Vaccine Update

[Jun]

Getting back to facts:

For people like myself who follow the developments , there is nothing new or exciting about these findings.

1 I'm sure all other members can read & many will be well educated and/or capable of interpreting a wide variety of news articles, technical papers and so on. It would be correct and polite to recognise that such skills are not unique.

2 There IS new information in the article & in particular, I believe it's not been shared here before.

This along with fading antibodies make it highly unlikely that vaccine succeed (and probably others too). The best hope is in finding good antiviral and maintaining standard precautions (like in Thailand.)

3 Whilst antibody life is not encouraging, the likely long life of T-cells is considered to be very good news by some of the experts. Whilst there's no certainty, I note quite a few capable people who have assimilated the data now expect that vaccines will be the solution to Covid. My best estimate is we get vaccines rolled out within 12 months, but of course it cannot be 100% certain.

I find the idea that T-cells from the 2003 SARS outbreak might be a contributor to reduced severity of infection in Asia to be both interesting and new (to this site).
Even if we have a vaccine which (for example) turns covid from a potentially severe disease into a mild one, I would be delighted.

[Jun]

"The UK Government has today agreed the following deals:

BioNTech/Pfizer – this is their first binding agreement signed with any government, and the UK has secured 30 million doses.
Valneva – in principle agreement for 60 million doses. If the vaccine is proven to be safe, effective and suitable, the UK has secured an option to acquire a further 40 million doses.
AstraZeneca – in principle agreement for one million doses of a treatment containing Covid-19 neutralising antibodies to protect those who cannot receive vaccines such as cancer and immunocompromised patients."

This is in addition to the deal for 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine. UK population approx 67 million.
Obviously there is no guarantee that any of these will work

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/mill ... g-vaccines

Also very good results on a treatment in a trial. Patients who received SNG001 had a 79% lower risk of developing severe disease compared to placebo.
https://www.investegate.co.uk/synairgen ... 0100H8341/

[Jun]

Quite a few vaccine makers are keen to use Brazil as the lab for their trials, presumably due to high and currently increasing infection rates. This is the 4th phase 3 trial announced in Brazil.

https://en.mercopress.com/2020/07/30/so ... cine-trial

There was a rather poor TV programme on vaccine development on Channel 4 in the UK yesterday. Despite the programme topic being described as vaccine development, perhaps only 20% of the programme was on that. Professor Gilbert did imply that infection rates in the UK are now rather low for the trial, so they need the input from Brazil.

[Gaybutton]

What I'm wondering about is what would happen to traveling to Thailand, after a vaccine becomes available and people are required to prove they got the vaccine, if even one incoming foreign traveler gets the virus anyway.

[Jun]

The Pfizer vaccine is approved by the UK regulator. Apparently vaccination will start next week.

https://www.investegate.co.uk/biontech- ... 0500H3495/