Covid-19 vaccine candidate is 90% effective, says Pfizer

[+ 7829V]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/09/covid-19-vaccine-candidate-effective-pfizer-biontech

[sydneyboy]

This is hot news in Australia. A triumph of science. If it fails we can always fall back on disinfectant.

[Mjonis]

I think it's very positive news. Fingers crossed!

[marylander1940]

I repeat my belief that we shouldn’t hold our breath for a vaccine.

 

Given that you know how he’d be offended by such a characterization, maybe you could hold back on labels?

It’s that kind of personalization that escalates things to incivility around here.

 

and as for “doing something rather than dying”...that’s not a black and white question. For example: What if that“something” has a 50% chance of creating another problem?

 

edited to add: let’s give my last question a context @marylander1940 - what if the vaccine had a 50% chance of causing impotence? Or, what if there was a 25% chance you would lose the ability to speak? Is something better than nothing in those scenarios?

 

Science is back!

 

Admin Warning: No politics in the Lounge

Edited November 9, 2020 by Cooper

[orville]

Pfizer itself has said more time is needed before a final verdict.

It's incredibly unusual for a Pharmaceutical Company to publicly announce this SO EARLY.

Big Pharma CEOs can be nastier than politicians.

I wouldn't be surprised this is a PR stunt to increase their market stock's value.

Even if their vaccine is just 50% to 60% effective. They can fall back to 'error margin'.

 

Meanwhile, people (especially 3rd world countries) keep dying because of HIV/AIDS.

I hope that, at least, this opens the doors to investigations on why an HIV vaccine has been so delayed.

 

 

[BuffaloKyle]

I truly hope the 90% effectiveness holds up. That would mean a fairly quick return to normal. As in by the end of 2021. Only 50% of people still say they would take it though. I will be in line as soon as I am allowed to get it!

[mike carey]

Pfizer itself has said more time is needed before a final verdict.

It's incredibly unusual for a Pharmaceutical Company to publicly announce this SO EARLY.

Big Pharma CEOs can be nastier than politicians.

I wouldn't be surprised this is a PR stunt to increase their market stock's value.

Even if their vaccine is just 50% to 60% effective. They can fall back to 'error margin'.

As it's been explained here by a medical researcher from Monash University in Melbourne on TV this morning, the effectiveness of the vaccine is being tested by examining people in the trial who contract the virus, and the number of infections required is about 150 from the 42K volunteers in six countries, they are at 93 or 94 at the moment so they have about two thirds of the required sample, so a reasonable indication. The vast majority of the infections are among people who received the placebo, and from that they have inferred that the vaccine is 90% effective. If the vaccine was not effective you would assume that half the cases would have been among those who had received the vaccine. That's not definitive, and when the other third of the positive cases are identified, the level of confidence in the results will be higher.

[orville]

As it's been explained here by a medical researcher from Monash University in Melbourne on TV this morning, the effectiveness of the vaccine is being tested by examining people in the trial who contract the virus, and the number of infections required is about 150 from the 42K volunteers in six countries, they are at 93 or 94 at the moment so they have about two thirds of the required sample, so a reasonable indication. The vast majority of the infections are among people who received the placebo, and from that they have inferred that the vaccine is 90% effective. If the vaccine was not effective you would assume that half the cases would have been among those who had received the vaccine. That's not definitive, and when the other third of the positive cases are identified, the level of confidence in the results will be higher.

Thanks for the breakdown of the numbers.

I will still wait and see, for 6 months at least.

Hopefully, this is something reliable now.

It should help reactivate the economy and get back to normal.

[Guest]

Seems like wonderful news. I tried to access my retirement account (457), received a pop-up that said "....attempts to time the market are rarely successful..." and was denied access to my account.

[Walker1]

Is the flu shot even 90% effective?? I have got the shot every year and still got the flu 3-4 times. Hope it is effective and this makes me wonder why no AIDS/HIV vaccine after so many decades?

[Mjonis]

Is the flu shot even 90% effective?? I have got the shot every year and still got the flu 3-4 times. Hope it is effective and this makes me wonder why no AIDS/HIV vaccine after so many decades?

 

flu vaccine varies as they have to "guess" which strains to make the vaccines for ahead of time (other factors as well).

 

I believe HIV has an extremely high mutation rate and a very rapid reproduction rate, which probably make it difficult to vaccinate against.

[Guest]

Is the flu shot even 90% effective?? I have got the shot every year and still got the flu 3-4 times. Hope it is effective and this makes me wonder why no AIDS/HIV vaccine after so many decades?

No, nowhere near that. How do you know the illness you suffered after getting the shot is influenza? Did you actually get tested for influenza and test positive? How do you know it wasn't a cold? That being said, getting the flu shot is no guarantee of not getting the flu. But it does mean you probably won't die or need to be hospitalized with the flu. Although the flu shot does provide strong protection from death and serious illness, it's one of the least effective immunizations at actually preventing illness entirely.

[SirBillybob]

It is inferred that about 85 in placebo group (.44%) versus 9 in vaxx group (.046%) acquired SARS-CoV-2 infection and I am assuming this was exclusively over the initial 28-day period as one must use a common time frame for comparison.

 

Since the 28-day period for some Phase 3 participants, I assume, ended months ago, it may be that there have been actually more than 94 infection cases to date because the 70 additional cases to make up 164 cases should be able to manifest fairly quickly if comparable to community infection rates. Again, I assume that there is a temporal stagger and that each analytic stage must equalize the duration from 1st dose. As time progresses, the between-subject temporal gap from 1st dose shrinks proportionally.

 

One phenomenon that supports my assumption about the preliminary 28-day analysis is that the one-month infection rate in USA over any given 28 days since mid-summer seems comparable to the placebo group infection rate reported. I have not compared to one-month infection rates in the other 5 nation study locations, though USA, Brazil, and Argentina seem to have similar trajectories in total cases. The remaining are Germany, Turkey, and South Africa.

 

It is unclear to me whether the 4,580 shortfall from subject volume target represents ongoing participants not yet at 28 days or some degree of dropout. The protocol is about 170 pages and I am not going to read it all ... I also do not have a pharm background.

 

Severity of infection cases has not yet been reported. I have attempted to ‘drill down’ a bit but it seems ambiguous and I believe that only symptomatic cases are reflected in the 94 to date ... due to the logistics of regular testing for the virus and capturing all exposures, perhaps. Also, some participants with past documented novel coronavirus exposure are included in the study, another potential confounder.

 

Once the threshold of 164 cases is achieved, assuming again about a 10:1 ratio of acquiring infection, I will be interested in how many of the anticipated 150 or thereabouts cases in the placebo group at that time has had severe or even lethal outcome. Because ICU-grade severity and also death are relatively small proportions of overall cases, you need much larger sample sizes and longer follow-up duration to assess the vaccine according to disease severity and mortality.

 

Because I assume it would have been somewhat advantageous for Pfizer/BioNTech to recently report case severity or death among the placebo group (parenthetically ... or suppress the actuality of severity/mortality among the 9 estimated vaxx cases ... that would have been less likely as well as poor fortune for the company), I take it that the results may be seen as not particularly impressive clinically, but a good prospect to mitigate transmission. That seems fine, the ultimate goal being to reduce exposure for those that might not respond well to the vaccine or might otherwise be among the unfortunates that experience severity or death.

[SirBillybob]

Updated to 95%, as by now many of you will know.

[+ sync]

Infuriating! If Typhoid Trump and his zombies had just worn masks and social distanced in unity at the beginning, we would be on the far side of this pandemic by now.

[Otto]

23 die in Norway after receiving Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine: officials

 

 

https://nypost.com/2021/01/15/23-die-in-norway-after-receiving-pfizer-covid-19-vaccine/

[josh282282]

While this report of 23 deaths in Norway is very important and requires further investigation that is robust & transparent, please be very careful to NOT MAKE ASSUMPTIONS or come to ANY CONCLUSIONS as that would be premature at this time. Good Science does not allow for this.

 

Specifically, people get heart attacks every day, sometimes in the morning. Do we blame breakfast for their heart attacks?

 

Continuing, the above report of deaths is from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) which reported in the article that, "More than 20 000 doses of the vaccine have been administered over the past few weeks in Norway and around 400 deaths normally occur among care home residents every week. ". (italics emphasis mine)

 

Also from the article from BMJ, "Norwegian authorities have prioritised the immunisation of residents in nursing homes, most of whom are very elderly with underlying medical conditions and some of whom are terminally ill."

 

Maybe these were patients who were dying & the vaccine had no relationship to their deaths? It is not clear (yet).

 

Therefore, today we can say nothing about the relationship, if any, between the Covid-19 vaccine & these deaths.

Give science time to fully investigate & report their findings.

As of January 15 2020, over 37.9 MILLION vaccines have been safely administered.

It is STILL this physicians (VERY) strong recommendation for everyone to get their Covid-19 vaccine when available to you.

 

Be safe my friends.

 

The BMJ article: https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n149

Edited January 16, 2021 by josh282282

[Guest]

While this report of 23 deaths in Norway is very important and requires further investigation that is robust & transparent, please be very careful to NOT MAKE ASSUMPTIONS or come to ANY CONCLUSIONS as that would be premature at this time. Good Science does not allow for this.

 

Specifically, people get heart attacks every day, sometimes in the morning. Do we blame breakfast for their heart attacks?

...

Yes, let's not get into the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. And yes, most heart attacks are in the morning, which is currently believed in medical circles to be due to higher catecholamine levels (epinephrine and the like). I'm not sure what the death toll is from Covid-19 among nursing home residents, but probably many thousands. Seems a bit silly to even bring this up.

 

 

Edited January 16, 2021 by Unicorn

[Luv2play]

There was the recent case in Miami where a 56 yo male doctor died a short time after getting his first shot of the Pfizer vaccine. He had a very rare reaction (he broke out in tiny red spots and quickly went to the emergency) which proved fatal in about 3 days. His name was Dr. Michaels and his wife said he was a very healthy individual. Scary but rare.

[Guest]

There was the recent case in Miami where a 56 yo male doctor died a short time after getting his first shot of the Pfizer vaccine. He had a very rare reaction (he broke out in tiny red spots and quickly went to the emergency) which proved fatal in about 3 days. His name was Dr. Michaels and his wife said he was a very healthy individual. Scary but rare.

Do you have a link to this report? I've never heard of a similar reaction to anything. Obviously, even if it were true that this reaction were due to this vaccine, given the tens of millions of doses already dispensed, the risk would be preposterously lower than the risk of the illness--several orders of magnitude lower.

[Luv2play]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/health/covid-vaccine-death.html

[Luv2play]

There is a report in the UK Guardian on this case as well.

[+ nycman]

Just remember that a temporal association does not prove causation.

 

In more simple terms, two statements can be true, true, and unrelated.

 

 

He got a COVID vaccination....true

 

Soon thereafter he got a severe autoimmune thrombopenia....true

 

The COVID vaccine caused his thrombocytopenia.....maybe false.

[Luv2play]

Just remember that a temporal association does not prove causation.

 

In more simple terms, two statements can be true, true, and unrelated.

 

 

He got a COVID vaccination....true

 

Soon thereafter he got a severe autoimmune thrombopenia....true

 

The COVID vaccine caused his thrombocytopenia.....maybe false.

I am aware of that and worded my post with that in mind. The article said the case is under investigation. I’m sure the autopsy and the man’s medical record will be studied closely. Interesting that he was a doctor so there should be good medical records in his case. At least, one would hope.

[Luv2play]

Looking back at my post I said reaction and maybe that will not be the case. But I would think that something exogenous brought about the quick onset of the disorder.