ClncClarence

I love how this clown tries to dispute every piece of encouraging news about these vaccines using his ‘logic’ despite the fact that the reports are being published, reviewed, and verified by medical and pharmaceutical professionals who have dedicated their entire professional careers to exactly this sort of data.

If only all these ‘experts’ were stuck commuting to reserve, they would see the light!

rickair7777

No. GCE on your part. Severe cases are not a subset of mild cases. If 30 of 15,000 placebo recipients got severe covid, then you'd actually expect about 30 of the 15,000 vaccine recipients to get severe covid.

No. See above. About 30 severe cases were PREVENTED by the vaccine and that's a very good statistical number. Look up the details of some other clinical trials and you'll get a feel for what sample sizes work. It's smaller than you seem to think (assuming the trial was conducted properly).

I think they have enough data (and so do they) to call it 100% for practical purposes. That is not of course 100.00000%, there will always be those with compromised immune systems (who are special cases with regard to any contagion) or even very rare cases of simple genetic bad luck. But plenty good enough for practical purposes.

Gordie H

Dr. Haseltine isn't too happy with Pfiser/Moderna's data transparency (and, less importantly, their behavior wrt insider stock trading). He's not saying anything he's seen is bad, just he hasn't seen everything:

"As hopeful as these promises may be, we have still not seen the full data from any of the Phase III clinical trials. So if the FDA approves one of these vaccines in the coming weeks, we will soon have to decide whether we trust the drug manufacturers and agree to the vaccine or whether we hold off until we can examine the data"

https://www.williamhaseltine.com/put...ovid-vaccines/

Excargodog

No, severe cases are not a subset of mild cases, but that wasn’t the analysis. Severe cases are MOST DEFINITELY a subset of TOTAL cases and the null hypothesis - if you are claiming a decrease in severity of cases - involves the severity of the immunized versus the non-immunized CASES. Clearly, those who never got infected AT ALL were at no risk to have severe cases, be they immunized or unimmunized.

So among those AT ACTUAL RISK TO HAVE SEVERE CASES you got 30 out of 185 for the placebo group and 0 for 11 for the immunized group. Those are good results for the treatment group, don’t get me wrong, but the EXPECTATION based upon probability of severe case given infected is still only about 15%. The EXPECTATION for the eleven cases that got COVID notwithstanding the immunization was that they would have somewhat less than 2 cases. The data was that they had 0, and that’s good. But that’s still sparse data. The confidence interval for that data may have 100% as one of its bounds, but it’s WAY TOO early to say that it’s 100% effective in stopping severe cases.

But overall - yeah, certainly very good news.

rickair7777

Math in public but here we go...

No, there were another approximately 174 vaccine recipients who statistically did get EXPOSED but did NOT get severe covid (or any symptomatic covid, not sure if they tested for antibodies for asymptomatic covid).

Vaccine prevented about 30 cases of severe covid. Also prevented about 174 cases of mild covid, with 11 getting through.

We don't know or really care how many of the mild cases would have been one of the avoided severe cases.

Vaccine performance:

Out of 15,000 vaccine recipients; (this number doesn't matter, could have been 200 or could have been 200,000. 15K was selected to get enough exposure, quickly enough, given known covid prevelance in the trial population).

About 185 got sufficient exposure to get infected;

30 of those would have got severe covid (but didn't). Period. Stop. That's all we need to know for efficacy vs. severe covid, and it's good news. In reality the zero is likely not zero, but a very small fraction since there are people out there with compromised immunity, etc. But 30 prevented out of 185 exposed gets us where we need to be for practical purposes.

Additionally, 11 got mild covid.

Two cases prevented, as you say, would not be statistically significant. 30 cases vs. 28 cases would not be very significant. 30 cases vs. zero cases (or 0.001 if you like) is statistically significant.

rickair7777

Article on vaccine acceptance, explains how they were expedited without being "rushed"...

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronav...son-to-fear-it

Escargot

Am I missing something? I thought vaccines help you fight a disease because they teach you how to kill it. Like sparring in the gym before you go in the octagon. But you still catch it. Which means granny still goes in the octagon. You're just likely to have a better outcome and get over it quicker. Maybe the new vaccines are a game changer? I'd appreciate more knowledgeable folks chiming in.
Edit: just read deeper in the thread

TOGALOCK

I really hope it turns out that the vaccine will also prevent a vaccinated person from spreading covid, but there has not been any indication either way yet. I was simply summarizing what I have read on the reasons for the distribution logic. On the other side of the extreme spectrum, I've also read other articles stating that a reason for the essential workers getting it first is that those positions are made up of large amounts of minorities who are also at higher risk: https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/23/...id-19-vaccine/

In any case, as one other poster stated, the CDC has a method to their madness and hopefully, after their meeting today, will be able to provide a little more incite into their distribution recommendation rationale.

HIFLYR

Interesting read about rushed vaccine development during the swine flu and vaccine tort immunity. Yes I am full vaccinated against horrific debilitating diseases but I am not jumping to take any of the new rushed COVID vaccines. Not for a disease that has a 98 to 99 survival rate with no long term Heath issues. Before you start my sister has had it and my 88 year old parents have just recovered from it. They all were just tired for about 14 days after the initial slight fever and Gastro issues all with no medication.

rickair7777

Sort of but not exactly. A vaccine also tricks your immune system into responding to a virus which isn't present. So you end up with various antibodies, helper cells, etc floating around in your system. The best result is that when you do actually get exposed there's enough immunity stuff already present in your system to intercept the virus before it gains any traction. If that doesn't quite happen then your immune system will ramp up and make more... then it's race between your system (which had a head start) and the virus, complicated by various biological factors including genetics and possible mutations, and by how much initial viral dose you got. That's a sliding spectrum, anything from asymptomatic to full blown illness in some cases.

The vaccine will almost certainly reduce contagiousness. Odds are if you don't get symptoms, the vaccine-triggered immune response caught it before it could replicate enough for significant risk of contagion.

It's possible that someone who has a poor vaccine response but was one of those folks who would have been aysmptomatic anyway could be a spreader.

But the "asmyptomatic covid spreader" was probably more media hype than statistical reality... if the virus is running amuck in your system to the point where there's a lot of viral particles in your secretions then something has to give: either covid takes over and you get symptoms from that, or your immune system ramps up which causes it's own, separate symptom set: fevers, aches, chills, etc All those "flu like" symptoms are immune response symptoms.

Still need to wait for the data to know for sure. I'm looking forward to a couple years from now when the science community can publish how it really works in 20/20 hindsight without political spin.