Article on vaccine disaster
https://archive.vn/Andgp
About changing mRNA vaccine doses:
Marrie Richards asks this: “It’s been argued that, in order to have enough vaccine to get more people immunized at least once, we should skip the booster shot. Is this a good idea?”
Several things have been proposed to stretch the vaccine supply: delaying the second shot; or cutting the dose in half for both the first shot and the booster; and even just giving a single shot, one and done.
The data is not robust enough to support implementing any of those. All those proposals are based on post hoc analysis of the Phase Three trials or looks at only Phase One data. To my mind, it just puts an added risk to the program without adequate evidence of benefits.
Let’s take the proposals one by one, starting with the single dose. All we know, right now, today, is that a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine will give you a modest level of protection for three weeks. It’s not very much protection. Looking at the virus neutralizing the antibody data, I would have said none, because it’s really between none and modest. So that proposal is a non-starter.
With delaying the dose, there’s the same risk. You’re just going to get people who get COVID.
Halving the dose is based on not a lot of data, from the early Phase One and Phase Two trials, that shows, “Yeah, there may be some merit to it, but it won’t be as good as the current vaccine.”
So my question is, why would you do that? All you would do is take a dysfunctional, unworkable vaccine infrastructure, which is what we have now, and instead of a least giving people hope that it’s delivering a good vaccine, you’d give them a crummy vaccine. A crummy vaccine on top of a crummy infrastructure is a non-starter. The answer’s no.
If you look at most of the people who are tossing out these ideas, they’re not vaccine scientists. They’re smart immunologists and infectious disease docs. They like the intellectual challenge of looking at the data and sort of speculating out loud. But from my perspective, it’s not a viable approach.
So what do you do? Well, one, you have to fix the infrastructure. And also, we’re going to need more vaccine.
This gets to the problem of the mRNA vaccines. We were never supposed to rely solely on the mRNA vaccines. It’s not a mature technology. It doesn’t have the capacity to do the job. We’ve known that for the whole year of 2020.
That was the whole rationale behind Operation Warp Speed: The mRNAs would be the first to get up, but then we would have later vaccines come along that are more robust in terms of production and the ability to vaccinate large numbers of people. That’s why you have the two adenovirus-based vaccines and the particle vaccines: They were they were supposed to be the worker bees on this. The mRNA was to get started, and then the others would follow it.
Our lab has a recombinant protein vaccine, and we’re scaling up to a billion doses. If the U.S. needs vaccine, you could bring our vaccine in from India, to do this. But don’t play games with the mRNA vaccine.
Not only does the proposal fail for scientific scientific reasons, it’ll also undermine public confidence, and a lot of the public is already skittish. If they see our leaders monkeying around with doses and intervals and things like that, the whole thing will fall apart. The people who are touting this idea are oblivious to public perception around vaccines. They don’t really understand how quickly a vaccine can be voted off the island.
https://archive.vn/Andgp
About changing mRNA vaccine doses:
Marrie Richards asks this: “It’s been argued that, in order to have enough vaccine to get more people immunized at least once, we should skip the booster shot. Is this a good idea?”
Several things have been proposed to stretch the vaccine supply: delaying the second shot; or cutting the dose in half for both the first shot and the booster; and even just giving a single shot, one and done.
The data is not robust enough to support implementing any of those. All those proposals are based on post hoc analysis of the Phase Three trials or looks at only Phase One data. To my mind, it just puts an added risk to the program without adequate evidence of benefits.
Let’s take the proposals one by one, starting with the single dose. All we know, right now, today, is that a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine will give you a modest level of protection for three weeks. It’s not very much protection. Looking at the virus neutralizing the antibody data, I would have said none, because it’s really between none and modest. So that proposal is a non-starter.
With delaying the dose, there’s the same risk. You’re just going to get people who get COVID.
Halving the dose is based on not a lot of data, from the early Phase One and Phase Two trials, that shows, “Yeah, there may be some merit to it, but it won’t be as good as the current vaccine.”
So my question is, why would you do that? All you would do is take a dysfunctional, unworkable vaccine infrastructure, which is what we have now, and instead of a least giving people hope that it’s delivering a good vaccine, you’d give them a crummy vaccine. A crummy vaccine on top of a crummy infrastructure is a non-starter. The answer’s no.
If you look at most of the people who are tossing out these ideas, they’re not vaccine scientists. They’re smart immunologists and infectious disease docs. They like the intellectual challenge of looking at the data and sort of speculating out loud. But from my perspective, it’s not a viable approach.
So what do you do? Well, one, you have to fix the infrastructure. And also, we’re going to need more vaccine.
This gets to the problem of the mRNA vaccines. We were never supposed to rely solely on the mRNA vaccines. It’s not a mature technology. It doesn’t have the capacity to do the job. We’ve known that for the whole year of 2020.
That was the whole rationale behind Operation Warp Speed: The mRNAs would be the first to get up, but then we would have later vaccines come along that are more robust in terms of production and the ability to vaccinate large numbers of people. That’s why you have the two adenovirus-based vaccines and the particle vaccines: They were they were supposed to be the worker bees on this. The mRNA was to get started, and then the others would follow it.
Our lab has a recombinant protein vaccine, and we’re scaling up to a billion doses. If the U.S. needs vaccine, you could bring our vaccine in from India, to do this. But don’t play games with the mRNA vaccine.
Not only does the proposal fail for scientific scientific reasons, it’ll also undermine public confidence, and a lot of the public is already skittish. If they see our leaders monkeying around with doses and intervals and things like that, the whole thing will fall apart. The people who are touting this idea are oblivious to public perception around vaccines. They don’t really understand how quickly a vaccine can be voted off the island.
