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1st January 2021, 09:37 AM | #241 |
Penultimate Amazing
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UK chief medical officers defend delay of second Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine doses (CNN, Jan. 1, 2021)
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/dann "Stupidity renders itself invisible by assuming very large proportions. Completely unreasonable claims are irrefutable. Ni-en-leh pointed out that a philosopher might get into trouble by claiming that two times two makes five, but he does not risk much by claiming that two times two makes shoe polish." B. Brecht "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions." K. Marx |
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1st January 2021, 10:19 AM | #242 |
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Whoops - been discussing this in the wrong thread!
I’d say there is a case for it, but I’d rather they didn’t take the risk, I don’t think given the limited supply of the Pfizer vaccine we should or need to take the risk. With the Oxford vaccine it seems the decision is evidence lead so can see why they’ve made that decision for that vaccine. |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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1st January 2021, 10:44 AM | #243 |
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1st January 2021, 10:59 AM | #244 |
Penultimate Amazing
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1st January 2021, 12:56 PM | #245 |
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1st January 2021, 01:31 PM | #246 |
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1st January 2021, 04:34 PM | #247 |
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Perhaps this: ThalidomideWP.
Originally Posted by Wikipedia
Once bitten, twice shy, as they say. |
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The social illusion reigns to-day upon all the heaped-up ruins of the past, and to it belongs the future. The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd, 1895 (from the French) |
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1st January 2021, 04:39 PM | #248 |
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I'm aware of Thalidomide, but this is a deadly infectious disease that's killing thousands of people every day.
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2nd January 2021, 02:39 AM | #249 |
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2nd January 2021, 03:42 AM | #250 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Thalidomide is not the way to be thinking right now. Saving lives is.
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A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. William Shakespeare |
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2nd January 2021, 04:04 AM | #251 |
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The social illusion reigns to-day upon all the heaped-up ruins of the past, and to it belongs the future. The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd, 1895 (from the French) |
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2nd January 2021, 05:58 AM | #252 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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2nd January 2021, 06:32 AM | #253 |
Illuminator
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There is talk on my Farcebook feed that the different vaccines coud be mixed between the first and second jabs in the UK. Is there any validity to this? I wouldn't have thought this would have been a tested thng to do.
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2nd January 2021, 07:04 AM | #254 |
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I've seen this from the New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/h...s-britain.html "Amid a sputtering vaccine rollout and fears of a new and potentially more transmissible variant of the coronavirus, Britain has quietly updated its vaccination playbook to allow for a mix-and-match vaccine regimen. If a second dose of the vaccine a patient originally received isn’t available, or if the manufacturer of the first shot isn’t known, another vaccine may be substituted, health officials said." Whilst not preferrable, it's better than leaving some people with only one dose ( once the second doses start to be issued in a few months time. ) No doubt some testing will be carried out prior to the three month period expiry. |
2nd January 2021, 11:13 AM | #255 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Don't have a link since I heard it on radio but apparently the idea of mixing vaccines is not officially recommended in the UK.
ETA: Better link. |
2nd January 2021, 12:59 PM | #256 |
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"To vowels. They stop consonants sticking together like boiled sweets in a paper bag." |
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2nd January 2021, 01:02 PM | #257 |
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2nd January 2021, 01:19 PM | #258 |
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2nd January 2021, 02:22 PM | #259 |
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But if different brands of hep B vaccine are manufactured the same way to the same standards, they are basically interchangeable. But these covid vaccines use different technologies. There's been no testing to see whether they can work effectively together. It could be catastrophic to let people think they've been fully immunized when in fact they haven't. I'd hate to have somebody injecting me with whatever they just happened to have on hand that day. Even having to think about it is more evidence that the vaccine distribution and delivery mechanisms are a mess. |
2nd January 2021, 03:41 PM | #260 |
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2nd January 2021, 04:40 PM | #261 |
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There is a trial ongoing of combining the UK (AZ/Oxford) and Russian (Sputnik) vaccines. There is a rational for this. Both use a viral vector, but a different one to deliver the same antigen. In theory the second dose of the same vaccine may be less effective because the body has developed immunity to the vector, so using a different vector may enhance the effectiveness of the second dose.
Since nearly all vaccines are presenting the same antigen epitopes and it is the epitopes that are important in theory any combination of vaccines should provoke long lasting immunity. Remembering the second dose primarily acts to prolong the duration not strength of immunity by provoking expansion of immunological memory cells that persist lifelong. This only works effectively if several weeks between first and second dose. Three weeks as in Pfizer vaccine is the lower limit for boosting in theory waiting longer will increase effectiveness of the second dose. From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3760154/
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ETA * Also of course the trials were to show safety. |
2nd January 2021, 09:09 PM | #262 |
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Latest updates from:
The Bloomberg tracker 12 million doses given worldwide, 4.28 million in the USA, 4.5 million in China, 950 K in Israel (It's actually over 1 million as of Friday according to some news reports, but the tracker doesn't reflect that yet), 947 K in the UK and 800 K in Russia. The Our World in Data tracker Doses administered per 100 population:
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3rd January 2021, 08:27 AM | #263 |
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3rd January 2021, 10:32 AM | #264 |
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Someone who's already had the virus and recovered, will they need to be vaccinated? Following the booster vaccine theory/protocol, is it the case that the vaccine might prolong the immunity that the disease/infection itself has already given them? And, in that case, will they need just the one jab? (Or will they too need both doses? Why?)
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3rd January 2021, 12:01 PM | #265 |
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Location: Canada, eh?
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I don't think anyone knows the exact details.
But we know it is possible to get reinfected, so vaccination is probably a good thing even if you had it. However if you had Covid19 recently your body still might have antibodies that might make the vaccine less effective. I suspect the best option is to vaccinate the people that had Covid19 but put them at a lower priority. Sent from my LM-X320 using Tapatalk |
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3rd January 2021, 01:53 PM | #266 |
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True. It's kind of unsettling, how little of the details we do know so far.
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That makes sense. Thanks for those inputs. And that would suggest that the vaccine is likely to be short-lived in its effects. That one may need to rinse and repeat, in six months or so. But I guess in six months or so we'll know a great deal more about this than we do now. |
3rd January 2021, 07:39 PM | #267 |
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So Quebec (Canada) seems to have a plan that is... interesting.
From: CTV News Quebec's decision to delay the second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine this week to inoculate as many people as possible with a first dose is causing concern for some health-care professionals working on the front lines. I can certainly understand the reasoning... get as many vaccinated as quickly as possible (even if immunity doesn't last as long) to head off the current surge of cases. (The article points out that the government is claiming a single dose is >90% effective, which might not be accurate.) |
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Trust me, I know what I'm doing. - Sledgehammer I'm Mary Poppins Y'all! - Yondu We are Groot - Groot |
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4th January 2021, 01:21 AM | #268 |
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Good question. No one knows how long immunity lasts yet. Practically there is no contra-indication to being vaccinated if you have had the infection that is known; it would be impractical at present to screen people to see if they have been infected (probably a majority of those infected have not been tested), so the simple solution is vaccinate with the standard protocol regardless of prior infection history. Yes in theory a single dose might function as a booster, given at the right interval, probably 2 - 3 months post infection.
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4th January 2021, 01:24 AM | #269 |
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4th January 2021, 06:23 AM | #270 |
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No, there isn't, as far as I know. But that's the part I wanted to cross-check here, since what one does know is so very sketchy! Thanks for that confirmation.
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And there are no contra-indications to taking a double-booster either, is there? (Far as I know there isn't.) So that, following that same reasoning, it might make sense for someone who's recovered from Covid-19 to go ahead and take both the doses, right? Even though in theory he perhaps might not -- maybe, perhaps -- need that booster follow-on jab at all? |
4th January 2021, 07:31 AM | #271 |
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I think it's well known that you don't get immunity immediately. Or at least it should be. Even in the clinical trials, there were people who got sick within a 10-day period after getting the first shot. After that, compared to the placebo group, it went down considerably.
Israel is vaccinating so fast it’s running out of vaccine (Washington Post)
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Israel seems to have no trouble getting what shots they do have into arms. And Japan hasn't even approved it yet. Incidentally, it looks like Japan will have another emergency declaration (at least in Tokyo and the 3 adjacent prefectures), which is what they did to slow the spread last spring, and it seemed to work at the time. At a high cost to be sure, but it slowed the spread and it stayed at a fairly low level for the rest of the summer, and then started to grow again as the weather turned colder. The situation objectively is not as dire here as it is in the United States and some other countries I suppose, in terms of the number of infections and deaths, but numbers are rising rapidly. |
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4th January 2021, 03:11 PM | #272 |
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4th January 2021, 03:59 PM | #273 |
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Infection is not a completely different process to vaccination. Some vaccinations e.g. live polio or smallpox are very similar. Infections 'try' to evade the immune system so some infections are poorly immunogenic; you do not get long last immunity and vaccinating against them is difficult, HPV would be an example where a good vaccine was developed, HIV or RSV where a vaccine has failed to be developed and TB one where there is immunisation, but it is not very good. For infections where you do not get good immunity vaccination should be better than natural infection. A significant proportion of people infected with hepatitis B get chronically infected and cannot eradicate the infection, prior vaccination prevents that. Usually post infection vaccination offers little benefit, but an exception is rabies, where post infection vaccination can be life saving. The virus evades the immune system but is fairly slow in progressing, giving time for vaccination to provoke an infective immune response.
Infections that provoke life time immunity like small pox can be vaccinated against with live attenuated vaccines that closely emulate the infection. infections like hepatitis B are vaccinated against by identifying a component of the infection that is normally fairly well concealed from the immune system and developing an enhanced response. For some infections you actually vaccinate against the toxin produced by the infection e.g. diphtheria or tetanus; you do not actually prevent the infection, just the dangerous consequences of the infection. So I guess what I am saying is, it depends. The process is not fundamentally different, but infections differ. |
4th January 2021, 09:48 PM | #274 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Great help, thank you Planigale.
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5th January 2021, 10:50 AM | #275 |
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"Wisconsin pharmacist who left vials out believed vaccine could harm people and change their DNA, police say."
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/04/us/wi...ing/index.html |
5th January 2021, 08:15 PM | #276 |
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You'd think a pharmacist ought to know better.
So much misinformation and disinformation on social media and "alternative" media these days. I wonder if this is another casualty of that? To be sure, there has always been misinformation and disinformation, but nowadays it's just a mouse-click away. |
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5th January 2021, 08:39 PM | #277 |
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Latest updates from:
The Bloomberg tracker 15 million doses given worldwide, 5.05 million in the USA (less than 1 million in the last 3 days; frustratingly slow). Remember that they initially promised 20 million by the end of December. The Our World in Data tracker Doses administered per 100 population:
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A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. William Shakespeare |
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6th January 2021, 01:25 AM | #278 |
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Israel is ahead because it approved the vaccine use earlier and paid $60 a dose as opposed to $20 paid by the US to get priority access. Other countries have proportionally less vaccine than Israel so cannot vaccinate more people. Certainly the UK could have vaccinated more people if it had had more doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
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6th January 2021, 06:07 AM | #279 |
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I would happily pay $60 a dose out of my own pocket for the vaccine. Well worth it.
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6th January 2021, 06:13 AM | #280 |
Lackey
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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