Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

(also side effects)

i think i posted the email i wrote to my family when we had the choice to get J&J the next day or pfizer in a week or two and i explained why i thought we should wait. that has more detail. but i cannot open this whole thread to find it.

AZ and J&J are pretty good. if you'd have told me a year ago we'd have two vaccines that are above 50% effective and are massively less risky than being vulnerable to covid, and we'd have before the one year anniversary i'd have been thrilled.

but the mRNA vaccines are absolutely the greatest successes of 21st century medicine: given to hundreds of millions of people so far, almost perfectly safe, and almost perfectly effective at both protecting the recipient against severe cases *and* stopping the spread by surpressing mild cases (which wasn't even a goal of the trials!)

i remember the day the first mRNA phase 3 results came out. absolutely staggering. again, the threads here are too long to find it, but i'm sure i posted here.

caek i'm sure that i've read that you can't just say AZ is 60% against Delta, vs Pfizer 90-odd%, because of differences in how long it takes AZ to reach full effectiveness and in dose scheduling. i'm thinking of this actually - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/22/pfizer-and-astrazeneca-highly-effective-against-india-covid-variant

there is a long tweet thread about this that i can't find now. i was just wondering if there were something newer or if that's the study you're talking about.

it's frustrating trying to understand this stuff. some studies are about whether a vaccine stops infection at all. some are about whether they reduce hospitalisation rates. for instance this one:

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/uk-study-finds-vaccines-offer-high-protection-against-hospitalisation-delta-2021-06-14/

PHE said that the Pfizer/Biontech COVID-19 vaccine was 96% effective against hospitalisation from the Delta variant after two doses, while Oxford/AstraZeneca's offered 92% protection against hospitalisation by Delta.

but the mRNA vaccines are absolutely the greatest successes of 21st century medicine: given to hundreds of millions of people so far, almost perfectly safe, and almost perfectly effective at both protecting the recipient against severe cases *and* stopping the spread by surpressing mild cases (which wasn't even a goal of the trials!)

this does seem pretty good yeah

Oxford/AstraZeneca's offered 92% protection against hospitalisation by Delta

Hospitalization is a significant indicator, but you can have long term health effects from a case not requiring hospitalization. Ideally, you want any viral infection at detectable levels to have no symptoms at all. The mRNA vaccines really shine in that regard.

This thread is great at making us poor AZ saps feel really good about life.

lol seriously. as someone who has a vested interest in how good the AZ vaccine is i kinda want to include it in the 'modern miracles' category too! and if it's not really a modern miracle... how come?

you can't just say AZ is 60% against Delta

no, you can't. based on the shitshow AZ phase 3 trial it's probably about 70% effective against *serious cases* caused by the original strain. it's likely less effective against delta than against the original strain given the evidence about delta's transmisability. it's certainly less effective at stopping mild/asymptomatic cases, although they didn't measure that in the trial i the interests of time (neither did any of the others, but it's super important if your goal is to stop the disease spreading in addition to protecting the people who receive the vaccine).

you also can't say the mRNA vaccines are 90% effective against delta because there are no studies yet afaik. it's clearly not 100% effective as evidenced by the fact there are plenty of cases among vaccinated people in the US where almost everyone got an mRNA vaccine. but we do *know* mRNA vaccines are 90% effective against even *asymptomatic cases* earlier this year (with the kent/SA strains circulating). that's the study i linked, which is different to the one you linked.

note the one you linked is focused on symptomatic cases and even then is unambiguously saying that that pfizer provides more protection than AZ. the one you linked to was conducted in the UK, where the dose spacing is both long and changing, so that's a confounding variable and might be what was discussed in the twitter thread you saw. but i hadn't seen that study and my point is not dependent on it.

“This study provides reassurance that two doses of either vaccine offer high levels of protection against symptomatic disease from the B.1.617.2 India variant and we expect the vaccines to be even more effective at preventing hospitalisation and death,” said Mary Ramsay, head of immunisation at PHE.

this is both true and the right thing for a public health authority whose goal is to protect the most number of people to say, especially if you're logicistically constrained. and if your goal is to protect only yourself it's perfectly fine advice to follow. but it's not at all the full story. i don't want to say you're being lied to or that you shouldn't get the first one offered to you. but if you have a choice you should get pfizer or moderna and it's not even close. and this is especially true if you live with people who can't get vaccinated (e.g. children, immunocompromised, republicans you don't want to die, etc.).

it's frustrating trying to understand this stuff. some studies are about whether a vaccine stops infection at all. some are about whether they reduce hospitalisation rates.

studying how effective a vaccine is against asymptomatic infection is insanely expensive. the study i linked is one of the few big ones. i haven't seen any of AZ or J&J. and stopping severe cases is more important. so the focus has been on severe cases. but even by that metric, mRNA is more effective if you have a choice. AZ is good too though!

i live with children and i don't have a choice.

from a 'real world' study in May:

https://inews.co.uk/news/oxford-astrazeneca-vaccine-is-more-effective-than-thought-with-second-dose-preventing-89-of-illness-1012287

PHE epidemiologist Meaghan Kall said there was “evidence to show that Pfizer (initially thought to have the edge on effectiveness) is actually running head-to-head with Oxford/AZ”.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

but if you have a choice you should get pfizer or moderna

It wouldn't be the National Health Service if you had any choice.

but yes - that's still symptomatic infection.

xpost

yeah might even be "severe" or "serious".

are you in the uk or france these days tracer?

UK. france won't give the AZ jab as far as i know. or as i call it, 'The Clotter'.

Le Clotteurrrrrrrrrrr

looks a lot like everyone in the UK who got AZ will get pfizer in the second half of the year based on the UK buying a bunch of pfizer last month when it already has more doses than it needs

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/apr/28/uk-orders-60m-more-doses-of-pfizer-covid-vaccine-for-booster-jabs

that's based on

Apart from the ones who've already had two doses of Der Klotter?

Or are we talking third doses here?

yeah i think the idea is you've had zweimal das klo then you'll get a pfizer as a booster. they've been running trials on this in the UK since march.

the other thing to say is ultimately vaccine takeup in the UK will end up much higher than in the US, which is probably worth at least as much as a better vaccine in the long run.

UK probably going to race away with it among these countries by august, which like i say is probably worth at least much in public health terms

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=new_deaths_per_million&Metric=People+fully+vaccinated&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~ISR~GBR

Good. I wouldn't mind getting a proper vaccine for a change!

i don't want to be a debbie downer! i had a choice and i waited a week to get pfizer. i think i'd have gotten J&J if i'd had to wait more like a month. J&J and AZ are both way, way, way better than nothing.

wow high praise from the pfizer rep over here

:)

Do you get a choice if you live in a Tory contituency?

Meh, AZ will turn out to better against the Andromeda Strain.

This thread is great at making us poor AZ saps feel really good about life.

The more people get any kind of vaccine at all, the better the virus can be suppressed.

My 70+ mother was able to get an appointment for AZ in October, and is now fretting about clots: I pointed out if she lives long enough to get a clot, she's doing better than millions of other folk.

could be worse. the trials of sinopharm and sinovac (different vaccines based on similar technology IIUC (i may not UC)) were extremely fishy in terms of detail/disclosure, and it seems they're not very effective at all in the real world: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/business/economy/china-vaccines-covid-outbreak.html.

(by could be worse, i mean you could be in a worse situation than living in a country using a random mixture of AZ and mRNA vaccines. it's not good that billions of people will be vaccinated dubious/demonstrably inneffective vaccines. if only there were countries with the ability to do something about that.)

Off topic from vaccines, but seems like my work is following the pattern I'm seeing in far too many places around here in the past few weeks - talking up a big game about continuing some form of remote work and encouraging hybrid options, only to pull the rug out from everyone at the last minute and decide, "nope, after all we do want butts in seats every day, so plan to get back in the office full-time".

Hope they like having to deal w a bunch of people quitting

Yeah, a company my wife used to do consulting work with apparently lost around 65% of their development team within three weeks when they pulled the same thing. I just don't see why so many places are suddenly reverting on this.

I got lucky - the company I work for actually hired a bunch more people during the pandemic, and now we can't all fit back in the office even if we wanted to, so it's going to be WFH for those who want to more or less in perpetuity until or unless we move to new space or axe a lot of people, and I don't see either of those things happening anytime soon

the pervasive myth = "working from home leads to less productivity" and leaders are so married to this "you have to physically be here" shit, it's stupid. one of the old heads of my former department used to demand every virtual person come in a day a week and they were all like "fucking WHY, though?".

fortunately, my company doesn't even HAVE a desk for me so I couldn't go in if I wanted to.

What drives me nuts is that my direct boss has, on multiple occasions, said that he's been stunned by how productive his team has been over the last year and how he'd be open to a continuing hybrid model for us but this decision is, sadly, being made above his head. It's frustrating, to say the least.

Executives are lazy pricks that spend most days drinking mai-tais in so-called "business meetings" that they spend half of talking about the Bears game, they spend all their day delegating to people and not actually doing anything so they assume everybody is like them.

this is why I didn't particularly feel guilty back in 2016 for the day that I bought a ticket to see Megadeth, hopped on a Megabus without my work laptop, and just pretended to work while staying connected to my work Blackberry/Skype for Business on my phone. attended one meeting on the bus though lol.

Megabus to Megadeth

It's also just... not true. The low(er) level supervisors, that directly oversee staff and interact with them on a daily basis, all pretty much support continuing at least hybrid. It is, of course (as Neanderthal rightly points out), the ones more distanced from the actual employees that make these decisions though.

if nobody shows up to the office then bosses can’t have their sycophants coming up to them in the hallway flattering them and asking for favors which is frankly the main reason most of them became bosses in the first place

the average boss doesn't even want to be a boss. I had a friend who also works with my company, and he was having a rough day, so he went on Skype and was trying to vent to his boss and get help. He expressed frustration, yes, and he was obviously frustrated, but his messages were pretty mild in terms of employee complaints (esp compared with mine).

Her response was "STOP! Why are you like this right now, what's going on with you? I thought we mellowed you out the other day." Like basically tearing him apart for having the audacity to come to her with a problem.

Unsurprising, but once again we seem to refuse to learn anything from the pandemic on any level. I was at baseball practice with my son last night and talking to three other people who had the same experience - their respective companies were all about remote and hybrid working two or three months ago, only to withdraw that and revert back to a 100% back in office plan within the last week or two. It's depressing as fuck, but late stage capitalism wins again.

we got told today, after getting the results of a staff survey where a lot of people said that they quite like working from home more often than not, that they are consolidating our office space, moving us from west london to central london.

given i live closer to the office than i do to the tube station, this is quite annoying *and* will cost me about £142 a month.

(they are planning on sub-letting the building, but there are empty floors in the other buildings on the site AND have spent the last year building more)

i would quit if they made me go back to the office. I do miss pooping at the office though. the restrooms are really clean.

also the snack machines take debit cards so I get fat there

if late stage capitalism was smart it would continue pushing the cost of WiFi, heating, air conditioning and office space onto its employees for the foreseeable future