Covid-19 Vaccine - Where, How & Costs

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In the US, the situation varies by state and city. Yesterday, a nightclub reopened here, something else reopened there. Instead of the media, there should be a simple, central reporting system at the local, state and national level. Information should be unfiltered and have no drama words.

The UK will definitely have a system in place for international travel according to a statement by the Prime Minister. The US stock market has been seeing record highs since they get high quality intelligence from various sources. I follow them as opposed to the mainstream media. One cruise line has sued the Biden Administration since they want access to US ports. Different messages reaching the public only creates confusion.

I am not doing anything differently since all this started but I am seeing irresponsible behavior on a regular basis.

Some type of vaccine passport will have to become mandatory since air travel has gone up in spite of warnings from the CDC. As the weather improves, I expect to see exactly what I saw last year: an increase in irresponsible behavior. It would be one thing if the virus only selected individuals and each individual lived with the consequences. Just like the flu, it can be spread to others in the same way.
 
Just as a side point this is three first time I’ve seen the full technical names of the AZ & J&J vaccines used in a news piece.

edition.cnn.com

Doctors home in on cause of blood clots potentially linked with Covid-19 vaccines

Doctors say they are homing in on the cause of blood clots that may be linked with certain coronavirus vaccines, and add their findings have important implications for how to treat the condition, regardless of whether vaccines cause it.
edition.cnn.com edition.cnn.com
 
edwest said:
Test and trace? How? When? These people get out of their cars and go wherever they want. And if they infect one or 30 people, how will anyone know? They will just get back in their cars and drive off.
Click to expand...

Tracing apps, mainly.
 
Grey Havoc said:
www.bbc.com

Sputnik V: How Russia's Covid vaccine is dividing Europe

The vaccine has not yet been approved by Europe's medicines agency but orders are piling in.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
Click to expand...

BBC said:
And yet Europe, or at least parts of Europe, are beginning to turn to Moscow out of frustration at the EU's painfully slow vaccine rollout.
Click to expand...

"[...]out of frustration at AZ's painfully protracted manufacturing problems."

Fixed that for you, Beeb.

I think it's crucial to differentiate - by now, this is no longer an EU problem, Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer have met and are meeting (or actually exceeding!) their delivery pledges. It is AZ's bottleneck that is derailing a campaign which would otherwise be proceeding as planned. Neither is it a UK problem, the "sneaky" preferential contracting was perfectly legitimate, it's merely brazenly at odds with the later British rhetoric about vaccine nationalism and free trade. And in any case, had AZ been able to scale up its EU production capacity as promised, it would never have become an issue in the first place.

This is *squarely* an AZ problem at this point - and it needs to be framed as such.
 
Trident said:
edwest said:
Test and trace? How? When? These people get out of their cars and go wherever they want. And if they infect one or 30 people, how will anyone know? They will just get back in their cars and drive off.
Click to expand...

Tracing apps, mainly.
Click to expand...

In theory. However, there are those with privacy concerns and distrust of government issues. It sounds simple and easy but as long as people can opt out, they will.

In the US, the activist media is complaining that vaccine distribution has not been equitable. What they actually mean is that certain groups of people are refusing the vaccine while others lack the information regarding how to get it and where. What are they going to do? Force these groups to get a vaccine? Take them, individually, to wherever they have to go? Their rhetoric is partly useless and somewhat self-serving.
 
edwest said:
In theory. However, there are those with privacy concerns and distrust of government issues. It sounds simple and easy but as long as people can opt out, they will.
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True, but there are effective solutions that are very inoffensive in terms of privacy, especially compared to some other apps that those with a distrust of government are wont to use. Anonymized QR code check-in for shopping, dining and public/private events, for as long as warranted by the epidemic situation, could be a carrot to increase adoption. Like vaccines, tracing (and tracing apps) doesn't need to be 100% watertight to make a useful difference, so a certain percentage of people opting out is tolerable.

The German tracing app, for all its failings, is a good example - technologically, it is almost totally harmless in terms of privacy. Where it went wrong is that it took too long (inexplicably long, even accounting for its sophistication) to be released, and WAY too long for a QR code check-in functionality to become available. The latter will only come in the next few weeks - given that the basic app launched in June last year and how little was done to it in the meantime, you can legitimately wonder what the developers were up to all this time!
 
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The infamous GDPR played a major role in that fiasco, it has to be said.
 
It certainly precluded certain statistical functionalities which would have been useful for informing policy (finding out the contexts in which transmission tends to take place, which is still remarkably unclear). Also, privacy protection has made it difficult to measure the app's efficacy, but it certainly cannot account for the glacial pace of development! In that connection it's just a convenient cop-out, as in some other contexts that I mentioned in an earlier post.
 
Trident said:
edwest said:
In theory. However, there are those with privacy concerns and distrust of government issues. It sounds simple and easy but as long as people can opt out, they will.
Click to expand...

True, but there are effective solutions that are very inoffensive in terms of privacy, especially compared to some other apps that those with a distrust of government are wont to use. Anonymized QR code check-in for shopping, dining and public/private events, for as long as warranted by the epidemic situation, could be a carrot to increase adoption. Like vaccines, tracing (and tracing apps) doesn't need to be 100% watertight to make a useful difference, so a certain percentage of people opting out is tolerable.

The German tracing app, for all its failings, is a good example - technologically, it is almost totally harmless in terms of privacy. Where it went wrong is that it took too long (inexplicably long, even accounting for its sophistication) to be released, and WAY too long for a QR code check-in functionality to become available. The latter will only come in the next few weeks - given that the basic app launched in June last year and how little was done to it in the meantime, you can legitimately wonder what the developers were up to all this time!
Click to expand...

Yes, any help is useful but this situation should be watertight. In Israel, a Green Pass is now in use. I see this as the direction the US is going. The state of New York is already offering the Excelsior Pass: https://epass.ny.gov/home
 
Tangential, a family friend was exceedingly reluctant to be vaccinated.

But, he was on furlough from a catering job, as site was shut.

Now site is warily re-opening, ramping up, he had choice of staying on furlough or having his deferred vaccinations.

He got the vaccinations...
 
Chilean study results are out; 1.5 million doubly vaccinated with Sinovac's Coronavac. I got my second jab of that three weeks ago.

67% REDUCTION IN SYMPTOMATIC INFECTION
85% REDUCTION IN HOSPITALIZATIONS
89% REDUCTION IN ICU ADMISSIONS
80% REDUCTION IN DEATHS

mRNA blows it out of the water, because mRNA is awesome next-gen stuff, but it's much, much better than no vaccine at all.

It also may not quite be adequate for herd immunity, but neither is AZ's 73%, and honestly, 90% effectiveness figures are not normal for traditional flu vaccines and the like, so talk of herd immunity was probably a bit skewed from the start unless they presumed really, really good vaccines from the start, which would have been a weird assumption in general.

abcnews.go.com

Big Chile study finds Chinese vaccine slashes COVID deaths

A study of millions of Chileans who have received the Chinese-developed CoronaVac vaccine has found it 67% effective against symptoms and 80% against death from COVID-19
abcnews.go.com abcnews.go.com
 
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COVID-19 may have many years of evolution and adaption to humans, and is probably in the early part of this cycle. The basic message here it’s evolutionary space for mutations is possibly massive. Even if the spike protein stops changing it may start evolving other parts of the virus instead. This bloke seems rather in awe of it, but then I guess that’s his area of interest.

www.independent.co.uk

Don’t underestimate evolutionary capabilities of ‘clever’ coronavirus, scientists warn

‘It’d be a brave person to say that the virus is nearing the end of its evolutionary route and can’t go any further,’ says top virologist
www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk
 
And that is assuming of course that it hadn't been tweaked in a lab to begin with.
 
The report about Chinese coton producer's labs medling with Covid-19 virus sample was quite worrying.
 
Grey Havoc said:
I have to wonder about that.
Click to expand...

Well, wonder no longer!

At its peak, the UK campaign vaccinated more than 840k people (1st + 2nd jabs) in one day, this rate is now decreasing again, I suspect simply because virtually every adult has now had their first shot. In Germany, the pace is increasing practically continuously as supply improves and GPs begin to contribute, reaching 770k people in one day recently. However, even accounting for the fact that the EU campaign started 3 weeks later, this means the UK is handily outpacing Germany per capita, at a population of 68M against 83M. But of course, the German rate could be higher if AZ was supplying according to plan, which would have seen it deliver about 270M doses to the EU in H1 2021, instead of the 100M it will probably be in reality. To date, Germany has received 22.4M doses overall, 5.6 of which were AZ - this vaccine therefore accounts for only 25% of the German portfolio, rather than the 47% it should have been.

Result?

770k*(16.8M+5.6M*270M/100M)/22.4M*68M/83M=900k>840k

This is a bit of a simplification of course, but the message is clear: AZ not meeting its obligations is likely the difference between Germany at least matching the UK or lagging behind it, on a per capita basis!

coronavirus.data.gov.uk

Official UK Coronavirus Dashboard

GOV.UK Coronavirus dashboard
coronavirus.data.gov.uk coronavirus.data.gov.uk
impfdashboard.de

Das offizielle Dashboard zur Impfkampagne der Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Wie die Impfkampagne in Deutschland vorankommt.
impfdashboard.de impfdashboard.de
 
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TomcatViP said:
The report about Chinese coton producer's labs medling with Covid-19 virus sample was quite worrying.
Click to expand...
Especially in light of this.

Article. It’s a little old but it points out how little research was done into coronaviruses until SARS and how little we still know about them. This what concerns me this lack of knowledge about them as a group. I mean they were only discovered in the 1960s.

www.google.co.uk

A Brief History of Human Coronaviruses

Milder, cold-causing members of this pathogenic viral family long remained under the radar, although they aren't entirely harmless.
www.google.co.uk www.google.co.uk
 
How can we think it’s a good idea for some countries to be taking years if not decades to reach the necessary levels of vaccination to control the virus.

We’ve seen this movie before. The general indifference to medical problems once they stop bothering rich countries is such an entrenched issue that there’s an entire branch of modern medicine dedicated to “neglected tropical diseases.”

Infections like tuberculosis and cholera — often seen by wealthy nations as 19th century relics, encountered mostly in opera and novels — are almost certainly more prevalent today than they’ve been at any point in human history. While U.S. TV networks run nostalgic reruns of the AIDS-themed musical Rent, two-thirds of people with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa.


In the case of Covid, that’s not just a moral failing, but a shortcoming on even the most callous measure of self-interest. If we want to see borders reopen and minimize the risks that fresh variants will arise to overwhelm the vaccine defenses we’ve worked so hard to erect over the past year, the rich world needs to start treating infection in emerging economies as an emergency on a par with what’s happening in its own backyard. In the fight against coronavirus, we will stand together, or fall apart.
Click to expand...

www.bloomberg.com

Opinion | Covid Isn’t Over, and the Next Wave May Be Worse

It’s way too early to talk about the coronavirus in the past tense, even with more widespread vaccinations. The worst outbreaks are accelerating in places least equipped to deal with them.
www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
 
Flyaway said:
lack of knowledge about them
Click to expand...
We know a lot about coronaviruses; the Wuhan lab did a lot of research studying the local strains around Wuhan and Southern China. Multi-digit percentiles of the inhabitants of rural South China are infected with various zoonotic coronaviruses. Such is life.

Since SARS in 2003, coronaviruses became a hot topic of research. Careers in Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and elsewhere have been built on studying coronaviruses, and all sorts of research was done on how vaccines against coronaviruses could be produced.

It's kinda why they were able to crank out vaccine candidates by January. Coronaviruses were well understood, and the possibility of something like COVID-19 was a known unknown from the start.
 
www.cnbc.com

Chile has one of the world's best vaccination rates. Covid is surging there anyway

A recent surge in coronavirus infections in Chile has sparked concern beyond its borders.
www.cnbc.com www.cnbc.com


wtop.com

Vaccine production halts at Baltimore factory - WTOP News

A key contract manufacturer for Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine has stopped making bulk vaccine substance and is retaining what’s already been made at its Baltimore Bayview factory while U.S. regulators continue inspecting it due to quality problems.
wtop.com wtop.com
 
Flyaway said:
he basically says is a complete fallacy with this virus.
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Yes, the Brits found out after like two weeks in February 2020, during which the WHO and the Chinese screamed at them at the top of the lungs not to go for herd immunity.
 
www.telegraph.co.uk

Tablet that treats Covid could be available to take at home by autumn

‘Antivirals taskforce’ launched with the aim of developing two effective treatments for virus in tablet or capsule form by end of year
www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk

www.telegraph.co.uk

Boris Johnson warns we 'can't delude ourselves Covid has gone away'

The Prime Minister has warned that the UK cannot "delude ourselves" into thinking that the threat of coronavirus has disappeared, as infections surge to new heights internationally.
www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk
 
"new heights internationally" The Media should be brought to task for their endless search for fear over facts. In the last month, people have been traveling and exactly the same thing that happened in December and various holidays is happening again. Cases do not rise by themselves. The virus is only doing what any virus would. But in order to wring out every drop of fear, the media must yell to the housetops. "Rise in parts of U.S.?" Today, I saw two Texas license plates in my state. The Canadian government gave police the power to stop motorists because of a rise in cases there. The police refused. Perhaps there is something to the idea that people, not governments, are at fault.

Vaccinations in the US are entering the final phase, while the media begins their fear campaign over the "climate crisis." At 212 million doses given, they see that their campaign will be wrapping up soon. News sources that cover Wall Street are more fact-filled and generally not prone to creating an atmosphere of fear. Customers are returning to stores. And that trend is accelerating as vaccinations average 3 million a day.
 
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