outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Thankfully, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has approved the AZ/Oxford jab for all age groups past 18.

I was going to say, the EMA approved it.

Tbf the Hundred Years' War was never not a misnomer.

I don’t understand the difference between saying it’s all good for a 64 year old and 65 year olds shouldn’t get it at all tbh

I guess they need a cut-off point, which is bound to seem a bit arbitrary.

My sister-in-law is a reporter/occasional anchor on WUSA, cool to see her colleagues’ work get mentioned

My sister’s friend - a healthy woman in her 20s - was hospitalised with covid last year and is now registered disabled & doctors have told her she is likely to be living with the effects for the rest of her life. My sister told me she can’t take a shower without needing to lie down after. She posted on fb from the hospital a few months after being diagnosed, her lungs were operating at half capacity and her O2 dropped about 10% when she walked any distance.

Obviously this is not the norm for a fit and healthy young person - *as every single person you are talking to knows*, majority are mild or asymptomatic - but man alive, claiming that you are just talking about “some media reports” does feel like goalpost shifting when you were directly responding to gyac’s post that simply (correctly) said that lots of ppl will suffer heart & lung damage with a post downplaying that. If all you were arguing against is the notion that mild or asymptomatic cases will result in organ damage, something nobody itt said or thinks, then fine I guess? But that’s not what it looked like esp coming hot on the heels of ridiculous horseshit like “I think we have a milder variant because nobody I know has been hospitalised lately”

“Today everything suggests that it is almost ineffective for those over 65, and some say over 60.”

"Many people say ~insert lie~"

Is a very Trumpian formation

yo Clay just a shoutout to say I'm glad you're here, and thanks for those posts

sorry folks but macron is, well, he's not right, because the trial was so badly run that no one really knows if the AZ vaccine works for 65+, but there is basically no evidence that either way. which is not to say it doesn't. it would be a surprise. but "no evidence either way" is not the stuff agency approvals are made of, and its honestly bordering on reckless (like so many things about the UK respone) to approve it.

the german report on their (non)approval breaks this down. they enrolled too few old people in the trial. they got one case of covid among 300ish 65+ people in both the control arm and the treatment arm. the vaccine is somewhere between -1405% effective and +94%. i.e. they are guessing.

Here it is: the crucial table showing Germany's calculations on the AstraZeneca vaccine's efficacy in over-65s. And good God, look at that confidence interval! For over-65s there was only one infection in the treatment group and one in the placebo group. pic.twitter.com/edUPhaL7sS

— Oliver Moody (@olivernmoody) January 28, 2021

nothing magic happens when you turn 65, and it would be a surprise if it didn't work, but they don't have the right data to say.

in an ideal world you wouldn't give healthy people a vaccination (which is not zero risk) unless you knew for sure that it worked. if we weren't in pandemic this vaccine would not be in use anywhere in the world. even in the "let's just do it an be legends" countries.

but we're in a pandemic so fair enough.

xp appreciate the “can’t guarantee based on lack of data” but think Daniel Howdon is otm both itt

The 8% story about the AZ vaccine was I guess based on this 6.3% number here, the central estimate for an effectiveness calculation based on one event being observed from ~300 in each treatment arm. In a way, less stupid than the previous speculation; in another, much, much more. pic.twitter.com/JgP2TuwYoN

— Daniel Howdon (@danielhowdon) January 28, 2021

jfc this might look less unhinged but it's probably going to cause much, much more harm than Trump's bizarre ramblings about "getting light inside the body"

— Daniel Howdon (@danielhowdon) January 29, 2021

I don’t understand the difference between saying it’s all good for a 64 year old and 65 year olds shouldn’t get it at all tbh

― scampish inquisition (gyac), Friday, January 29, 2021 11:01 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

the cutoff is arbitrary, but the idea that vaccines are less effective in older people is solidly grounded. it’s true of virtually any vaccine afaik and there was suggestion of this with the pfizer/moderna data iirc though the numbers of patients >65 in those trials were (regrettably) small and therefore the estimates are less precise

that said even if they are less effective on an individual basis, the risk older people face is so much higher that prioritizing them is still
important

sorry folks but macron is, well, he's not right, because the trial was so badly run that no one really knows if the AZ vaccine works for 65+, but there is basically no evidence that either way. which is not to say it doesn't. it would be a surprise. but "no evidence either way" is not the stuff agency approvals are made of, and its honestly bordering on reckless (like so many things about the UK respone) to approve it.

the german report on their (non)approval breaks this down. they enrolled too few old people in the trial. they got one case of covid among 300ish 65+ people in both the control arm and the treatment arm. the vaccine is somewhere between -1405% effective and +94%. i.e. they are guessing.

But the EU have approved the AZ vaccine?

Oh, I see, the Germans haven't. I forgot the German and the French are allowed to do what they like in the EU.

xps ty k3vin, that makes sense to me

AFAICT, howdon is saying "the best guess _based only on that data_ is that it barely works for 65+, but that's probably not a very good guess because the samples were tiny so the uncertainties are huge". that's true?

& also that Macron’s intervention isn’t going to do anything great for French citizens already sceptical of vaccines

honestly i kind of feel like this is on the people at AZ and oxford who fucked up the trial so badly that they only saw one (1) (one!!!!!!!!) case among unvaccinated people in the most vulnerable population (this of course isn't the only way they fucked it up, there was the whole half dose thing, small samples, etc).

i know the politics of vaccines in france are particularly weird, and maybe the right move here is to say "this vaccine would be approved even if there weren't a raging pandemic" but ... well, that _is_ a lie.

i should be clear, i think approving AZ and getting it into arms is the right thing to do. it's undergone more than enough testing to know it's safe, it would be surprising if the efficacy for over 65s really were 7% or whatever, people are dying right now, and we're short of vaccine supply.

Great shitpost

It is quite funny to hear senior officials from Brazil, India and US talk about freedom and democracy 10 times in a five minute speech. They happen to be the 3 countries with the most Covid-19 cases in the world. Too free?

— Chen Weihua （陈卫华） (@chenweihua) January 29, 2021

lol, he is the guy who called marsha blackburn "a lifetime bitch" i'm pretty sure

that "China state-affiliated media" tag sure is something

It's true, we could use some less inhibited strong men to lead us – Bolsonaro, Modi and Trump did not go far enough. Unless…

https://interactives.lowyinstitute.org/features/covid-performance/#politics

vaccine approval for kids may be closer than i realised (bit in here about how these trials work too) https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-anthony-fauci-coronavirus-pandemic-infectious-diseases-coronavirus-vaccine-47af1ca6b75a2cedaac7923b7b084404

i thought it was like "we have to do another 30k person trial but with kids" but it sounds like they set the bar lower (is it safe, does it work better than chance), which requires a smaller sample. but they do a kind of a ladder of trials going down the age groups, which makes things take longer.

For anyone interested in long covid, it’s the focus of the latest briefing by the Independent SAGE panel as they’ve just published a report on it. Worth a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5YRGAk0Rdo

First 14 mins are uk-specific weekly stats then main discussion starts. I like these briefings, they do a good job of communicating the concerns of scientists to a lay audience and go into what gets (quite deliberately) left out of the government messaging. (For non-uk ppl, indie sage is a counterpart to the government’s scientific advisory group for emergencies that was set up due to concerns about the lack of transparency and, well, non-independence of sage) (also for non-uk ppl: play this video for blood sausage content like “there are people wandering the aisles of Tesco with diarrhoea and covid toes”)

Report here: https://www.independentsage.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Long-COVID_FINAL.pdf

Indie SAGE: a mix of MHRA and Public Health England with the swagger of Chris Whitty

Indie Saga: the demo who will be taking cruise holidays in a couple of decades

I want to echo Clay in a slightly different way...a few of my best friends haven't really left their houses in months, haven't seen anyone except from their porches, etc. That we're going to be in this sort of state for another 6 months to a year is fucked up, and I don't blame you for any despair.

I'll also say that as someone who had stage IIIb cancer, major surgery, and a huge new weird body thing to deal with, emerging into a pandemic has not been ideal. 2020 was the year I was supposed to see all the friends and places I missed when I couldn't in 2019.

So please, vent and share yr despair, yes. Also know that it actually can still be a distinct pleasure to be alive in this time-- do whatever you can to find that center, and try to operate from there. Even I lose focus on this at times, but it has helped me immensely.

They're vaxxed.
They're vaxxed.
My folks are fully vaxxed.

*Whistles*

https://i.ibb.co/HB2WMxj/FB-IMG-1612027039115.jpg

Seminole County FL has their shit together. They were inviting people with later appointments in early as they're AHEAD of schedule.

We got called before we were done filling out paperwork

congrats!

Here's hoping Miami-Dade gets their shit together.

'Grats, that's excellent news.

Wonderful to hear.

Congrats Neanderthal, great news indeed.

I am really glad to hear this, neanderthal! My mom is supposed to get her first dose tomorrow (congregate senior living facility in Indianapolis).

congrats caveman and extended cavefamily!

"covid toes"?

covid toe is real ppl, wake the fuck up

My mom gets her second dose this week but the email they sent that has to be printed was ridiculous - most of it was a 8000px wide image (which includes the barcode that's actually necessary). If she didn't have me to fix it, not sure how that printing would have happened.

They’re wandering the aisles of Tesco for Christ’s sake

Short for covid cameltoe iirc.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/health/coronavirus-covid-toe.html

wow, i thought i had kept up with news on this but that is the first time i've heard of "covid toes" and that article is from May! i don't know anything.

I've also spent too much time reading up on this shit and I'd never heard of it before today either.

Nobody wants to talk about the toes

I suspect a cover up, the media are in the pocket of Big Toe

It's true, they're toeing the line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UgRQ9yPaIw

My partner and I think we have covid toe at the moment. It's like chilbains, and pretty painful - an immune system thing, apparently. We're reasonably sure we had Covid last March, so not sure if this means we got it again, or what.

Haha, everyone knows about covid toe here. You see them all the time in Tesco.

do britishers all wear flipflops or something? I haven't seen anyone's toes in public since august and even then it's a socks and sandals situation among city dweller so as to not get dogshit on your heels