Re: Coronavirus (R.I.P Captain Sir Tom Moore 1920-2021)
 

Did it not turn out that the time between the doses was the crucial factor? Or have I fallen for government spin?

Two different vectors, apparently.

"Some researchers worry that our immune systems could respond to an adenovirus vaccine by making antibodies against it, which would render a second dose ineffective. To avoid this, the Russian researchers used one type of adenovirus, Ad26, for the first dose, and another, Ad5, for the second."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...9-vaccine.html

Re: Coronavirus
 

I think if a vaccine manufacturer had a choice of testing at 3 weeks or 12 weeks gap between doses, given the emergency they were always likely to test the shorter one first. However, lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, and as I've said before we are not designing vaccines in a vacuum. There is lots of data from other vaccines that give us an idea how things *should* work, all being well.

And in this case, not only does prior experience suggest the Oxford vaccine *should* work well with a longer gap between doses, there is now direct evidence that it *does* - and that it may in fact work better. The BBC has now written up a story based on that Lancet pre-press paper:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55910964

Re: Coronavirus
 

There are remainers who accepted the democratic decision and there are hardliner remainers who still refuse to accept the result and even plan to campaign to rejoin.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Re: Coronavirus
 

You know, it’s fun to be able to see the last time any particular member viewed this thread. Because it means some of the loudest critics of British government policy around vaccine rollout, and serial doubters of the efficacy data for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in particular, have been on the forum and have viewed this thread since the new data began to get wide coverage this evening. Yet none of them has had anything to say about it. :scratch:

Re: Coronavirus
 

The proof in the pudding of the Pfizer jab, will be whether people get a second booster dose within the time frame and the effect of that on the variants.

I would not be surprised if yet another variant appears before a month is out.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Why would they?

We’d simply be dismissed for having the audacity to think that this Government would take short cuts to get out of the pandemic. Herd immunity, antibody testing, rapid testing and Operation Moonshot all strategies to shorten the pandemic in the hope we’d gain some economic benefit. You’ve made the point yourself that there are serial doubters. I’ll happily put myself in that category and to be honest no number of scientists mulling over the data and presenting it in a slightly different way is going to give me confidence given it could be presented as 62/70/90/95% by the company responsible for testing it themselves.

The real world activity is ongoing now and against the active variants in the community. The only results that count.

---------- Post added at 08:21 ---------- Previous post was at 08:17 ----------

Given the lag time for information on new variants to enter the public domain it’s certainly possible there are further mutations out there already.

Re: Coronavirus
 

I'm sure there are many variants out there but many will be unviable for the virus, make no change to the proteins due to redundancy in coding, make no relevant change, make a relevant change but no practical difference to infectivity/antibody response/severity of infection.

It's hard talking about virii as they aren't really alive so they can't really be thought of as mutating. Mutations occur because of errors in processing in host cells and if that results in a virus that infects better it will grow in the population.

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The issue with CV is that it's novel to the world. Think of the impact of European explorers taking disease to the New World and how that decimated local populations to whom it was novel. Once we've cycled around this virus for a bit I'd expect death rates to reduce as we build up "herd immunity". Although the virus can still pass around and infect we get used to the type of virus and hopefully it becomes like flu or cold and for most people a minor disease with vaccinations/boosters for more vulnerable.

Re: Coronavirus
 

EU vaccine war: Belgium bans AstraZeneca for over-55s in Brussels jibe as UK stands alone
BELGIUM has advised against giving the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine to over-55s because of a lack of data about its efficacy.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/polit...e-covid-latest

Re: Coronavirus
 

Why over 55? I personally know someone who is a semi retired Nurse in her 60s who was one of the test subjects, who has been informed she has had two doses of the AZ vaccine. No bother whatsoever.

Re: Coronavirus
 

I suspect it a cunning plan to make the British population not want it, so the EU can get more stock.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Re: Coronavirus
 

I suspect the criticism was because the government were making the decisions before that data was publicly available. Which makes it look like taking a dangerous gamble rather than following the science. However, it's certainly possibly that SAGE got view of the data some time before it was published. (That Lancet article must have taken a fair bit of time to produce)

Re: Coronavirus
 

If the data shown in this tweet is correct - https://twitter.com/olivernmoody/sta...81400071860230 then there is a point in not giving older people the vaccine as it doesn't seem to work. Of course, more data is coming through on this

Re: Coronavirus
 

Let them crack on, it just makes their slow roll out even slower. It just means that when the data is there - and it will be - that it is perfectly effective in over 55's, 65's, they'll just look even more incompetent to their populations.