LeSving wrote:
The point is, in the eyes of the public, AZ is bad, Pfizer is good, and side effects is one factor. As far as I’m concerned AZ with their dodgy business practice, and with good help from the UK I have to include, has shoot themselves in the foot. AZ is full of bad vibes, while Pizer is only good vibes. The public loves good vibes, and hate bad vibes.
That’s up to the countries concerned – it’s none of my business and none of AZ’s business really. They’re doing the whole thing at cost and make absolutely nothing from it. If your country (and others) doesn’t want it, that just makes things easier for AZ.
I wouldn’t kid yourself about the reasons for it though. It’s a classic petulant “well, we don’t want it anyway” reaction, and of course politicians in various countries have to manage the fact that they completely screwed up their procurement programme and make it look like their mistakes weren’t really mistakes because that product wasn’t required anyway.
Pfizer will be falling about 10m doses short on it’s delivery commitments to the EU up until the end of February. I see no frothy-mouthed outbursts or threats of legal action from the EC, probably because behind the scenes the Americans have told them to shut up or get nothing at all. But of course, the Brits are an easy target to beat up on so no problems making a lot of noise there.
Talking about ‘dodgy business practice’ doesn’t cut much ice when a firm is doing something for you at cost. Frankly I’m somewhat surprised that AZ hasn’t just torn up the contract and given them their part-payment back, but then it became clear quite early on here that they wanted to do the right thing for the good of humanity and not just use it as a means to make a tonne of cash (like Pfizer).
Peter wrote:
That must be the work of local media/politics, because the two are very similar in performance, side effects, etc.
There are some significant differences: Efficacy of against serious infection is 95% for Biontec vs. about 75% for AZ. That is a difference. In addition to that purely due to time lag of the AZ vaccine we already have real life efficacy data from Biontec – also on suppression of transmissibility but not yet on AZ.
These differences might not make a significant difference from epidemiological POV, but to understand that one needs much more insights than average population has. Therefore the population has the simple question “Do I want the 95% or the 75% vaccine” – or, even more pragmatically “if I’m offered vaccination with the 75% vaccine should I take it or wait until I can get the 95% one?”.
In such a situation, it is quite obvious that click baiting media is not very reluctant to publish any horror stories on side effects of the 75%-vaccine….
World is not fair
Malibuflyer wrote:
Efficacy of against serious infection is 95% for Biontec vs. about 75% for AZ
Nope.
The main phase III study for the BioNTech product used endpoints of serious/moderate illness. They only tested each trial participant for the virus once, at the start before they were vaccinated. Participants were only subsequently tested if they became ill with Covid-like symptoms. I have the protocol here, because we did it :-)
The main phase III study for AZ tested every single participant several times right through the study, symptomatic or not. The AZ efficacy data is based on infection, not illness.
Nonetheless, we are seeing good data coming out as the programme progresses. The Israel data on transmission is very encouraging, and what we have so far in the UK is suggesting that efficacy is improved by the longer gap between the two jabs. But none of this is particularly surprising to anyone with a prior (and more breadth of) general knowledge about vaccines or viruses.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Therefore the population has the simple question “Do I want the 95% or the 75% vaccine” – or, even more pragmatically “if I’m offered vaccination with the 75% vaccine should I take it or wait until I can get the 95% one?”.
To my knowledge no-one in Europe is being given this choice. Supply is simply too short. Anyway, it’s not about them personally – it’s about the population. If the vaccines between them manage to largely remove Covid-19 from circulation (or make it so rare as to be not a problem) then it isn’t going to matter which one you had.
Malibuflyer wrote:
World is not fair
I doubt AZ cares. They’re not doing it for a profit, hence why you see no PR effort from them. Interesting to see the degree to which European politicians have rubbished it, but I don’t think they’re actually rejecting the shipments, are they? Perhaps AZ should ship it all to Africa if the EU doesn’t want it?
Vax passports concept is going to run into another problem.
Say country A has approved the Russian or China one for use on its population but the UK for example has not
What is going to be the status of an individual from county A fully vax’d according to their home country’s reg when wanting to enter the UK in this example.
Are they going to be regarded as an approved individual for entry despite their vax not being authroised in the UK – or are they not and are to be subject to some restrictive quarantine process?
This leads to the conclusion that they can only work if ALL vax’es are approved in ALL countries.
Graham wrote:
The main phase III study for the BioNTech product used endpoints of serious/moderate illness. They only tested each trial participant for the virus once, at the start before they were vaccinated. Participants were only subsequently tested if they became ill with Covid-like symptoms. I have the protocol here, because we did it :-)The main phase III study for AZ tested every single participant several times right through the study, symptomatic or not. The AZ efficacy data is based on infection, not illness.
Don’t know who it was on either side – but sounds like Biontec has by far the better people/advisors on study design than AZ has …
Graham wrote:
To my knowledge no-one in Europe is being given this choice.
In Germany you are informed beforehand which vaccine they will give you – and looks like many people decide not to take the vaccine if they are offered the AZ one. You don’t have the choice between vaccines – but you have the choice to take the one offered to you or not.
Graham wrote:
then it isn’t going to matter which one you had.
From a fact point of view: Absolutely. Unfortunately most people do not care too much about facts…
Btw – and uncorrelated to these points:
It is interesting how press does indirectly influence public sentiment for/aginst certain vaccines. In Germany the two vaccines we are talking about are called “Biontec and AZ”. in UK the press seem to call them “Pfizer and Oxford”…
Malibuflyer wrote:
Don’t know who it was on either side – but sounds like Biontec has by far the better people/advisors on study design than AZ has …
It depends from which point of view, though the designs are as I would expect them to be taking into account the commercial situation – the Pfizer one for profit and the AZ one not.
The AZ design is far more scientifically robust. The Pfizer one is better geared towards a good headline result. The firm I work for (ICON) designed and ran the Pfizer/BioNTech trial. I don’t know for sure which firm designed and ran the AZ trial, but it was PROB90 Iqvia (who I once worked for, when they were called Quintiles) – they have a long-standing partnership on a lot of AZ’s development work going back a decade or more.
This news is out today – Public Health Scotland reports 85% (Pfizer) vs 94% (AZ) reduction in hospitalisations. It’s a large RWE (real-world evidence) study with over a million participants. It seems that the UK is the only place rolling out sufficient numbers of both products sufficiently quickly to gather comparative data on this sort of scale. It is the first data we’ve seen where AZ appears to outperform Pfizer, but it is not that surprising – particularly in a real-world setting – to those who understood the significance of the difference in the phase III designs.
Malibuflyer wrote:
In Germany you are informed beforehand which vaccine they will give you – and looks like many people decide not to take the vaccine if they are offered the AZ one. You don’t have the choice between vaccines – but you have the choice to take the one offered to you or not.
Of course, same here. This is a free country, you can always decline, and product being used is not hidden from you – we don’t go in for that sort of stuff. This is not the same as people having a choice of product, because there is no guarantee if/when you’ll get invited back again, or what the product will be next time. Again our media, never slow to sniff out something controversial, has not reported people getting funny over choice of product.
Malibuflyer wrote:
in UK the press seem to call them “Pfizer and Oxford”…
I don’t see that. Our media seems to have settled on Pfizer and AstraZeneca, which is logical. It’s the case in the article I link to above, and just about everything else I see. In the UK were are unlikely to favour Oxford over AZ as a descriptor, since we view both as (largely) British. It may be different in Germany though, where the choice of names is a straight one between a German company or an American one.
Graham wrote:
Again our media, never slow to sniff out something controversial, has not reported people getting funny over choice of product.
There have been isolated reports of some boomers wanting “the British vaccine”, but as far as I can tell these are very isolated cases, and 99.99% people don’t care which one they get, they just want to be vaccinated.
There is the capacity and will here in U.K. for us under 50s to get jabbed ASAP – I am sure the U.K. will continue to take any AZ capacity that is thrown up. I am hearing stories of vaccination centres in certain areas now being stood down on some days in the U.K. because the roll out protocols won’t allow them to call forward younger groups – we could go even faster.
We just had another outbreak here (for some reason they decided not to vaccinate transport workers, despite being them the main risk of infection here – they’ve suddenly had a change of heart over that and started vaccinating them). Again talk of “low risk” venues found through contact tracing, and one of these venues has shown onward infection to new people, who have undoubtedly spread it further. I’m betting we will be in another 3 week lockdown again by the weekend. Fortunately the weather was nice enough to fly this weekend so I gave the plane a decent run.
MattL wrote:
There is the capacity and will here in U.K. for us under 50s to get jabbed ASAP – I am sure the U.K. will continue to take any AZ capacity that is thrown up. I am hearing stories of vaccination centres in certain areas now being stood down on some days in the U.K. because the roll out protocols won’t allow them to call forward younger groups – we could go even faster.
There is certainly a lot of capacity to vaccinate, but supply (or perhaps the roll-out protocols as you suggest) is proving more limiting.
As a single point of data, I have volunteered through St John Ambulance and been trained and background checked as a vaccinator. I am fully signed off and ready to go whenever they want me, and have been for some weeks now, but the rostering app they’ve given us shows zero vacancies for vaccination shifts anywhere in the country for the foreseeable future. I deduce from this that there is no shortage of people to get the job done. It might be better if they made more use of such volunteers and sent the docs and nurses back onto their day jobs, but others are paid to make those decisions.
