I beg the Farm's forgiveness if these specific articles were posted.
Watch to see how mRNA is being harnessed by scientists to to try to protect us from disease — including Covid-19.
www.statnews.com
The race for a vaccine against the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2, is on, with 54 different vaccines under development, two of which are already being tested in humans, according to the World Health Organization. And among the different candidates is a new player on the scene – mRNA vaccines.
horizon-magazine.eu
Honestly one of the most infuriating aspects of this will be people who know nothing about the spotty history of vaccines calling people who know enough about vaccines to be wary "science-deniers".
All that keeps running through my mind at the moment is the opening of I Am Legend.
Anyway, when can I get an
@Otterly analysis on all this?
Some thoughts: bear in mind I’m not directly involved with any of these nor have I seen any interim data that’s not public.
Moderna have never had a product to market before.
Astra Zeneca have had some eyebrow raising side effects.
Pfizer obviously have a track record and are competent.
Moderna’s jab is shipped at regular conditions for dispensing whereas Pfizer’s needs a -80 freezer and that alone is going to be a logistical ballache that will probably need the army involved, because they’re very good at logistics.
all the trials right now are going on interim analyses. What normally happens with a trial is that you do the trial, and collect safety data as you go. You do interim analysis as you go and safety reports are monitored in real time. EVERY adverse event report is scrutinised. If anything horrific comes up the trial can be paused, or stopped, and sometimes if your drug is a miraculous wonder the trial gets stopped so everyone can have it. But mainly you do the trial and present the final data to the regulators and they go over it. The Astra Zeneca trial has been paused once already.
what’s happening here is that all the companies involved have permission to drip feed that data to the regulators as they go. So these are not final analyses they are interim ones.
so some bits are not being skipped, just done on the hoof, but my main worry is sample size and follow up duration. The adverse events you see after six months of trial in 30k people are not necessarily what you’d see in millions after years. The power of the sample size is maybe not big enough to pick up rarer events. Let’s say there’s a 1/30,000 side effect - are you going to see that in your 30k trial population? Probably not as half are taking a placebo here. Now vaccinate a billion people. How many will you See?
mRNA is a new vaccine platform - there’s a lot we don’t know about it. The background work suggests it should be safe but should isn’t good enough IMO. I also worry about quality control in manufacturing and shipping so many doses in such a short time, under such pressure.
I am pro vaccine in general, but thorough testing is what makes drugs safe and rushed drugs and vaccines have a history of disaster. I am also pretty concerned about how much public money is being used to go straight into this, and with what kind of oversight and due diligence. And what kind of coercion, in terms of surveillance, and requirements for employment and travel. We are talking about billions of dollars here. That’s a lot of temptation.
To be clear, i am not anti vaccination. I work in the industry and I’m vaccinated against plenty of stuff, my kids have had all their jabs and a couple more. But... I am cautious about this and concerned at the scale and speed and logistics and implications. I also value individual freedom highly and would never support compulsory vaccinations for anything. It’s concerning to me that people with deep knowledge of the industry can be labelled as loons for voicing quite reasonable queries.
I guess we will see. I won’t be taking any of them until a few hundred million other people have for several years and I am old enough for the risk/benefit calculation to shift a bit. Obviously if someone is 95 or highly vulnerable they may feel differently.
