It’s just a stupid troll

BMJ link

Even the 30% -50% of folk who’re naturally immune

Where in that bmj link does it state 30%-50% of folks are immune? Answer..it doesn’t. What it states is that some small studies suggest higher immunity levels…and that potentially up to 50% have a degree of immunity..maybe..

So..small studies, inconclusive data, yet you state it as if it’s a fact when it’s just an unproven theory. One of many…

These type of articles gained some following during the summer when infections were extremely low but there is no evidence of pre-existing immunity with the second wave. Its one of those papers trying to fit a theory around an observation that has now been confounded after more data is know.

The article raises some good points, it’s far from conclusive though and undermined by some pretty basic points, like the levels of distancing still being observed in places like London & Stockholm

BMJ link

Which recycles the same tired old multiply-refuted Gomez and Guptra nonsense.

Case closed.

I think it is of interest, and may explain why some people have serious disease and others do not. But would you bet the NHS farm on it? Given that hospitals have seen a doubling of admissions every 7-10 days in Tier 1 since September, and are just controlled in Tier 3 and lockdown?

It’s all very well pointing to desired immunity and easier to reach herd immunity. But the facts are that the brakes on force of infection are not coming from immunity at the moment. If they were, then areas with highest past burden would have slowest RATE (not absolute numbers) now. That has not come to pass. The doubling time for cases in London was about the same as the South West! I wish it had, and that immunity was a significant player. But it has not been. It WILL be, and vaccination will speed that brake.

It’s interesting that you lot will find flaws in bits of research that don’t fit your narrative, but will accept serious flaws in research that does.

I’ve yet to see anyone explain, for example, how the serious flaws in the population studies on mask efficacy aren’t contradicted by the high number of cases and deaths in countries with draconian mask restrictions relative to countries with more relaxed rules.

It’s very disappointing that few scientists seem willing to question the efficacy of masks (the mandatory kind, not the medical grade ones) despite the original research that promoted their usage being of incredibly poor quality (one widely quoted study, for example, was based on a sample group of 2, ffs).

Unfortunately, masks have become a political hot potato and science has been swept along with the flow. Just because studies show that putting material between two groups of rats helps to stop the virus doesn’t mean that in the real world, with humans, you will get the same results. I think the high case numbers in Spain and Italy pretty much confirm that they are next to useless in reality.

Show me how this isn’t the case and I will change my tune.

fit your narrative

Which one is that then?

Oh, the mask one. Wear a clean or new one properly. Use it as well as social distancing, not instead. Spend less time on dodgy internet content.

Masks only work when in conjunction with 2m distancing. Most folk I experience can’t seem to do both at once.

My question is. What is the risk or concern with wearing a mask?
is it going to cause harm to the wearer or others? If not then if it has a small positive effect then the impact is worth the cost.
Allowing the population to be infected to induce immunity without a vaccine will have a huge cost. Both in deaths, but also in morbidity, reduced life spans and the impact on the nhs.
You are not comparing like for like there both in terms of cost and impact.

In the largest randomised controlled trial, masks reduced infections by 15% with a not statistically significant P=0.38. Medical mask were supplied to the treatment group (a box of 50 o believe). The trial was powered not to miss an effect three times as big 8/10 times. It’s not the first clinical trial that has not seen a big effect and then produced a nonsignificant finding with a trend. What you can say is that they do not halve infections. They needed a trial about three to ten times bigger to really measure the effect seen.

The P value implies that were the trial to be repeated multiple times, a finding as big as 15% might be expected by chance about 1/3 times. Normal convention is to accept 1/20, but it is only a convention. The vaccine P value was more like once in many trillions of trials.

By the way I can easily believe that we have increased contacts by 18% more than no mask wearing – hence no overall effect. This seems blatantly obvious effective risk compensation. Mask may allow a more normal interaction than no masks. But the overall effect is probably quite small. I’m still happy to wear one and was happy to before compulsion. I don’t wear one outdoors of course.

I think this is one of the most recent studies regarding T Cells….

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.02.20222778v1.full-text

No idea if it’s significant or not as it’s all well over my head 🙂

Am I the only one that just doesn’t get the fixation on whether we should have to wear a mask to not to nip into the shop for 5 minutes?

I feel sorry for the poor sods in hospitals/ shops that have to wear them pretty much constantly at work. It can’t be pleasant, I get that.

I think my partner that works in an NHS lab would castrate me if I moaned about wearing one to go into the co-op. Rightly so too.

Unfortunately, masks have become a political hot potato and science has been swept along with the flow

If I am honest, scientists have been quick to claim certainty when there is nothing of the kind. I don’t care for the political aspects – the virus just doesn’t care. But expecting large effects, be it masks halving virus spread, or herd immunity playing a large role, seems wishful thinking to me. In my day job 10% is a BIG effect in a clinical study. I can imagine a mask might have a modest 10% effect, that immunity reduces the rate of infection by 10% (after all that’s about seroprevalence). But throwing around BIG numbers is just folly. If the effect size was large, things would be obvious. That’s why there is divergent opinion – the effect sizes are modest hence things are grey. The effect size for lockdowns is larger, and enough to show decline in infection rate. But it’s actually not THAT big (R down from say 2-3 to 0.8 means a 66% reduction in transmission) – this likely varies depending on severity of controls.

Now the vaccine response (90% reduction) is obvious. But don’t read into that more than has been studied in the trial itself. Welcome to the world of human clinical experiment. It’s been quite a journey over the past 20 years. It has also provided perspective that many commentators (on both sides) seem to lack.

My Feynman quote again “If you thought that science was certain, well that’s just an error on your part”. I hold this very dear when I look at any data. Ask how wrong can you be, then look at the data again. After doing that, I still can’t see any sense in Gupta’s position even with all the “if…” caveats that help nobody with decision-making.

[tl:dr] Big effects like vaccine response are obvious. But they are also pretty unusual, so most things look grey and there is likely some truth in all positions. Miracle “cures” are rare.

It’s really quite simple. If you don’t have a genuine medical reason for not being vaccinated (supported by a certificate of exemption from your GP) then you either take the vaccination or self-isolate permanently.

Eh? Well that’s obviously not correct, and the sentiment is really not helpful

Yeeeeees – I don’t really understand the mask thing – it really isn’t any kind of inconvenience to wear one to Tesco’s etc. I understand the worry that wearing a mask might make you complacent and less likely to self-distance effectively, but that’s not what I’m hearing from those against masks.

Ok, there is debate about just what level of protection a mask affords….. but until we understand that, why not just wear one now? Not a rhetorical question – would genuinely like to hear what the objection is, beyond the “it’s not been proven” or “BuT mOi LiBeRtIeS!”

Regarding vaccine compliance, the Aus PM got into trouble early in the Pandemic for saying it’ll be compulsory. Vaccines here are pretty heavily legislated for here: Your child can’t go to school or childcare unless they have had all of their vaccines, and I think much/all of any social welfare stops if you child hasn’t had their jabs.

It’ll be interesting to see how they handle compliance in adults, but I suspect it’ll be quite high: our international borders are still closed, and will likely only open fully once a vaccine is “in the wild” – to be able to come in (or return home) you’ll have to show that you’ve had your vaccine. I suspect they will find another “stick” to motivate adults too – there is talk of $100 “eat-out-to-help-out” type vouchers being issued in the new year – wouldn’t surprise me if you only got those once you’d had your vaccine.

Also, I’m a drug research director. I’m not involved with covid research, but I just want to address the issue of the development of these vaccines being “rushed”.
You have to distinguish between something being done urgently because hundreds of thousands of people are dying and the global economy is tanking, and “cutting corners”. From what I can see – the development timeline of these vaccines is as I would expect – unprecedentedly fast yes, but in line with my expectation. Most drug trials are delayed by the following things:

Prioritizing resources at the company running the trial (no issue for Covid)
Finding enough Drs to do the trial (no issue for Covid)
Ethics and regulatory approval timeframes of 30/60 days for the trial (no issue for covid, go to the front of the queue, we will convene a special committee meeting this weekend etc etc).
Finding enough subjects to take part in the study (no issue for Covid)
Waiting for those subjects to progress through the study so that the impact on their disease can be measured (no issue for Covid)
Regulatory approval of the data (see above)
Negotiations over cost to the NHS (I don’t know how this is going TBH – but I’m sure the deal is oven-ready)

I don’t see anything in the development timeframe of these vaccines to worry me – I will be getting my jab as soon as I’m allowed.

I don’t see anything in the development timeframe of these vaccines to worry me – I will be getting my jab as soon as I’m allowed.

I may be mistaken, but as far as i can tell pretty much anybody on this thread with even a whiff of scientific knowledge seems to think the vaccine is a good thing, and will be taking it. Which goes along with my brother’s opinion, a professor of clinical pharmacology, and a member of the the UK covid vaccine safety panel.

So…Before someone sticks a horrifically dangerous needle in my arm, can the likes of cinemman girl please let us know what they are basing their reservations on? Is it scientific knowledge, or something you’ve read on the interwebz?

I suspect it’s the latter, but if you can explain why it’s dangerous (ie they’ve skipped test phases rather than just compressed the timescales) then I’m all ears…

In fact I think we’ll all be grateful if there’s something we need to be worried about..

what they are basing their reservations on?

To be honest I think it’s a “prove that it is” vs “prove that it isn’t” type thing.

I can understand the perspective of: “You want me to take it, prove that it’s safe”. However, whether something is “safe” is something that different people will have different bars for – and some people will find data, whether official or anaecdotal to support a position of “I’m not 100% convinced it’s 100% safe, therefore I’m not taking it”.

I think, certainly, there needs to be a significant communications effort from the government to explain to people what the vaccines is/does, and what the potential side effects could be, including some that are unknown. This worries me, because if there’s one thing that Bojo et all have shown over and over again since the start of the current unpleasantness….. is that they are crap at communication (either deliberately, or via incompetence).

I think some of it goes back to the, “if it takes one woman 9 months to make a baby…” .
And the fact that no trials can have looked at any longer term side effects, because it’s so new.
It’s worthy of reasonable and rational discussion.
But I can’t see vaccine uptake really being a problem in this country. Demand is going to outdo supply for some time yet.
By the time it catches up, the discussion will have moved on.
There’ll be vaccine envy, imo.

Dumb question about the Oxford results – if the low/high dose appears to give 90% effectiveness, does that mean that the approval would be for a low/high dose delivery when it is rolled out or will there be further trials to determine the best dosing strategy – and if they do that, what happens in the meantime?

Sensible question – I’d guess that the 90% regime would be rolled out. Hard to have an ethical trial where one leg is already shown to be less effective.

I’m guessing that the low/high dose was given to too small a cohort for the data to yet be taken to mean what we all hope it means. You can see why they mentioned it in the PR even if that is the case though. This all means that production (and sales) can we ramped up, with a 70% “promise” and the hope that more data will deliver 90% results before or soon after millions of arms start to get the needle. I’m sure TiRed will be reading and summarising for us later.

Yes, they’ve said that the half/full dose regimen was administered to a smaller group, so out of the 30 or so people who had the vaccine and went on to get COVID, only a few can have been on that dose. So there will be some uncertainty in the actual percentage figure. Still pretty encouraging though overall. I mean 62/90% is not as good as 95%, obviously, but even this is likely to be very useful indeed overall, even if ‘just’ for the first year or so until better is more widely available.

So chimp adenovirus vaccines do not protect to the same extent as an mRNA vaccine. Probably the presentation of the spike protein to the immune system or dose for response. The preclinical protection was notably lower than mRNA vaccines too.

Dose is always an issue, and it’s very hard to gain approval for an untested higher dose regimen. I’ve never seen it. I’ve seen the opposite. The PD-1 cancer antibody pembrolizumab was approved at 3 mg/kg despite most of the data being dosed at 10 mg/kg.

Looking at the results, the high dose has lower efficacy, but fewer subjects. Hence the 90% and the lower response may not be significantly deferent. They’re not giving away too much at the moment. But both beat placebo. I’ll bet there’s no difference wand the overall efficacy is just lower than the mRNA vaccines.

Press release here.

https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2020/azd1222hlr.html

Tim Harford has another show on BBC radio – ‘how to vaccinate the world’. For those concerned about the speed of vaccine development and the emergence of possible side effects it’s a pretty good listen for the lay-person IMO.

Also, to add to batfink’s points above, there was a chap interviewed on R4’s PM last week ago referenced much of what was said by batfink, and also threw in getting funding and grants, preparing bids for grants, and that funding running out because maybe things just took longer than expected and having to go through the whole process again. You’ve also got the numbers involved – there’s not a shortage of people exposed to the thing you’re trying to stop. Then as batfink says, put all that against a backdrop of tanking economies and health services being put under massive pressure, and there’s quite a willingness to get things done…

Thanks. I’ll take whatever vaccine is made available to me, ASAP if its all the same.

The Oxford results are very encouraging. Half-doses giving a moderate chance of immunity (close to a normal year’s flu jab), would help inhibit tranmission immediately, and mean that more doses are available immediately too. Interview on BBC suggested the criteria for approval had been met.

Now it’s over to the government to provide the logistics of mass vaccination. They’ve only had since March to start preparing, so shall we say sometime next summer? 🙂

so shall we say sometime next summer?

Sounds reasonable. And if the briefings to the press promise suggest faster than realistic delivery to the masses… you can be sure that ‘failure’ to meet a faster timeline is the “fault” of the NHS next year… not those controlling both the pursestrings and prioritising of efforts this year. Hug your GP and local NHS trust staff (virtually).

To be honest I think it’s a “prove that it is” vs “prove that it isn’t” type thing.

I can understand the perspective of: “You want me to take it, prove that it’s safe”. However, whether something is “safe” is something that different people will have different bars for – and some people will find data, whether official or anaecdotal to support a position of “I’m not 100% convinced it’s 100% safe, therefore I’m not taking it”.

I don’t think that is the primary reason just based on our local FB.
The main “reason” is simply “the man can’t tell me what to do”.
Based on communications from our “government” with flips/u-turns and seemingly illogical instructions this is human nature.

Every “justification” for this is really subsidiary to this. Case in point …

Ok, there is debate about just what level of protection a mask affords….. but until we understand that, why not just wear one now? Not a rhetorical question – would genuinely like to hear what the objection is, beyond the “it’s not been proven” or “BuT mOi LiBeRtIeS!”

No debate… communications said “masks don’t work” ..”masks do work” … no actual information about who a mask is meant to protect… where and how to use one.

Not wearing one or wearing it poorly (chin/no nose) has become a point of pride…A group of 10-12 MTBers in Peaslake were loudly discussing how to NOT wear a FREE mask before going into the store. [masks for free with optional donation]

In the meantime… things are being contained admissions wise…

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare

Let’s not mess that up over December… please.

Really good to see batfink’s informed opinion on the speed of vaccine development, would be nice to see that message getting put across more to help inform the debate.

The only doubt really would be around long term effects, and I’m happy to take my chance on that.

I’m assuming it’s still too soon to judge how long the vaccine protection will remain with you? Any news on where they are with that, or can anyone explain using small words how they actually test and assess the length of protection?

The longevity of protection will be monitored as the trials will most likely not finish on approval by the regulators.
I might have to look up the documents if I can find them.
I’m not allowed to comment on the az results as it is in my contract as I work for them. But the details as released are really interesting and it is all systems go for submission

no actual information about who a mask is meant to protect…

I thought it was made fairly clear when they flipped to wanting us to wear masks that it was because it was felt to slightly reduce the risk of the wearer spreading it to someone else when worn properly and in conjunction with other actions let proper distancing.

The government have brought this on themselves through shambolic communication, but I think it suits their agenda of blaming the public if we all immediately start looking for the problems.

I guess the question for the Oxford Vaccine is:

If I’m in the 30% it doesn’t protect, am I likely to get less severe illness?

Hopefully that proves to be the case, so the general population get the cheaper Oxford one, leaving the most at risk the better one, and an Antibody jab for those immuno-compromised.

More cash

I thought it was made fairly clear when they flipped to wanting us to wear masks that it was because it was felt to slightly reduce the risk of the wearer spreading it to someone else when worn properly and in conjunction with other actions let proper distancing.

My observation based on the excuses I hear is it wasn’t made clear … certainly not clear enough to change opinion over a total U turn and not from a government that has a very low trust.
[even many supporters don’t actually believe what is said in general, rather they are happy to believe its a lie that works better for them]

Who really believes kids can’t spread the virus in a classroom for example?

The government have brought this on themselves through shambolic communication, but I think it suits their agenda of blaming the public if we all immediately start looking for the problems.

Agree completely…
I’d love to see the numbers as to how people who test negative or those who have active antibodies
have a higher chance of transmitting the virus than those who don’t test …

If the vaccine doesn’t protect you, you will still be protected by a reduction in the infectious population so reduces the chances of you catching it in the first place

If I’m in the 30% it doesn’t protect, am I likely to get less severe illness?

No idea about whether you have some improved ability to fight an infection off. Interested to hear anything about that too.

But even if your in the 30% it doesn’t protect don’t forget  you’re still getting protected by the 70% it works for.

The more ignorant anti-vaxxers there are, the better. Means there will be more to go round for the rest of us and I will get my dose quicker.

(Yes I know it matters if there are too many of them.)

I think, certainly, there needs to be a significant communications effort from the government to explain to people what the vaccines is/does, and what the potential side effects could be, including some that are unknown. This worries me, because if there’s one thing that Bojo et all have shown over and over again since the start of the current unpleasantness….. is that they are crap at communication (either deliberately, or via incompetence).

Could you boil all that down to three words?

Basically the remaining obstacles to a successful vaccination programme fall almost entirely on the government. You would have thought that this was something of an open goal, but this lot have shown themselves to be able to miss those consistently.

If I’m in the 30% it doesn’t protect, am I likely to get less severe illness?

what is likely and less severe ?
How do you even know if you already had the virus and didn’t notice?

 yet you state it as if it’s a fact when it’s just an unproven theory

natural immunity is a fact, you understand that right? I mean, how do you think humans survived plagues and pandemics when medical science didn’t exist and couldn’t provide a cure?