Sadfish wrote:
most of the vaccines for covid are old tech.
the mrna ones are new, but they are not brand new, they have been a decade in construction and half a century in design.
sure the timescale has been shortened to get it to market but no trials were rushed they were just done in parallel.
Thinking is that this situation has changed forever the way we develop, test and roll out vaccines. You are correct, the Oxford vaccine was a carbon copy of their MERS vaccine, using a simian virus as a conjugate to carry the spike protein. That had been in clinical trial for a while. They had it ready in weeks - early January last year I think. It hasn't changed since then - just been tested. The mRNA vaccines are actually quite novel in that there had never been one on the market before, but you are correct, the basic tech has been in development for a long time. In vaccine world though that's like the first man on the moon. The Novavax vaccine is also an unusual format, they've been trying for 18 years to get a product to market and this is their first. They were laying people off 18 months ago and running out of money, we know those guys quite well as they are neighbours of ours in the US and they now spend a lot of money with us on serology testing. Turns out it could be the best vaccine of the lot so far. The issue with public health is that the markets are ultra conservative. You see this in medicine and in food safety testing. There is no benefit from being "first" to adopt something novel.
We are actually seeing data for the effectiveness study "live" so to speak. Effectiveness is the study of how well the vaccine actually reduces the disease in the population and includes data on limiting transmission etc -this can only really be seen once you give it to a large population. That's why early reports that "nobody knows if the vaccine will even stop the disease spreading" were accurate but misleading. The vaccines were expected to stop disease spread but the data was not available - you can't get that from a clinical trial into efficacy - just not enough people get the vaccine.
We have been lucky in one way, covid is not a difficult virus to deal with, this was recognized almost immediately. The vaccines we have are all stunningly good. Anything over 50% efficacy is considered "good", so to have 75-90% for all the vaccines is remarkable. If Covid had been like HIV then we would be in real trouble.
What the Germans have been doing makes no sense. They already have a real problem with vaccine uptake and seem to be doing all they can to make it worse. As my German buddy told me today, "We are becoming more un-German by the day". I'm currently trying to get documentation to give people in my team across Europe priority vaccination as they regularly work in customer Covid labs with covid positive samples.
