Good news overall. But it does said this: " A six-fold reduction in neutralizing titers was observed with the B.1.351 variant relative to prior variants. Despite this reduction, neutralizing titer levels with B.1.351 remain above levels that are expected to be protective." I assume that translate to ... well, they didn't say so I'm not going to guess... but I will, it's not as protective against the S.Africa variant, just not sure by how much.
Also, the current monoclonal antibody treatment for Covid19 appears to not be effective against the S. Africa variant. All together... this variant is concerning, to put it mildly. South African Covid variant appears to ‘obviate’ antibody drugs, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says (msn.com) “The South Africa variant is very concerning right now because it does appear that it may obviate some of our medical countermeasures, particularly the antibody drugs,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb said.
I don’t know exactly what Moderna says. to my reading, the article says we don’t have enough data to say for sure whether our vaccines will or will not stop the SA variant but they think it is more likely that vaccines WILL offer protection. my biologist buddies are very freaked out about all the viral incubation in millions and millions of humans and what that will mean moving forward after many mutations. Hopefully vaccines really squash all variants and we can quit running mutation experiments by late summer or so!
The US is doing a lot of vaccinations relatively quickly and we will have enough doses to vaccinate everyone who will take it. That is my point.
I guess it depends on what you consider “ a lot” is. I don’t view one to two million per day as a lot. If we get up to 4 million per day, then I would be much more optimistic. I don’t think anything has gone quickly other than the development of the vaccines. The roll out has been a joke. Hopefully Biden can do something at the federal level to get things moving. I also think people who are one of the lucky few to have received the vaccine look at things differently than those that are still trying to get their first shot.
We don’t have 4 million doses a day to inject. They can’t produce them that fast but yes if they could produce them that fast then that would be great. There is no indication we will ever have 4 million doses being distributed a day. The recent numbers showed injections basically keeping up with daily distributions. If you are disappointed with the US rollout then you should see how the rest of the world is doing.
Vaccinations are going pretty well. We'll be at over 20MM people by end of January. If they can average 1.5MM per day in February, that's another 45MM. 2MM/day in March would be another 60MM. That puts you at 125MM by end of March. I think those are reasonable metrics to meet (we're already at 1MM+/day). Consider that there are 330MM people in the US. 80MM or so are kids. Another 80MM or so don't plan to get vaccines for whatever reasons. Another 20MM will have had Covid fairly recently and don't necessarily need a vaccine right away. So that leaves you with 150MM who want and need a vaccine. Those estimates would get everyone who wants & needs a vaccine done by mid-April. The bigger question seems to be these mutations and if a new one makes the vaccine completely worthless and we go back to square 1. If one mutation becomes easy to spread, vaccine-resistant, and deadlier, we have a huge nightmare on our hands because everything we've done the last year has been about getting to this vaccination point.
Right now, I'm looking at # of people getting their first shots each day. The production levels do have to increase to handle both 1st and 2nd doses, though. But by lateFeb/early March, we will also hopefully be mixing in the J&J vaccine too - which both increases available production and goes down to single doses for those people.
The other question is whether therapeutic treatments also materialize. There is a separate stream of medications and treatments in various phases of the FDA process. Some of those candidates are antivirals that have the potential to minimize or stop transmission altogether in addition to reducing the health impact of Covid-19. (this would basically be the covid version of Tamiflu). That stuff is just as important as the vaccine given all of the mutations and the risk that the vaccines will lose efficacy over time.
I think we can all agree that the rollout has been disorganized and frustrating for many people. They had 10 months to prepare for this and it appears little planning was done. People shouldn’t have to be speed dialing all day trying to get lucky to get a shot. They had 10 months to come up a plan that would be fair and organized.
That's a great point! I know there are repurposed drugs in all sorts of trials and also people working on SARS-Covfefe2 specific ones. It's just a kind of arms race, but I like our chances overall. The chance of a seriously bad mutation -- a more deadly virus that also evades our treatments/vaccines -- are hopefully pretty small, (I hope).
125 million doses by the end of March is 62.5 million Americans vaccinated with both doses. Which is like 20% of the population assuming you are looking at the two dose (much more effective) vaccine. I’m with Newlin - if we could get to 4m doses per day we could inoculate everyone who wants one in 3-4 months. 1m/day just never gets you there.
I agree it's been a trainwreck. But on the flipside, I'd argue that this is an unprecedented project and there's also no good way to do it. There are way more priority people (whether you talk about front line health people or elderly or whomever) than there are vaccines. And no government official wants to be the person that says "Person A is more important than Person B". And you can't really schedule people in advance because reality makes it impossible to know when the vaccines would be approved and how real-world production lines would work out. They certainly could have had portals and sign up systems in place earlier - no question about that. But you'd still have endless appointment cancellations, last minute appointments, etc because of the sheer amount of unknowns we're dealing with in real-time. The lack of federal coordination has been the biggest failure in the whole process, because we're relying on 50 different state health systems to duplicate all the same work. In an ideal world, much of this would have all been routed through CVS and Walgreens instead of hundreds or thousands of random providers. At least those are are set up for tens of millions of annual flu shots already and cover the vast majority of the US population.
Local news here in MN is reporting a case of the Brazilian variant from someone who lives in the Twin Cities who recently traveled to Brazil..
I'm talking people, not doses. We're already doing more than 1MM new people per day, so I'm not sure why anyone would be suggesting 1MM doses per day going forward. Look at how testing ramped up from March to May. Once all the production and distribution systems ramp up and kinks get worked out, things move very quickly. Add in the J&J vaccine hopefully getting approval in 2-3 weeks and you have another major increase coming.
Most of that 20MM don't necessary need it, but they aren't asked to wait. Let's just said 170MM... Assuming no supply hiccup from here out, and 1.5MM/day (conservative bet), that put you ~June. Takes 3~4 weeks to "immune". ~July should be good for those that want it, assuming there is at least some good protection against all variants.
If we only average 1.5MM/day, that would qualify as a disaster, in my opinion. If we're only at that level in a month, I think we have failed miserably.
Have you seen the UK plan. The Gov’t contacts the person and tells them where and when to go for their shot. They are prioritizing mainly by age. Seems fair and orderly. I’m sure they have some bumps in the road, but it seems far superior to the mad scramble in the US. https://www.pharmaceutical-journal....on-programme/20208621.article?firstPass=false
I don't think any new variant should really be a surprise and probably has been floating around a while undetected. The US isn't exactly on the cutting edge of tracing/genome sequencing these things. I think we discovered one or two new strains in the US not too long ago. As long as the vaccines keep winning ...
