Malibuflyer wrote:
Truth is: Although the old communist thought of “nations should own all IP and means of productions to create utmost incentive to activate “latent capacity”” has largely been proven wrong by history. In every single case (= nation) where this approach has been actually tried out it has been shown that the negative impact on actual capacity (i.e. capital not invested in equipment, workers reducing effectiveness, etc.) is an order of magnitude larger than the theoretic “unlocking of latent capacity”.
Or, like a famous Neo-capitalist once said: Even if the socialists are right, it is still better to utilize 80% of 200% capacity than 100% of 50%.
I suppose the best solution should be in between. From current events it is pretty clear that a basic infrastructure should be available locally, not only for vaccination production but also for stuff like masks and other things. However, the state as I can see it is very unsuitable for this purpose: At least here they screwed up everything they could (reserve storage and also giving up a half private vaccination manufacturing plant for cost reasons) and are quite inept even to procure properly. I guess the fact that they now actually have set their money on the two vaccines which are still without blamish regarding side effects may prove them right but also lucky.
Therefore I’d say that it would probably be best if governments need to insure a certain basic infrastructure for vaccination productin to be there, but in private hands. That is pretty much what develops now here, though on coorperate initiative (Lonza/Moderna) which should be guaranteed by the state.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Same will happen with Covid as soon as we have a good vaccination status in Europe: we will still se imported cases and local outbreaks but case and fatality numbers will be below “typical life risks”.
I guess the defining factor there will be what kind of mutations are are around where. It may be necessary to still implement travel restrictions to places where mutations exist which are not or insufficiently covered by the current vaccines, but generally, I guess you are right on this. IMHO it will take longer though as the whole thing goes two ways: It is not only our vaccination status which is important but also the one of the “target countries”, particularly in the case where they have no infections to speak of right now. That means, if we want to re-instate travel to Australia, NZ and other low or no Covid regions, they will rightly want to assure that no vaccined people will import the virus into their non vaccined population. So they need to be up to speed with vaccinations as much as we are before we can talk of unrestricted travel.
Peter wrote:
An astonishing bit of news just now: England has vaccinated 95% of over-55s. Not so much that 95% of over 55s have been done but that the anti-vacc movement has more or less collapsed – despite huge and obviously well organised and well funded campaigns on social media to discredit the vacc programme
I hope the same thing will happen in France and elsewhere.
I think the best way is a carrot i.e. make it widely known that travelling abroad is going to be very hard without it. The challenge is that some countries travel abroad a lot more than others.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
I do wonder if in the end it amounts to Pfizer and Moderna having more dilligently filled in their packaging sheet with side effects while AZ and J&J did not or missed the actual problem.
I don’t think so. The trials of vaccines are done over a few tens of thousands of people, but the probability of the blood clots are on the order of less than 10 per million. The trials for ALL the vaccines are small enough that very rare side effects measured in single digits per million are quite likely not to show up in the trial. Especially if the probability of this side effect is limited to only a section of the people in the trial.
If I were 20 years old, I’d still gladly have the AZ vaccine, the risk is absolutely minuscule: the risk from the vaccine is significantly lower than the risk of getting hospitalised/long COVID for a 20 year old.
Exactly.
IMHO the “this was not on the packaging” is just inventing a hook on which you can hang some political/unrelated coat.
If you take some other random drug and read the side effects and google them, you find they occur at a far higher rate. In many cases at 10% plus. Not 1ppm or 10mm but ten percent (which as everybody here will know is 100000ppm 
)
Admittedly this situation is different because you are giving the “drug” to people who are not showing symptoms of the “illness” and such drugs need to be a lot safer, but the ppm levels here are so far out of the ballpark of what anybody would bother about in normal times… Like I say, this is 100% media/political football and everything is either being used to manipulate some agenda or is a hot topic because there is no other news (well, no news apart from a load of people who are fed up with CV19 lockdowns and are going around setting fire to stuff).
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Certainly the whole thing appears to be a result of the fast track certification but the question remains if the risk outweighs the benefit or not.
Comments like that show that while everyone has become an armchair expert on vaccines, the big picture of clinical research and pharmaceutical development in general is missing.
None of this is due to fast-track certification. The only part that has been fast-tracked is the data going straight to the front of the queue at the regulators and being reviewed as soon as it becomes available. Normally one waits in a fairly long queue, and then for detailed review of a barely-tangible claimed benefit (e.g. a cancer drug which might prolong survival by 2 months compared to some other drug). The other parts that are skipped are the dithering about which product to develop in which indication, the ROI analysis, gaining of funding, etc. There are loads of articles out there on all this. Then the fact that, the trials being healthy-volunteer studies with quite relaxed inc/exc criteria and this being something everyone is interested in, you can recruit 10,000+ subjects in a very short time. In an oncology study – sick patients with complex histories and tight inc/exc criteria – you might easily take a year or more to recruit 100 patients.
All of these vaccines have been the subject of large-scale clinical trials – five-figure subject numbers, which is far more than the average drug is ever tested in prior to being granted a licence. The average drug is probably administered to ~5,000 subjects prior to licencing, although the standard deviation is high and in rare diseases the number will dip below 1,000.
Reactions happing in the region of 1-4 ppm simply aren’t going to show up in any clinical trial that could ever practically be conducted. You only find this out in the real world once millions of people are using it, and that is no different for a Covid-19 vaccine than in is for any other medical intervention.
LeSving wrote:
They haven’t even reacted properly as of yet, except nonsense about risk vs benefits. Risk vs benefit is up to each and everyone to decide for themselves. What the EMA should do is to figure the causes and exact risk, and label the vaccine accordingly.
Again, not seeing the big picture about how that might work. How can you determine the cause, calculate the exact risk and label the product before you have some data? What would you have them do, keep the product in carefully-controlled clinical trials for the next 20 years? Some people just aren’t getting the fact that reactions happening at such a tiny frequency just aren’t detectable in any sort of research environment.
alioth wrote:
If I were 20 years old, I’d still gladly have the AZ vaccine, the risk is absolutely minuscule: the risk from the vaccine is significantly lower than the risk of getting hospitalised/long COVID for a 20 year old.
I agree. I would not have hesitated one minute taking AZ, even at 58. It’s interesting however how the different reactions are, some countries allow it from 60 up, others with different age limits e.t.c.
Thank you and @Graham for clarifying the way the research was done. I am far from even an armchair expert, I simply ask myself questions and find myself privileged to have access to health professionals here who can give educated answers. It’s pretty obvious that one can not really rely on the press or even government agencies for that these days.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
It’s pretty obvious that one can not really rely on the press or even government agencies for that these days.
What Graham wrote about “fast-track” has been known to me for a long time (half a year at least) from reading the press and government agency information..
Malibuflyer wrote:
I’m not perfectly fine with that – I would hope for a world where this does not happen. I do think, however, that everybody who calls themself “adult” should know that the reality is not like our dream and therefore officially and politicians do lie, promote “fake news”, etc.
It’s interesting to see that it appears that ministers, heads of state and members of parliament simply lying to protect themselfs and their blunders and / or crimes appears to be accepted as a matter of fact these days. I wonder in that case why people so much got their knickers in a twist then over recent presidents and others who openly and balantly lied and were massively and rightly attacked up to impeachment. If it was just a given fact that these people lying to us is as natural than a dog urinating at a lamppost, then why bother. Personally I don’t feel that way: People, no matter who they are, who lie and cheat in order to cover up their failures or who do so out of malicious intent should be taken to responsiblity for these lies. Be that by not being reelected or be that by being prosecuted, that depends on the case.
Therefore “but a politician told me so” is not an excuse for grown ups….
Well, not just any politician but the so called “single official voice” of the ministry of health and the health minister himself. I suppose that is a difference to just some politician or even member of parliament.
Fact is, people need to trust someone to lead in a crisis or at least tell them the truth to the best of their knowledge. Clearly, many people on this forum, being who you are and being knowledgable in the field can indeed educate themselfs where needed on the internet and sort out what is plausable or not. The general Joe Public can’t, particularly not in the beginning of a crisis where nobody nows anything really. I think what largely destroyed trust in the official voices at least in this country was the outright lies at the start. And due to that, later statements and campaigns e.t.c. to keep the illness contained failed because of the lack of trust more than the lack of discipline. This could be seen in some other countries where the exponents were more up front and honest: while by now also there patience e.t.c. has eroded, initial and mid time response by the public was more effective.
I am far from proposing that dictatorships are the way to go, but particularly in democracies, WILLFULL compliance of people depends largely on the trust they bestow on their government or whoever leads in a crisis. Once that trust is lost, it is very hard to even have recommendations followed. It’s exactly in this distrust where armchair experts pop up all over the place, contradicting and insulting each other which leads to even more distrust and resignation. This is not effective crisis management.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
People, no matter who they are, who lie and cheat in order to cover up their failures or who do so out of malicious intent should be taken to responsiblity for these lies. Be that by not being reelected or be that by being prosecuted, that depends on the case.
Your problem is the political class have become very good at it. When is a lie a lie, and when is it an opinion, and if it is a lie, when is it based on best and reasonable information at the time, and when is it not. In short it is often very difficult nailing someone in a Court after several weeks of cross examination, so what chance with politicians unless they (and the civil servants) have really got it badly wrong. This is increasingly the challenge of accountability and bringing anyone actually to book and without even getting inolved in the inbuilt political controls in the process.
I suspect we all believe China is not telling the truth over the Uighurs but go ahead and prove they arent being re-educated if you will.
Also the political class have a protective blanket. These days very few speak from the hip, they have a whole subclass that will have considered what they have to say, and while a lot of the politicians may well be very clever political operators, they are not in their own right the bightest bulbs in the chandelier – and some of them may even be missing a filament or two. :-)
