Vacci-Nation [CLOSED DUE TO DISRESPECTFUL, INSULTING, POLITICAL POSTS

[spike021]

Video shows crowds of passengers cramming in to train leaving London ahead of Tier 4 lockdown

[JD001]

Originally Posted by spike021

Video shows crowds of passengers cramming in to train leaving London ahead of Tier 4 lockdown

People are just mad, I bet yah that a lot don't even understand the meaning of Christmas..

I am happy to make sacrifices to stop this thing or at least get it under control. I am on holiday for 2 weeks and will be busy preparing for a professional exam... And in-between times just chilling.. can't do anything else!!

[spike021]

Originally Posted by JD001

People are just mad, I bet yah that a lot don't even understand the meaning of Christmas..

I am happy to make sacrifices to stop this thing or at least get it under control. I am on holiday for 2 weeks and will be busy preparing for a professional exam... And in-between times just chilling.. can't do anything else!!

It's okay, I'll be on-call for work for bits of Christmas Eve, then start full-time from 4PM Christmas Day until New Years Day. I ain't doin' shit other than maybe Facetiming the parents or something and hoping I don't get paged for work..

Over Thanksgiving we had like two major outages (thanks AWS) soooo I'm not very optimistic that it'll be an easygoing holiday off for me.

[JD001]

A new mutation seems to have started in Kent, UK. It has been given a name '501 Y-Y'. Levi's need to get ready for a "spike"...

[AnalogMan]

Originally Posted by spike021

Video shows crowds of passengers cramming in to train leaving London ahead of Tier 4 lockdown

This is one of the reasons the pandemic is still raging and increasing in most places around the world. For whatever reasons - COVID fatigue, denial, or just plain stupidity - people are not dong what needs to be done to reduce transmission.

The mRNA vaccines have been a remarkable, unprecedented achievement. But due to supply limitations and administration logistics, there won't be enough of them or soon enough to quickly vaccinate our way out of this. As much as we would love for it all to be over and life to go back to normal next week with a quick 'shot' for everyone, it's not going to happen that way. We'll still have to observe other containment measures (wearing masks, social distancing, closing venues where unmasked crowds gather, etc.) for a while. But many people just don't want to do that.

Virology and immunology are very complicated. But the rules of contagion can be fairly simple: people gathering in contained spaces without masks is a recipe for spreading infection. Ignore that and infection spreads.

So many people whine that they're tired of restrictions, that they're 'done with the pandemic'. Unfortunately, the SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn't care, and isn't done with us.

[soundman98]

Originally Posted by spike021

I had a coworker at my last job who would never wash his hands. Then he had a kid last year and he was like "I want to make sure we teach them good hygiene", and I thought to myself... dang what's your idea of good hygiene?

related/unrelated. was just at a customers house, their dog was jumping all over me, sticking it's nose in my pocket the entire 6 hours i was there.

turns out the owner always keeps treats in his pockets, and lets the dog fish them out.

the entire time i was there, the owner profusely apologized for the dog jumping all over me and looking for treats...

people like to think we're better and more advanced than animals. but if we can't be consistent with the animals 'beneath' us, we can't possibly be.

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by AnalogMan

This is one of the reasons the pandemic is still raging and increasing in most places around the world. For whatever reasons - COVID fatigue, denial, or just plain stupidity - people are not dong what needs to be done to reduce transmission.

The mRNA vaccines have been a remarkable, unprecedented achievement. But due to supply limitations and administration logistics, there won't be enough of them or soon enough to quickly vaccinate our way out of this. As much as we would love for it all to be over and life to go back to normal next week with a quick 'shot' for everyone, it's not going to happen that way. We'll still have to observe other containment measures (wearing masks, social distancing, closing venues where unmasked crowds gather, etc.) for a while. But many people just don't want to do that.

Virology and immunology are very complicated. But the rules of contagion can be fairly simple: people gathering in contained spaces without masks is a recipe for spreading infection. Ignore that and infection spreads.

So many people whine that they're tired of restrictions, that they're 'done with the pandemic'. Unfortunately, the SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn't care, and isn't done with us.

Exactly. People are over it, but we still have at least three to four more months of this before we might see deaths fall to acceptable levels due to the sheltering, the vaccine and the winter season.

It seems like they will be able to make a lot of doses, and the distribution of these doses will mostly be delivered to rich countries within the next year. The US and Germany aren't hoarding these doses for themselves, so it will take longer than it could, but the world isn't limited to these two companies. Moderna's vaccine has been approved in the US. There are dozens of vaccines approved throughout the world, and there are over a hundred and fifty vaccines world wide going through clinical trials still.

From the article below, they say that the Gates foundation estimates there will be a 33% difference in deaths if we distributed this better. Maybe their estimate is low because this has progressed far already, but that estimate seems low to me because if they gave this to the elderly, vulnerable and frontline workers worldwide then that would dramatically reduce the incidence of deaths, IMO.

The pharmaceutical giant and its German partner BioNTech intend to manufacture a total of 1.3 billion doses throughout 2021, yet the vast majority of these have been pre-ordered by the likes of the UK, Japan, the US and the European Union.

These countries, which have bought up hundreds of millions of doses between them, represent just 14 per cent of the global population.

Separate research conducted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation shows that the equitable distribution of the Covid-19 vaccines globally would prevent 61 per cent of subsequent deaths, compared to 33 per cent of deaths avoided if doses are shared among rich nations first.

The US can acquire up to 600 million doses under the agreement terms it reached with Pfizer. The UK has pre-ordered 40 million doses, while Japan and the EU have secured 120 million and 300 million shots respectively.

Research by Airfinity, a data-based science analysis agency, shows that the British government has secured 380 million doses from a variety of global manufacturers, equating to 5.7 shots per person.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/h...-b1721162.html

[Irace86.2.0]

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/19/...ivirus-moderna

Apparently the vials have enough extra vaccine in them for a sixth or seventh dose, which will add up to a lot. It is an extra 20-40% more.

Also this is a cool article:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03626-1

[AnalogMan]

Originally Posted by Irace86.2.0

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/19/...ivirus-moderna

Apparently the vials have enough extra vaccine in them for a sixth or seventh dose, which will add up to a lot. It is an extra 20-40% more.

Also this is a cool article:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03626-1

Thank you! The Nature piece was very interesting. I think the key sentence in the article was:

"To repeat such rapid success will require similar massive funding for development, which is likely to come only if there is a comparable sense of social and political urgency."

I spent my career in the pharmaceutical/biotechnology industry, for much of the time working to develop new anti-infective agents. I know all too well, from personal experience, that it all comes down to money (as most things in life do).

For so many years, there was essentially no interest in putting money into developing new anti-infective agents (vaccines, antiviral drugs, or antibiotics). Over the course of several (pre-pandemic) years, literally every new company trying to develop antibiotic drugs had closed its doors due to a lack of investor interest. Despite the surge in drug-resistant infections, investors just didn't care. They didn't think that enough money could be made fast enough to compete with other more lucrative and quicker investments -

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/25/h...esistance.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/h...new-drugs.html

This pandemic was different because it was immediate, it threatened the entire population of the world (including investors), and a lot of money could be made off of it. So, money poured in.

The development of the mRNA vaccines in a one year's time is nothing short of miraculous. Before this, if anyone would have said a vaccine could be developed for a new virus in one year, from start to finish, I would have asked them to please share their mushrooms with me. But the not-so-little secret some people might not appreciate is that it wasn't any cheaper to do it in a year's time vs. the usual 10-15 years. It cost billions of dollars to do it. Pfizer spent a lot of its own money to develop their vaccine (albeit with a $1.95 billion dollar purchase order), and Moderna received $1 billion in research funding plus their own $1.5 billion order. It was done at beyond light-speed, but it still cost billions of dollars comparable to what it would have taken if spread out over many years. It was just concentrated into an unbelievably short time.

Developing vaccines and drugs is extraordinarily expensive. Running a 40,000 patient clinical trial costs a staggering amount of money, and even more when you compact it into one year instead of several. The money to do things like this has to come from somewhere. Operation Warp Speed had a budget of $18 billion. When you put that much money to work, a great deal can be accomplished, sometimes in astonishingly short times.

It seems to be human nature to react only when a crisis is overwhelmingly obvious, and often when it's (too) late in the process. I don't know if a comparable sense of social or political urgency will happen again for other medical problems, unless it's another pandemic that immediately threatens the entire world population.

SARS-CoV-2 is not the last pandemic the world will experience. There are so many other viruses lurking out there that scientists have been trying raise the alarm about for years, only to fall on deaf ears. Think how many lives could have been saved and how much suffering could have been alleviated if there were vaccines or therapeutics on the shelf available the moment they were needed to treat COVID-19. But most people (at least those controlling money) can't be bothered with preparation. They laugh at the waste of investing money for something that isn't a real and present danger right now.

The world got off easy with MERS and SARS. It will be interesting to see what happens when the next one hits. I would hope people with money (meaning, institutional investors and the government) would remember what happened with SARS-CoV-2. But, unfortunately most people have very short memories. Combined with the overwhelming costs of this pandemic, the trillions of dollars which has to be paid back and will weigh heavily on the economy for years to come, there may be reluctance or simply inability to open up the wallets again the way that money flowed this time.

It would be so much easier if the U.S. had a national healthcare system like almost every other developed country in the world. Taking the profit motive, and moreover the legal requirement to maximize shareholder returns above everything else, would free up so much money for endeavors like this as well as remove the time pressures to generate a return on investment right now! But, it's not going to happen anytime soon.

Money is a zero-sum game. The pie is only so big. We (ostensibly) get to choose how it's sliced up and where the money goes. Every dollar that's given to corporate profits is a dollar that isn't spent on things like salaries for physicians and nurses, equipment and staff for hospitals, medical supplies, and developing new medications and preventatives. Which is why it floors me that so many people oppose national healthcare, and instead prefer that their money goes to maximize earnings of for-profit companies and fatten the wallets of shareholders instead of being used for their benefit on actual healthcare.

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by AnalogMan

The development of the mRNA vaccines in a one year's time is nothing short of miraculous. Before this, if anyone would have said a vaccine could be developed for a new virus in one year, from start to finish, I would have asked them to please share their mushrooms with me.

Like you said, because of $$$. Actual development of the vaccine isn't the hard part. In fact, it didn't take long at all, which is why some of those timelines in the article (below) aren't applicable. Scientists are leveraging what has been learned from the past, and in some respects, this vaccine may have been on the shelf and ready to go once DNA sequencing was made available to customize it for this strain. Obviously, we get the seasonal flu vaccine designed, approved and manufactured in under a year, so we have the capacity if we have the funding.

If we invested similarly in other things then I'm sure we would have solved many problems.

[86TOYO2k17]

Politics: is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.

How is 90% of this thread not considered politics?

[Ultramaroon]

if it quacks like a duck... hey, where's jen?

[Summerwolf]

How many of you are actually thinking about getting the vaccine as soon as you can.

I'm a bit skeptical of the Pfizer product. The specialized freezers in pharmacies, and the instructions to keep it at -70° weird me out. You're telling me there is a RELIABLE network of delivery people keeping this product at the right temperature the entire time and then every single person is reconstituting it correctly.

I'm not up on my medicine history but has any other product in the last twenty years needed its own specialized freezer that's being supplied by the company? I'm sure there has to be, but a mass marketed vaccine of this scale?

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by 86TOYO2k17

Politics: is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.

How is 90% of this thread not considered politics?

They delete posts about politics all the time. It's fine. They don't want us getting into debates about ideals. We can say the government is doing this or that, but we can't talk about parties or forms of government or whatever, especially when it turns into a spat and a blame game.

There is plenty of personal anecdotes here about how one country is doing compared to another, but that is about all that flies. They already shut down the other thread because people were getting too worked up with extreme ideas and conspiracy theories instead of just sticking with conversations that were on topic, posting relevant articles/news and relevant data/science.

You can PM anyone you want if you want to debate politics, or you could gamble and continue to post here, which may get you banned, the thread deleted or your posts deleted. That is the deal.