Coronavirus

[joglynne]

Originally Posted by RichardCoulter

A doctor said on TV yesterday that the vaccination works by exposing people to a mild dose of Covid, thus allowing their immune system to recognise the virus & prepare itself to fight it.

As a consequence, someone asked if they should have the vaccine if they've recently had the virus. The answer was yes, but to wait for four weeks before being vaccinated.

It seems odd that someone who naturally catches it doesn't become immune, but someone who is given it artificially obtains a varying level of immunity. If having and surviving Covid doesn't give one immunity, it's interesting that being given it artificially does.

The vaccines do not give you the actual live Covid-19 virus. If it did it would mean that anyone who was vaccinated risked passing the virus on to other people.

If you would care to read the following link it explains how the vaccination works.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019...they-work.html

Originally Posted by jfman

https://twitter.com/rp131/status/136...423951366?s=21

It looks like England are upping their second doses too, albeit not by as much (as a proportion of all vaccines) as the increases in Wales and Scotland. Be interesting to know if the trend continues ahead of the 12 week threshold or whether it levels off. I suppose it’d also be interesting to know if they’re Pfizer, AZ or a combination of both.

The variation is most likely due to the need to ensure second doses happen not more than 12 weeks after the first. If need be, that will involve doing them sooner rather than later. There’s no signal in your data that anybody has taken a clinical decision to deliberately move to a different dosage schedule.

Despite the roaring success of our vaccination programme so far, we do still have finite capacity for conducting vaccinations and finite quantities of the vaccine itself. To complicate things further, supplies of the Pfizer vaccine, which is the one given to all our earliest and most vulnerable recipients, are constrained at the moment while they concentrate on bringing new production capacity on stream. This constraint has been known about for many weeks and was planned for.

It is imperative that these people get the correct vaccine and that they don’t get it too late. It seems to me to be perfectly sensible to go slightly early if that’s what available resources dictate. How good it is, though, to be in a position to take such decisions from a position of strength.

[jfman]

So now the numbers could indicate an increase we have spin to support it in any case.

It'll be interesting to see if the long term average second dose trends closer to 3 weeks than 12.

I have friends who got vaccinated today and came home with second appointment dates 11 weeks from now. Obviously you can’t determine a trend from a single case but it very much has the appearance of safeguarding 12 weeks as the upper limit for waiting for the next dose as opposed to an attempt to shift back to 3. If you’re hoping for a massive u-turn and some sort of revelation that the 12 week strategy was wrong all along ... well you’re going to be disappointed.

I have now booked my Covid-19 Vaccinations, as I am eligible working in the health care sector, I hesitated at first, as I have had Covid, but I was asymptomatic but now I am not messing about. Both my parents have had theirs and they have been fine.

[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by Mick

I have now booked my Covid-19 Vaccinations, as I am eligible working in the health care sector, I hesitated at first, as I have had Covid, but I was asymptomatic but now I am not messing about. Both my parents have had theirs and they have been fine.

[pip08456]

Originally Posted by jfman

So now the numbers could indicate an increase we have spin to support it in any case.

It'll be interesting to see if the long term average second dose trends closer to 3 weeks than 12.

It will for the Pfizer vaccine IMHO. I was told I would be getting my second AZ jab in 11 weeks.

Wales started ramping up 2nd doses 10 days age, 10 weeks from the start.

In the past 10 days, there has been a massive jump in the number of second doses given out in Wales. So far this week, Wales has administered 27,099 second doses and is leading the home nations in terms of jabs administered per 100,000 population.

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/w...covid-19911703

[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by jonbxx

How does that tally up with the EMA approving the AZ vaccine for all adults;

Link

In the end, the safety and efficacy of the AZ vaccines in over 65s is, at best, an educated guess. It's a risk worth taking probably but still a guess.

I don't think honouring your international agreements is much of a crime to be honest....

Spot on.
EU has punished us by approving the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and Japan, Switzerland and Korea have rewarded us by not yet approving it.

[RichardCoulter]

Thanks for the info & explanations as to how the vaccine works. Looks like the doctor was wrong, which is a bit worrying (unless i've got it wrong, which is entirely possible due to cognitive impairment following a brain injury).

What programme was it on?

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by 1andrew1

Spot on.
EU has punished us by approving the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and Japan, Switzerland and Korea have rewarded us by not yet approving it.

In the valley of the deaf ....

Pardon?

[jonbxx]

Loving this site BTW - https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vac...ainst-covid-19

Interesting data on that page. About half way down is a chart of how many people have had two doses of vaccine

United States 20.61 million
European Union 9.93 million
Israel 3.21 million
United Arab Emirates 2.19 million
Germany 1.91 million
India 1.48 million
Brazil 1.44 million
Italy 1.35 million
France 1.32 million
Turkey 1.27 million
Spain 1.22 million
Poland 1.03 million
Indonesia 825,650
United Kingdom 669,105
Romania 611,553
England 528,360
Serbia 487,359

Shows how the policies differ from country to country.

Also good info on vaccination attitudes. When asked how likely different nationalities were to get a vaccination, the numbers are shocking;

United Kingdom Dec 31 71.3%
Denmark 66.2%
Finland 58.4%
Sweden 56.6%
Norway 55.1%
Italy 55.0%
Spain 51.8%
Netherlands Dec 31 51.6%
Australia Dec 31 50.3%
Canada Dec 31 48.9%
Germany Dec 31 41.0%
Japan 36.7%
Singapore 34.6%
France 29.8%

UK and the nordics leading the way!

Originally Posted by Chris

I have friends who got vaccinated today and came home with second appointment dates 11 weeks from now.

My 2nd appointment was auto generated, on May 11th, which makes it 11 weeks and 1 day after my first.

[RichardCoulter]

Originally Posted by Hugh

What programme was it on?

I was getting up to date with my recordings from the past couple of weeks of 'Morning Live', so it will have been the daily Coronavirus update from Dr Xand van Tulleken.