What's particularly worrying is that all vaccines use the same spike protein (although AZ doesn't have the pre-fusion conformation stabilising mutation which a number of other vaccines do). So if this substantially lowers efficacy of one vaccine it will have directionally the same effect on all of them. Of course the response of efficacy to antibody titre and other correlates of protection is non-linear so it could be that AZ was just low enough for the mutation to kick them into the "doesn't work" zone.
I expect that come late summer we'll all be getting another booster of some sort against whatever mix of variants is around. The trick will be prediction although we are helped by the fact that both mRNA and vectored vaccines can be changed and produced quite quickly.
I also think that the emergence of this variant may save lives in the end because it forces to the front of everyone's mind the necessity of vaccinating the entire world and may make it politically easier to ship vaccine to the poor countries of the world before the rich countries have finished their vaccination programmes.
In the US, it's been ramping up to about 1.5 million shots a day and a one-shot J&J vaccine will presumably be coming on line. But, yes, depending upon the assumptions you care to make, it'll probably be later in the summer before the majority of people in the general population pool <65 years old get a vaccine.
It depends on a lot of assumptions. How many shots per day--currently at about 1 million in the US but ramping up. One shot vs. two shot vaccine mix. If/when younger children get added to the pool. What percentage of the population wants a vaccine.
A lot of people should be vaccinated by the end of the summer. But that would require accelerating things a fair bit from the current pace--which would put the 90% mark around Thanksgiving.
In the USA the Biden admin is setting up mass vax sites that currently aren't running(so i expect they will make an impact) and they're promising they can speed up by 50% more.
Also for what it's worth I assumed I was talking to an adult who wants a vax when I made my statement.
Yes, barring any major setbacks, I'm optimistic that by late summer I will be able to get a vaccine without going through major gyrations. (And, in practice, I'll try to get one earlier rather than later even if it's still a bit of a hassle.)
I think there's enough evidence from 2020 that your views aren't cynical, but instead realistic. The feasibility of world-wide coordination should no longer be expected regardless how high the stakes.
Would new shots adapted to novel strains have to pass the same trial process as the first versions of the vaccine? Or are there some provisions for an even faster approval? I don't know how it works for the flu vaccine.
The flu vaccine skips the effective part of the trail, but still needs to go through safety tests for a few months.
I'm not sure at what point we are comfortable enough with vaccine technology to agree to that. There have been a few vaccine candidates in the past that made things worse, we think we understand the flu well enough to not worry about that. However for the new vaccines we don't have as much information.
Although if the virus keeps mutating there will be pressure to bypass the process to approve faster. That pressure is why the flu vaccine bypasses steps, if we did everything "by the book" we wouldn't have a working flu vaccine ever.
The FDA has announced that boosters to address novel strains will undergo a rapid review process. Full details of what that will involve are expected in 2 to 3 weeks.
In my Algorithms in Drug Design class in school, one of the research projects was using docking software to do an alpha/beta search for mutations that would alter protein structure while preserving binding affinity, with the idea of heading off vaccine escape (in this case HIV) by predicting the mutations likely to escape antibody binding.
Is anything like that being done with covid?
Edit: the Alpha move was to mutate the antibody and the Beta move was to mutate the viral protein iirc.
Because vaccines are in short supply. The choice isn't AZ+Moderna+JJ+PB vs Moderna+JJ+PB. the real choice today is AZ+Moderna+JJ+PB+NOTHING vs Moderna+JJ+PB+NOTHING, with the size of nothing being larger in the second case.
So really it is c: you vaccinate everyone with whatever you can get your hands on. Once everyone has had some vaccine you look at data of what is working and give everyone with a less effective vaccine an additional dose of whatever works - which will probably be a new vaccine that doesn't exist yet!
Don't forget that mutations are continuous. We might be looking at another mutation in 3 months as supply catches up that evades vaccines in a completely new way.
> give everyone with a less effective vaccine an additional dose of whatever works - which will probably be a new vaccine that doesn't exist yet!
I would be careful about assuming that's an option. The vaccines have been tested individually, but have not been tested together. It's not out of the realm of possibility that getting some combination triggers some kind of immune reaction or something else.
> Don't forget that mutations are continuous. We might be looking at another mutation in 3 months as supply catches up that evades vaccines in a completely new way.
This is, sadly, a reason for poorer countries to delay vaccination. If there's going to be a mutation that evades this vaccine, and you can only afford one round of vaccines for everyone, you'd be better off waiting for the vaccine that prevents both.
Based on the last article about this, SA doesn't have the money to do 2 rounds of vaccines. A lot of the money was spent suspiciously, but now funding is limited. It seems that anyone who gets a subpar vaccine is just going to be stuck with subpar coverage.
That works both ways: the sooner the alternatives are available in adequate quantities, the less the harm (if there is anything to be concerned about) of continuing to use the AZ vaccine at least until then.
Fair point, but the others won't be available in adequate quantities anytime soon. I'm not sure where SA stacks up, but nobody is getting adequate quantities before this summer at best.
As a) is likely to reduce the serious cases faster, that seems like a point in its favor.
One complication might be if people getting mild cases end up spreading the variant faster, because they are not incapacitated by it - but it is not as if it is having much difficulty spreading now, despite the serious cases it creates, as it seems to spread before it incapacitates. I don't think this possibility demands that we stop using this vaccine until this issue is unequivocally settled.
Healthcare professionals are first in line in the South African vaccine rollout. It's possible that not protecting against moderate to severe illness is an inadequate outcome for this group. Skipping this group in order to vaccinate others may not be politically palatable.
Skipping this group is not an inevitable consequence of continuing to uze the AZ vaccine. The rate at which this group can be vaccinated with other vaccines is an orthogonal issue.
people in other groups may be unwilling to take the AZ vaccine, but so long as they are not being coerced to do so, this is not an issue.
There have been serious side effects documented for these vaccines. Bruising, soreness, "covid mouth", miscarriages, deaths, anaphylactic shock, etc. The vaccine has also not been out long enough to know of any long term health issues.
The data is not in whether they are effective against death. They didn't test the super vulnerable in the studies. If you look at the places that have high vaccination numbers, you don't actually see any significant drop in covid cases or deaths. If anything, those places are staying high while the rest of the world is dropping. They were released under emergency authorization which means that they haven't fully testing and verified them to the level that would normally be done.
If they are as effective as the hype, we should be seeing significant positive results by now.
If you look at places that have high vaccination numbers, oh wait, there aren't any. Israel is leading the world with only about 20% of their population having undergone a full vaccination regimen, and it takes a few weeks after the second dose for immunity to reach its highest level. Given how fast they are vaccinating, a very high proportion of that 20% was given that second shot in the last few days.
In other words, there is no place on Earth where we would expect vaccination to have an impossible to dispute effect on the top-line deaths or hospitalization numbers... yet. Give it 6 weeks.
To your other points about side effects, nearly 100m people globally have gotten at least one shot. The mild side effects which require a day off work are completely worth it, and the severe ones happen extremely rarely, to where a risk adjusted decision even for a very young and healthy person would still be to get the vaccine.
Only one of your points is even mildly valid, that the vaccines haven't been out long enough to know if there are any long term health issues. While we won't know this for generations, because of the definition of "long term," we also have no reason to believe that there would be long term health issues, while we know that SARS-COV-2 infection can DEFINITELY cause long term health issues in a significant minority of people infected.
Lastly, many folks pushing anti-vaxxer propaganda are selling something: usually quack cures. Ignore the parent comment, and focus on the facts.
>we know that SARS-COV-2 infection can DEFINITELY cause long term health issues in a significant minority of people infected.
Only 10% of positive cases (not including asymptomatic, untested cases) have any symptoms after 3 weeks.[1]
This is not significant compared to say, pneumonia.[2]
>we also have no reason to believe that there would be long term health issues
Medical history is replete with doctors and pharmaceutical companies making this claim for new treatments which ended up having horrible long term effects for many people.
Asking whether these covid vaccines work is not anti-vaxxer. The antithesis also holds true, what data shows that they are working? Your example of Israel is the most troubling because they have the highest proportion of vaccinations, but their statistics of cases/deaths are not falling as fast as the rest of the world (or even the Palestinian population that isn't getting vaccinated). Does it mean that the vaccines don't work? Not necessarily. It could be as you suggested, not yet. It could mean that people are changing their behaviors now they are vaccinated. It could mean that at risk people are getting sick on the way to/from getting the vaccine.
> Your example of Israel is the most troubling because they have the highest proportion of vaccinations, but their statistics of cases/deaths are not falling as fast as the rest of the world (or even the Palestinian population that isn't getting vaccinated). Does it mean that the vaccines don't work? Not necessarily. It could be as you suggested, not yet.
. . .
Early this week, with the country reporting a clear and sustained drop in the number of people age 60 and older who are severely ill, experts became confident they were seeing the effects of the vaccine. People over 60 were prioritized in the initial stages of Israel’s vaccine rollout, so this was where the signal was expected to show up in national COVID-19 statistics.
“We say with caution, the magic has started,” tweeted data scientist Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, on Feb. 1, noting that COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and severe illness were all falling among the over-60s.
What’s more, follow-up studies conducted by one of Israel’s largest HMOs, Maccabi Healthcare Services, suggest that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, which has been used for most of the shots given so far, is working almost as well in the real world as it did in clinical trials, with over 90% efficacy after two doses. This was not a guarantee: Drugs and vaccines may perform slightly differently outside of the controlled bounds of clinical testing.
As the charts above and below show [see article URL], the decline in severe cases began in mid-January, shortly after a steep rise in the number of older Israelis getting their second vaccine shots.
Only 31 out of 163,000 Israelis vaccinated by Maccabi Healthcare Services were diagnosed with COVID-19 in their first 10 days of full-strength protection, its top vaccine statistics analyst, Anat Ekka Zohar, told The Times of Israel on Thursday.
Maccabi found that an equivalent sample of unvaccinated Israelis was 11 times more likely to be diagnosed with the coronavirus, which allowed it to calculate the effectiveness rate.
> Your example of Israel is the most troubling because they have the highest proportion of vaccinations, but their statistics of cases/deaths are not falling as fast as the rest of the world
Care to cite a source? I see the Times of Israel disagrees with you.
Is OpenVAERs a legitimate source of information for vaccine injury? The site claims the data is sourced from the HHS. Has this been validated? If so, is this raw data or has it been reviewed and vetted by HHS. Self-reported data from non-medical professionals likely needs significant vetting, analysis and interpretation.
You do realize that these events must be compared to the natural rate of these events, right?
There will be people who die the day after their vaccine, because they are old and fat and will have a heart attack.
There will be people who die of rare diseases within hours of their vaccine, because we are intending to vaccinate the entire world and these things happen naturally and likely have nothing to do with the vaccine.
Until you have data in a control group comparing the rate of these events to the vaccinated group, you have absolutely nothing other than fear mongering.
Completely agree except for "Until you have data in a control group comparing the rate of these events to the vaccinated group, you have absolutely nothing other than fear mongering."
If these vaccines were released under a normal process, it meant that there was enough trials/scientific consensus that they were effective and did not cause significant adverse reactions. There were limited trials and many at risk people were excluded from them. So you can't say that "its safe for a pregnant woman to take the vaccine". You can only say, "there is no information that says it is not safe for a pregnant woman to take the vaccine". All you know is that 5 adverse reactions (miscarriages) were reported. How adverse reactions was it based on how many took it? You don't know. It wasn't in a trial.
Worth noting that the JJ vaccine (which is similar) showed 89% efficacy against severe disease (hospitalization) wrt the SA variant. So - it's very likely that all vaccines will prevent healthcare systems getting stressed and significant excess mortality. Additionally if the vaccines are retarding the viral loads (it seems likely) then they should reduce transmission.
...which means that the optimal strategy is still go ahead with the Oxford-AstraZeneca phase 3 trial DESPITE these disappointing results, because they don't have another vaccine in SA and they really need to reduce hospitalizations and transmissability.
Unfortunately, the vaccine review system is not setup to allow such nuanced approvals.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's what SA does; the health minister kind of signaled that it may be resumed. I'm sure they're at least considering it. Normal approval processes for vaccines are getting modified all over the place, nowadays.
The 501.V2 variant is widespread in South Africa and is troubling due to its potential for vaccine evasion [1]:
> On 6 February 2021, The Financial Times reported that provisional trial data from a study undertaken by South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand in conjunction with Oxford University demonstrated reduced efficacy of the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine against the 501.V2 variant. [68] The study found that in a sample size of 2,000 the AZD1222 vaccine afforded only "minimal protection" in all but the most severe cases of COVID-19. [69] On 7 February 2021, the Minister for Health for South Africa suspended the planned deployment of around 1 million doses of the vaccine whilst they examine the data and await advice on how to proceed. [70]
Looking at the bigger picture I think the world will suffer from those countries that handle Covid the worst because
the virus will not disppear in those countries and it has time to mutate there until it reaches a state that can evade the vaccines and then re-infect the other countries.
Several epidemiologist are trying to warn the developed nations that the current battle for covid vaccines provisioning is doing the world a disservice since it allows the virus to mutate in parts of the world that can't compete economically for vaccine shots (Manaus, South Africa, etc.)
But Nash equilibrium is still more powerful than everything else ...
Since we don't have enough doses or dosing capacity yet to make anywhere reach herd immunity, not even tiny Israel (although hopefully they are getting close), it's not like shipping everything to South Africa would change anything. Also, given the refrigeration requirements of the early vaccines, shipping it to lower income countries would probably just increase the chance of some of the doses spoiling.
Really, it's in virtually every country, so there's not a place on Earth where it's not mutating.
Same thing: those animal hosts are everywhere. There is no particular reason to expect that an animal host in Isreal won't be the source of the next mutation (Israel is currently number 1 in per-capita vaccination)
Animals carry lots of nasty diseases, Ebola, rabies, SARS, MERS, etc., yet these are under control in large parts of the world, thanks to basic hygiene. If we were willing to follow e.g. New Zealand's example, committing to actually applying what we have learned about containing local outbreaks, maybe we couldn't eradicate SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, but we could do so much better at controlling it, allowing us to largely go back to normality.
Yeah, I haven't seen a lot of discussion of this, but cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, and mink is a lot of other mammal species already proven to be able to pass it on. I think we will never live in a covid-19 free world again, it will be like measles; always in circulation, but hopefully we get effective vaccines against it.
The important thing to note is that the significance of this study goes beyond the AZ vaccine. Please correct me if I've missed one, but from what I've seen there aren't any other vaccines that have completed similar trials in South Africa. The "good news" about the other vaccines' effectiveness against the variant have been based on in vitro immune response[1], not real-world trials. What would be good to know though is what response the AZ vaccine had in tests similar to the ones performed with other vaccines.
Which overlaps with the CI on other COVID variants. This is a small sample study, and the media and governments are probably too quick to take the centre of the estimate. Sampling variation could explain the outcome as much as the South African variant.
I would assume the very wide CI mentioned above means that, since it includes 0, we can’t say there is a statistically significant effectiveness (it is not significantly different from 0% effectiveness).
> we can’t say there is a statistically significant effectiveness
Agreed, although to clarify and be more precise, it also doesn't prove it's not effective. It effectively says that the sample was too small to tell anything.
> (it is not significantly different from 0% effectiveness).
This statement isn't true - it means that they are 95% sure the range of possible values is between -50 and +60, but it does not mean that the average of those two values is correct. 0% effectiveness is possible, but was not shown in this study.
You’re right, semantics are everything. I left implicit the “in this study” part. As always, failing to reject the null doesn’t mean the null is true :)
This is not really correct. CI means we are 95% sure that the true result falls somewhere within the range of -50 to 60. What this really means is that the study lacks statistical power to say anything interesting at all about vaccine effectiveness.
Right. I phrased it a bit differently below. By “we can’t say” I meant that the study/researchers aren’t able to claim that the vaccine has non-zero effectiveness, i.e., they haven’t rejected the null.
AZ has already said they are waiting until their new US-based trail finishes before even applying. They haven't finished recruiting, 28 days between shots, then (I think) 75 infections in the participants before they will report interim data.
I'm also in the AZ study and just spoke to the head doctor of my testing site Friday. They've finished recruitment and likely will have enough cases by the end of this month. BUT...the FDA said they won't consider an EUA until they have at least 2 months of safety data from half the participants. Given that restriction, he expects them to not be able to apply for an EUA until April.
The AZ data is often considered to be somewhat dodgy, e.g. with dosages mixed up, patient groups selectively joined or split up for p-hacking purposes, etc. I can understand the US wanting a proper study under their own oversight.
I think dodgy is overstating it a bit. It's clear from the data in multiple trials and post-rollout studies that AZ vaccine is very safe and somewhat to very effective. There is a lack of gold-standard double-blind trial data to nail down answers to specific questions about efficacy, but given current overwhelming evidence of saftey and the raging pandemic it's entirely reasonable for e.g. MHRA to approve rollout.
The main question that seems to remain is effectiveness in over 65s. Essentially not enough older people became sick in either arm of the trials (e.g. due to lockdown) to make any conclusion. However there is definitely indirect data (antibody titres) to infer that efficacy is not reduced in older population.
I think the chances that it is unsafe are zero. Someone in the UK would have noticed by now, they vaccinated quite a lot of people.
The interesting question that needs to be answered is: to what degree does it work, and for which groups? Of course it would be possible to just widely distribute the vaccine (since I consider it safe) and run the study to answer that question in parallel. In the worst case, you widely distributed an expensive placebo. Don't know if that is a good idea overall however.
In my mind the worst case is we hold off on distributing it for a couple of months. And later find out that it was far more effective at preventing death/hospitalization than symptoms. So we end up 1,000 more dead than we would have if we vaccinated with the AZ vaccine.
I guess the problem with rolling out ineffective vaccines is if you waited a little you might have got a better one. Guess it depends a bit on how long it'll take to crank up the others.
Given the low confidence intervals due to the small study size (~10,000) in the overseas studies, I don't think the FDA is wrong to wait for enough events (aka X people get COVID) in the USA study to more accurately determine effectiveness (30,000 participants, 2/3 with vaccine). That said, I think it's likely safer to consider safety data from those other studies, as that's unlikely to change much based on study size (especially combined with the fact that X million have been distributed overseas).
So does this mean that the mRNA vaccines are probably going to be like flu vaccines, where they have to predict which variant will dominate each season and adjust the doses accordingly?
Can other options like the adenovirus-based or J&J ones be expected to cover a broader spectrum of mutants?
(And why are so many people downvoting these questions? I'm genuinely curious, and I really tried not to offend any sensibilities, but did I say something wrong? Oh god why do people always hate me so much? Is it possible to say or do anything right anymore? Maybe it's time to quit social media...I'm out, y'all are cruel.)
I think you're probably being downvoted (note: not by me) because the way your comment is written makes it sound a bit like you're assuming the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is an mRNA vaccine when it's not.
Problem is, the platform is a vector virus that causes immunity against the vector. So while you can create a new vaccine for the variants, you either cannot reuse the vector or you can't vaccinate old-variant-vaccinated people against the new variant. The body would kill the vector too quickly, limiting exposure to the payload too much.
In that respect mRNA vaccines or live vaccines have an advantage.
I don't think that's correct (but I'm willing to be corrected by an expert).
I believe the immune response is mainly triggered by the spike protein. If the spike protein of the variant is different enough to cause a degree of vaccine escape, then the spike protein of the vaccine should be different enough to not get immediately cleared from the body.
This is based on what I've understood from listening to interviews with prof. Sarah Gilbert, head of the Oxford team.
The parent is referring to a valid concern that with repeated doses (like from a subsequent booster), the mild antigenicity of the vector virus itself can be a problem. The Oxford vaccine uses a Chimpanzee adenovirus, which can infect human cells but not replicate inside them. There after delivering the vaccine payload, over time the protein coat of the vector will be chopped up and presented to the immune system, as are all cellular proteins. As you are unlikely to have been previously infected with a chimp adenovirus, it should elicit not much of an immune response, but the body will see it as foreign and start raising antibodies against the adenovirus proteins (adenoviruses have their own versions of "spike" proteins, among others). Of course, we would expect most of the immune response would be against the corona spike payload, but some fraction would inevitably be for the adenovirus as well.
When you get your second dose, you already have some antibodies against chimp adenovirus, which will potentially destroy some of the vector before it has a chance to be taken up by your cells. Third or fourth booster shots against coronavirus variants using the same chimp adenovirus vector would trigger worse reactions, destroying some portion of the vector before the payload can be delivered. The Russian Sputnik vaccine tries to reduce this likelihood by using different adenovirus vectors for each dose.
It's not clear how much it'll continue to mutate. Since this is a brand new virus, it's had 100M+ people so far to experiment on, and clearly the early versions were not as efficient at spreading as the newer variants.
Once we have herd immunity through vaccination (since natural immunity is rather hit-or-miss) I would hope the rate of mutations slows down significantly.
Logically i would have thought the opposite would have happened, since natural immunity is mostly to the nucleus protein (difficult to mutate), and vaccine immunity is based on the spike protein (easy to mutate). I would have thought any partial vaccine immunity would increase mutation rate.
Also been worried that mass vaccinations might short-circuit the mutate to less severe variant process that happens in nature. By taking the advantage away from the current spike configuration we might give an advantage to a worse variant that would naturally have died out (out compete by its parent variant)..
Disclaimer; I'm more qualified to write a science fiction novelette on this theory than a medical paper, so take all this with a big grain of salt.
It's probably too early to say if the vaccines have had any effect on the mutation rate, since wide-scale vaccination has only just started ramping up.
You'd think it'd be easier to say whether people are getting reinfected after catching COVID the first time, but the testing data is sparse enough that there doesn't seem to be any confirmation on whether it's widespread or just isolated cases. Most notably in Manaus, Brazil, where one of the new variants has been spreading.
I'm definitely not qualified to make anything other than wild guesses on this subject, but everything I've read suggests that scientists are scratching their heads as well. Conventional wisdom is that the spike is the easiest to target, so whether the human immune system picking the N protein is a mistake or brilliant move seems to be up in the air. Some reading: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-00480-0
Mutating to a less severe variant: Given that SARS-CoV-2 already has delayed symptoms and a high percentage being asymptomatic cases, I'm not sure there's much pressure to make it milder. Also the overall spike design is what gives SARS-CoV-2 its higher infectiousness compared to the original SARS, so one would hope that mutations to it (to avoid existing antibodies) would tend to make things less effective, although unluckily the virus has been discovering some new configurations that are both more infectious and also less protected against by the existing vaccines (especially the 60-70% ones). Paper on infectivity of variants: https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674%2820%2930877-1.pdf
It’s worth noting that the Oxford vaccine can be quickly altered too, as it’s based on a platform technology. They suspect a version with variants can be in production and being rolled out by August.
I wonder though if the really good trial data of the MRNA ones mean they’ll be able to do just safety trials (nothing on effectiveness) in the future, while the Oxford collaboration will be closer scrutinized.
What you are saying might turn out to be true. There was a report on how Chinese vaccine was good in some countries but not doing well in Brazil, it may be related to mutation as well. If the virus mutates fast because countries are not controlling the spread well enough, current vaccine may be less and less effective in time. I am sure the producers are updating their vaccines in meantime. It will take time and the production will take time as well.
Unfortunately mRNA vaccines will not be a universal solution for all countries, it will only be applicable for a few rich countries.
I feel like it is optimistic to think that we will be allowed to live our lives the pre pandemic way. These new strains will be trotted out as a good excuse to keep these restrictions around much longer.
IMO no government in the US is going to indefinitely ban large indoor gatherings, indoor dining, bars, schools/universities as usual, physical conferences, etc. And any "rules" notwithstanding I fully expect that when summer rolls around and a lot of people, especially the more vulnerable, have been vaccinated whether it's imperfectly or not are going to back to beaches, bars, concerts, etc. At some point, it's just another disease of which there are many that sometimes kills people.
All pandemics end eventually, but it depends right? It depends on hospital capacity and how infectious and lethal the variants are and if the vaccines work and how fast the spread is. Not to mention super spreader events.
Covid wild-type was/is bad enough to crush global hospital systems so that's really a big issue. It will take years to train more doctors and nurses to run covid wards if that's something we decide to do.
Also things won't go back to normal because our hyper-globalization and world wide travel has definitely increased the risk of pandemics. So we have to think of the next unknown one, use technology to prepare as well as implement risk reduction processes. Covid testing for international travel will probably never go away.
Your comment appeared to be complaining about downvotes (as does this one). Even if not that though, it's at least commenting about voting, which the guidelines discourage.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
I expect a comment more likely to be well received would be something discussing and/or reinforcing the specific points the parent made. In that context it would probably be fine to say something like, "I don't think you should have been downvoted." But without context or reasoning it doesn't have much substance.
"I don't think you should have been downvoted."
The virus is in the same family as some of the common cold virus'.
Coronaviruses replicate their RNA genomes using enzymes called RNA-dependent RNA polymerases. (RNA is relevant)
https://www.newscientist.com/term/coronavirus/#ixzz6lrn6xyYr
I agree that people on HN downvote reasonable opinions and questions that do not go against HN guidelines.
It is the reddit effect. At first Reddit was like HN populated with highly educated people. As it got more and more users it democratized: The vote of a know-it-all 16 years old is the same as the one from a PhD in the field. In fact there are thousands of non experts for each expert, so they always win in a public space.
We add to that that we are using text, we do not carry intonation and other emotional information and lots of people will misunderstand whatever you say.
So the more popular a place like this becomes, the most degraded it becomes.
Do not take that seriously. I had great karma when I posted my real identity years ago and now lots of my comments are downvoted too, and I am the same person. I did not care then and not care now.
Note: I edited this to fix formatting, and I initially suggested a different link [12], but have removed the suggestion, as the interesting point of the article is still made (the suspension of the specific vaccine).
___
There's some important details not mentioned in the article, which make this more of an emergency than a reader of just the article will notice.
Allow me to paint some back story, but the summary is this:
- We (our country) got 1 million doses of this vaccine last week, being ill-prepared and flustered to get our act together
- These doses expire in April, we do not have a roll-out strategy because politicians played politics (I'll explain below)
- We are broke, and the trust between people and gov is diminishing quickly
Initial Lockdown (March 2020)
Many people were initially positive when our first lockdown started. The President set up a "Solidarity Fund" [0], with initial donations of ~$70m USD (R1 billion) from a few wealthy families in the country.
The government 'diverted' funds to the PPE roll out, and the President expressly said that there wouldn't be looting [1] of funds.
The government put us in a quasi-martial-law with a committee called the NCCC [2] (name can be found in the link), parts of which have been taken to court, because of arbitrary laws/rules, and a very apparent power-grab by the ruling/governing party.
Some of the bizzare things that came out of this NCCC:
- A ban on cigarette sales, not substantiated by anything scientific at the time. They lost the court battle, but true to form, are appealing [3].
- Regulations on sales of winter clothes. Arbitrarily defining the details of clothes that can be bought or not, what aisles to be used. It was as ridiculous as talking about crop tops and tights [4].
- Instituting racist policies to only help certain businesses [5]. I feel obliged to say that I'm an African black, and I agree with the sentiment that this was unConstitutional, as we all should enjoy the same rights. The gist of this was that the President said something like "this is a chance to redistribute wealth by only supporting black businesses".
The above has been met with criticism, and has eroded trust.
PPE Looting/Corruption
Now, one only needs to search for "PPE Corruption South Africa" to get stories about articles almost-daily.
- Premiers (leaders of provinces) have been implicated or accused
- President's spokesperson has been suspended, and has failed to submit her financial interests [6]
- As of October 2020, at least $700M USD is under investigation for being looted for PPE [7]. Politically connected people were setting up companies, selling 100ml of sanitisers for up to $3000 USD, all sorts of horrors.
Anecdotally, one of the provincial ministers (MEC) of education, has been up in arms against a white-owned/run trade union called Solidariteit, for deciding to build their own techno-university with private funds.
The university was to cost ~$20M USD, and has been completed after around 2 years.
I mention this, because this MEC's department spent ~$30M USD 'fumigating' schools that were closed during the lockdown.
The criticism has been that the virus doesn't last long enough in sufraces to warrant this waste.
He is unable to account, trying to use 'processes' to shield himself [8].
Funding The Vaccine
Now, back to the vaccine. The SA government is part of the COVAX programme [9].
They 'missed' the deadline to make a deposit twice last year [10].
The Minister of Finance will disagree with this, but for the Solidarity Fund, and other NGOs to step in, is troubling.
There have been discussions from our Treasury, to raise taxes to fund the vaccine [11].
This comes in the midst of irresponsible behaviour by our government, that has contributed to the closure of a lot of companies.
I need not bore the reader with details, but we are broke, our unemployment is rising (even the Statistics SA are stymied from gathering stats, because they're under-funded).
A pause of the vaccine rollout makes medical sense, but given that the doses that we've paid for and received 1 million doses (for a country of 58+million) [12], and have no roll-out plan [13].
So, how is a government that has looted more than enough money to pay for enough doses of the vaccine (less than the $700M USD 'under investigation') to the point of not being able to pay a mere deposit on time, going to fund alternative vaccines?
EDIT: Medical aid/insurers talked about sourcing the vaccines for their members, but government and the public at large seemed to initially be against this move. I don't know what's changed, but the private medical insurers are now helping government with administration instead.
It's a shame that Africa suffers, while it has the resources to alleviate poverty.
If you've read this far, this has been opinions of mine, with some articles to provide context. I'm no reporter. Thanks
[1] I can't find a reference to this anymore, there's just so much noise about the actual looting, that the initial promises are hard to find. I'll update if I find an article or tweet from Presidency.
[13] The health minister was asking health-care practitioners on Twitter last week, to register themselves. There's been overall criticism by HPCs that they're in the dark about doses coming in just a week. This is something that should have started last year already. https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2021-02-03-340...
For anyone reading this, this person is not embellishing or being a complainer as mentioned by some others here. In fact, it is actually much worse than what is described here, the list would be very long if all of it is listed here. Other than the covid corruption, there are a ton of other issues too that makes everything worse (SAA, Eskom, Post Office, broken municipalities, State Capture, Telkom/Icasa, The Guptas/Zuma's/Malema's/Ace/Vbs Saga).
The biggest piece that is broken in our country is our Justice system. None of the evil people will put one foot in jail. Our democracy/gov is a sham. It's just theater at this point. They are all actors, being paid to extract value from us (aka your labour). Their bosses are not in South Africa..
I saw a picture the other day of the Police Minister sitting next to Ace and having a laugh. It is revolting. That person completely raped one of the Provinces and now he sits in parliament making jokes with the person who should lock him up.
Stuff like that. Loads of it. It doesn't feel like a real country anymore at all. At least until some form of justice prevails, until then it's all just lies and corruption.
> The biggest piece that is broken in our country is our Justice system.
I completely disagree. SA faces the same problems that other countries do, just more of them at the same time. Corruption networks are hard to penetrate if it's the government itself that's corrupt. Our institutions aren't as strong as most developed countries.
> Our democracy/gov is a sham
Our democracy works very well. There is a lot of faith in the process and we haven't had an armed group storm the parliament (yet). The electorate is satisfied with the country being run by a corrupt party (57.5% voted ANC). This is unfortunate, but it's also the definition of democracy. People get what they vote for. That process is working very well. You (and I for that matter) don't like the outcome, but we don't represent the majority.
I've had this conversation with my my mother a few times.
America and South Africa are very similar, both historically and their current trajectories. We suffer from the same cultural "deadlocks" which seems nearly impossible to escape since nobody seems willing/mature enough to have a calm conversation about our shortcomings and how to fix it. There are also systemic/administrative governmental deadlocks which frustrate the problem further. A very common scenario between both countries is the huge difference between the rich & poor and between how gov operate vs how people live.
I have also had these same thoughts, and in some ways the USA is today where South Africa was in the late 80's. Time will tell how the USA handles its domestic crisis.
That's a big statement. Even with the election of Biden and the Democratic capture of the Senate, you think the USA has been currently trending in the wrong direction? I harbor little love for the Dems, they could do a lot better on certain issues, however they have to be seen as the better party on climate, stimulus, and COVID, and their election gives me some hope.
Also South African - re the cigarette ban - this was really dodgy. (non-smoker and very anti tobacco in general so this is against my own personal biases)
There have been reports as far back as 2017[0] that Dlamini Zuma, who for all intents and purposes was the decider of this ban, is personally involved in the huge black market for cigarettes and therefore had personal motivations for the ban.
Linking an old news article to show that this isn't a case of retrospectively looking for dirt, though there are plenty of recent ones too.
Another South African here, brought tears to my eyes. I don’t know what citizens can do because these MPs are completely deluded and derelict of their duty.
I would support directly electing MPs. Then political parities report directly to us!
> I would support directly electing MPs. Then political parities report directly to us!
Been there. Watch out for these traps:
a. FPTP (first-past-the-post): this is a truly horrible system. In a FPTP system, the person currently occupying the position (regardless how corrupt) has a huge advantage, and it pushes everything towards a two-party system where there isn't a third option (then, all they need is to give you two equally bad options, and you're screwed for good). It's also easy to introduce "distraction candidates" to just chip away votes from competition.
b. Even two-rounds or instant-runoff "winner takes district" system is not ideal; what happens here is that the small parties are strongly disadvantaged. You _need_ to have a very strong local voice, to win any one district. So for instance a general party that tries to talk to educated youth won't make any dent - they're spread across regions, and likely won't get past 10% anywhere
Proportional systems have huge flaws but really are the lesser evil. Ideally you should have something like an open list (where you vote the party, but also the order of preference within said party). And/or primaries for parties/ to decide the list of candidates & the order in the list, for said candidates.
Ideally you should have something like an open list (where you vote the party, but also the order of preference within said party)
As an example how this is implemented in NL: in elections, all individual candidates are on the ballot, organized by party (yes, the papar ballot is massive -- one of the main criticisms of this system). The candidates are ordered by preference as determined by the party itself, and in general, if a party wins 8 seats during election, that means the top 8 candidates on the ballot take their seat.
The lead candidate (also the face of the party campaign) is ranked #1, and people usually vote for #1 if they only care about voting for a party, not an individual. But people can vote for a non-#1 position (called a preferential vote), and if a specific candidate receives more votes than a pre-determined threshold, they're bumped on the candidate list. This allows voters to influence the resulting body composition not just by party, but by individual member.
Some stats from the last national election are on the Dutch Wikipedia page (but not included in the english translation) [0]:
- 150 seats in total
- 46 candidates have met the preferential vote threshold in total
- 3 candidates could not take seat because their party won 0 seats
- 4 candidates took seat at the expense of a (initially higher-ranked) candidate from the same party
- the remaining 39 candidates would have taken seat anyway because of their original party rank
I frequently find myself defending our constituency based electoral system here in the UK from people who believe proportional representation is fairer. They're right in some ways, but I dread moving towards electing lists of candidates drawn up by central party committees.
Both systems have pro and cons. I am used to vote for pre-defined party lists and a direct mandate for a deligate. Then parties form a coalition, which then chosses a chancelor. Less potential to be messed by populism, the downside is, that the chancelor (head of the executive branch) almost always is the head of the majority party and is alos holding a deligate andate. This blurrs the lines between legislative and executive branch a tad too much if you ask me.
The other extreme is kind of like the US. Pre elections along party lines to choose a candidate that is the directly elected by the electorate. Ver democratic, not blurred lines between government branches. Ignoring stuff like the elctoral collage, the Senate and Gerrymandering, this system is very prone to fall prey to populism.
I guess as long as it works, both solutios are fine. I personnally like the French system a lot. Directly elected Presidents, seperate elections for parliament. I am not judging these systems by the governments it produces, so.
In Australia we use proportional representation to elect the federal senate (upper house). It is used at state level too, in some states.
I used to be of the opinion that it was fairer. I no longer think so. I agree with former PM Paul Keating, who referred to the Senate as "unrepresentative swill"[1]. When I first heard this view, I thought Keating was nuts. What could be better than PR for giving minorities a voice? All you need is portion of votes and you get a seat. Seemed pretty fair to me, and allowed members of minor parties to have a say in the passing of bills into acts.
But that's the problem. Very often a few minor party seats hold the balance of power. The 2 major parties are deadlocked in disagreement over some legislation and whether it becomes law or not falls into the hands of a few senators represented by a minority.
So oftentimes the "uprepresentative swill" get to pass law, or not.
That's not really true. In Australia, plenty of bills get passed with bipartisan support; you just don't hear much about it as it's not newsworthy.
But on issues that are pertinent to each party's ideological position and the expectations of their members/voters, they will take strongly opposed positions.
This is important, so that voters have different options to choose from, and that each party must argue convincingly for their policies when campaigning.
If the parties are in consensus on most things, you end up with something not so different to one-party rule, and possibly endemic corruption.
Exactly. The US system is entirely designed around this. Two legislative bodies and a head of the executive all have to agree. If they can’t, it doesn’t get passed.
Transferable Vote would help the UK system more than PR (which is theoretically more democratic, but in practice moves power further towards party hierarchies and massively promotes political fragmentation). Transferable Vote lets “least worst” candidates win, rather than the current “most-compact minority” which typically disenfranchises 2/3rd of the electorate.
Why not have both? I.e. directly elected MPs and PR.
One way to do this would be to have 90% of the MPs elected in 3-6 member STV constituencies, with every candidate belonging to a party list. Then total the number of 1st preferences each party list got, and allocate the remaining 10% of the seats to the parties to maximalise proportionality (e.g. by d'Hondt). The top-up candidates elected fro each party will by losing candidates from that party who got the highest vote share.
That way, each party will get a number of MPs proportional to its total support, and the individual MPs elected will be the ones the voters most like.
Choosing MPs by party lists means the MPs have to be loyal to the party, not the voters.
The problem in the UK (and other places probably) is lack of representation. IDK what happened to the political establishment, but there are too few politicians supporting what the people believe.
people in support of the current establishment like to smugly pronounce it proof that what the people believe is therefore "wrong" if no educated politicians support it (to the tune of "Reality has a well known liberal bias"); but even if this was the case (I'm sceptical) - it kind of undermines the ability of the political system to support a representative democracy that is actually representative.
that said, maybe there is better representation, and it is just suppressed. As Brexit gained quite a few politicians flipped. That said, why did it have to take so much effort for something supported by about half the population, and even now the best we have if Boris - not a true Brexit supporter, but a flagrant populist who support whatever will get him ahead.
I dread moving towards electing lists of candidates drawn up by central party committees.
They way it works in Norway and Sweden at least is that while you vote for a list of candidates drawn up by the party, you can also select your preferred candidates on that list and as such affect which candidates on the list get seats.
That would be an awful system, although we have a constituency list anyway.
Labour could put up a dead dog in Bootle and would get elected. Conservatives could put the same up in Christchurch and win.
To implement PR,
First, you make the constituencies larger - about 5 times the size now. For example instead of having 4 constituencies on the Wirral you have 1, or 1 in Cornwall instead of the 6 now. Those constitutencies elect more than 1 MP (4 in the Wirral, 6 in Cornwall)
Then you number them in preference order.
This results in the people electing individuals (so preferring a locally popular candidate over a parachuted candidate), but also ensures that if 54% of Cornwall constituency want Tory, 23% want Labour, 19% want Lib Dem, 4% want others, you'd end up with something like
3 Tories
2 Labour
1 Lib Dem
Which is far more representative of the wishes of the people of Cornwall than currently, where 6/6 MPs are Tory on 54% of the vote.
One of the easiest ways to show people that proportional representation is troublesome is to highlight how in past elections it would have given UKIP 83 MPS and even the BNP a dozen or two MPs in the past.
In other words, whilst PR will help you get a representative of your favourite party in, it will also help get representatives of parties who you really don't want in.
After reading up about how SA elections work, I'm a bit confused. It sounds like when you vote you order a set of parties by preference and then PR is used to figure out who won a given area. Once you win that area, the party nominates a set of candidates to represent that area, but this set isn't known at voting time and the order the candidates are chosen is somewhat arbitrary. There's also a case where control of an area is shared, but I'm not entirely sure how that works in the context of PR. Is that roughly correct, or have I missed something?
Initially, it sounded like it had corruption potential built in, but in reality it's not that dissimilar to UK elections. Candidates are selected by their party and we vote for whoever we're given. The difference is that we know who might be elected ahead of time and debates can focus on personal records as well as party agenda.
> Is that roughly correct, or have I missed something?
There's 2 systems. The one you mention is municipal (lowest level), and then there's a purely political-party based one.
Municipal
A ward can elect a political party member, or an independent candidate. The elected candidate who wins, gets a seat in council.
> Once you win that area, the party nominates a set of candidates to represent that area, but this set isn't known at voting time and the order the candidates are chosen is somewhat arbitrary.
Parties also send a candidate-list to the elections body, before the elections. 50% of the council seats are determined by apportioning within these lists. This is meant to be fairer on smaller parties who might otherwise not get enough votes to get a councillor in.
The system is accepted (opinion), and doesn't seem arbitrary as there's rules that allow independent verification.
Provincial and National
These are purely party-list based (perhaps similar to UK then), instead of the 50% split above. Similarly, party lists are known before the elections, and are immutable throughout the 5 years (only get removed if you die or resign from your party, but can't be moved up or down).
There's again some process to determine how many people on the list per party, go to Parliament and the provincial equivalents. So, to your last point; we also know whom we're getting before the elections.
There was a Constitution (supreme) Court ruling last year that requires the next national elections to allow for independent candidates. The sentiment from those interested in our polls, is that the same hybrid municipal system might get chosen.
> Parties also send a candidate-list to the elections body, before the elections. 50% of the council seats are determined by apportioning within these lists. This is meant to be fairer on smaller parties who might otherwise not get enough votes to get a councillor in.
This sounds very similar to the AMS system used in Scotland and Germany.
But would it work? People all over the world have proved to be extremely gullible, a vast majority can be influenced and manipulated, and the worst people running for election are usually the ones who won't hesitate to do that.
Brexit and Trump clearly prove people will vote against their best interests if properly influenced.
Your first sentence can be used by folk who don't share your political stance to support the reverse of your second sentence if, like you, they make assumptions to fit their beliefs.
Clearly they need a wise dictator like you that can tell them where their best interests lie. Obviously the proletariat is too unintelligent to manage that on their own.
Me? oh no I'm just another moron. And I can be influenced as well, I'm just, due to my profession, more aware of how the influencing works, and I think we need awareness that the algos which helped fracture the US in 2 factions are deeply detrimental to society, and yet they keep getting used to boost a few companies' ad revenue.
We accidentally built the paperclip maximizer AI, and it doesn't give a shit about collateral damage.
This is such an arrogant take. Clearly you know what is in people’s best interests and you can’t possibly leave such an important decision to the people themselves.
No I don't. I unfortunately don't have a solution to offer and certainly don't think I am qualified to rule a country, or any part of it. But we need to ensure the technologies which enable this kind of mass manipulation are not taken advantage of, because we've seen the result.
I agree that the government's hard lock-down was excessive, but just one nit-pick: most of what's called 'looting' in the SA press is actually what's technically referred to as 'irregular expenditure', which the Auditor General is very clear does not mean outright fraud but rather referrs to breaches of tendering legislation. This could be anything from over-priced goods (as you mention) to noncompetitive tendering offers. I therefore think 'inefficiency'/'croynism' would be more appropriate term. This means only a certain percentage of the $700M could be reclaimed with perfect efficiency and it's not completely clear that would be enough to cover all vaccine costs.
Good summary, thanks for adding it. One does feel obliged to mention one's "race", as it seems like it's the first thing that someone will assume (wrongly or not) in any conversation in SA. And saying that one shouldn't mention some amount of background really is along the lines of "all lives matter".
So, anyway, agreed with your arguments and thanks for the additional ones I didn't know about. It's important for all South Africans to understand the difference between background and your own future. Many other countries do have this kind of unity, but at historical price of a lot of wars. In SA we essentially avoided war at the cost of multiple identities, and this is something we should draw on for the better.
South Africa is unique in the sense that there is a strong problem of racism and violence by black people against white people. This is something very hard to understand and accept in the current political climate of the USA, but what it really shows is that all people are basically the same and racism has no color.
A super-interesting book this is Jonny Steinberg "A Man of Good Hope". The man in question is a Somali who, when he's being interviewed, does various jobs in the poorer parts of South Africa. And has interesting perspectives on things, and how they look "from below" as it were, as opposed to the more common outsider's impressions from people visiting from richer countries.
>Since its establishment the EFF has made a number of controversial racially or ethnically based statements about a number of South African minority groups. The EFF is widely criticised for inciting and perpetuating racism.[130][98][131] The EFF is known for staging controversial public protests aimed at increasing political support by driving race division and intolerance. Party practices have been defined as "fascist". [132][133][134][135][136][137][138] This approach has proved persuasive to a largely disenfranchised young black youth in South Africa who are mired by poverty, unemployment and inequality, where all minority groups, in particular whites, are singled out by party propaganda as the sole benefactors and drivers of inequality.
The BBC had a fairly objective review of data a few years back[1]
I think at least a few things need to be understood/considered in the context of "farm murders". There's been a growing movement from the EFF/ANC for "expropriation without compensation" of (primarily white-owned) farm land, so apart from any attacks there's a perception that the farmer's control of the land is illegitimate and must be taken by force.[2] Many of these attacks have also been horrifically violent, involving rape, prolonged torture, murder of children and the elderly, etc.[3][4]
'The white minority took our land. Enough is enough' - Julius Malema, EFF President and Commander-in-Chief
Lastly you need to think analogously to other countries - crime tends to be concentrated in poor, dense urban areas. For rural farmers to be murdered at a rate comparable to a dangerous inner city is extremely odd, and if you think the per-capita murder rate is closer to the high end of 150/100k vs. low end of 9/100k, you're talking about a level of ongoing violence seen almost nowhere else on earth.
Then separately there has been a recent/ongoing wave of violence against foreigners[5]:
A refugee from Democratic Republic of Congo told Human Rights Watch: “I was selling clothes on the street when nine South Africans carrying sjamboks and sticks came. They were beating people, shouting ‘You foreigners, go home! We don’t need you here! You are taking our jobs and money!’ I started to run away, but I was beaten, and my two bags of clothes were taken.”
In the US context this is difficult to comprehend since it's "black against black" xenophobia, but there's also the topic of racism against "coloureds" in South Africa. Perhaps one takeaway should be that Americans need to have a less parochial and US-centric understanding of other countries, which often have conflicts that don't smoothly map onto US politics and racial categorizations.
> The BBC had a fairly objective review of data a few years back
This is analogus to me asking for objective data about Afganistan...from the US.
I think you've missed my point entirely, either disregarding my concern for objectivity as invalid or you really do believe commonwealth countries, which are largely homogenous and/or majority white - are the best examples of objective views on a criminal/race driven murder in a majority black, African state.
I will continue nonetheless to ask for objectivity.
The call for expropriation without compensation isn't new nor is it growing. It's a regular part of South african political discourse since pre-1994. Nor is it a new concept, being a regular part of post war administration - see Post World War Japan[1], Korea and Taiwan for US involvement in land reform not dissimilar to South Africas land reform policy and make your own conclusion.
> racism towards coloureds
This comes off as grasping at straws. This would be national news. I would like to see evidence of this please.
> This is analogus to me asking for objective data about Afganistan...from the US.
They said objective review of data, not objective data. I would expect Americans are perfectly capable of objectively reviewing data about Afganistan. If you disagree, please provide evidence.
> disregarding my concern for objectivity as invalid or you really do believe commonwealth countries, which are largely homogenous and/or majority white - are the best examples of objective views on a criminal/race driven murder in a majority black, African state
Why not? Why does an analyst need to be black/African to be "objective"?
By the way, neither ad hominem attacks nor straw man arguments (farm murders) are useful - not only they bring nothing constructive, but encourage degragation of the discourse into emotional name-calling.
I'm very well aware of the history of SA and the suffering of black people. However, I don't think it justifies the attacks some white people experience in SA from some black people.
The "straw man arguments (farm murders)" refers to the fact that the original poster didn't mention farm murders, it was introduced into the conversation in order to attribute a weak argument to someone else in order to attack them on it, aka a straw man.
Now you say "Genocide of the White man is a myth in South Africa" - sure, but who mentioned anything to do with "Genocide"?
Why? The current mainstream narrative bothers me in several ways. First, you can often hear that racism against white people is not racism. Even the term "reverse-racism" was invented for that purpose! Second, Americans have a unique history and relationship between black and white populations, and they try to project the same relationship on other nations (there was a famous article by a black Brit who essentionally said, please don't involve black people in other countries into this).
I would hope HN is one of the few places where we can talk about sensitive issues like these in a civilized way, without microaggressions and trying to look at it objectively. I don't mind downvotes although I prefer rational arguments.
It depends on whether you understand racism as a systemic phenomenon that disenfranchises people, or as one group of people actively disliking another.
Your statement rests on the latter understanding, but that's inadequate for South Africa. There has not been centuries of injustice meted out to white people in addition to name calling. Even unintentional prejudice now from white people ends up affecting black people in South Africa far worse than hatred that just stops at words.
Out of the major developed countries, Britain is leading in vaccine distribution. In terms of infections, British numbers are on par with other European nations when controlled by population.
Where is this negativity coming from? From the outside, it looks like you're doing something right.
In order to promote compliance with the lockdown, we're on a 24/7 diet of bad news.
> British numbers are on par with other European nations when controlled by population.
According to [1], per capita the UK has 2x as many deaths as Germany, 3x as many as Canada and 33x as many as Japan. We've even got 20% more than America.
Admittedly part of that is differences in reporting standards, population ages, and the chance occurrence of new variants - but I don't think anyone will be taking the British response as a model in the future.
>According to [1], per capita the UK has 2x as many deaths as Germany, 3x as many as Canada and 33x as many as Japan. We've even got 20% more than America.
Are you cherry picking numbers that you like? Because you're cherry picking numbers that you like. UK is about average compared to developed countries. The per capita deaths are not out of line with the rest of the developed world. Yes, this also means there are countries that did better. There are countries that did worse.
You also ignored the vaccination rate, of which UK is a leading nation.
Why do people feel the need to be negative on this point and single out UK when every country is struggling with COVID. In the US, California has been under a near total lockout and is about the same or worse compared to states like Texas or Florida.
There are no easy answers, and I'm not sure if lockdowns are worth the cost, given the spread that we're seeing.
>Admittedly part of that is differences in reporting standards, population ages, and the chance occurrence of new variants
> Are you cherry picking numbers that you like? Because you're cherry picking numbers that you like.
Believe me, I would like nothing better than to report the UK's response had been good.
But if I'd quoted the reported death rates from China and Russia you'd have claimed they were dodgy numbers from dodgy governments; if I'd quoted numbers for Australia and New Zealand you'd have claimed I'd cherry picked remote island nations; if I'd quoted numbers for Taiwan and South Korea you'd have claimed I'd cherry picked countries with SARS experience, and if I'd quoted numbers for Kenya and Iraq you'd have claimed they have young populations and limited testing facilities.
Every single one of those countries has less than half the deaths per capita the UK has, according to that BBC map.
> Why do people feel the need to be negative
What you consider "being negative" is what I call acknowledging factual reality.
When you claim that British numbers are on par with other European nations per-capita, and you offer no citations, then I look at the numbers and I see that we've got twice the deaths per capita of Ireland and Germany, of course I disagree with you.
>I would like nothing better than to report the UK's response had been good
It's not about UK's response being good or bad. I'm not seeing evidence of any particular COVID strategy working wonders. Especially in the presence of confounding factors like different viral strains, climates, population densities and centers, age demographics, testing strategies, data gathering methodologies (e.g. how the dead are counted as 'COVID' cases), etc. etc. etc.
Are you sure you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison when you just read a number from some internet dashboard?
What is the magic answer to COVID? Masks and Lockdowns? California and New York have been at a mask mandate and full lockdown since March/April. Florida has been largely open throughout the entire time. Texas was somewhere in the middle (though more like Florida). For months Florida and Texas were beaten up by the press while New York and California were praised. I'm looking at their population-controlled case counts and death rates [1][2] and California, Texas and Florida are basically identical. New York has been under lockdown, and their death rate is through the roof most likely because they made one huge mistake in their retirement home policy early on.
It's going to take us years to figure out what happened.
>When you claim that British numbers are on par with other European nations per-capita, and you offer no citations
Come on, we're looking at the same numbers but that's not the point. You can't just do a straight numbers comparison. What I'm seeing is every country struggling with this in pretty much the same way. I'm sure some are doing something better than others. But AGAIN, hard to figure out what that is given its close to impossible to control for all kinds of variables. Talk to me 5 years after the pandemic is over - we'll have some good answers then.
> What is the magic answer to COVID? Masks and Lockdowns?
I can't claim to have a magic answer, but there are loads of things the government fumbled.
For example, in July the government was claiming to be surprised by asymptomatic carriers even though they'd been well known since the Diamond Princess, right at the start of the pandemic. Perhaps we could have had leadership who were on top of basic, well known facts?
The national track-and-trace system was a shambles - surprising no-one, as it was built by contractors with a long track record of failed projects, overseen by unqualified cronies.
Perhaps back in March, the decision not to covid test patients being discharged from hospitals into nursing homes wasn't such a smart move?
Perhaps we shouldn't have made the bizarre decision to reopen universities for in-person teaching, sending loads of students travelling up and down the country to live in cramped, shared accommodation.
Maybe it wasn't so smart to have that period between lockdown 1 and lockdown 2, when people were allowed to go on holiday to france and spain - then the government would announce a rules change with 24 hours notice, forcing holidaymakers to race back to the UK? That was some truly weird public policy.
Perhaps the government's announcement that they wanted people to stop working from home and go back to working in offices, a few weeks before the had to call for the second lockdown, wasn't such a smart move?
Maybe when we had a second lockdown we shouldn't have announced an end date for it up front, and ended it when the load on hospitals was clearly still rising. Maybe that way we wouldn't be in our third national lockdown right now.
Perhaps we shouldn't have waited nine months before we started testing truck drivers and others entering and leaving the country? And perhaps new arrivals' self isolation should be something more credible than them giving a pinkie promise?
The UK has suffered more deaths—controlled for population—than almost any other country. Overall, management of the pandemic was extremely poorly handled – we had multiple ridiculous decisions, taken purely for political reasons, that resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths and caused further economic damage. In my area, I was personally under four different sets of restrictions in a 12-day period and nobody had a fucking clue what was happening.
Given this, I think there is widespread surprise that the vaccine rollout in the UK has been well-handled – because it has. Many of us were genuinely expecting the other shoe to drop, but fortunately good decisions have been taken and this should be celebrated.
>The UK has suffered more deaths—controlled for population—than almost any other country.
Are there any confounding factors that need to be controlled for? Like different viral strains, climates, population densities and centers, testing strategies, data gathering methodologies (e.g. how the dead are counted as 'COVID' cases), population age distributions.
Are you sure you're doing apples-to-apples comparison?
I don't think this is fair. There is trust in the British people/buisness, then there is trust in the government
As a _people_ we have worked together to do wonderful things.
The government has done one good thing, and one brilliant thing, and many many stupid things.
The good thing is job support. Its not perfect, but its almost at a par with the wider continent.
The brilliant thing is taking a risk with the various vaccines. Paying for doses regardless of outcome makes sense. The cost of the unused doses/useless doses is nothing compared to the loss of 1 million jobs.
But.
The lifting of the second lockdown. The in inability to monitor isolation, the inability of the tracing infrastructure to predict winter. The sheer vindictiveness of the late third lockdown.
40% of all deaths happened because Boris wanted to "save" Christmas. He couldn't stomach the decision to cancel it, even though it was obvious from october. He dithered, dithered and dithered until there was no choice.
I can forgive the first lockdown lateness, we didn't know. Second lockdown not so much. Taking councils to court to force them to re-open schools even though the local hospitals were running at 190%, un-fucking-forgivable. I say this as someone who is vaguely right of (british) centre.
In short, its not an embarrassment of being british. Nothing of the sort, I just wish that our political class would stop tarnishing our country by being so terminally shit.
We should all celebrate a vaccination program being effectively rolled out. It looks like the UK, including government, has handled this well. Credit where its due, etc.
It's not a surprise that many of us were skeptical given the poor handling of so much else. But the UK government completely fucked its pandemic response overall and 100k people are dead. This is a terrible outcome, and I'm honestly kind of concerned that they'll get away with it in part because there will be so much collective loss of memory in the wake of a successful vaccination rollout.
I find it interesting that you perceive this as a recent phenomenon - rigorous cultural self-criticism almost seems like a culturally British trait from my perspective. Are you suggesting this is new?
The news suggests they are delaying the second dose, or at least strategising.
If there isn't enough vaccine to go around (which there isn't) giving people the recommended 2nd dose is also a gamble.
> The UK’s strategy to delay the second dose of both ... vaccines is so that more people can be vaccinated with their first dose rather than giving a smaller number of people both doses. The hope is that this will save more lives
Do you think the advantage of the 1st vaccine is less than that of the 2nd? i.e that it is better to have 1 person with the recommended 2 vaccines, and another with no vaccinations; versus, two people with only the first vaccination.
And is allowing current strains to spread further because there isn't enough vaccine not a gamble?
I'm also not sure there is a big problem:
"Neither bacteria nor viruses evolve resistance to vaccines as easily as they do to drugs, they wrote. Smallpox vaccine never lost its effectiveness, nor did the vaccines for measles or polio, despite years of use."
There will always be at least some from EU promoters, the vaccine saga is the first to contradict some of the "better together" rhetoric against Brexit.
Just look at the vaccine distribution BS; Factory raids, export laws..
I'm South African, and married to a Brit. We moved to the UK some years ago, and I was really excited about not being angry about politics all the time...
I'll admit the vaccine stuff's been good but a lot of the other stuff has seemed kind of mistimed etc, especially coming from Thailand where I was in April. For instance masks - straight away in Asia, UK took 6 months. Restricting flights and isolating - should have been Feb / Mar when it started which Asia did but brought in 6 months later when it was too late. Hotel quarantine made sense at the start - now we have this weird hotel quarantine 34 countries out of 200 including non quarantine for some countries that have the SA and Brazil variants. Plus no bid contracts for the chums. Could be worse but kinda disorganised. In comparison Thailand was surprisingly coherent and had 1000x less death in spite of being a tourist center with the first case outside China. Before it got going I thought the Brits and US would have it down and SE Asia be 3rd world chaos but it was kinda the other way.
The article's headline says "Confirmed: Guideline that government will only help ‘51%-black-owned companies’ is fake", although on its face this seems to contract the point I understood you to be making. Maybe I've misunderstood something?
The back-story here is that there was a draft policy that got leaked, and there was outrage about it. Given that it wasn't published yet, gov was able to retract it, and say that the draft was fake.
Whether it was genuine or not, remains speculative I suppose.
The eventually settled-upon directives were better than the initial ones, and the article at [0] seems balanced enough (Points 3-7 are most relevant).
Maybe I shouldn't. I mean it will be a huge PR campaign, cover-ups of possible failures and big profits for participating parties. Still probably net positive.
you mean ready like societies in the US, UK, China, France and other aggressors and occupants (so often wearing blue helmets)? Or men in suits sitting in off-shore banks in the West who help loot the continent on nation-state scale (Gabon => France)? Or Germany who still refuses to acknowledge and pay retribution for war crimes in the region? Or did you mean the current EU government with its Erdogan & FRONTEX firewall that ensures we keep those refugees in concentration camps during a pandemic.
It provides context on the financial and preparation (or lack thereof), which can be of value when someone reads them.
> I always wondered why we South Africans think we are so special
Respectfully, if news about Burundi appears on a website that's read by at least 40% North Americans [0], who might not have interesting context about some back-story on Burundi, would such person think "they're special" when offering such details?
> Especially the South Africans who left after the transition to a democracy
Well, I've missed work for almost 2 weeks because we've been burying family members, some in the Health Department, who have been complaining about the lack of PPE.
You can understand my anxiety when we were hopeful that a vaccine could be rolled out to protect front-line workers, but now it could be a few more months before we're able to procure the alternatives (I'm assuming the mRNA ones).
No. Its still irrelevant to the fact that the Oxford vaccine is probably ineffective to the South African strain. The post is more South African whining rather than the discussion at hand.
First, in this case, relevance is not binary. Second, even if it was 100% unrelated, it's still interesting to know the context first hand rather from a fellow HN-er as opposed to a more general view from a journalist who is limited in what they can say.
As an American, I was very interested to hear a critical perspective. It's difficult for foreigners to understand the significance of a news story in isolation, so having someone explain is very helpful.
The typical internet South African tends to post extremely negative news about the country. Some of them haven't lived here in many years after immigrating to Australia or some place just as "racially homogenous".
We are a new country only truly existing since 1994. So we need to go through the growing pains. The same pains any other country has to go through. But certain members of internet South Africa believes that these pains are due to our leaders being black rather than we are just a new country.
Hi, I'm very-invested in our country, and I'm involved in social activism that helps to step in where our country lacks (as will always be the case around the world).
I also mentioned in the post, that I'm an African black, precisely because of the presumption that when someone provides information about our country's failings; they must be white people from the pre-1994 days.
I don't understand why you keep mentioning people who left South Africa, as I'm not one; and you'd have noted from my post, and its response to you.
> But certain members of internet South Africa believes that these pains are due to our leaders being black rather than we are just a new country
Perhaps this isn't the forum, but I'd really like to understand how you're arriving at this conclusion.
Sure, I can accept that my post isn't relevant to the point that you've taken from the article, that the O-AZ vaccine doesn't work against the strain that we're experiencing.
Would you rather censor me (when we don't know each other) under the unproven assumption that I'm a whiner?
Unfortunately (you must have observed, particularly in the case of South Africa) it is not easy to accept that someone is who they say they are on the Internet. The DA is accused of running hundreds of fake accounts on twitter, and we all know about Bell Pottinger.
Your question, "would you rather censor me" is the hope that I cling to, because it sounds more reasonable than troll to me.
> We are a new country only truly existing since 1994.
This is a risible excuse. SA had the infra structure, resources, processes and, thanks to Mandela, the philosophy for success in hand. Subsequent leaders threw all this in the bin in pursuit of completely visible corruption and cultural despotism and kleptocracy.
I don't think "new country" and "growing pains" is a valid excuse for the absolute humanitarian disaster that has been allowed to happen in SA under the current government. And no we don't think it's because they're "black", it's because they're incompetent and evil, and care more about enriching themselves than helping their countrymen.
South Africans have adopted an outrage persona that's hard to ignore.
We're serial complainers. Maybe it's the ever-present cloud of former british colonial rule and their custom of complaining ad nauseum.
Yes, we are corrupt. Yes, we made absolutely brain dead decisions. Yes, we are headed into a black whole of a failed state (experiment?)
But the bullshit pulled by AZ isn't surprising - given how little regard most of the world has for the continent and they should be called out for it. The vaccine wasn't a generous donation.
Note that AstraZeneca's agreement with Oxford is that it will manufacture the vaccine on an at cost basis for as long as the pandemic lasts (and no sooner than July 2021).
While it's not a donation, it's also not being sold for a profit; they may be able to make a profit in the future.
How does that square with AZ charging SA "nearly 2.5 times higher than most European countries"?[0][1]
The Guardian claims that an official claimed that they were told by AZ that the discrepancy is due to European countries having paid for R&D, but anybody in the chain could have been lying.
> How does that square with AZ charging SA "nearly 2.5 times higher than most European countries"?[0][1]
At least you are getting it. We Europeans seem to have pre-funded production and now it turns out much of it is shipped to higher-paying customers first, and we must wait until "production issues" are solved.
An issue is that R&D is a fixed cost rather than a variable cost, so determining how the R&D costs are to be split among AZ's customers is pretty hard and potentially prone to abuse. Are they to be split among all expected customers before the pandemic ends? All expected customers during the lifetime of the vaccine? During the lifetime of this family of vaccines?
Given that apparently it makes up the majority of the price, it's quite an important detail.
The trial in question was conducted on younger people who generally don't get severe cases, so they have no evidence either way on that. However, the trial showed that that the vaccine appeared to nearly completely ineffective in preventing infection:
> Nineteen of the 748 people in the group that was given the vaccine were infected with the new variant, compared with 20 out of 714 people in the group that was given a placebo.
The sample sizes here are small and the results have not been published, so it's too early to draw any major conclusions, but it certainly doesn't look great.
I wasn't aware that we thought any of the vaccines provide sterilising immunity. Has this changed? The Pfizer trial was regarded with some scepticism a while back as they didn't test everyone, so we don't really know how good it was at preventing infection, for example.
There was news last week that the AZ vaccine could reduce transmission by 76%. However although widely reported in the media I did see some controversy about this (as yet not peer reviewed) study.
A simple way to calculate Bayesian confidence intervals is sampling from Beta distributions. This is using the Beta(1,1) prior (uniform random) for both vaccine and control population.
The data suggests it is unlikely that the vaccine reduces infection by >=50% (<5% probability) and a probability close to zero it reduces infection by >=70%.
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
# number of infections, and obs
infect_ctrl,obs_ctrl=714, 20
infect_test, obs_test=748, 19
sample_C=np.random.beta(infect_ctrl+1, obs_ctrl-infect_ctrl+1, 100_000) # sample 100k times from posterior Beta distributions
sample_T=np.random.beta(infect_test+1,obs_test-infect_test+1, 100_000)
# percentage reduction in each sample
perc_reduce = (val_C-val_T) /val_C
# histogram of % reduction in infection
pd.Series(perc_reduce).plot.hist(bins=20)
# how likely, given this data, is > 50% reduction in infection from vaccine
(perc_reduce >= 0.5).mean()
# c. 3%
(perc_reduce >= 0.7).mean()
# <0.1%
Is there any evidence in South Africa that it actually does protect people from dying? If there are only 2,000 people in the study, it might be too small to conclusively say whether it's protecting from severe and lethal cases.
All I've done is skim the article, so I'd love to be corrected by someone with more information. Given that about 1/1,250 of the South African population has died of coronavirus, I'd guess that a 2,000 person random sample over the course of a couple months wouldn't be large enough to expect much in the way of deaths, even with a placebo.
If there were conclusive evidence that the vaccine eliminated deaths from the South African variant while still allowing mild cases, I think the situation would be different. But it sounds like there are still a lot of mild cases without much evidence re deaths.
The dominant strain of Covid in South Africa is different and existing vaccines are far less effective at countering due to changes in the spike protein which these vaccines target. The effectiveness against this strain is not 60-80% as it is against the other strains but below 50% which was the standard the WHO chose as a acceptable vaccine.
South Africa has limited health resources and spending them rolling out an ineffective vaccine when they have orders for the Johnson and Johnson one coming next month doesn't make sense.
> The dominant strain of Covid in South Africa is different and existing vaccines are far less effective at countering due to changes in the spike protein which these vaccines target.
Only Johnson&Johnson data may say something about it for real. Novavax's investigation was underpowered (4000 people, wide confidence intervals), and this one is even more so.
The rest of the evidence comes from antibody neutralization assays in vitro, which although very useful they are not representative of the whole immune response.
The UK and South African variants are actually not all that similar. Only the South African variant has large changes to the spike protein. This is why the UK is putting so much effort into stopping the spread of the SA variant right now.
"UK 'Kent' variant with the E484K mutation - it was seen in 11 out of 214,159 samples"[1]
There's been only a handful of cases with that variation in the UK, it is not the dominant strain which the AstraZeneca results you referred to came from.
So despite much heralded increased transmissibility, it has failed to prove dominant despite being incidental in timeline with b117. No great artistry will make it more fearsome than the lack of proof thereof.
Depends on the cost. If they use resources to roll out am ineffective vaccine now to the detriment of future attempts to roll out effective options, waiting might be a better choice. Also, there is enough vaccine skepticism in the world today and I'm not sure vast distribution of something with questionable efficacy is necessarily a good idea.
That's too simplistic: getting hundreds of thousands of at-risk people mixing with others in order to get a shot of an ineffective vaccine — I imagine the net result wouldn't be saving any lives at a cost of delaying alternative vaccines for these people for longer (I guess interactions between them have been even less tested).
The vaccine doesn’t seem to protect the people in the study (young people). Young people don’t tend to die from covid. They don’t know if it would work on older people but I would think it wouldn’t either. This doesn’t look like it actually saves lives.
The study may be early to really tell but so far there is no evidence that the vaccine works at all against the variant that is widespread in South Africa.
> The effectiveness against this strain is not 60-80% as it is against the other strains but below 50% which was the standard the WHO chose as a acceptable vaccine.
Just how stupid are we, really? We're all locked up due to a virus that went around the world in months. If there's a variant anywhere that the vaccines don't work on, then this is just a selective breeding program we're setting up. We'll all get the vaccine and then go out and catch the new one because we stopped the quarantine.
It's possible all the experts are stupid, or that you don't have as deep an understanding of the situation as they do. Which is more likely? That may come across as glib, but seriously, occasionally when it seems like the expert consensus makes no sense, it indeed doesn't. Most of the time though it's just that you don't have the necessary knowledge and experience to effectively evaluate the expert position.
In this case, yes, as people are vaccinated, variants that evade vaccines will spread more easily than others. From what we've seen so far, these same variants tend to be more contagious regardless, so that likely would have been the case anyway. By vaccinating though, you achieve a few things. First, you protect people from the variants that are susceptible, saving a lot of lives in the short term. Second, you massively cut down transmissions of the virus, each of which gives it an opportunity to mutate and produce new variants. Third, in most cases, you do provide some protection even against resistant variants.
And finally, just as the virus is not static, neither will be the vaccines. Work is already underway to update all the major vaccines to cover the new variants, and that process should be much faster than creating the initial vaccines (in design, trials, and roll-out). So it will be possible to vaccinate against variants that evade current vaccines.
Yes, it will take a while, and it would be nice if the virus would just sit still and not mutate. But we're still far, far better off with vaccines than without them. You are correct though that other measures will need to remain in place for some time as well.
Many experts agreed with Hinkley at the beginning of this. They tended to be deplatformed or fired by politicians trying to sell a cure for the (extremely uncommon) cold.
Any introductory textbook on virology will explain that we can’t cure influenza, rhinovirus or coronavirus for exactly the reasons Hinkley outlined.
In related news, the press doesn’t do interviews with virologists. Instead, they talk to epidemiologists, sociologists and psychiatrists.
That’s strange, since those people aren’t experts on viruses, and they certainly aren’t experts on coronavirus. Where are the articles that consult coronavirus experts? It’s been a field of study for decades.
> these same variants tend to be more contagious regardless,
It may be the case for B 1.1.7 (but around 30%, not the 70% originally flaunted by the UK government and the media), but at this time there are no data on transmissibility of B 1.351 (the variant discussed here).
I thought I'd read something recently suggesting that the SA variant was also thought to be more transmissible, but I can't find it so you're likely right. Regardless, as more people are vaccinated or infected it will select for variants that can bypass immunity to earlier strains. It doesn't follow from that though that vaccination is dangerous or undesirable.
I think perhaps there's a tendency to make a mental analogy to antibiotics, where it is dangerous to expose pathogens (bacteria in that case) to antibiotics without wiping them out completely, because you encourage resistance. There are a couple differences here though. First of all, we have a limited number of viable antibiotics, but these vaccines can be continually adapted to target changes in the virus.
More importantly though, the interaction between the two is different. It's not that the virus is being exposed to the vaccine and selecting for mutations that avoid it within a host, as bacteria might do in response to an insufficient round of antibiotics. It's simply that the vaccine will protect against the strands it can, which will leave us with the ones that resist vaccines. That situation is better than the one where we're being infected by all strains!
An exception would be if there were vaccine resistant strains that caused more severe illness than non-resistant ones, and that infection with a non-resistant strain also protected against these resistant strains, whereas the vaccine didn't. That isn't the case now though, and such a strain is unlikely to develop, because immunity from vaccines tends to be stronger than natural immunity. (So if anything, the opposite is true - even against resistant strains people are likely to be better off with vaccine-based than natural immunity.)
The most efficient vaccine should be put under the public domain, and its production liberalized in every country. Market and private propriety here are not efficient.
If you do this, who will develop a vaccine and more importantly TEST it at all?
Private corporations won't, governments would have too and governments would develop in private, evaluate in private and give it to their own citizens, vaccines would become state secrets.
I swear, in the morning of Europe timezones you get these pointless "just make everything free man" comments. I'm starting to think they're trolls or bots.
This argument that patent protections should be suspended has been made quite seriously in several newspapers here in Finland. I don't think these people are trolling.
I do share the reservations about retroactively revoking protections, although I'm not convinced governments could not co-operate on vaccine development.
If the state (any state) would decide on this, we would have not any mRna vaccines because "obviously this new thing will not work and/or is too risky".. Remember that just a year ago the AZ vaccine was the clear front runner. That is also one of the reasons why the EU did not order enough/too late of Biontech.
That wouldn't make any difference. The hard part isn't the recipe for producing it, the hard part is making all the equipment to produce it - all along the entire supply chain.
Maybe we don't talk more about this because nobody here has deep insights into the current vaccine production chains (and therefor into the actual bottle necks), so we have no clue how many deaths could be avoided?
These last few weeks have opened my eyes to how hypocritical the world is. Last year everyone was up in arms about mask production being centralized in China and every country was calling for domestic production. Now, with the vaccine being made by 3 or 4 companies, everyone is like "oh we can't get the doses we paid for? It's okay we'll wait". Including the EU so this isn't a matter of just "masks are easier to manufacture locally than vaccines".
>Including the EU so this isn't a matter of just "masks are easier to manufacture locally than vaccines".
But masks are easier to manufacture locally than vaccines.
And context is important too. Had there been no patents, are we sure the private investments would have been made 10+ years ago to developed COVID-19 vaccines in record time this year?
Now or when the next pandemic hits? Suspend patents now, better be prepared to develop the next vaccines without private pharma. Then again, maybe that would work out just fine. I doubt it would be unproblematic, either.
> Good for them! Now if they can just send their supplies our way?
Seriously?
Not only is the selfishness in the comment questionable, the selfish logic in itself is flawed... You can pretty much count on the SA strain reaching your country at some point, if it's not already there.
The news is chilling no matter what perspective you take - altruistic, selfish, or anywhere in between.
As you can read in other comments, this is a political game using a deadly epidemic as a wedge.
On the one hand there’s people complaining the rich countries don’t provide vaccines to the poor African countries. On the other hand South Africa doesn’t want to use the vaccine for political reasons.
Note also that even if the results of their studies are right, using the vaccine is still much better than not using it.
If they choose not to use it, which according to the article they do, I have about as much sympathy for them as I have for antivaxers. Suit yourself, as long as you don’t require me to quarantine because of your decision I don’t care.
Yeah, it seems like it. The only real issue the AZ vaccine seems to have is the South African mutation. The other so called "issues", efficiency for elderly, is just fake. Intentionally leaked by the German ministry of health by the looks of it. That claim was debunked, and it still got a hold on things. The press is still pushing it to some degree. Would be interesting to see the motive behind all that.
Also funny, the AZ contract is the only one that leaked. And they are by no means the only one to face production ramp up issues.
Biontech is getting the opposite reporting in Germany. That is somewhat puzzling.
Thr initial claim I am aware of came from a German newspaper, Bild (the Handelsblatt was quick with it as well, not sure which newspaper was first). That claim was "AZ only 8% efficient with patients over 60 (or 65, don't remember that with all the figures thrown around)". That claim was false, as the 8% related to the number of trial patients. That claim came from the German Ministry of Health, "informed circles".
Only after that AZ clarified what the 8% really mean. And yes, efficiency is not yet proven. Unproven efficiency is quite a different thing from a claimed 8% efficiency so.
I see a real pro Biontech and anti AZ campaign going on in the German media. One that is quite welcome, as it allows politicians to deflect blame. Brexit helps to mud the waters even further. Don't forget, we have elections in Germany this year.
As far as I know, the AZ contract is the only one with additional uncensored parts that was published. AZ is in the defensive now. For no real reasons. And over this discussion, in the EU and also in SA it seems, we totally miss the importance of a smooth vaccination campaign. And the lacking preparation thereof.
Most of the participants in these studies were between 18 and 55 years old. There are not yet enough results in older participants (over 55 years old) to provide a figure for how well the vaccine will work in this group. However, protection is expected, given that an immune response is seen in this age group and based on experience with other vaccines; as there is reliable information on safety in this population, EMA’s scientific experts considered that the vaccine can be used in older adults. More information is expected from ongoing studies, which include a higher proportion of elderly participants.
I'd assume the EMA's assessment is based on AZ's data and application, rather than on reports from German newspapers or politicians.
We can probably all agree with the EMA's assessment that AZ's effectiveness for the elderly is likely but not convincingly demonstrated yet. Based on this it's reasonable for different national EU agencies to give different recommendations for application to the elderly. For instance, in the Netherlands national agency recommends using Pfifer / Moderna for the 65+ and AZ for 65-.
Not to mention that President Macron came out with some genuinely anti vaxer statements on 29th Jan which are completely false
> “The real problem with AstraZeneca is that it doesn't perform as we expected. (…) Everything suggests that it is almost ineffective on people over 65. "
Anyone who has paid attention to the response around the failure of the EU vaccination program knows this is pretty standard diversionary politics.
I honestly believed, my optimism outpacing my zynism obviously, that authorities learned from, IMHO excusable, communications fuck-up regarding masks last year. This one is worse, way worse.
The only way vaccinations will work on scale will be to have vaccines that can be handled by every doctors practice. They are vaccinating million sof people already every year, they have the supply chain in place and the people. I for my part am not counting on vaccination centers and central appointment booking.
As I understand the conflict: EU negotiated a lower price than UK, but both parties got contracts guaranteeing a certain number of doses. When AstraZeneca got production problems which meant they couldn't fulfill all the promised deliveries, they decided to fully honor the UK contract and cut delivery to EU severely. This infuriated the EU, and they threatened blocking export of the vaccines produced in the EU.
More fun if it turns out the AstraZeneca vaccine is useless.
Where do you get this idea that contracts guaranteed a certain number of deliveries? The contract the EU signed said best effort everywhere.
Why would AZ agree to a contract to guarantee certain deliveries on a brand new vaccine with unproven manufacturing, on a non-profit basis? It doesn't make any sense.
The other thing which isn't mentioned is the UK's deliveries were also cut, probably even more severely than the EU ones. The UK was originally meant to get many tens of millions of doses by the end of 2020, in reality it was far far less.
> AstraZeneca has reduced its projected vaccine rollout to the EU, despite signing a contract to supply millions of doses, citing an issue with a plant in Belgium. It did not, however, cut its supplies to the UK.
My understanding is that while the EU contract said something like "best effort" the UK negotiated stricter language for their contract, which meant that when AZ lawyers interpreted both contracts together they concluded that they had to priorities the UK.
> The contract the EU signed said best effort everywhere.
If the contract really said best effort everywhere, they may have a leg to stand on, since that seems to preclude using different delivery guarantees in other contracts.
> The EU negotiated badly, and AZ used that to fool them. I think AZ deserves some moral blame here as well.
Completely unacceptable and unsupportable suggestion.
The EU had absolute clarity on the differing supply chains for differing contracts with AZ. No amount of contract negotiation increase culture yields in vaccine production lines.
The Belgian investigation into the production facility with the manufacturing problem: what did it evidence? I'm curious because I've not come across what the result was or if there was any evidence of dissembling from AZ.
They also checked the customs forms, but we didn't hear anything (to my knowledge after). The head of the UKs vaccine taskforce also said she thought it was very unlikely that AZ vaccines were shipped from the EU to the UK (this makes sense, how would you ship them if those factories are not up to speed yet?).
As a European, I am much angrier about the politically driven and scientifically inaccurate comments to this effect and the damage it will have on this and other vaccination programs long term than I am about the EC's slowness in procurement.
What is Macron going to do when he gets loads of this vaccine in Q3? "Never mind that stuff about it not working, please go get vaccinated?". It's Trump level (remember that guy) irresponsibility.
> What is Macron going to do when he gets loads of this vaccine in Q3? "Never mind that stuff about it not working, please go get vaccinated?". It's Trump level (remember that guy) irresponsibility.
Macron should be piloried for his antivaxxer comments. France has a serious issue with people refusing the vaccine as it is. Not helped by their deliberately complex steps to give it out.
Total lunacy. I had hoped SA might not descend into its usual levels of incompetence, misinformation, blame games.
They have done this because the batch they received has a 2-3 month expiry life. They do not believe they can give that batch out in that timeframe. They have set up almost literally no infrastructure
SAs vaccination plan is to generally beg other countries to do it for them. They already frittered away most of a R500bn IMF loan on absolutely nothing.
I expect that come late summer we'll all be getting another booster of some sort against whatever mix of variants is around. The trick will be prediction although we are helped by the fact that both mRNA and vectored vaccines can be changed and produced quite quickly.
I also think that the emergence of this variant may save lives in the end because it forces to the front of everyone's mind the necessity of vaccinating the entire world and may make it politically easier to ship vaccine to the poor countries of the world before the rich countries have finished their vaccination programmes.