Covid-19 Vaccine - Where, How & Costs

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Vaccine patents battle intensifies as poor nations struggle in war on coronavirus (ft.com, subscription or registration may be required)
As the world stood still in lockdown in April 2020, a group of Oxford researchers packed the cell cultures needed to make their experimental coronavirus vaccine and quietly shipped them to India’s Serum Institute.

The scientists were worried that the university’s prospective partner, AstraZeneca, eager to control the intellectual property behind the shot, would stop them, and that their vaccine would never reach the poorer nations that most needed it, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

In the case of AstraZeneca, their fears would prove to be unfounded. Oxford and the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker have since signed a licensing deal with Serum and produced hundreds of millions of doses of the cheap, portable jab for middle and lower-income countries.

But with hindsight, the covert shipment, intended to guarantee the mass production of Covid-19 shots at low costs, was an opening salvo in the fraught battle over intellectual property and technology transfer in which the world is now embroiled.

“We considered the risk of [Serum] going rogue and we didn’t want that to happen,” Oxford’s Sandy Douglas, one of the researchers developing the shot, told the Financial Times. “But that doesn’t mean we weren’t conscious AstraZeneca might have had a different view and that it might have preferred to have total control.”

The pharma group deserved “credit”, Douglas said. “Once [AstraZeneca] got over their initial hesitance, they really did run with the tech transfer to poorer nations,” he said. AstraZeneca, Oxford and the Serum Institute declined to comment.

But few other pharma companies have done the same, and when India and South Africa approached the World Trade Organization in October last year with a proposal to suspend intellectual property rights for all Covid-related drugs and technology, it was quickly shot down. Such a move would make it easier and cheaper for third parties to manufacture the most successful vaccines and treatments, thereby boosting and diversifying production, India and South Africa said.

The pharmaceutical industry has countered that waiving patents, which it says are necessary to protect the investment needed to bring drugs to market, would not lead to more doses. Pharma executives say they are already doing everything possible to scale up production and that third-party manufacturers lack the experience and knowhow needed to produce complex vaccines without help.
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Richard N said:
Texas governor Greg Abbott tests positive for Covid

He has forbidden mask mandates in Texas and was doing this yesterday (no masks here) :
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SCREW THE ARSEHOLE. Now he will get a taste of his own absolute idiocy.
Remember, the virus don't care about politics or biased reality.
It is there to infect, kill, and spread.
 
The United States reported more than 1,000 COVID-19 deaths on Tuesday, equating to around 42 fatalities an hour, according to a Reuters tally, as the Delta variant continues to ravage parts of the country with low vaccination rates.

Coronavirus-related deaths have spiked in the United States over the past month and are averaging 769 per day, the highest since mid-April, according to the Reuters tally.
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https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-reports-more-than-1000-covid-deaths-single-day-2021-08-18/
 
This can be described no other way than a completely human manufactured epidemic.

https://arstechnica.com/science/202...nues-to-rage-as-states-set-new-covid-records/
Archibald said:
Richard N said:
Texas governor Greg Abbott tests positive for Covid

He has forbidden mask mandates in Texas and was doing this yesterday (no masks here) :
Click to expand...

SCREW THE ARSEHOLE. Now he will get a taste of his own absolute idiocy.
Remember, the virus don't care about politics or biased reality.
It is there to infect, kill, and spread.
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He won’t as unlike what he’s messaging to his voters, he is fully vaccinated. See link below.

https://www.newsmax.com/amp/us/covid-19-vaccinated-governor-greg-abbott/2021/08/17/id/1032764/
 
Grey Havoc said:
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/...t-pentagon-spending-toward-global-vaccination
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An unexpected development. The United States has been called the world's policeman. This, however, is a sign of humanitarian goodwill.

From the point of view of Wall Street, the world consists of three parts: Developed Nations, Developing Markets and the poor nations. The poor nations are too small to make a significant contribution to growth, meaning the sale of goods and services. So the focus is on Developing Markets, that is those countries where growth fueled by demand for goods and services is required, or 'developed' based on certain things. To put it bluntly: you can't sell anything to the dead.
 
CDC Moves to Stem Future Threats. The headline of an article that appeared today on the business news site Bloomberg. An excerpt:

"The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will launch a new outbreak analysis and forecast center, picking a group of outsiders from academia and the private sector to lead the new initiative."
 
Texas school district adds masks to dress code, finding possible loophole in Abbott’s ban

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/08/18/texas-masks-paris-dresscode-abbott/
"A North Texas school district has made masks a part of its dress code for the academic year, hoping to exploit a possible loophole in Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s statewide ban on mandates regarding face coverings.

The Paris Independent School District of about 4,000 students announced it would include the masks in the dress code after its board of trustees said it was “concerned about the health and safety of its students and employees.” The district, located about 110 miles northeast of Dallas, noted that Abbott’s executive order last month did not suspend a chapter in the Texas Education Code that gives school districts power to oversee health and safety measures, thus allowing Paris ISD officials to elect to “amend its dress code consistent with its statutory authority.”
“The Board believes the dress code can be used to mitigate communicable health issues,” the district said in a statement. “The Texas Governor does not have the authority to usurp the Board of Trustees’ exclusive power and duty to govern and oversee the management of the public schools of the district.”

Paris ISD appears to be the first in the state to use its authority to set a dress code requiring students and employees to wear masks, potentially setting up other school districts to do the same."
 
My friends at church tonight (we all masked) said that people in New Orleans are getting vaxxed up because everything is requiring it or weekly foot long brain ticklers. Seems it's time my city up the river adopt these requirements as well.

We need to straight up stop being nice to antivaxxers.
 
An Alabama doctor watched patients reject the coronavirus vaccine. Now he’s refusing to treat them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/18/alabama-doctor-unvaccinated-patients-valentine/
"In Alabama, where the nation’s lowest vaccination rate has helped push the state closer to a record number of hospitalizations, a physician has sent a clear message to his patients: Don’t come in for medical treatment if you are unvaccinated.

Jason Valentine, a physician at Diagnostic and Medical Clinic Infirmary Health in Mobile, Ala., posted a photo on Facebook this week of him pointing to a sign taped to a door informing patients of his new policy coming Oct. 1.

“Dr. Valentine will no longer see patients that are not vaccinated against covid-19,” the sign reads.

Valentine wrote in the post, which has since been made private but was captured in online images, that there were “no conspiracy theories, no excuses” stopping anyone from being vaccinated, AL.com reported. The doctor, who said at least three unvaccinated patients have asked him where they could get a vaccine since he posted the photo, has remained resolute to those who have questioned his decision in recent days.

“If they asked why, I told them covid is a miserable way to die and I can’t watch them die like that,” wrote Valentine, who has specialized in family medicine with Diagnostic and Medical Clinic since 2008."
 
Just a n=1 event. My office has 7 people (main office is in Poland). I got sick 2 weeks ago. 2 days later tested negative for corona virus. A guy in his early 60s got sick about 3 or 4 days later and tested positive for corona. He got better and then Sunday (4 days ago) ended up getting admitted where he still is. If I hadn't gotten tested and tested negative boy would I feel guilty.

My wife does Er medicine so there is no debate about the virus being real. Not even in the early days a year and a half ago. We figure that we got the virus in February of last year when we both got coughs that never turned into the colds we thought we were getting.

I read something interesting recently. The Spanish flu killed 6% of the population. Corona virus has killed 0.05% of the population. Even if the world had not closed and there were 10x more people falling to the virus it would still be about 1/6th of the Spanish flu.

I see both sides of the debate. But if the operating procedure is to close the planet earth for every virus that circulates we will never see a normal life ever again.

Also since when do we fault people for getting sick? No one calls HIV positive people bad words for getting the virus. But a virus that circulates in the air and people say to let people die who catch it. This has to stop.

I read that Israel is now saying 34% of the new corona patients are vaxxed. They also say no one who got the first variant is getting sick with the new one. So a previous infection is 100% effective seemingly indefinitely whereas the vaccines now require annual boosters.
 
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rooster said:
I read something interesting recently. The Spanish flu killed 6% of the population. Corona virus has killed 0.05% of the population. Even if the world had not closed and there were 10x more people falling to the virus it would still be about 1/6th of the Spanish flu.
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Did it? Maybe in India. In the US the death rate was closer to .6%. Covid has killed over .3% of my US county so far with no signs of slowing down.

Also since when do we fault people for getting sick? No one calls HIV positive people bad words for getting the virus. But a virus that circulates in the air and people say to let people die who catch it. This has to stop.
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A relative of my sister-in-law came to a small family dinner after testing positive a few weeks ago. My brother has an auto-immune disorder and has yet to recover. Should I fault her or not? There's getting sick and then there's callous irresponsibility.

I read that Israel is now saying 34% of the new corona patients are vaxxed. They also say no one who got the first variant is getting sick with the new one. So a previous infection is 100% effective seemingly indefinitely whereas the vaccines now require annual boosters.
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I don't know about this but as of yesterday the Israeli Health Ministry says 154.7 serious cases per 100,000 unvaccinated people compared with 19.8 for vaccinated. Also consider ~78% of Israelis are vaccinated to some extent.
 
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What comes across from this is how well all the vaccines work against a variant they weren’t designed for, and is the fittest variant as well so far.
Tso doses of the Pfizer vaccine has greater effectiveness against the Delta coronavirus variant compared to the Oxford jab, but but its efficacy declines faster, research shows.
Scientists from the University of Oxford have said that after four to five months, the level of protection offered by both vaccinesis similar.
The findings, which have not yet been peer reviewed, also suggest that those infected with the Delta variant after their second jab had similar peak levels of virus to unvaccinated people.
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https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/pfizer-vaccine-effectiveness-oxford-jab-study-b951331.html
 
Given that I have just gotten my first shot of the Pfizer vaccine on Sunday, I find that to be not great news. Would have much preferred the AstraZeneca vaccine myself, but our government is pretty much a EU puppet these days, to the point where we are actually throwing or giving away most of what stocks of the latter vaccine we did manage to procure. :rolleyes:
 
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rooster said:
No one calls HIV positive people bad words for getting the virus.
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...Anymore. It's still a highly stigmatized and politicized virus whose best friend is hatred.
rooster said:
But a virus that circulates in the air and people say to let people die who catch it. This has to stop.
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Agreed it has to stop. People need to get the vaccine and stop DDoSing the medical system.
 
I admit I expected these figures to look much better by this stage.


Asked about the latest figures, Professor Peter Openshaw, a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) which advises the Government, said: “I think it’s very worrying. This is a very large number. If you think, 34,000 people, that’s a lot of people testing positive, and to be seeing over 100 deaths a day at this stage, you know before schools have gone back, while the weather is still relatively good, we’re not back into winter yet. I think we’re all really anxious about what’s going to happen once we return to normality.


“We’re going into the winter with really very high levels of infection out there in the community and we just don’t really know what’s going to happen.”


The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is meeting this morning to discuss a potential booster campaign and people who might “really need” a third dose of a coronavirus vaccine. Committee member Professor Adam Finn said a decision is imminent that those who are “very unlikely to be well protected by those first two doses” will need a third one.
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https://inews.co.uk/news/health/covid-cases-uk-winter-coronavirus-infections-deaths-numbers-1158221
 
The truth is we have no historical precedent for the moment we’re in now. We need to stop thinking back to 1918 as a guide for how to act in the present and to start thinking forward from 2021 as a guide to how to act in the future. This is the pandemic I will be studying and teaching to the next generation of doctors and public-health students.
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To manage that future, I won’t look to our past; I’ll look to how we handle our present. We must learn to innovate, plan, and test evidence-based pandemic protocols; develop and resupply stockpiles of protective gear, intensive-care devices, medications, and vaccines; and fund basic infectious-disease research. We must also insist that our leaders demand transparent communication and disease surveillance among all nations as new threats develop around the world.
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What keeps me awake at night is the real risk that our flummoxed leaders will forget about the very issues that got us into this mess in the first place. They will move on to other projects and plans. Such purposeful amnesia only helps to set us up for another pandemic—a tragedy of Himalayan proportions, not to mention a definite threat to our collective health. The coronavirus pandemic is setting a new benchmark, one we’ll be studying to help us navigate the next one.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...nfluenza-pandemic-history-coronavirus/619801/
 
What a bunch of conflicting information. Is comparing statistics the way to go? For scientists, yes. The average person should still follow all suggested health precautions. That is all we can do. The past matters. They did not have multiple vaccines in Spanish Flu days so we, meaning the world, are ahead.

A note to the World Health Organization: Contact some multi-billionaires. Have them build vaccine production facilities specifically for poorer nations.

A note to idiots who plan on opennig schools in the Fall: Put every child in a spacesuit type garment with an independent air supply. See the outfit worn by SR-71 pilots for reference.
 
rooster said:
I read something interesting recently. The Spanish flu killed 6% of the population. Corona virus has killed 0.05% of the population. Even if the world had not closed and there were 10x more people falling to the virus it would still be about 1/6th of the Spanish flu.
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That's not how exponential growth works, even if the death rate were lower. First it's 10x, then it's 100x, then it's 1000x (etc), and preventing that growth's what locking down bought us. In many ways the infection numbers are more significant than the death rate, 100 people with a death rate of .5 vs 1000 people with a death rate of .05 both need 50 coffins, and 10,000 at .05 is significantly worse.

The authorities in 1919 were working with a much lower knowledge of epidemiology, and a much more limited ability to lock down - our (1st world) society shops once a week or so, whereas in 1919 people shopped daily because they didn't have freezers. The idea that I could browse a huge catalogue of food and have several weeks worth delivered the next day with no human interaction bar a delivery driver standing 2m back from my door would have seemed magical back then (doubly so that it was available across all classes!). We have a much greater ability to limit person to person interaction than they did in 1919.

On top of which we've got an extra century's worth of scientific advancement* and planning / prepping for the big one**, plus a generally healthier populace.

* Such as knowing what a cytokine storm is, and why it kills the healthy - that alone is a major advance over the knowledge of the doctors fighting Spanish Flu.

** Covid isn't the big one, something with the death rate of MERS and the covert infection phase of Covid is the nightmare scenario (though MERS might be a bit too aggressive, there's probably an anti-sweet-spot of death rate vs transmissibility somewhere between MERS and Covid)
 
On the train this afternoon and of course the one guy not wearing a mask (masks strongly encouraged on that line) is the one who let out the almighty sneeze....
 
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