Some directionally encouraging results on take-up rates
- 87% of those 65 and over plan to get vaccinated
- 69% of those 50 to 64 plan to get vaccinated
- lower rates for younger age groups, but still over 50%
People have more trust in seeing someone they know get the vaccine and not immediately dying, than they do of a 6-month clinical trial with 1000s of participants. People are dumb.
Austria is also recommending FFP2 starting Jan 19th and mandating it starting Jan 25th (?). The Jan 19th recommendation was announced a few days in advance. Why they didn’t make the recommendation effective immediately is one of the quirks of bureaucracy I’ll never understand.
I can’t comment on the system in general, but if we are going to have the ability to make high-quality vaccines at a moment’s notice and produce them from existing infrastructure, then there’s no way it’s justifiable to deny vaccination to hundreds of millions of people for months. It has to be much faster, at least for something like COVID.
The Biden team is definitely lowering expectations on purpose.
Every single administration official hammers the 100 million doses in 100 days thing when on TV. And, honestly, the strategy is working. I’ve seen journalists describe the goal as “ambitious” or “lofty” many times today already. Nobody seems to notice the goal isn’t actually ambitious at all (as others have noted, we’re already averaging 900k+ a day).
So it should be an easy win for Biden. I just hope they don’t take their foot off the gas when it becomes clear we’re hitting the goal. We should be able to do way better than 1m per day.
NZ would be a stretch imo - some South East Asian countries maybe.
Also that anonymously sourced hopelessly vague article that CNN was happy to parrot saying “there is no plan”. Lowering expectations.
They could have gone sooner than that, even.
It was clear by the end of January that deaths were doubling every ~3 days in China, as I wrote about itf at the time.
It took Johnson’s bag of septic shite two more months to lock down.
Correct me if I’m wrong but Italy have traced Covid back at least as early as November 2019, in monthly sewage samples taken from the time. France first case is early Dec 2019.
Closing any borders 10 months ago might have limited initial spread but unlikely anywhere in EU was going to be a NZ (IMO)… unless we closed borders 2 motnhs before covid was heard of
Plus you can lock down and get things under control, but the minute you lessen the restrictions, it’ll just pop back up and go exponential.
Oh I don’t disagree that would almost certainly have been a superior course of action. Don’t think things would be “over” had that happened, but absolutely there would have been fewer lives destroyed by the virus.
I can’t speak at all to specifics of this vaccine, but there have been raw goods issues for months. If it’s a vials issue, I wouldn’t be surprised. It comes and goes a bit, but there are basic medical goods - things like Microbiology plates, which we cannot get. So we use an inferior product, change process, etc. It is madness right now.
From CP - assuming this poster knows what they’re talking about, it sounds like what I kind of suspected - the real bottleneck is raw materials and subcomponents in the manufacturing process. Maybe the DPA could help?
Biden speaking now, saying he’s going to use DPA.
I didn’t catch the name or credentials of a doctor/expert on CNN earlier but basically the massage was
More cases=more replication=more mutants
Immune response is much more than the neutralizing antibody, both naturally and vaccine acquired. It should be robust enough to give very good protection for now. Long term the vaccines will need to be updated.
Monoclonals and convalescent plasma may lose effectiveness because they are focused on only/primarily the neutralizing antibodies.
The faster we can knock it down with social D, masking, and vaccinations, the better.
Supply out from the feds to the locals is the primary issue. Localities will adjust once they get more supply.
J&J with one shot regime and a promised rapid production of a billion doses has potential to be a big game changer.
It would have been so easy for Trump to do a B- job on Covid and get re-elected in a walk. We only had to turf 400,000 plus as a trade-off to get him out of office. Thanks awval.
Republic was 29th Feb - presumably upon new, early testing on return the residents from Italy. I’m talking about early cases before covid tests, possibly deaths blamed on pneumonia before covid was a thing. Ireland’s date should be at least two weeks before 29th feb when the surveillance is done - when did Ireland start testing - be a miracle if the first positive test case was indeed the first ever case within the country.
Meh, you know I ain’t disagreeing with you but retrospect is always easy but no country, other than China was closing mid feb - Italy was thinking about it
My parents had the opportunity to get their vaccines from my hospital. Apparently my idiot brother convinced them they shouldn’t take the vaccine because they hadn’t been “tested” properly. I had planned to visit more often now that my wife and I had been vaccinated. Instead I laid down the ultimatum that they won’t see me again until they can show me their vaccination card. I really need to cut out all the idiots in my life
But aren’t we also completely out of vaccine doses because the “reserve” the Biden administration was planning on distributing to speed things up didn’t exist? This all reminds me of Obama promising to bring unemployment numbers down when he campaigned, only to find out the Bush administration was masking the numbers and they were something like 4 times worse than expected.
I think it’s a bit misleading. We are at almost a million doses per day of distribution capacity, but the whole distribution bottleneck is just because everyone involved is a complete incompetent–giving the shots isn’t actually the hard part. Getting enough vaccines produced for 200 million doses still needs to be produced.
Also, note that it’s easier to do 1M shots/day early on, but to maintain that pace, you need to average 2M shots/day to cover the second doses for people.
None of that is to say that the goal is not too cautious, but it does require significant improvement from where we are now.