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9 hours ago, DB said:

Prompted by Fauci's latest comments about the likelihood of achieving herd immunity in the US, I took a quick look at the Bloomberg vaccination tracker (sometimes this is paywalled, sometimes not, seems random to me.)

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/

Looking at Israel, it seems that the number of vaccinations has almost stalled at close to 60%.

I doubt that they've lost all access to vaccines, so there must be some other reason.

If they're stuck at 60%, that's not reaching even the more optimistic "herd immunity" levels. I suspect that this isn't a non-denominational anti-vaxx sentiment, but if the split is religion based, is it the ultra-orthodox Jews, or is it Islam? (Plus the usual moonbat "vaccines cause autism" crowd.)

The NewsHour, our public television news program here in the States, did a report a few weeks ago on what's going on in Israel that you can find here.  In short it's a combination of a lot of things - some ultra-Orthodox simply refusing to get it, anti-vaxxers in general, young people not seeing a need to get it, and that Arab citizens have low rates (though they never really said why from what I recall).  They've apparently instituted a vaccine passport program.  I'm curious if we'll see the same thing here.

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3 hours ago, Ivanhoe said:

We certainly need to protect our elderly from COVID;

 

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I take it this is some 'gotcha!' attempt?  The latest guidelines from the CDC say it's ok to be in close proximity indoors if everyone has had the vaccine.  Everyone in this shot has.

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5 hours ago, Skywalkre said:

I'm not quite sure what you're talking about in your third paragraph?  As for the US as a whole COVID has killed so many that life expectancy dropped a full year in 2020 from 2019 estimates.  That's huge.

Yes, most were the elderly and in poor health.  In this area I'm in full agreement with you in regards to reporting.  Way back at the start of this thread someone posted a link to a Joe Rogan podcast with a doc out of the U of Minn who specializes in infectious diseases.  Rogan asked him if there was anything we all could do.  I loved the doc's answer - just live a healthy life.

The sad reality is most Americans don't do that.  That doc was terrified of what was going to happen in this country because we have so many unhealthy people here and his fears have played out - the US is currently sitting at 18% of all worldwide COVID deaths despite having only 4% of the world's population (and to be fair that number is probably a bit higher than it should be given some of the poorer nations aren't reporting figures as accurately... but even then it's still bad).

I just haven't seen this mentioned in reporting of the virus.  I've seen countless stories about various screw-ups at various levels of government and the terrible job Americans have been doing of following guidelines about masks and social distancing... but not a damn thing about maybe this should wake Americans up to the fact that if they just took better care of themselves we probably could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Third paragraph basically means that every who had Covid died -- as reported in the media -- because of Covid. The underlying, serious health issues were ignored. 

I agree with you on the need for more Americans to live a healthier life-style. I also agree with the other posters that some state governments have over reacted in their issuing and enforcement of laws regarding Covid. Two example are New York nursing homes and California being overturned by the Supreme Court on religious activities. 

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9 hours ago, Skywalkre said:

I'm not quite sure what you're talking about in your third paragraph?  As for the US as a whole COVID has killed so many that life expectancy dropped a full year in 2020 from 2019 estimates.  That's huge.

Yes, most were the elderly and in poor health. 

 

In other words, the people who were mostly likely going to die anyway if they caught the flu or any number of other illnesses.

And before your knee jerks about my heartlessness, you need to know something:  that is precisely what happened to my mother about 15 years ago.  She had been struggling with all manner of diseases, including cancer, and she was in a nursing home.  A bout of the flu came through the home, and she succumbed. 

I do not blame whoever it was that came in with the flu.  I don't even blame her for not having lived a healthier life.  It was her time.  Had it happened this year from Covid, I wouldn't blame people who don't wear masks or any such other silly finger-pointing.  Doing so is nothing more than scapegoating.

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That is about same ballpark number that local study has, 3 times less likely to catch it if one dose of vaccine was taken.

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On the COVID-after-vaccine thing, I sure wish somebody would get the data to tell us if vaccine failure is associated with low antibody levels post-shot or some other testable parameter.

IOW, if vaccines are 100% effective for those with antibody levels above X million per microliter (plus acceptable levels of other parameters like inflammation markers, coagulation markers, etc), whereas people with antibody levels below Y million per microliter have only 20% effectiveness, people could decide to do/not-do stuff based on quantitative estimate of risk.

 

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3 hours ago, lucklucky said:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/05/one-third-recent-covid-deaths-not-caused-virus/

Sometimes even the most dishonest profession have change the narrative.

Almost a third of recent Covid deaths in England and Wales not caused by virus

 

 

It's behind a paywall, so I can't tell exactly how they're probably misrepresenting the data to draw that conclusion. Note that UK deaths are in the low tens per day, so the key misrepresentation may simply be expecting people to ignore the word "recent" and think that the one third figure applies to all historic data.

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So there is talk about waiving the patents to Covid vaccines so that they can be made cheaply for the 3rd world.

 But what's going to happen next time a pandemic comes? Who's going to invest a billion dollars in developing a new product, if their intellectual property is going to be copied immediately by other people?

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11 minutes ago, Mikel2 said:

So there is talk about waiving the patents to Covid vaccines so that they can be made cheaply for the 3rd world.

 But what's going to happen next time a pandemic comes? Who's going to invest a billion dollars in developing a new product, if their intellectual property is going to be copied immediately by other people?

The federal government (USA) has now invested about $6 billion in the Covid-19 vaccine from Moderna, the Cambridge, Mass., biotech that few outside the scientific and investment worlds had heard of a couple of years ago.

Unfortunately behind a paywall, U.S. government has invested $6 billion in Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine (statnews.com)

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Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine offers strong protection against key variants of concern, real-world data from Qatar shows.

Not free:

Quote

The Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine provides strong protection against two concerning variants of the virus, including the one that has most worried scientists because it can evade parts of the immune response, according to new data from Qatar.

 

The study, published as a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was about 90 percent effective at blocking infections caused by the B.1.1.7 variant, a more transmissible version of the virus now fueling outbreaks around the world. That encouraging finding was not a surprise, but the study also found that efficacy eroded only slightly, to 75 percent, against the B.1.351 variant that was first detected in South Africa.

The B.1.351 variant carries mutations that help it elude some antibodies and as a result is considered by many experts the most challenging variant among those that have been identified. Because the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and one from the biotechnology company Moderna were tested in clinical trials before that variant emerged, it had remained unclear until now whether protection would be eroded by the variant. While the new study suggests the vaccine is somewhat less protective against the variant, it offered strong protection, particularly against severe, critical or fatal cases of covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/05/05/pfizer-vaccine-virus-variants/

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2 hours ago, Mikel2 said:

So there is talk about waiving the patents to Covid vaccines so that they can be made cheaply for the 3rd world.

 But what's going to happen next time a pandemic comes? Who's going to invest a billion dollars in developing a new product, if their intellectual property is going to be copied immediately by other people?

It depends on how they address it.  If they open it up under pandemic requirements under WHO for a suspension of license to manufacture constraints I don't think it will have a great impact.  With any pandemic that's a reality anyways.  The key part will be if they open it up for a technology transfer.  The real value in these vaccines long term is as a platform to combat other diseases.  If the process opens up the information share of how to make the next one that will have major impacts on sharing in the future.  Additionally, if it opens it wide open for generics for vaccinations and boosters AFTER the pandemic period then that is where it will get ugly.

Honestly though, the breaking of the patents was a forgone conclusion from the get-go.

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1 hour ago, nitflegal said:

It depends on how they address it.  If they open it up under pandemic requirements under WHO for a suspension of license to manufacture constraints I don't think it will have a great impact.  With any pandemic that's a reality anyways.  The key part will be if they open it up for a technology transfer.  The real value in these vaccines long term is as a platform to combat other diseases.  If the process opens up the information share of how to make the next one that will have major impacts on sharing in the future.  Additionally, if it opens it wide open for generics for vaccinations and boosters AFTER the pandemic period then that is where it will get ugly.

Honestly though, the breaking of the patents was a forgone conclusion from the get-go.

But can they be used for bad things?

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Got the second Pfizer jab on Tuesday 4th. No secondary effects, apart of some soreness around the point of injection. Probably some sleepiness, too, but that could be attributed to other reasons.

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2 hours ago, RETAC21 said:

But can they be used for bad things?

Depends how bad you want it to be.  The current platform won't allow you to rewrite genetic code or infect someone with a transmissable virus.  It could be used to provoke a significant and potentially lethal immune or autoimmune response but it would probably be noticed fairly quickly.

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4 hours ago, nitflegal said:

Honestly though, the breaking of the patents was a forgone conclusion from the get-go.

If it was a forgone conclusion then why is this a story?  Why didn't Pfizer et al put everything in the public domain from the very beginning?

Edited by DKTanker
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3 minutes ago, DKTanker said:

If it was a forgone conclusion then why is this a story?  Why didn't Pfizer et al put everything in the public domain from the very beginning?

Because the goal is similar to movies and the premiere weekend, make the money up front and then get out.  In a pandemic of any significant size you will have a small window before the patent gets broken for third world uses to make your money in the West.  It is because of this that you saw no similar issue with SARS, MERS, HIV, etc; the lethality is in the first world so you won't make your profits in the west before the WHO and treaties with the EU force the patent breakage.  It's basically a guarantee to lose  hundreds of millions of dollars in return for some slight good press before you're painted as evil capitalists profiting off dead black and brown people.  The brilliance of the Trump response (and on a lesser scale Merkel's in Germany focused on national companies) was that they acknowledged that from the get-go and guaranteed billions of profits before that could happen to the successful companies so they had all the upside of a blockbuster without the risk of a pandemic patent situation.  It suddenly made a massive investment in a vaccine/cure financially viable.  

 

As a comparison, this is why HIV vaccines and SARS/MERS were left untouched and the research has been driven primarily by the NIH (and foreign equivalents) and academia where they are not burdened by a profit motive.  Which is why they have been plugging away for 20-40 years with no vaccine candidate even identified and why we are very, very lucky that Trump did not follow the CDC guidances and Pelosi's pressure to focus our efforts within the NIH.  

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3 hours ago, nitflegal said:

The brilliance of the Trump response (and on a lesser scale Merkel's in Germany focused on national companies) was that they acknowledged that from the get-go and guaranteed billions of profits before that could happen to the successful companies so they had all the upside of a blockbuster without the risk of a pandemic patent situation.  It suddenly made a massive investment in a vaccine/cure financially viable. 

Claiming that people respond to incentives? That's racist!

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11 minutes ago, Tim the Tank Nut said:

so a businessman who understands the concept of profit essentially allowed "big pharma" to save the world.

that is DEFINITELY racist.

It's a good thing we got regular politicians back in charge!!

I can't wait to see what progress-with-a-capital-P we get when Andrew Cuomo is Secretary of HHS.

 

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It's only Germany who is opposing the patent waiver.

I doubt that there is much in the AZ vaccine that is particularly patentable - the viral vector approach must be traditional by now. If only there hadn't been a concerted campaign by the politically motivated to undermine the reputation of this vaccine.

Anyone checked the incidence rate of Pfizer BioNTech vaccine for blood clots that are potentially lethal recently?

This report of a pre-print notes that the rates are comparable for AZ and both Pfizer and Moderna. The Pfizer and Moderna data is US sourced, the AZ data is EMA sourced.

https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1005

This begs a fairly obvious question - why is AZ subject to hysterical treatment everywhere, but these others are not?

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it's hard to believe that the companies won't fight this in court.  After all isn't the "eminent domain" concept a property of the legislative side of government rather than the executive side of government?

More than that, the release of the intellectual property makes it even easier for the Wuhan Institute to create a more capable virus the next time.

I'd say China is certainly getting their money's worth out of their investment in the election.

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