COVID-19: Vaccine and testing procedures Megathread Part 3 - Read OP

hmmm wrote: »

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1366863233538228233

They managed to plan for that under the Trump days, hard to not feel like Europe dropped the ball. Europe should be on a par with the US and UK

Addressing Variants of Concern: On February 24, Moderna announced that it completed manufacturing of clinical trial material for its variant-specific vaccine candidate, mRNA-1273.351, against the SARS-CoV-2 variant known as B.1.351 first identified in the Republic of South Africa and has shipped doses to the NIH for a Phase 1 clinical trial that will be led and funded by the NIH’s NIAID. The Company also provided an update on its strategy for addressing SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern.

Publication of Note: Letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine published February 17, 2021, showed vaccination with the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine produced neutralizing titers against all key emerging variants tested, including B.1.1.7 and B.1.351, first identified in the UK and Republic of South Africa, respectively. The study showed no significant impact on neutralizing titers against the B.1.1.7 variant relative to prior variants. A six-fold reduction in neutralizing titers was observed with the B.1.351 variant relative to prior variants.

mRNA tech allows speedy deployment of modified vaccines. Moderna, Pfizer and Curevac will have an advantage. And this is only the beginning. Anyone interested see the list of mRNA targets Moderna has in the pipeline in the full PR linked below.

2021 Financial Considerations
Advance Purchase Agreements (APAs): Already signed APAs for scheduled delivery in 2021, reflecting a total of $18.4 billion in anticipated product sales. Additional discussions ongoing with several governments relating to APAs for scheduled deliveries in 2021 and 2022. Moderna responded to a tender to UNICEF to supply COVAX in 2021 and 2022 and discussions are ongoing with COVAX/UNICEF.

18.4 billion is massive just for the 2021.

https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-reports-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2020-financial

is_that_so wrote: »

The EU is a bigger entity than both combined and not a single country. It also follows what the EMA says and applications for approval have stalled the process here. The US should have able to do what they are now promising, an inept Trump stopped that from happening.

The EMA being slightly slower isn't a major issue. They approved Moderna in early Jan yet we still have hardly any doses. It took the US over 3 weeks to approve J&J . The EMA will do it on the same timeframe - maybe a day faster. The EMA aren't the reason why AZ has missed every target that they themselves set.
What the EU has done poorly is that it didn't take enough risks with manufacturing. The US handed over billions to ramp up production - some of this was in the form of higher prices. The EU didn't. AFAIK the only real investment in manufacturing was by German and even that was in the form of a loan to BioNtech last September. We will start to see benefits of that next month.

Saw a video online last night, of some guy following Luke O'Neill down the street with a microphone and presumably he asked about long term side effects from the vaccine, to which Luke started to talk about stage 4 trials.

The poster of this video tried to spin it as a "they're experimenting on the population" conspiracy.

I'm going to go weep for humanity now.

Mickey 32....re above link...Found a good analysis of the findings here..good news for those who have been already infected
Does this mean we might be able to save vaccine doses for those who really need it and does it potentially mean unless the virus undergoes very significant changes we wont need an injection every year... those people previously infected seem to be holding up amazingly well to the new variants with a very very low chance out of the hundreds if millions infected? Anybody what are your thoughts?

https://mobile.twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/1366742151351132168

Apogee wrote: »

There are currently 435,895 doses administered as of Sat 27th. If 500,000 administered by Sun 7th, that comes to 64,005 for Sun 28th-Sun 7th. Seems low, even allowing for AZ 25,000 shortfall.

Tbh, I would take any figures that Donnelly throws out as being quite loose. He is very poor at speaking clearly and concisely.

He very likely meant to say we will have administered more than 500k or will have administered 520k by the end of the week.

The 25k AZ doses that were missed last week were supposed to be delivered this week. Has that not happened?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/02/covid-germany-and-france-under-pressure-to-shift-oxford-vaccine

josip wrote: »

What kind of timeframe would you consider 'any time soon' ?

This year I suppose

Thelonious Monk wrote: »

This year I suppose

You’ll be done by September I’d say at the latest

Some more data on the Brazilian variant (P1):

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.01.433466v1.full.pdf+html

Way less intimidating than the data for B.1.351 (SA), convalescent serum had ~6.5x drop while vaccine plasma had 2.2x drop for Pfizer/BNT and 2.8x drop for Moderna. The SA variant had lots of convalescent serum KOs and vaccinee serum had 3-8x fold drops.

It's interesting that the vaccinee serum is consistently outperforming convalescent serum in terms of quality of the response. It's very consistent and looks to be somewhat broader. I think the messing with the B cells and germinal center formation by the wild type infection could indeed be blunting the humoral immune response and giving vaccines the edge against this virus.

Hmmzis wrote: »

Some more data on the Brazilian variant (P1):

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.01.433466v1.full.pdf+html

Way less intimidating than the data for B.1.351 (SA), convalescent serum had ~6.5x drop while vaccine plasma had 2.2x drop for Pfizer/BNT and 2.8x drop for Moderna. The SA variant had lots of convalescent serum KOs and vaccinee serum had 3-8x fold drops.

It's interesting that the vaccinee serum is consistently outperforming convalescent serum in terms of quality of the response. It's very consistent and looks to be somewhat broader. I think the messing with the B cells and germinal center formation by the wild type infection could indeed be blunting the humoral immune response and giving vaccines the edge against this virus.

I didn't understand a lot of what you said, but I liked your closing line!

Vaccine rollout to be discussed in the Dail tomorrow at 1

josip wrote: »

I can see you dropping in at 4:50 every evening, "eh, any spare vaccines today?"

It wouldn't exactly be out of my way! Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to take one from a higher priority person. But given the short shelf life, I'd hope they have a back up plan and they'd find an enthusiastic volunteer here!