Interesting question, and I don’t know. Maybe @Danspartan does?
If you’re saying it’s variance caused by sample size, then ok that would make sense.
I usually find arguments based on ‘we haven’t seen this before’ a bit less than convincing.
Vote Guillotine Party.
Yes, that’s another way to put it. That’s exactly why they couldn’t get approval for half/full – N was not large enough (at least that is my understanding).
But it wasn’t just sample size. The sample was skewed. The were all under 55. The immune system generally deteriorates with age, so any group with fewer olds would do better.
I’d like to know how just the under 55s in the full/full group did, but I haven’t seen that analysis yet. Though I haven’t looked very hard.
It’s more the randomness of who will get which vaccine that bothers me when there’s a clear case for giving some groups one vaccine and other groups t’other.
It’s almost as if they don’t give a shit and are just going through the motions, cossetted by a large Parliamentary majority. No, that surely can’t be right. :/
Grunching so apologies if this has been discussed, but would any of the more scientifically literate mind weighing in on the significance? It seems like a big deal to me, but the sample size seems like it might be small to draw major conclusions, but maybe that doesn’t matter because all we care about in this context is positive cases?
Anyway, this smells like it has the potential for a massive class action regardless of the percentage of athletes that have heart damage. 30% is insane:
This is why NOBODY should want to get Covid for any reason.
Cue dumb people not understanding how problematic this can be over many decades.
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OH became a state in 1803, so most of them were still kicking around then. More like, “what the fuck happened to Ohio, it used to be nice wilderness?”
If people who get one dose stop taking precautions and start returning to business as usual, couldn’t that contribute to an environment where more dangerous mutations of the virus could emerge?
Yep. Even if they had given out all of the doses they have received, we’d be at a slow pace. I’ll maybe even give the benefit of the doubt if they wanted to only give out half of the delivery to make sure they have enough doses in reserve to give the second dose to everyone who got the first. But we’re suffering thousands of deaths a day, many people are still locking down, businesses are suffering, and the vaccinations seem to be rolling out with no sense of urgency. It’s infuriating.
In my science bro opinion, doing college sports right now is the dumbest fucking idea I’ve ever heard of.
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I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, but even that is debatable.
The efficacy numbers are only with respect to getting COVID. In the Oxford/AZ study no one in the vaccine group got sick enough from COVID to be hospitalized or die. It was 100% on that measure. Given the limitations of these studies because of the time pressure, there is some doubt on whether that is actually the case, but that is the number they got.
So if it’s going to be that good at preventing death, one could argue that it’s not worth sweating who gets which vaccine. That takes time and effort. Just give everyone whichever one they can get the quickest.
Now maybe some of those people who did get COVID but didn’t die had some lingering issues. I didn’t read anything about that but I didn’t go that deep into the weeds on this.
Yeah but… BCS CHAMPIONSHIP THIS WEEKEND BITCHES!!!
It isn’t only about preventing a covid death though.
Long covid sounds particularly appalling, and VD’s post above (what an unfortunate abbreviation lol) shows 30% of student athletes having covid-related heart damage, so god knows what it does to the more vulnerable.
I have nfi how the two vaccines compare wrt preventing all of these effects.
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I think that’s unlikely. Even the mutant strains are thought to be susceptible to the vaccine. The part that would have to mutate to dodge the vaccine would almost certainly render the virus unable to infect the host cells (this is an over simplification).
What is likely is that more people will die because they are not as immune as they think they are.
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Agreed, but most of the long COVIDs I’ve heard about got “seriously ill” with the initial infection. According to the study, not only was no one hospitalized, but no one even got “seriously ill”.
I don’t know if they investigated long-term sequelae thoroughly. Doubtful given the time pressure.
Neither does anyone else. It’s all speculation at this point.
Spot on from my reading
Given the new variant seems to attack all ages groups with equal verosity, it just seems wise to get any vaccine in UK arms that may prevent the hospitals, that are already reporting crisis positions, from becoming further overrun.
https://mobile.twitter.com/deardrewdixon/status/1344056192822345729
New strain is irrelevant. It bothers me people keep doing calculus on these dumb behaviors while waiting on being vaccinated in the next 6 months - 10 years.
If anyone is having these discussions in their head they should just stop. They are stupid and wreckless. She gets zero credit for leaning towards not doing it.
My favorite reply to her:
https://mobile.twitter.com/jennycohn1/status/1344331796163383296
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Substantial mutations needed to totally outwit current vaccines - Van-Tam
Charlie Cooper at Politico also asked Prof Van-Tam what the latest science shows on whether the vaccine will be effective on the new virus variants.
Prof Van-Tam says both the UK strain and South African strain are either in, or on their way to, a government laboratory at Porton Down “to be assessed by the expert virologists to check that the AstraZeneca vaccine will still be effective”.
He said he understands that Pfizer is conducting very similar experiments.
“That isn’t unfortunately work that takes 12 hours in the lab. It takes more like 12-14 days, because you have to take the virus and grow it up live,” he says.
"So it will be a few more days, potentially a couple of weeks, before our scientists can give us a solid steer on that."
He added that if there were an impact on the vaccine effectiveness, he would expect it to be a marginal degradation rather than “we’ve lost the lot”.
“You would need very, very substantial mutations indeed to completely outwit these vaccines altogether,” he says.
Of course, but I don’t fault the athletes for it, do you?