With news of Pfizer’s vaccine likely expansion to 12+, and likely upcoming expansion to 2+, this is amazing news:
In multiple analyses, the researchers found that the vaccine was 87 to 89.5 percent effective at preventing infection with B.1.1.7 among people who were at least two weeks past their second shot. It was 72.1 to 75 percent effective at preventing infection with B.1.351 among those who had reached the two-week point.
The vaccine was highly effective at protecting against the worst outcomes. Overall, it was 97.4 percent effective at preventing severe, critical or fatal disease from any form of the coronavirus, and 100 percent effective at preventing severe, critical or fatal disease caused by B.1.1.7 or B.1.351.
The second new study, which was published in The Lancet, was conducted by researchers at Pfizer and at Israel’s Ministry of Health. It is based on more than 230,000 instances of coronavirus infection that occurred in Israel between Jan. 24 and April 3. During that period, B.1.1.7 accounted for nearly 95 percent of all coronavirus cases in the country, which has vaccinated more than half of its population.
The researchers found that the vaccine was more than 95 percent effective at protecting against coronavirus infection, hospitalization and death among fully vaccinated people 16 and older. It also worked well in older adults. Among those 85 or older, the vaccine was more than 94 percent effective at preventing infection, hospitalization and death.
That is astounding shit. Like, beyond all best case scenarios good.
That’s a fair question, but hard to answer. Depends on the facts on the ground, will see what community cases are like and how the vaccines appear to be holding up. At minimum I will be masking up until kids can be vaccinated, but probably moot here as mask mandates are here for the long haul.
To be clear, I don’t really have a problem with how anyone in this thread is acting individually. My lament is just there is no will to do anything as a community besides hope the vaccines work. I’m guessing Wichita would be happy to make more sacrifices than masking in a restaurant if we were trying as a community to either eliminate COVID or at least get case counts down to low levels. But since that isn’t a goal of the community anywhere here in the US, kind of hard to ask for more sacrifice at this point when we aren’t pedaling towards anything.
I like to do whatever doesn’t make me stand out, so I am more likely to get away with whatever crimes I may have committed by not drawing attention to myself.
I’m in the camp of thinking that masks only make sense if most people are wearing them and that they mainly protect others, so if I’m around people who won’t wear masks, then fuck y’all and I want to spread as much COVID as possible back at them.
At first blush, it seems good to me. As a general concept I think setting a precedent that there could be exceptions in IP rules for the most life saving medicines while still maintaining (a) some profits for companies that invested time and money to initially develop the drugs and (b) establishing a framework where the companies making the “generics” are doing it openly and with good safeguards (rather than just doing some grey market ish) seems like a big win. And it’s a good sign that the US gov’t seems to agree given how much concerns over pharmaceutical IP has traditionally impacted our approach to international trade negotiations.
That being said, I think a lot depends on how the actual negotiations and implementation works out. There are lots of ways where this process could play out too slowly or they put so many restrictions on the types of companies authorized to start making the vaccines that it fails to make a meaningful impact on actually getting shots into arms. Or, in a an attempt to supercharge production, they let too many manufacturers get in the game without proper oversight and a bunch of less effective or even dangerous generics hit the market.
Still, I think the announcement as a whole is good news.
I’m wondering how much of patent stuff is an actual issue. Production seems to be the issue mainly right now.
That being said patent will likely be an issue down the road. Highly doubt that any big pharma will truly be hurt by this because, well, they’re big pharma
