outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

I'll take a tall Pike

A Slaynta

question: if a vaccine is "90% effective" does that mean it is 100% effective for 90% of people or that it's 90% effective for each individual case of exposure?

I believe means that the treatment group had only 10% as many infections as the control group at the endpoint they evaluated. But it might mean something more complicated than that.

So i.e. maybe they unblinded data for initial analysis when they had 110 infections and found 100 infections in the placebo group and 10 in the treatment group. (Then also they have to have a sufficiently high-powered study for this to have an acceptable chance of being near the true effect size. There are frequentist statistical models involved.)

so the question i'm asking isn't answerable in the terms i'm presenting?

It means they don’t have data that could tell you that (probably) (I don’t know that there’s a paper yet)

Like they don’t know how many times each participant was exposed to covid 19, the endpoint they’re tracking here is covid-19 infections between the vaccine and placebo group. The vaccine is effective if fewer people in the vaccine group get infected, to an extent distinguishable from random chance, within a margin of error:

Also yeah neither of your options is correct and I don’t think there’s a way you could know either of those things.

2020: the year where neither of my options are correct and there's no way I could know things

What about breaks in the incredibly complex -70C cold chain?

-70C is not incredibly complex, I handle lab supply shipments that cold all the time. It just requires a styrofoam cooler packed with a few pounds of dry ice pellets. Can keep things colder than -70C for 48 hours and that's assuming no freezer storage at the shipping depots which won't be the case for COVID vaccines, UPS is stocking up on freezers. And they'll probably use better coolers than the styrofoam ones we use! Also after we unpack the dry ice shipments I drop the pellets in my tea so it looks like I'm drinking a magic potion.

One challenge is you can’t necessarily deliver many vaccines to a population in a short time (such as every employee of a large medical center) without loads of free -80 space to put doses in, and now a bunch of institutions are probably gonna start buying up -80s, because capitalism ensures efficient distribution of resources

My university knocks out 1-2k flu shots per day during their yearly vaccine drives. Even at half that rate you can just top up the shipping containers with fresh dry ice as they arrive, you don't even need electric freezers. They won't be sitting around for very long.

Not to say it will be easy, but stuff like large-scale vaccination and cold shipping and storage are solved problems, and we've got very strong motivation to throw a lot of resources at this disease. I'm more worried about healthcare worker burnout than the logistical issues, because, as you say, capitalism.

"We now have clear evidence of efficacy of the vaccine to prevent Covid-19 disease"

Dr Stephen Hoge, president of US company Moderna, says a new vaccine that protects against Covid-19 is nearly 95% effectivehttps://t.co/AoBDS5oTIy pic.twitter.com/TPxFAqq59E

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) November 16, 2020

wow.

Big if true obviously, but this is a huge advantage over Pfizer’s:

A key advantage of Moderna's vaccine is that it does not need ultra-cold storage like Pfizer's, making it easier to distribute. Moderna expects it to be stable at standard refrigerator temperatures of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (36 to 48°F) for 30 days and it can be stored for up to 6 months at -20 degrees Celsius.

Pfizer’s vaccine must be shipped and stored at minus 70 degrees Celsius, the sort of temperature typical of an Antarctic winter. At standard refrigerator temperatures, it can be stored for up to five days.

Friendship ended with Pfizer,

More like Pfftfizer, amirite

please let this actually be good news

that is fantastic news, both Pfizer and Moderna have been manufacturing large quantities of their vaccines concurrently with the safety trials.

i'm as pro-vaxx as they come and i'm still slightly o_O about it tbh

Right now I'll take any amount of good news thank you very much, yeah I know that there's still a lot more work to do but step in the right direction etc.

still slightly o_O about it

I'm slightly o_O with these mRNA vaccines, where the antigen is displayed on native cell surfaces. My intuition is that there's potential risk for autoimmune disease that would only appear months/years after trials. I'll still take it, the isolation hasn't been good for my mental health...

yeah I'm preparing myself for an extraordinarily shitty winter but it should hopefully be all good news after that

At some point someone will have to determine whether it's safe to take both (for double the anti-Covid action!), or whether the nation will divide into opposing camps like Crips / Bloods.

The latter sounds like heaps of fun tbf

yeah the last four years have been a blast

Of course there will be a third camp, the Nones, who believe it's all a Soros / Zuckerberg hoax and the vaccines have tracking software. Sorry I forgot to mention that element

it's actually a bill gates hoax too. ever heard of "the bill and melinda gates foundation"? it's a big secret organization that has a lot of money behind it. they're going to "vaccinate" the whole world

even the word sounds bad. "vaccine". not good.

The word ‘vaccine’ was derived from ‘vacca’, Latin for ‘cow’, because its real function is to brand you as easily manipulable CATTLE!

etymologically it's from the Australian word for holiday

Yes, a vaca from CRITICAL THINKING!

question: if a vaccine is "90% effective" does that mean it is 100% effective for 90% of people or that it's 90% effective for each individual case of exposure?

― Four Seasons Total Manscaping (forksclovetofu), Monday, November 16, 2020 12:26 AM (sixteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Also yeah neither of your options is correct and I don’t think there’s a way you could know either of those things.

― The Bosom Manor Michaelmas Special (silby), Monday, November 16, 2020 1:28 AM (fifteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

silby is right unfortunately. what a vaccine trial like this can tell you is: if 100 people has been vaccinated and 100 people have not, and they all do exactly the same things in the same populations for the same amount of time, the vaccinated group will have 90% fewer cases of covid.

the trial on its own doesn't allow you to distinguish between these two possible reasons for that observation:

- 90% of the vaccinated group are perfectly immune but 10% have no additional immunity
- 100% of the vaccinated group have immunity that reduces their risk on each encounter by 90%

and those aren't the only possible reasons.

the upshot of this for individual behaviour is: if you are lucky enough to get the vaccine early, don't go around licking doorknobs. wait until lots of people have had it.

doorknob futures down on advance word of of no-licking recommendation

everyone read "on immunity" btw. it's good (and its not all bayesian stats nonsense). i love the last sentence:

Immunity is a shared space. A garden we tend together.

the fact that we are extremely bad at this is why 90%+ effective is such a big deal. the more effective the vaccine is, the fewer people need to get it in order to get to herd immunity.

actually starting to feel hopeful for the first time in about 8 months, I think by June 2021 I may finally get to meet my nephew

if the vaccine is 50% effective and you are the only person who gets the vaccine (which is how most people think, because they don't understand herd immunity) then it's not insane to think "this might not help and i'm skeptical about trump/vaccines/whatever" so i won't get it.

so you might only get 50% of people getting a 50% effective vaccine, so 25% of people resistant to infection (plus the 5-10% of people who got it naturally).

this is kind of the base case i've been assuming/expecting for the past 6 months. it's a huge bummer because it would mean years more of this.

but if it's 90% then lots more people overcome that skepticism and you might get get 70% adherance, i.e. 63% resistant via the vaccine. and at that point you're likely at herd immunity. tbh you might even get herd immunity if only 50% of people get a vaccine that effective.which is great because 1) selfish assholes don't actually make things worse 2) people who _can't_ get the vaccine for whatever reason still get the benefits.

one of the other big deals about moderna relative to pfizer (other than the temperature thing) is that they ran the trial on kids as young as 12. being able to immunize schoolchildren is a huge deal for obvious reasons.

we were planning to send our kid back to daycare in january, but we're now wondering if we just stick it out for a couple more months. that's partly because january is probably going to be ... not good! but also because if you have a concrete exit strategy it becomes much easier to put up with lockdown. so i wonder if we'll see some people being a weirdly better about the lockdown compromises as vaccine rollout starts?

probably no chance in Hell of saving the Orlando Fringe Festival next year but praying they can move it until later in the year. two years of not running will kill it

trying to figure out how much money to put in the childcare FSA for next year, this is kind of changing the calculus

In California, Gov. Newsom just "pulled an emergency break(sic)" and most of the state has rolled back from Yellow/Orange tiers to Red/Purple. Not sure if this means we are back to shelter-in-place or not. Also thought I heard "curfew" at some point in his presser.

In Oregon we have new restrictions statewide as of Wednesday. It's obvious the governor is trying to walk a line that communicates the seriousness of the situation, while not pushing people to the point of rebellion .A good leader can't close their eyes and pretend the current trend won't fill every hospital bed in the state in another two or three weeks. But there's no enforcement mechanism out there strong enough to force 4 million Oregonians to follow new restrictions on social gatherings if they don't want to comply.

This is why Trump's constant undercutting of the messaging for eight months mattered. In this kind of situation, his lying and dismissiveness was incredibly damaging and it can't be undone now.

yup, it really is almost entirely his fault. it's amazing and infuriating.

And he will never face a single fucking consequence for it either, which might just be the most maddening part of it all.

I mean, one could argue that losing the election was a consequence, but I don't think that is nearly sufficient for the deaths he's caused.

yup, it really is almost entirely his fault. it's amazing and infuriating.

― howls of non-specificity (sleeve), Monday, November 16, 2020 5:38 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

challop: it's not almost entirely his fault, a lot of blame can be shared by our federal system (i.e. every state makes its own rules) and the craziness of our current streak of right wing quasi-libertarianism. Counterpoint: if Trump had had full control of the entire country, things actually would have been worse.

TBC, no question his messaging was damaging. But I could imagine a counterfactual where Obama is president and people in places like Texas and South Dakota rebel against his rational guidance.

silby is right unfortunately. what a vaccine trial like this can tell you is: if 100 people has been vaccinated and 100 people have not, and they all do exactly the same things in the same populations for the same amount of time, the vaccinated group will have 90% fewer cases of covid.

the trial on its own doesn't allow you to distinguish between these two possible reasons for that observation:

- 90% of the vaccinated group are perfectly immune but 10% have no additional immunity
- 100% of the vaccinated group have immunity that reduces their risk on each encounter by 90%

and those aren't the only possible reasons.

the upshot of this for individual behaviour is: if you are lucky enough to get the vaccine early, don't go around licking doorknobs. wait until lots of people have had it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_d7xzbGgWA