Graham wrote:
Almost no drugs get tested on pregnant women. Some are known (through historical use) to be ok. In a medical emergency you give them what they need and the long-term consequences will be what they will be – keeping the mother alive comes before birth defects, etc.
That is correct. We anaesthetists usually resort to very old drugs if we have to anaesthetise a pregnant woman, because these drugs have been in circulation for so long that one would know by now if they cause severe birth defects, even though they were never properly studied to that end.
Vaccination is usually recommended not to take place during pregnancy, regardless of the vaccine. The chance of anything bad happening to the mother or child is very much 0, but in the off-chance that anything does happen, it could be (wrongly) blamed on the vaccine. So the reason for not vaccinating pregnant women is mainly a legal one. Women who do want to get pregnant are recommended to get their vaccinations in order before trying in earnest to concieve…
There are lots of interesting questions about why trials are done the way they are, and of course the search for a Covid-19 vaccine has put into mainstream media the details of the industry I work in, which previously most people knew almost nothing about. I have found the news coverage to be generally pretty accurate, although they lack contextual explanations when stating certain things (like saying that trial X included no people over 60, but not why that would be, etc.)
For assessing efficacy you want your dataset to be as clean as possible. The dirtier it is, the larger (and thus more expensive) it needs to be in order to demonstrate an effect with statistical significance. By excluding certain populations (those who are likely to get sick, die or leave the trial for some reason) you help keep the data clean. Each trial protocol has a long list of inclusion and exclusion criteria, and these lists are much longer now than they were when I started in the industry in 2003.
A vaccine trial can be pretty strict on criteria because you are recruiting healthy subjects and there is no shortage of them. When you are trialling a drug in stage IV cancer patients, you have to relax the criteria because your target population is by definition extremely sick and likely has many co-morbidities.
When we bid to conduct a trial, part of our proposal (to demonstrate our expertise) always involves commenting on the protocol and making recommendations. The most common type of recommendation is telling the customer that they need to consider relaxing some inc/exc criteria because otherwise they will not find enough/any qualifying patients.
Of course, some populations are excluded purely for commercial reasons. They are medically/statistically ‘troublesome’ and there is little or no money to be made in getting a drug approved for use in them.
Reading the local news now. It looks like we will get flooded with vaccines from the start of next year. It will be given first to everybody in the “risk group” first. That is everyone over 65 years, have some underlying illness or are medical personnel. About 1/4 of the population.
This also means that general availability will not occur before Easter time at the earliest.
IMO it’s over. This time next year it will seem as a bad, distant dream 
LeSving wrote:
IMO it’s over. This time next year it will seem as a bad, distant dream
Well. The economy will be damaged. Lots of companies will have gone out of business. No one knows if e.g. Norwegian or SAS will still be around.Youth will have lost a lot of their education. The public health situation will be degraded. We will live with this for many years to come even if the disease itself has stopped.
The UK gets a new higher resolution site. You have to select from the pulldown menu, or enter a postcode.
LeSving wrote:
This time next year it will seem as a bad, distant dream
Should we start buying Norwegian shares now when they are 0.36 NOK?
If you want to be diluted when they do a debt-to-equity swap, it’s the perfect moment!
Norwegian was in big trouble already before Covid. It will be interesting to see what will happen to them. The government has refused to help out because of the insane loans they have and because of the Chinese now own a lot of it. I have a few shares there as well, bought at 1.0 NOK What I think will happen is they simply get rid of most of the company, then concentrate on the Norwegian/Scandinavian market and start all over again. But, they may also end up dead.
Wizz Air has started flying here. Nobody wants them, and the pilots aren’t capable of operating in winter conditions. They refuse to fly in conditions that are OK for SAS and Norwegian. They are dirt cheap though, but the way they operate, I cannot see they will last through the winter. A company that is so inexperienced and use so inexperienced pilots they cannot fly people “home for Christmas” is nothing but a joke.
LeSving wrote:
the pilots aren’t capable of operating in winter conditions
Really? I wonder. They’ve been operating in such conditions for a long time, maybe not in arctic conditions, but normal winter conditions they should even know from their homebase.
“The UK gets a new higher resolution site.”
It seems to be only England, not the UK. It doesn’t look to give more detail than the Scottish site has been giving for weeks. But it looks to be simpler to use
