So mutation isn't expected to be a huge concern, unlike say influenza which mutates relatively rapidly and requires an annual tweak to the vaccines.

What's more, any new strains we do see spreading more widely will do so because their mutations confer a competitive advantage. In practice that usually means more drift towards higher infectiousness but less severe symptoms - the same mechanisms that have left us with 4 other endemic but mild common cold coroanviruses.

The new SARS-COV-2 vaccines may be a useful tool to get us over this hump where the virus is still novel to a large proportion of the population, but are unlikely to be required indefinitely.

gustavf · 5 years ago

I'll take the other side of that bet.

Zenbit_UX · 5 years ago

It's more than zoom, everything that's gone up from the pandemic is dropping: amzn, meli, jmia, se, shop, sq. The markets had them valued at a premium due to their monopolies in the pandemic but retail stocks are now trending up premarket: bbby, etc.

TomGullen · 5 years ago

I don't think it's worth looking at individual stocks in this instance, and I think you're not understanding why Zoom would drop on good vaccine news.

sethammons · 5 years ago

Investor speculation doesn’t put nails into anything :)

randomsearch · 5 years ago

Did it? I’m looking at ZOOM and it’s on 500

strombofulous · 5 years ago

I don't understand, aren't future events supposed to be already considered in the stock price? It's not like a vaccine was unpredictable

TheHypnotist · 5 years ago

Zoom isn't going anywhere

tinyhouse · 5 years ago

Well, stocks go up and down, nothing new. There are also too many investors who panicky buying and selling without much knowledge of the industries they buy/sell stocks.

Zoom has been doing up ~500% this year. The large fluctuations are expected. Online learning/work will continue to grow regardless of a vaccine. It's not going to be in a crazy rate like it has been this year because of covid. I'm not even talking about companies, cause that's a no brainer. I'm talking about education and hospitals. For example, the convenience of having a virtual appointment is great for both doctors and patients and it's not going away no matter what.

My opinion about Zoom. Selling because of a vaccine is pretty stupid. You should sell if you think they are over valued and not be able to compete with the big companies long term. One thing to pay attention to is their future plans. If they don't have plans to expand their product line I would worry long term. There's no problem for a company to pay for Zoom for video calls and for another company for things like slack/docs etc. But when you have companies like Google/Microsoft who package and integrate everything together, and can give you a good price for it too, then it's a concern. Google/Microsoft make many subpar products, and this year zoom showed it nicely. But they keep copying the important features and will eventually close the gap.

bipson · 5 years ago

Although I want to agree, none of the companies started from zero.

All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades.

Not trying to diminish the accomplishments achieved, great effort nontheless. Just saying nobody started from zero here, that would have been insane and frankly impossible.

thinkharderdev · 5 years ago

I don't really understand the underlying science but the nucleic acid based vaccine platforms seem really, really exciting. Getting an effective COVID vaccine is obviously huge, but the ability to rapidly develop vaccines in the future for emerging pandemics is amazing.

easytiger · 5 years ago

DNA/RNA vaccinations have been around for 30 years or so.

ApolloFortyNine · 5 years ago

What I find more impressive is Moderna was finalized in February, and most of the other candidates were finalized by March.

If we could somehow develop rapid testing in some way, it's shocking to me that the vaccine could have entered mass production by the Summer.

There was a time where the only true way to test a new model Aircraft was to build one, but nowadays pretty much every characteristic is well understood by the time it enters service. To reach a similar point with vaccine testing will be important when the next pandemic hits.

jdhzzz · 5 years ago

> What are the markets, a handful of rich

I'm not yet but hoping to be...

> They are neither wise nor competent

That's me again, but doesn't preclude my success...

However this 1995 paper (1) indicates that the S&P 500 behavior does "Granger Cause" changes in USA GDP. i.e changes in S&P 500 does predict changes in GDP from 1 to 3 quarters out. So that's the one legitimate reason to be encouraged by rising markets. Perhaps the woman who cuts my hair will be able to get off food stamps by spring.

1. https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?redir=1&a...

ploika · 5 years ago

Since you asked, also the pension funds of almost everyone you know.

TomGullen · 5 years ago

I'm not a vaccine expert, so when vaccine news comes out and the broader market reacts extremely positively to this news it just gives me confidence this is the real deal.

There has been other vaccine news in the past which my friends/family talk about excitedly but the broader market didn't budge much.

I don't see any problem in using it a general barometer for this sort of news.

Beached · 5 years ago

do you not have a 401k or ira or other similar fund?

coryfklein · 5 years ago

Are you suggesting that the signal of the markets today has zero corellation with the promise of this vaccine? That seems like quite the position to take.

Or are you lamenting that much attention is given to something that is primarily driven by wealthy organizations? I guess I might sympathize with you there.

pembrook · 5 years ago

> What are the markets, a handful of rich in banks and large corporations?

Glad you asked. No, "the markets" are not simply a handful of rich people, banks and large corporations. The markets are also more than just "stocks."

In fact, the majority of "the markets" is actually bonds, and most of those bonds are debt issued by nearly all the countries of the world (sovereign bonds). I think roughly 80 Trillion dollars, but don't quote me.

If you live in a country with roads, infrastructure, buildings, etc.--then the markets are responsible for everything around you.

But you seem to be complaining about stocks since they get the most media attention, so let's look at those.

You may not realize it, but the future of every single country with a socialized pension system, sovereign wealth fund, etc. depends on the returns of global stocks. They make up only a portion of most pension portfolios, but deliver nearly all of the returns. Everybody has a stake in them even if they don't realize it.

Are the markets all-knowing or perfectly efficient? Of course not. But it's literally the only place where you can measure how a global herd of humans are feeling about the state of the world at any given time with a single number. This makes it a default reference for journalists to cite, ie. "thing happened, this is what the humans and their algorithms collectively think about it."

The journalists are often wrong and don't understand what's happening, but this case seems to be pretty straightforward.

ECA_stax · 5 years ago

What did you mean by swt? Surely you are not making fun of Islam in a completely unrelated thread.

TomGullen · 5 years ago

That's the popular view but I don't think they've been as irrational as lots of people think.

0xffff2 · 5 years ago

S&P 500 is only up 90 points right now, and I don't see any evidence it was up 400 at any point today.

More generally, The DOW is way up, S&P up moderately, and NASDAQ only up a little bit. That looks like it may well be a result of vaccine news to me, which is less good for the big tech companies that make up the NASDAQ than the broader set of companies tracked by the DOW and S&P. I would expect an election related bump to have pretty equal effects on all three indices.

refurb · 5 years ago

Shipping hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccine at -80C is more than a “minor logistical challenge”. First, you’d never ship in a liquid nitrogen dewar. It would be a massive logistics bottleneck considering the weight of dewars and the volume you'd be shipping (Pfizer already has deals secured for hundreds of millions of doses). And plus, these are packaged vaccines - a glass vial with a label, in a paper box, with a folded product info sheet inside. You can't submerge the whole thing in liquid nitrogen.

Shipping at -10C is a major logistical challenge. Mentally it doesn't sound like like much, but that's envisioning a single vial to a single patient. Multiply that by one million and deliveries to not only NYC but to Booneville, Louisiana. Temperature excursions mean spoiled product - product that gets thrown out. -80C is way harder than -20C (there are no vaccines today that require -80C).

You can’t just throw it on dry ice and say “we’re good”. Even just packing it is complicated. You have a pallet sized box with 20,000 doses. You put it in a box and surround it with dry ice. Are all the vials the same temperature after 2 hours? Are you sure? You need temperature monitoring at multiple points in the package so you know when it’s been spoiled.

Your delivery gets held up for 12 hours at customs, are all the vials still -80C? Are you sure? What do you do when you deliver to hospital and find out they don’t have -80C storage, even though they said they did? Do you have an intermediary storage facility you can bring it to until you figure out a solution?

Do you have monitoring after it’s been delivered so it doesn’t spoil before administration? Correct thawing procedures? What happens if a dose is thawed and the patient doesn’t show up and it sits at room temp for an hour? Just throw it out? Or is it still good? Are you sure?

And to add on top of all this - you (as the manufacturer) might have all this figured out, but you need to make sure everyone along the logistics chain does too. Guaranteed you'd send emails and letters in advance, and have massive yellow stickers all over the shipment that says "Must be stored at -80C" and you'll have a customer call you a week later asking if the product that's been sitting at -10C is still good.

Here is a document from WHO that will tell you way more than you’d ever want to know about cold chain distribution. There is an entire section on how to appropriately stack the vaccine vials in the freezer so they stay the right temperature. Yeah, it's that complicated.

https://www.who.int/immunization/documents/IIP2015_Module2.p...

Even cold chain for today’s products is really fucking hard.

Derek Lowe had a good quote on this:

"Pfizer has provided these details to the CDC about shipping and storage of their candidate: the vaccine can be shipped in “dry ice pack” boxes, but that dry ice will need to be replenished within 24 hours of receipt. The shipping carton needs to be closed within one minute of opening, and not opened more than twice per day. Vaccine vials, once removed, can be kept at refrigerator temperatures for up to 24 hours or at room temperature for no more than 2 hours after thawing. So this is going to take a very organized approach to make sure that the vaccine is handled properly without wastage. We’re looking at a lot of dry ice and a lot of orders for ultra-cold freezers if this is the candidate that gets heavy nationwide distribution. And mind you, I’m talking about organized distribution in Little Rock and Long Beach. What about La Paz and Lahore? What about Lubumbashi? Even back inside the US, what’s the nearest source of dry ice in Shiprock, New Mexico or Oceana, West Virginia?"

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/08/31/co...

bluGill · 5 years ago

Many supermarkets carry dry ice. Any city of >50,000 people will have a company supplying dry ice and liquid nitrogen. CO2 is a byproduct of several industrial process, so that market it glutted. It is easy to turn CO2 into dry ice (if you don't care about efficiency - with the supply being virtually unlimited there is no reason to care much)

m12k · 5 years ago

I'm not sure it's fully possible to not compromise on safety one way or another when doing something like this quickly. Let's say a side effect is that 1% of women become sterile half a year after getting the vaccine - how would we possibly know that after testing for 3 months? All we can do is say it's very unlikely based on other vaccines with similar approaches, and monitor for effects on the reproductive system (or anything else unusual in the body) that is know to potentially lead to something like that down the line. In the end, we can (and probably must) decide that taking the time to disprove there being any long term negative effects, is more likely to cause more harm (because more covid-infections will happen in the meantime) than the good it is likely to do us. But it is still a higher risk than the usual approach where we test for longer.

3dbrows · 5 years ago

Thank you, do you happen to have a link?

st1x7 · 5 years ago

Can't that be interpreted as either of the options in the parent comment?

maxerickson · 5 years ago

This CDC page defines it in terms of cases:

https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson3/section6.html

So "disease" is probably an infection there, not relatively milder infection.

90% still crushes the transmission rate.

shmel · 5 years ago

So what does it mean? Less severe symptoms or sterilizing immunity?

DiogenesKynikos · 5 years ago

There's no such thing as "Covid infection". There's SARS-CoV-2 infection, which often causes CoVID-19 disease.

Pfizer is saying that their vaccine is effective at protecting against CoVID-19 disease. They haven't said anything about preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection yet, as far as I can see. The difference is important, because there are vaccines (such as the Salk polio vaccine) that only protect against disease, but not against infection. People get infected and pass on the virus without ever getting sick, so there's no herd immunity.

permo-w · 5 years ago

only your feet get ill

carlmr · 5 years ago

I would assume something like with the influenza vaccine, where you have immunity to i think around 70% of currently available virus mutations, if the vaccine works.

jyoshi · 5 years ago

Perhaps its something like "90% percent of the individuals' immune system are successful in quick eliminating covid without any symptoms or adverse reactions".

I admit I know very little on how immunity to diseases work, but I imagine that with viruses there is a chance it'll progress to a full blown infection even if you are vaccinated in some cases.

bjarneh · 5 years ago

> what would it even mean for somebody to be "90% immune" to a disease?

Hasn't this virus already mutated to a bunch of different strands? Could it mean you're immune to 90% of the known variations of the virus?

ubercow13 · 5 years ago

Immunity isn't binary

ajuc · 5 years ago

In terms of D&D you have +8 to constitution saving throw vs this infection (assuming DC is 10) :)

OJFord · 5 years ago

No, it's probabilistic, about the 'amount of protection' from or 'decrease in likelihood' of contracting it, which is why generally people are happy / would have been happy even for a much lower percentage - protecting ~everyone a bit is higher impact than protecting a few people a lot.

It's the same as 'herd immunity', where each member is '90% immune' and as a result the herd is 'more immune' than if only 10% of its members were 100% immune.

sambeau · 5 years ago

It means reduced severity so that people still get ill but you get 90% less people than you would expect hospitalised.

innomatics · 5 years ago

It is great news.

I didn't see the case numbers but I've inferred to arrive at 90% that there were 9 cases in vaccinated group vs 85 in controls. (95% C.I. 80-99%)

Very interested to see forthcoming results from competitors that don't face the -80 degrees issue.

aquadrop · 5 years ago

If new pfizer's vaccine has similar numbers, e.g. 90% after two shots and 80% after one shot, can it be more efficient to just use one shot, considering current race with time since we need to deliver vaccine to billions of people? Are there numbers for protection level after one shot somewhere? I couldn't find it at first glance.

mquirion · 5 years ago

It's a 2-dose regimen, needs to be stored at -70C, and Pfizer already said they'll only have 1.5B doses over the course of the next year.

It's going to be a very slow roll out.

standardUser · 5 years ago

We should be clear about the goalposts. Reducing the transmission rate to a manageable level will be very easy with even just some fraction of the population being vaccinated. What exact percentage is unclear, but it's a lot less than 100%. No realistic number of anti-vaxxers can change that.

Eradicating the virus is a whole different goal, and there could be lots of different impediments to that. After all, we still get vaccinated for a large numbers of illnesses that we haven't eradicated but are just very rare. That's not a terrible endgame for COVID.

DiogenesKynikos · 5 years ago

R only drops if this vaccine provides sterilizing immunity. The press release only discusses protection from disease.

A vaccine that only prevents disease, but which does not prevent infection, does not necessarily create herd immunity.

tomrod · 5 years ago

My thought exactly.

WhoIsSatoshi · 5 years ago

=> projected cost to the customer seem to be ~ 80/100 per shot with 2 shots needed (if we go with a $20 base + $80 premium)

christophilus · 5 years ago

That’s surprisingly cheap. Are they breaking even at that price?

hestefisk · 5 years ago

I suspected quite similar to how people are vaccinated against the flu every year.

aphextron · 5 years ago

>In reality, a vaccine is probably going to offer a lower (but if this study is true, acceptable) level of protection. I wouldn’t be surprised if the protection drops exponentially after 2 months. Similar to the live virus

Serology reports for the Moderna vaccine (very similar technology) are showing 4-5 times higher levels of antibodies than those who actually contracted the virus.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2028436

turing_complete · 5 years ago

I found that strange too. Diverse is a relative term, not an absolute one.

rimliu · 5 years ago

Random sample of women aged 19-30 would be less diverse than random sample from anybody.

lbeltrame · 5 years ago

It means that it includes people from different ethnicity, ages (also younger and older people) and some immunocompromised people.

stu2b50 · 5 years ago

You want to have at least a nontrivial group of every race and ethnicity to ensure that you collect enough data to make sure it's also effective on everyone.

Additional challenges in the US are that many minority communities are distrustful of the pharmaceutical industry due to historical reasons and you typically need a concentrated effort to do outreach there to actually collect enough volunteers to meet your sampling concerns.

ggghhhfff · 5 years ago

Random sample != representative sample

jefe_ · 5 years ago

Thermo Fisher Scientific has freezers that hit these temps. About $10-20k per unit it appears.

https://www.fishersci.com/us/en/browse/90106033/ultra-low-te...

gezh · 5 years ago

https://www.skycell.ch/

robjan · 5 years ago

Probably the airlines who will both be dealing with the logistics and be able to return to BAU quicker because of the vaccine. For example, American Airlines is up 25% premarket today and IAG (owner of British Airways) is up nearly 30%.

jashephe · 5 years ago

Based on this NYT article [1], some logistics companies planning to store and transport the vaccine are using freezers from Stirling Ultracold. It may just be a curiosity, but their freezers (as the name would suggest) use bona fide Stirling engines rather than the typical two-stage compressors used in most ULT freezers.

As someone in life science research who uses plenty of -80 freezers, I've always been curious about Stirling Ultracold. Maybe they're on to something after all.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/business/coronavirus-covi...

sixQuarks · 5 years ago

You’re way too late to the party. Peloton became a $30 billion company during covid. Down over 10% in premarket trading

Closi · 5 years ago

Yep, time to invest in zoom too. I assume at some stage people will need to make more video calls.

Cthulhu_ · 5 years ago

I think Nintendo will do pretty good as well, Animal Crossing looks like an ideal game for a lockdown.

bluGill · 5 years ago

this is the only investment I find possibly useful. Liquid nitrogen is so common in industry that I don't think there will be a problem sourcing enough just from spare capacity.

mxcrossb · 5 years ago

I saw some claims on Twitter that zoom took a hit, though there’s enough random noise in the market that I never know what to believe

kgwgk · 5 years ago

Seems like yesterday was a good time to buy shares. Now it's not so clear!

andylynch · 5 years ago

I initially thought so too, but there are some big losers in the market today - think home delivery (Ocado) , entertainment (Netflix), and more interestingly specialist Covid test suppliers.

boffinism · 5 years ago

Except ZM

empthought · 5 years ago

The RNA is read by human cells and the spike protein antigen is created by human cells; it’s not particularly viral RNA.

icegreentea2 · 5 years ago

They could do that, but it's far more likely to be just dry ice. -80 being a class of freezers is a thing because that's what dry ice can provide.

-80 transport often consists of good insulation and a good chunk of dry ice instead of active measures.

salex89 · 5 years ago

I'm not sure it can be used, since it is much colder than -80. I actually hope it can be, because there is quite a few liquid nitrogen facilities, usually near big medical facilities. Dry ice, quite rare. I've seen some for special effects, but declared at a higher temperature than -80.

salex89 · 5 years ago

Haha, I find it easier to traverse Germany side-to-side than Serbia.

ahoka · 5 years ago

"Also, this is a German result, and people trust Germany more."

Like with the diesel emissions?

captain_price7 · 5 years ago

> people trust Germany more

What people are you talking about here? Western societies or entire world?

jryle70 · 5 years ago

> So those who claim that Russian vaccine is only on the 1/2 phase spread an outright lie.

Russian vaccine was announced back in August, when it was only on phase 1/2. In contrast phase 3 Pfizer/biontech had been well under way at that time.

Russia announced a not fully tested vaccine, proudly called it "Sputnik V". The exact words Putin used when announced it was: "As far as I know, a vaccine against a new coronavirus infection has been registered this morning, for the first time in the world". So geopolitical concerns and pride are correct assessment. No wonder it drew skepticism.

fuoqi · 5 years ago

As if "the West" and the US in particular don't lie left and right if it helps to promote their agenda. It's a simple matter of who aligns with whom.

captain_price7 · 5 years ago

America launched a fake vaccination campaign to catch osama-bin-laden; many villagers in surrounding areas are refusing to take vaccine because they have lost trust.

Western governments are no doubt better for their own citizens than say Russia or China, but we outsiders have absolutely no reason to trust one government over the others. Russia's vaccine has only passed phase 2- now that's a good point, "Trust" absolutely isn't.

disown · 5 years ago

Right... And iraq was invaded because of the truth?

You think russia and china lie because of propaganda. Their citizens believe we lie because of propaganda.

Whether one views another country favorably relies entirely on propaganda.

disown · 5 years ago

You have to stop reading propaganda. If we had a vote around the world, russia and china together would win over the "west" by a long shot. It wasn't russia and china brutalizing the world for 500 years. It isn't russia and china destabilizing much of the world today.

We have to stop believing that the "west" is the world. It's going to bite us in the end one day. The only thing people around the world like is wealth. As china and russia get wealthier, even that won't matter as much.

lettergram · 5 years ago

Real question I have is how well the study was conducted AND how long immunity lasts. Even if both were good here... we won’t have the vaccine widely available until mid to late next year.

danpalmer · 5 years ago

This may be true for urban/suburban US/Europe/China/India, but this is not true for large parts of the world.

There are parts of rural US/Australia for example where despite people having cars, they may need to take a plane to get to a vaccine treatment centre with enough density to get stock. They may not be able to afford that travel even if the vaccine is free.

Much of the African population is spread over small communities where roads may not be reliable, let alone car access. If your minimum distributable unit is 10k vaccines, as it looks like it could be to begin with, that rules out a significant number of the population.

Invictus0 · 5 years ago

Skip to 3:20 if you don't want to hear a few minutes about why COVID is a big problem.

0_____0 · 5 years ago

interesting... vid suggests that we have to use cryogenic techniques to store vaccine partly because there hasn't been enough time to test how they store at higher temperatures.

so perhaps the infrastructure requirements will relax as time goes on

anoncake · 5 years ago

You know exactly what I meant so don't pretend otherwise. By the way, 1.26 million is less than 0.02% of the world's population.

anoncake · 5 years ago

Then please post some of that evidence. Evidence, not anecdotes -- of course there are individual cases among millions of infected, that doesn't mean it's a phenomenon worth caring about.

anoncake · 5 years ago

How do we know there won't be any adverse effects after years?

djsumdog · 5 years ago

45,000 is an incredibly small sample set and this is an incredibly short amount of time. Look at 1976 and the Swing Flu vaccine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bOHYZhL0WQ

45,000 doesn't scale up to 100 million or a few billions. The Swing Flu vaccine left major neurological problems in over 4,000 people, many of which were paid out in law suits. We still have vaccine courts.

1_player · 5 years ago

Thankfully, the US antivax movement is not as strong in the rest of the world, and thankfully not everyone needs to be vaccinated for the R0 figure to drop considerably.

If cretins don't want to be vaccinated, it's their loss.

ByteJockey · 5 years ago

How long, exactly, are they good for once they warm up?

I assume you aren't injecting people with something at -80C. How big of a window is there for injections?

zzzeek · 5 years ago

medical freezers of this grade seem to be pretty pricey, in the $6000 range

https://www.labrepco.com/product-category/cold-storage-produ...

kgwgk · 5 years ago

minus-80C-frozen? (that's -110F)

dplgk · 5 years ago

Is that the nasal swab? I did one last week and dropped it in an outdoor quest logistics metal box.

rq1 · 5 years ago

There are reported cases of people who built up immunity against the Chinese strain and got infected with the European strain while still having antibodies for the first one.

Danish are killing 17M minks because of a novel mutation that infected 12 people (reported).

woofie11 · 5 years ago

Rate of mutations is directly proportional to number of viruses out there. We're having exponential growth in the amount of COVID19 (with a slow exponent, with social distancing, but exponential none-the-less). That we've seen mutations back when there was a tiny fraction of the cases we have today is a very bad sign.

If it jumps species, as we saw with mink, we may have a reservoir in nature with no control. It will mutate and periodically jump back to humans.

sergioisidoro · 5 years ago

My point was the validation and peer-review. There are many possible confounding factors, including isolation and mask use.

Also I might have misread the protocol, since I'm no medical scientist, but wasn't the efficacy of the vaccine measured only in a 1 month timespan? Are we even sure the effects are long lasting?

I just don't want to get the hopes too high too soon. The crash after a positivity high can be quite bad. Reuters is even live streaming Wall Street because of this announcement!

athenot · 5 years ago

True. But seeing a potential path towards making a sifnificant dent to the uncontrolled spread of the virus is a welcomed respite from nearly a year of darkness.

EDIT: I upvoted you because you make a valid point. Things will not recover overnight. But at the same time, we can still celebrate the hope of a promising solution.

bluGill · 5 years ago

depends. If this provides spread prevention as well, then places can start opening up in about 6 months as enough locals get vaccinated as to slow the spread to the rest. On the other hand if this provides only some immunity but you are more infectious (ie the body doesn't fight the virus off, just makes it less dangerous - I don't think this is possible but....) we can't open up for years as anyone vaccinated is a risk to everyone else.

Of course there are other vaccines in development. If any other them pass trails that changes things too. we can only speculate as to how.

No matter what though, there is now a real light at the end of the tunnel.

amb23 · 5 years ago

One of the lead doctors in the UK is saying life will start to look normal in Spring 2021 (albeit, I assume he was referring to the UK alone). There's good reason for cautious optimism & patience.

Science has done its job; now we need to push for coordination between infrastructure, government, and business to finish it.

collyw · 5 years ago

Screw the media for pushing this and lockdown as the only possible solution. This will still take ages to be rolled out.

charlesdm · 5 years ago

This is great and all, and I'm not against vaccinations, but is this safe long term?

Am I the only one here who doesn't want to get inoculated in basically the first batch?

elevenoh · 5 years ago

>We'll be seeing the first EUA's by December, and shots in the arm before the end of the year

What makes you say that? That's quite fast, no?

chasd00 · 5 years ago

thank god Biden was elected, otherwise this news would have been thrown in the trash.

_ph_ · 5 years ago

Yes, this is an incredible scientific achievement. Before calling all humans awesome, I have to point out though, that there are a lot of countries which managed the pandemic really well, especially in Asia, but most western industrial nations quite badly failed at this. A faster and better reaction to the outbreak would have helped a lot. Both with all the casualties which sadly were the consequence and with the ability to eradicate the virus via vaccinations.

cpmsmith · 5 years ago

>We'll be seeing the first EUA's by December

Emergency Use Authorization, for anyone else who hadn't encountered the term yet

MichaelApproved · 5 years ago

How dangerous did you assess it to be?

brownianemotion · 5 years ago

Glad to hear the virus is not dangerous, a pity you've informed us all so late!

HelloMcFly · 5 years ago

Three of my dead family members (edit for clarity: not my immediate nuclear family, but people I'm still close to) don't feel the same way (nor do those who were impacted by the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths in the US), but I'm glad you've found this whole thing to be overblown.

aphextron · 5 years ago

>I wake up long time ago when I realized the virus is not as dangerous as the media reported it. You too should wake up right now and live your life. Stop being afraid.

This is really exciting news. How did you find out? Shouldn't we alert the public?

benlumen · 5 years ago

Who said I was afraid? I'm literally locked in my house in England, and all of the pubs are shut, and I'm banned from hanging out with my friends or my family. I want all that to end. I want to get back to seeing the world and going to festivals and for everyone to be able to do the same. I want my elderly grandmother to be able to see us again without worry. It's nothing to do with me being afraid.

Tor3 · 5 years ago

Why shouldn't I be afraid? If my parents get infected there's a close to 100% chance that they'll die, due to their existing conditions. And I have to visit them, so do others. There's a real risk of infection there.

swalsh · 5 years ago

Hey man, some people have multiple gods.

benlumen · 5 years ago

It was a figure of speech.

InterMilan · 5 years ago

I thought it was bush meat. So human decided to eat something that they shouldn't. Geniuinly asking.

djrogers · 5 years ago

Actually, no - if one follows the 'religious logic' as you call it, we live in a Fallen World under the dominion of Principalities and Power of Darkness. It is from there that the virus came.

The 'God will smite thee' beliefs largely came about as a form of control over people, and do not line up with New Testament biblical teaching.

standardUser · 5 years ago

"it will likely be months before doses start going"

Where do you get that it will take "months" between emergency approval and actual vaccinations? The communications out of the leading vaccine teams clearly state otherwise.

djrogers · 5 years ago

> "If I go out for steak, I'm probably okay at 90%," versus, "If we have our family reunion at Disney World, there's a 50% chance we're all going to be attending a funeral in a month, even if everybody got the vaccine."

How in the heck do you arrive at a 50% chance of someone dying? You might argue that there's a 50% chance of someone getting the virus (that's really debatable, it's not highly contagious), but even if someone did, their chance of survival is several orders of magnitude higher than 50% unless they are in a high-risk group...

ulrikrasmussen · 5 years ago

0.9^n are the odds where you all go and get exposed simultaneously. When a large enough portion of the population is vaccinated, that prior probability goes way down.

bluGill · 5 years ago

I would assume that the countries are the only ones with a factory that is capable of making this. Give me a few billion dollars and a year and I can set up another factory, but it would have been too risky an investment 1 year ago (before COVID), or even 3 months ago . Even now it is too risky an investment as the current factories can produce a lot of vaccine, and there are other candidates that also have factories, so odds are the world will be vaccinated before my 1 year factory comes online.

A 1 year factory build is extremely fast - freely trading money for time. A more reasonable schedule would be several years (a lot cheaper)

alexduggleby · 5 years ago

Polymun from Klosterneuburg (near Vienna) are suppliers of Lipid-Nanoparticles used for mRNA vaccines.

Translated from: "Bei der Impfstoff-Entwicklung von Pfizer und Biontech mischt auch die Klosterneuburger Firma Polymun mit. Die heimischen Experten liefern wichtige Teile für die Vakzine zu. Als eines von nur wenigen Unternehmen weltweit ist Polymun auf die Herstellung von Lipid-Nanopartikeln spezialisiert. Diese werden für die Herstellung von mRNA-Impfstoffen gegen Covid-19 gebraucht, da die verwendete mRNA ein geeignetes Transportvehikel braucht, um in den Körper eingeschleust zu werden."

Source (German): https://kurier.at/wissen/gesundheit/biontech-plant-zulassung...

tuna-piano · 5 years ago

"Polymun Scientific Immunbiologische Forschung GmbH is one of a handful of makers of lipid nanoparticles, microscopic vessels used to deliver genetic material into the body."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-one-leading-coronavirus-vacc...

317070 · 5 years ago

Do you have a source for this? I am curious if this is true.

hm10 · 5 years ago

And rightfully so. Don't forget that Biden winning wasn't a sure thing - so it's not like they were waiting until Biden won to announce it. The CEO specifically mentioned in September that they refused R&D money from the US Government in order to protect themselves from being politicized. In that vein, it was the right thing that the announcement was made (intentionally or not) after the election was concluded to minimize this news being politicized.

standardUser · 5 years ago

This sounds untrue and inflammatory and needs a citation.

anovikov · 5 years ago

That would be middle point - that is 50% chances that actual reliability is better than 90% reliable, 50% that it's worse. But we have 95% confidence interval. This is what my question was about.

On infinitely large number of cases, the numbers will be the same. But we only have 94. I think it's about 2 to 3 cases that they actually got from the group that got vaccine, but not sure.

gilrain · 5 years ago

That and not caring who is hurt along the way and from whom their hoarded wealth was exploited.

Witoso · 5 years ago

I would add some clarifying quantifiers to your statement as not all rich people are rich because of markets knowledge. Inheritance of wealth is also an important contributor.

jason0597 · 5 years ago

The greatest predictor of wealth is your family background, not your knowledge/interest of the stock market:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/economi...

bluntfang · 5 years ago

most rich people are rich because they were never not rich

netsharc · 5 years ago

If only it's that accurate... IMO market participants just react to news because they expect others to act a particular way, and I as a participant would try to see how I could profit from how others act.

In this case, no one probably bothers to dig deeper, it's the BBC and it's good enough, everyone will think the world will soon be rid of Covid, so they will buy stocks, so I should also join the up wave...

jason0597 · 5 years ago

The top 1% own over 50% of equity in the country. The following 9% own about 30% of equity. All in all, that's the top 10% owning more than 80% of the equity in the country.

I disagree that a lot of people are invested in the stock market. Statistically, it's very few people.

adamsea · 5 years ago

> There's potential for a huge gain in efficiency here ... Of course the market is exited at the long term prospects of that.

IMHO this supports the OPs point, which is that the stock market in its current incarnation does not care about the lives of human beings.

Which is unacceptable. We collectively have enough creativity and intelligence figure out how to have a stock which can not only reflect corporate profit but also human well-being.

I think it begins by acknowledging market externalities - pollution being one of them - which allow for activities which are profitable within the shared fiction of the market, but which are, in our broader shared reality, ultimately destructive.

The Happinese/Well-being GDP also seems like an interesting idea.

jjk166 · 5 years ago

But there are also people with millions at stake who are metagaming that other people will think this is important enough to increase the future outlook of top companies and thus changing their strategies to profit off them.

The market is a weighted function of an insane number of variables, and we know none of the weights. Any attempt at reading the market to understand those variables is going to be about as useful as trying to observe butterflies by looking at hurricanes.

jason0597 · 5 years ago

55% of Americans may report that they own stock, but the top 10% own 88% of all stocks

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

frockington1 · 5 years ago

It is probably much higher as well. Many people probably do not know that their retirement plans are invested in the stock market

tomohawk · 5 years ago

I see your point, but it seems to be overstated as having a promised $2B out there surely had a positive impact.

mlindner · 5 years ago

Having a guaranteed $1.95 billion as a result of development causes companies to invest additional money.

FiReaNG3L · 5 years ago

Depends on the scale - we are talking mass vaccination of the whole planet here.

danesparza · 5 years ago

My understanding is that -80c cold storage isn't widely available. The Ebola outbreak might have shown how to get small numbers of doses into a warzone, but scaling this up might prove to be a logistical difficulty.

"Once a provider receives that vaccine, it really starts the clock that the vaccine needs to be administered within five days of when it's put in the refrigerator"

Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-vaccine-distributio...

studius · 5 years ago

Ebola was localized. COVID-19 is not.

I like your optimism, and what you said isn't incorrect about Ebola at the time, but I don't think it's correct about our current situation. How many locations globally have this level of refrigeration? Given that there would be high demand for it, wouldn't prices on any available refrigerators exceed what even the most altruistic companies and organizations could pay?

This still needs to be solved. We have a lot of entrepreneurs, investors, and engineers reading this, so let's not be hasty in hand-waving over something serious.

ksk · 5 years ago

While you may call it a 'solved' problem, in reality, its a problem that every single pharma company in the world wants to avoid, due to the high costs and other challenges.

Source: I work in vaccines, and our company works on thermostable formulations, among other things.

bufferoverflow · 5 years ago

I think we can eradicate it by contact tracing. With 90% efficiency it will be extremely tough for the virus to spread. For any new cases you simply test everyone in the vicinity of the infected person.

But I don't think even that will be necessary. 90% efficiency reduces R so much, it will probably die out on its own.

The real problem is mutations that are not covered by the vaccine. If it mutates as efficiently as flu, it will be a challenge.

ianbooker · 5 years ago

That is immunity after illness, isn't it? I would not be sure you can extrapolate that for immunity after a specific vaccination. The vaccine from Mainz / Mayence for example trains your immunity by introducing just parts of the shell / shell dna / rna. Could work even better for immunity or worse, one has to study that for every vaccine seperatly, I think.

remote_phone · 5 years ago

This is incorrect. They tested SARS patients over 17 years later and they still exhibited an immune response. As long as SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t mutate dramatically the body probably has long term immunity.

zebrafish · 5 years ago

This vaccine is against the entire spike glycoprotein. Some in production vaccines are only against the RBD (the protein that actually latches onto ACE2). There are variants out there that have been shown to escape RBD antibodies. However, since this vaccine encodes the entire spike, there are other areas that antibodies can bind to. They stated in their press release that the vaccine elicits a Th1, CD4+, and CD8+ T-cell response against both the RBD and other areas on the spike. I think this is the most promising aspect. This means it should hopefully be effective against even escape variants.

The_rationalist · 5 years ago

Where is the preprint?

dheera · 5 years ago

I'd happily take a shot a year for a decade in return for getting rid of lockdown.

copperx · 5 years ago

Just to clarify, what you're saying is with respect to an actual infection, and not the vaccine, right?

Animats · 5 years ago

Right, we're about 8 months from the first recovery, so that's what's known. As time goes on, that number may increase.

MichaelApproved · 5 years ago

I thought it was that 90% show production of antibodies.

pmachinery · 5 years ago

The first line of the article states:

"The first effective coronavirus vaccine can prevent more than 90% of people from getting Covid-19, a preliminary analysis shows."

AQXt · 5 years ago

> that's why Brazil and India are nearing herd immunity with basically no serious medical infrastructure saturation.

[citation needed]

ciceryadam · 5 years ago

Coronavirus: Overwhelmed India hospitals turn Covid patients away. Hospitals in the country are struggling to cope with the number of patients they’re getting. Many are dying without getting the treatment they need. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-india-53014213

jp555 · 5 years ago

dry ice manufacturing companies?

Do You mean the Co2 supply chain? We make a lot of carbonated beverages; there will likely be no shortage.

andylynch · 5 years ago

Yes. Pfizer have published info on their logistics, there are details in the wall st journal. Basic idea is a little box of ~1000 doses goes in a big box filled with enough dry ice for up to ten days. Average delivery time will be around 3.

edit: See https://www.wsj.com/articles/pfizer-sets-up-its-biggest-ever...

procinct · 5 years ago

Fortunately it sounds very contained. All cases (fewer than 15) were confined to a single location and there haven’t been any more detected since September. So most likely the mutation is now extinct.

DataGata · 5 years ago

Hence the genociding.

thehappypm · 5 years ago

Yet another reason to move to a plant-based lifestyle. Covid came from some folks in China using exotic animals for some purpose. Now a new variant seems inevitable from animal populations. Is it worth the burgers and coats?

mknoke · 5 years ago

There is no need to be too worried about it right now

https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/05/spread-of-mutated-corona...

A more aggressive take: https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/13240857614493040...

alisonkisk · 5 years ago

That seems wrong. The data probably came first, but in less popular publications.

corobo · 5 years ago

At least this one has a decent looking 'n' value. The BBC also address this in part

> There are still questions - how long does immunity last, does the vaccine work as well in high-risk elderly people, does it stop you spreading the virus or just from developing symptoms?

I'd rate the news as "vibing" on a scale of clickbait to party for the world

mbesto · 5 years ago

Judging from other threads these trials have been independently reviewed, so it appears it's not "just" a press release.

this_user · 5 years ago

The results came from the independent data safety and monitoring board that is analysing the trial results on PFE/BNTX's behalf. PFE/BNTX themselves don't currently have access to more data. But there is no reason to suspect that these results are not accurate.

bluGill · 5 years ago

Who knows. This is the first to track and announce scientific results. It may be better or worse, we don't know. Maybe numbers are being kept and we can figure out in a few years. Maybe the Chinese are not keeping track in any way and we will never know.

dehrmann · 5 years ago

Or the Russian one /s

asdfman123 · 5 years ago

One point they made on NPR is that it's hard to imagine any sort of vaccine that would be as harmful as the virus itself, which is killing 1000 people per day.

tachyonbeam · 5 years ago

There's many vaccines in development, even some to be available as nasal sprays and oral vaccines. I'm hopeful that by the end of this year, we'll get 1 or 2 more vaccines successfully completing Phase 3, and then several more in 2021.

TearsInTheRain · 5 years ago

> There are numerous companies which specialize in -80C transport and shipping. These containers can be used as temporary (3-7 day) storage at destinations where they do not have infrastructure.

But what kind of capacity can they handle? I imagine the scale of a Covid vaccine rollout would overhelm prior existing infrastructure

Negitivefrags · 5 years ago

Could you name some of the companies? Are any of them public?

asdfman123 · 5 years ago

Why, biologically speaking, does it need to be that cold? I'm guessing something breaks down at higher temperatures?

(That's -112 F, for anyone else wondering.)

Florin_Andrei · 5 years ago

Is that literally 1.5C colder than dry ice?

If that temperature could be obtained with dry ice, that would simplify things a bit. But AFAICT dry ice sublimates at -78.5C.

JohnJamesRambo · 5 years ago

What is wrong with RNAlater? Seems like it is just EDTA and Sodium Citrate and Ammonium Sulfate.

https://www.protocols.io/view/RNAlater-Recipe-c56y9d

hundchenkatze · 5 years ago

I don't read safety sheets often so I'm likely off base here, so please correct me if I'm wrong. My interpretation is that when used correctly it's safe.

Section 2 states it is non-hazardous.

Section 4 states it is not expected to present a significant ingestion/inhalation hazard under anticipated conditions of normal use.

Finally, Section 11 indicates that the Ammonium compounds present in RNALater may be harmful, but only when they are administered at LD50 concentrations.

DrBazza · 5 years ago

I'm curious, which country is this?

In the UK, the NHS are generally on top of things like this, so it should not happen in most cases.

yreg · 5 years ago

It will be an incredible challenge, but there is at least some economy of scale on our side.

Wendover did a nice video[0] on this topic month ago, explaining how UPS/FedEx/DHL/… are already massively upscaling their cold chain infrastructure. Retrofitting planes, building giant freezers in transport hubs.

[0] The Greatest Logistics Challenge Ever - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byW1GExQB84

throwaway2245 · 5 years ago

Same experience for Hep A vaccine. Got the first dose, then there was a global shortage when it was time to get the second dose - not available.

If there are 7 billion people and 1 billion doses in the next year, it's going to be awkward.

alexfromapex · 5 years ago

Probably due to DNA storage because I used to work with genomics and we had the same temps

refurb · 5 years ago

I'm highly skeptical. Needing -80C is a major disadvantage. Pfizer would have collected stability data at higher temperatures if they could get it.

The fact it's -80C means they can't prove it stable at higher temperatures.

RobertDeNiro · 5 years ago

These are the most difficult numbers to have because the vaccine and trials are still only a few months old.

tempestn · 5 years ago

The mechanism of action is known, so potential side effects are largely predictable. I'm not an expert, but I don't see any reason to think there would be unexpected long term side effects from this sort of vaccination. Is there reason to think otherwise?

anoncake · 5 years ago

Estimates for herd immunity are between 20-80%.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan · 5 years ago

It's still more difficult and expensive than the alternative.

It's not a big deal for the first world, but poorer nations may hold out for future vaccines that remain stable at higher temperatures and only require a single dose.

542354234235 · 5 years ago

Having something is different than having something at scale and being able to effectively implement it. Logistics in less developed countries is already more difficult. Adding in specialty refrigeration requirements further complicates that. Large scale logistics should never be assumed or hand waved away. Mass toilet paper shortages in first world countries this year is a perfect example of how easy it is to massively disrupt logistic chains. What do you think shipping 100 million plus vaccines a month that require specialty refrigeration and dry ice will do to the supply of dry ice in Nigeria or Albania? Or the US for that matter? How many of those dry ice shipping containers does Pfizer have? How quickly can they be manufactured?

tempestn · 5 years ago

What's the point of even commenting if you're too busy to so much as string together a few coherent sentences?

apostacy · 5 years ago

I for one agree with you. There is no rush to get vaccinated.

Personally, I doubt I will get it at all. The authorities have a very long way to go to win back my trust, after the chain of screwups over the last year.

We've seen that they will lie to us, we've seen that they apply rules to us that they themselves don't follow, and we've seen them take advantage of the situation for their own benefit.

It is a huge shame that so many people are not going to take it solely because they've betrayed our trust so many times that now that they might be doing something good, we won't cooperate.

minerjoe · 5 years ago

I just ignore the down votes. You probably hitting the target.

This is of concern. The medical industry has a history of covering up the direct know effects of their medicine, AKA poisons. That system has been know for a very long time to lead with arrogance and it sometimes takes them a very long time to pull things they know are killing people. Its just too much $$$.

See vioxx and merck, for just one example.

XorNot · 5 years ago

Short-answer: we don't and can't, since you'd need to use the vaccine for a long time.

Better answer: the vaccines are new but the individual systems used to develop them are not, and we have historical trials of a lot of the same techniques which show no long term risks. The biggest unknown has always been the risk of triggering a short-term, unexpected primary immune response that causes harm to the recipient. In the vaccines being developed, that has generally not been found to be the case, and since they're based on the virus currently infecting people we would not expect a response worse then that (which is to say: the components of vaccine use are all well studied, these are understood and safe materials).

The other issue is when we talk about "rushing" vaccine research, this does not involve shirking safety research - i.e. consider the influenza vaccine which year over year is basically a new vaccine we develop quite quickly. What it does mean is that you overlap the stages of vaccine development: normally if you have a P3-trial vaccine, you'd wait till that trial was successful before building the factory to make it. Instead, companies are being paid (or paying themselves) to build facilities and scale up production as soon as they get to the P3 trial stage - financially it's a huge risk, since what they have might not work, or might have an unacceptable risk profile in those trials - which means all the investment is a dead-loss.

This is where government steps in (and has stepped in in places): by guaranteeing the investment on getting those facilities out, it means if your vaccine works then you're ready to go and it's in production right away - as opposed to being another year to 2 years down the line while you work on manufacturing.

Kliment · 5 years ago

This is all true but is missing some important detail - the box (shipment container suggests shipping container sized things, it's more of a flight case size thing) is meant for long distance transport, rather than local distribution. It holds the vaccines at -80C for ten days, and can be refilled with dry ice (which is widely available anywhere that has a carbonated drinks industry) to extend that period. The ten days is how long it's expected to be in continuous transit, worst-case. The vaccine must be thawed before use, and can be stored in a regular freezer for a few days, just not indefinitely.

Since the transport cases are reusable, and don't need to be completely populated, what will likely happen in rural areas is that they'll have a case for shipment, refill it with dry ice on site, and use a second case to transport a small number of doses to the point of use. Repeat until used up, refilling with dry ice every few days at a central location (less than a week's travel from administration sites). I don't think it's going to be a major problem in practice.

The_rationalist · 5 years ago

Oh well let's not benefit from others brains knowledge, experience and computing power, let's instead think in isolation and cultivate our blind spot bias

ImaCake · 5 years ago

Yep, scientists at this level are far too busy and obsessed with their work to have any interest in celebrity. I‘m sure there are a few exceptions, but I suspect they would rather be left in “peace“. They already have enough undergrads and unemployed post docs bothering them without the public‘s attention!

djsumdog · 5 years ago

The software engineer in me makes me very weary of this. All of our historic vaccines came from very bad circumstances and they were tested on people without any real guards, starting with Jenner's famous Horsepox treatments.

I'm fine with this vaccine being available for people who want it, but as someone who is low risk, I really hope this doesn't become mandatory. A lot of people aren't old enough to remember the Swine Flu vaccine and all the complications from that.

No one is talking about the safety here and that's disturbing. I don't see how a vaccine can be listed as safe with less than a year of testing. Traditionally it's an 8~12 year process.

squarefoot · 5 years ago

Thanks for the correction and good news! Would the pandemic situation ease the access to it for everyone, or market laws (high prices) will prevail as usual?

antgiant · 5 years ago

That is all true as long as the RNA doesn’t replicate itself and only produces antigens. However, I couldn’t find any papers at all that discussed if any of the current mRNA vaccine candidates self replicate their RNA to amplify the antigen production. I’d love some good references that address that.