COVID-19 vaccine

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The only way to definitively eradicate the pandemic is to have a vaccine that can be administered to all inhabitants of the planet... To ensure the availability of the vaccines to all people on the planet almost at the same time, it has to be free from ownership. To do so we intend to make a global pharmaceutical social business operational as soon as possible. ~ Muhammad Yunus

A COVID-19 vaccine is any of several different vaccine technologies intended to provide acquired immunity against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19).

Quotes[edit]

2021[edit]

organized chronologically

  • The study showed that between the fifth day and the 12th day after receiving the first vaccine dose, there were no differences between the vaccinated group and the non-vaccinated group: the rate of positive tests for the SARS-CoV-2 in the two groups was similar. In other words: no difference in infection rates was observed between those who were vaccinated and those who were not vaccinated.

2020[edit]

organized alphabetically by authour

A cooperative approach to developing vaccines is important because developing vaccines is an inherently risky undertaking... Only about 7 percent of vaccines in the early stages of development are successful, and only 17 percent of those that reach trials on humans end up being successful, according to figures compiled by GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.
Even before we knew it was a coronavirus, I said it certainly sounds like a coronavirus-SARS type thing. As soon as it was identified, I called a meeting of top-level people and said, 'Let's start working on a vaccine right now.' ~ Anthony Fauci
This devastating pandemic, with all its worldwide chaos and horror, has at the same time created a perfect alignment of technology, science, need, and opportunity. The global impact of Covid-19 could change science forever...Let’s Not Waste It, Jane Metcalfe
In case anyone is wondering I strongly support the development and widespread adoption of a covid-19 vaccine and will take it as soon as it is widely available... ~Jimmy Wales

(alpha by author)

  • We have people around the world working as fast as they can to try to develop an effective vaccine against this dangerous disease. That is great — except these people are working in competition, not in collaboration. They all want to be the first to develop a patentable vaccine that will allow them to get very rich if it proves successful... the coronavirus should be yet another lesson as to why there is a better alternative to patent monopolies for financing biomedical research.
  • The coronavirus pandemic is a clear instance in which the whole world shares a common interest in developing and distributing a vaccine. This should mean that we have open research, where all findings are posted on the web as quickly as possible, so that they can build on them. Once a vaccine is developed we should want it spread throughout the world as quickly as possible at the lowest possible cost.
  • Within days of the first confirmed novel coronavirus case in the United States on 20 January, antivaccine activists were already hinting on Twitter that the virus was a scam—part of a plot to profit from an eventual vaccine... Recent polls have found as few as 50% of people in the United States are committed to receiving a vaccine, with another quarter wavering... In France, 26% said they wouldn’t get a coronavirus vaccine... Even before the pandemic, public health agencies around the world were struggling to counter increasingly sophisticated efforts to turn people against vaccines. With vaccination rates against measles and other infectious diseases falling in some locations, the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019 listed “vaccine hesitancy” as one of 10 major global health threats.
  • The race for a COVID-19 vaccine is setting off a different kind of competition in Washington: Who will get it first?... Trump administration officials have signaled they will take a “tiered approach” to giving out the vaccine when it is ready and said that, depending on the results of clinical trials, high-risk individuals, people with pre-existing health conditions, and front-line health care workers will be prioritized. After those groups, it’s anyone’s guess. “Will it be people at highest risk? Will it be people who are key to spreading and transmission? Will it be politically effective lobby groups? Will it be people who can pay the most for it?” said Barry Bloom, a research professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
  • The United States has bought up virtually all stocks of a drug shown to reduce the recovery time of COVID-19 patients... Remdesivir – an anti-viral drug first developed to tackle Ebola – has been approved for use treating coronavirus in the UK and the US after trials suggested it could cut recovery time by around four days... it will charge $2,340 (£1,900) for a typical treatment course for people in the U.S. and other developed countries... Critics in the U.S. attacked the price because taxpayers have funded much of the drug’s development.
  • It does raise two very important questions: what is a fair price for a drug, and what is fair access to a drug, and those are common issues but are particularly important in a global crisis like this. That’s part of the fair access question ― the trial that gave the result that allowed Remdesivir to sell their drug wasn’t just done in the U.S. There were patients participating through other European countries, in the U.K. as well, and internationally ― Mexico and other places... And I wonder how they would feel knowing now that the drug is going to have restricted availability in their own country and would they have volunteered for that trial if they had known that?
  • The details of the contracts come just days after the Trump administration faced backlash from consumer groups for refusing to require Gilead to charge a reasonable price for its Covid-19 treatment remdesivir. On Monday, as Common Dreams reported, Gilead announced it will charge U.S. hospitals around $3,120 per privately insured patient for a treatment course of remdesivir, which was developed with the help of at least $70.5 million in taxpayer funding. "Allowing Gilead to set the terms during a pandemic represents a colossal failure of leadership by the Trump administration," Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen's Access to Medicines Program, said in a statement Monday. "The U.S. government has authority and a responsibility to steward the technology it helped develop."
  • Noting that U.S. taxpayers have contributed billions of dollars to help develop a Covid-19 vaccine, the Vermont senator (Bernie Sanders) asked the panel: "Would you agree with me that after that kind of investment we should make sure that every American, every person in this country, can get a vaccine regardless of their income?" National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, CDC chief Dr. Robert Redfield, FDA commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, and Assistant Secretary for Health Adm. Brett Giroir, each answered in the affirmative.
  • If everything moves smoothly, it takes 3-6 weeks to get to the point where you can start testing (the vaccine to treat SARS-CoV-2), then you look to see if they can raise an immune response, normally in an animal. You won't start to get human studies until about the beginning of the summer, probably July (2020). But, it's a bit of a moveable feast.
  • Polls show that the American people are extremely worried about contracting the virus. However, the government has a much bigger concern: that if they find a COVID-19 vaccine, China will copy it and distribute it for free. To many, it will not be immediately clear why it would be a problem for a manufacturing superpower, home to 1.4 billion people, to inoculate itself and others. But to the White House, this would be “stealing” a potential American innovation.
  • In the early 1950s, American scientist Jonas Salk pioneered a world-changing vaccine against polio, a deadly disease that tens of thousands of Americans contracted annually. Instead of patenting it and making a fortune, he insisted that his invention belonged to all of humanity. By 1994, polio was eradicated in North America. Yet 70 years later, the logic of capitalism dictates that where... there are enormous profits to be made, and anyone acting outside that system to reproduce a vaccine is not acting responsibly, but “stealing.”
  • Today we envision a vaccine within two years, and for frontline health care workers, probably much sooner. It’s remarkable how fast science can happen when everyone is focused on the same problem. This devastating pandemic, with all its worldwide chaos and horror, has at the same time created a perfect alignment of technology, science, need, and opportunity. The global impact of Covid-19 could change science forever.
  • We just announced that mRNA-1273, our COVID-19 vaccine candidate, has met its primary efficacy endpoint in the first interim analysis of the Phase 3 COVE study.
    • Moderna Inc via tweet published November 16, 2020
  • This vaccine will be needed by 8 billion people. What happens to poor countries who cannot afford to pay the prices that they'll be charging in the rich countries? Happy to sign, pledge your support http://vaccinecommongood.org
  • In case anyone is wondering I strongly support the development and widespread adoption of a covid-19 vaccine and will take it as soon as it is widely available... I don't think I should be in the first wave to take it as that should be people more vulnerable or more likely to be spreaders... I think that's right. [replying to comment: "it should go to health care workers first"]. I'm not an expert. I just know that I'm healthy and safe at home, so it will be more helpful for others to go first. But I'm eager to take it!
  • The long-term evidence of safety is going to be limited because these vaccines are going to have only 6 months or 5 months of data. So, we’re working super hard on a very active pharmacovigilance system, to make sure that when the vaccines are introduced that we’ll absolutely continue to assess their safety.

December 2020[edit]

Developing the vaccines and getting them licensed is like building base camp at the bottom of Everest. And actually getting to the peak - (that) is the delivery part. ~ Kate O’Brien
With this net-work capacity, whether you live in Chicago, Illinois or Murdo, South Dakota, we're able to ensure time definite deliveries of these shipments and we feel very confident in our capabilities in this regard. This is what our network was built to do. ~ Richard Smith

(Quotes are in chronological order)

  • Dr. Kate O'Brien, Director of WHO's Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals, compares the monumental task ahead to climbing the world's tallest mountain.
    "Developing the vaccines and getting them licensed is like building base camp at the bottom of Everest," O'Brien said at a recent WHO Q&A session. "And actually getting to the peak - (that) is the delivery part."
    In other words, O'Brien suggests developing COVID-19 vaccines in record time was relatively easy, but when it comes to transporting and distributing those vaccines, "There is going to be a struggle, frankly, in every country, about how to do this quickly."
  • [T]he major players in transporting and distributing vaccines will be companies like UPS and FedEx, especially once the vaccines are on the ground.
    "We have the capability to serve every zip code in the United States of America. We do it every day," FedEx Express executive Richard Smith told senators Thursday in hearing on the logistics of transporting the coronavirus vaccines.
    "With this net-work capacity, whether you live in Chicago, Illinois or Murdo, South Dakota, we're able to ensure time definite deliveries of these shipments and we feel very confident in our capabilities in this regard," Smith said. "This is what our network was built to do."
  • Jonas Salk’s vaccine helped wipe polio from most of the world, something that many people hope will happen with the coronavirus vaccine. However, Salk warns eradicating polio from the United States was a long and difficult journey, and he doesn’t expect eliminating COVID-19 will be any easier.
    “It’s going to be a long road, just even getting enough vaccines out to people around the world ... this virus does not respect borders,” said Salk, a doctor and a part-time professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh, where his father developed the polio vaccine. “It travels by airplane everywhere in the world and unless this virus can be contained everywhere, it’s going to continue to spread and be a problem.”
  • [The vaccine's approval was] a huge British success story, [and] the single biggest stride that we've been able to take since this pandemic began.
  • We've got 100 million doses on order - add that to the 30 million doses of Pfizer and that's enough for two doses for the entire population
Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine candidate is stable at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, which is colder than an Antarctic winter. ~ Theresa Machemer
Once it leaves the deep freezers of Pfizer, it has a limited time before it needs to be in somebody's arm. ~ Hani Mahmassani
The ultra-low storage conditions are so unprecedented that in order to be successful it has to be a perfectly orchestrated and choreographed dance. ~ Soumi Saha
It’s another good example of how all our rural hospitals are at the end of a supply chain with less leverage to make important purchases. It’s the wild west of the supply chain; that’s not how you fight a pandemic. ~ Tim Size
  • If the CDC was worried about a shortage of ultra-cold freezers, it hasn’t happened yet. One company, Helmer, reached capacity and now can’t deliver new freezers until March but, for the most part, suppliers are delivering ultra-cold freezers in two to six weeks, said Behlim. Much like for vaccines, though, the distribution of ultra-cold freezers isn’t even across the country. One local Wisconsin hospital looked into acquiring freezers, said Size, but was told delivery would take two to three months. Larger hospitals with the budgets for multiple purchases come first, he said.
    “It’s another good example of how all our rural hospitals are at the end of a supply chain with less leverage to make important purchases,” he said. “It’s the wild west of the supply chain; that’s not how you fight a pandemic.”
  • Mahmassani says the challenge is not just in quickly putting together a global supply chain for billions of vials of vaccines, but what's particularly challenging is that the first vaccine in line for authorization, developed by Pfizer, must be stored and shipped at temperatures of minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit (-70 Celsius), otherwise it will go bad.
    "So that requires speed in moving but it also requires a sort of minimizing the number of hand-offs because it has a limited shelf-life," Mahmassani says. "Once it leaves the deep freezers of Pfizer, it has a limited time before it needs to be in somebody's arm."
    That means transporting the vaccines "essentially, you know, it has to be seamless. You can't miss a beat. Otherwise you're losing very valuable product," Mahmassani adds.
    And when transporting vaccines hundreds or thousands of miles from coast to coast or overseas, there's one mode of transportation in particular that stands out — air travel.
    "There's no replacing the speed of an airplane," says Chris Busch, managing director of Cargo in the Americas for United Airlines.
  • The entire WORLD is being badly hurt by the China Virus, but if you listen to the Fake News Lamestream Media, and Big Tech, you would think that we are the only one. No, but we are the Country that developed vaccines, and years ahead of schedule!
  • Anaphylactic reactions can occur with any vaccine, but are usually extremely rare—about one per 1 million doses. As of 19 December, the United States had seen six cases of anaphylaxis among 272,001 people who received the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a recent presentation by Thomas Clark of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); the United Kingdom has recorded two. Because the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines use a new platform, the reactions call for careful scrutiny, says Elizabeth Phillips, a drug hypersensitivity researcher at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who attended an NIAID meeting on 16 December. “This is new.”
    News reports about the allergic reactions have already created anxiety. “Patients with severe allergies in the US are getting nervous about the possibility that they may not be able to get vaccinated, at least with those two vaccines,” Togias wrote in an invitation to meeting participants. “Allergies in general are so common in the population that this could create a resistance against the vaccines in the population,” adds Janos Szebeni, an immunologist at Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, who has long studied hypersensitivity reactions to PEG and who also attended the 16 December gathering.
  • The coronavirus vaccines do have side effects — but that doesn't mean they're harmful. It actually means they're working. We know from Pfizer's clinical trials that short-term side effects occurred with-in 24 to 48 hours, especially after the second dose. Sixteen percent of people ages 18 to 55 and 11 per-cent of people over 55 reported fevers after the second dose. Even more people reported having fatigue, headaches and joint pain. (The Covid-19 vaccine hasn't yet been approved for children under 16.)
  • I've also heard of concerns that the vaccine may cause cancer in the long term, particularly from anti-vaxxers worried about what other ingredients in the vaccines can do. First, unlike non-mRNA-based vaccines, Covid-19 vaccines don't contain other components. Second, mRNA-based vaccines can't make changes to the human genome and therefore are extremely unlikely to induce new genetic mutations in the cells of the kind that lead to cancer.
Joanne Silberner, “Why You Should Still Wear A Mask And Avoid Crowds After Getting The COVID-19 Vaccine”, Shots, NPR, (January 12, 2021)[edit]
  • With the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in December found that protection doesn't start until 12 days after the first shot and that it reaches 52% effectiveness a few weeks later. A week after the second vaccination, the effectiveness rate hits 95%. In its application for authorization, Moderna reported a protection rate of 51% two weeks after the first immunization and 94% two weeks after the second dose.
    "That's not 100%," says Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and a member of the Food and Drug Administration's vaccine advisory board. "That means one out of every 20 people who get this vaccine could still get moderate to severe infection."
  • Before approving the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, the FDA asked the vaccine manufacturers only whether their products protect people from COVID-19 symptoms. They didn't ask if the vaccines stop people who've been vaccinated from nevertheless spreading the virus to others. The emergency authorizations by the FDA that have allowed distribution of the two new vaccines cite only their ability to keep you — the person vaccinated — from becoming severely sick with COVID-19.
    In the words of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Experts need to understand more about the protection that COVID-19 vaccines provide before deciding to change recommendations on steps everyone should take to slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19."
  • Here's how that might work: Let's say you've been vaccinated and you encounter SARS-CoV-2. You're much less likely to develop symptoms — that's clear. But your immune system may not fight off the virus completely — it might allow some viruses to survive and reproduce and get expelled from your nose or mouth in a breath, cough or sneeze. Remember: No one can be sure yet if this actually happens or if it happens often enough that you'd be emitting enough active virus to sicken someone else.
  • Even though the pre-authorization studies of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were as streamlined as possible, they still required quite a lot of work. Each of the 75,000 volunteers had to come into a clinic; get a test for the coronavirus; get either a vaccine or a placebo shot (without knowing which they'd received); return for a second shot; and come back to the clinic for testing anytime in the interim if they showed any symptoms of having caught the virus.
    Adding in even more coronavirus tests along the way to see if the vaccinated volunteers had picked up or were transmitting the virus would have delayed the initial results considerably, Corey says. And in the midst of the pandemic, speed was of the essence.

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

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