Why am I not surprised?
I hope that the points you made earlier about vaccine safety will be widely reported in the media. The first vaccine will carry at least some safety risks. I myself always get vaccines, but even I don’t like this “rush to market” approach when it comes to stuff that’s going to be injected into my body. The process takes time for a reason.
No, he didn’t. Semantics. Well, I was paraphrasing, not quoting. To me, “cautiously optimistic” normally means you’re pretty darn confident, just not 100%. Hence, “likely”.
Hard to get that when you read it in context.
Given that the body can make a good response against coronavirus, we feel cautiously optimistic that if we mimic safely natural infection with our vaccine, we will be able to induce a response in a person that would be equivalent to the response that natural infection induces.
And:
You can have everything you think that’s in place and you don’t induce the kind of immune response that turns out to be protective and durably protective. So one of the big unknowns is, will it be effective? Given the way the body responds to viruses of this type, I’m cautiously optimistic that we will with one of the candidates get an efficacy signal.
Here are some more comprehensive remarks on the topic:
STAT: In a recent interview with the Financial Times Merck CEO Ken Frazier—which you have made—that we could have Covid-19 vaccines within 12 to 18 months. Merck has a ton of experience developing vaccines. Are you at all worried that expectations for the timeline to vaccines have been set too high?
Fauci: I am not really very concerned about the timetable of this for the following reasons.
The general trend on the part of the pharmaceutical companies, because of the enormous investment that goes into the development of a vaccine, is that you don’t go to the next step until you’re fairly certain that the step you’re in is going to be successful. The other thing is you don’t start manufacturing anything until you have a pretty good idea that you have a successful efficacy signal. That protracts out the time frame. But what we’re doing is something that’s called developing “at risk.”
What it means is that at the same time you’re finishing your Phase 1 trial, you’re preparing your Phase 3 trial sites, which is very expensive, and then you’re starting to manufacture the vaccine even before you know it works. All of that cuts months off.
We’re now completing the Phase 1 [with the Moderna vaccine]. The initial data look very promising from the neutralizing antibody standpoint. And so they’re planning to start the Phase 3 in the first week or so of July. Not only with the Moderna vaccine, but also very likely with the AstraZeneca vaccine. And then as we get later into the summer, we’ll get the Johnson & Johnson in clinical trials.
You need a few months at least of having vaccinated individuals getting exposed. So let’s say it’s July, August, September, October. By November, you should have an efficacy signal.
If you do and you’re already manufacturing doses, by December and January, if you’re lucky and if in fact it is effective, you can have a significant number of doses available by the end of the year, the beginning of 2021. So I think it’s aspirational, but it’s certainly doable.
The only thing that’s the big unknown to me is that, is it going to be effective? I think we could do it within the time frame that I’ve outlined. But there’s no guarantee that it’s going to be effective.
Well, let’s all hope that it does in fact work out and we can all get in line for a covid shot in January or March or whatever next year. But IMHO, I’m not even “cautiously” optimistic about that actually happening – taking both safety and efficacy into account.
Miracles do happen, and maybe we’ll have one. I’ll try to think positive.
“As much as I hate working at home, I think that working in a shared indoor space is the most dangerous thing we do,” said Sally Picciotto of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the 18 percent of respondents who said they expected to wait at least a year before returning to the office.
Completely agree with her - working in the office is like going everyday to a restaurant and eating inside for 8 hours - good chance you will get infected over time
With no negative connotations intended, I have to say I got a chuckle (which is a nice thing lately) out of envisioning a restaurant patron eating continuously for eight hours straight every day! Same place? Guinness Book of Records…
The longest time I’ve spent at a table in a restaurant was six hours. And we were on the patio.
Sweden has had 48 deaths per 100,000 to date, which is fewer than Belgium, Italy, Spain, or the UK and only slightly more than France.
On the other hand, that’s higher than almost every other country in the world.
Sweden’s approach isn’t really working if you for example compare it to its neighbors. And most reports indicate that their seroprevalence isn’t much higher than other countries. In addition, pretty much every virologists you can discuss with doesn’t expect that any country will get “rid” of Covid-19 by herd immunity without vaccine. (It might only happen if we don’t have a vaccine in 3-4 years)
It’s a clear indication how bad it is going in Sweden when even their top epidemiologist, who came up with their current approach, says now that they wouldn’t do it again as it causes too much death compared to any possible advantage
I don’t think that anyone is going to know the best strategy other than in hindsight. Eventually we’ll reach herd immunity, with or without a vaccine, and at that point covid will likely join influenza and pneumonia as diseases that kill tens of thousands of people every year in the US – but nowhere near 100,000 or more.
Also, we’ll hopefully have learned, as Sweden has painfully found (not to mention Italy with its many free-lance care homes), to better shield the very frail elderly, especially those in nursing homes, when an outbreak with any deadly potential begins.
Nobody knows the best strategy but Sweden’s strategy was obviously one of the worst possible and it was clear from the beginning.
That is the interesting question - since Covid-19 is quite different than an influence virus there might be a realistic possibility that even with a vaccine (which might help only for short periods of time) this disease might have significantly deeper impact in the future compared to influenza etc.
But this is only Covid-19 specific - other pandemics will have other age distributions, e.g. Spanish flu had the least impact on the elderly
Whether Sweden’s strategy was worse will probably be impossible to say until there are ample supplies of a safe, effective vaccine.
Denmark’s recent random antibody test found 2%.
Is that how you read this?
Q: It’s obvious that everything hasn’t gone as well as it could have. What would have made the situation better?
A: It is obvious that it could have been better. And that comes down to social distancing. If you close society and don’t let people our for six, eight, ten weeks you will have a more obvious social distancing than otherwise.
But I think the fundamental strategy has worked well. I can’t see how we could have acted in a totally different way. Of course there are details which you can think about, and we do that continuously. We have also made small changes all the time, and will certainly continue to do so.
Q: Will what you are saying now affect the future strategy?
A: No, we still have very good grounds for the social distancing efforts that have been taken, and that have had effect. We have stayed on a level which has made it possible to have a good health service and so on. Now we and others are working on improving the situation for the care for the elderly.
Q: So the decisions taken by you and the Public Health Agency at the start of the pandemic, you still stand by them?
A: Based on the knowledge we had then we are still in agreement that the decisions that were taken were adequate. Based on the knowledge we had then.
The third part is about Toto.
The low percentage of people presenting covid antibodies in tests is really surprising, given the total number of clinically identified cases.
Best Case Scenario: It turns out by September 2020 that 80% of our population has already had the covid without even knowing it! Which would mean we have “herd immunity” to it, at least as good as with colds, and we can return to the living. Additionally, a vaccine that’s tantamount to curing the common cold becomes available in January 2021, and then every single person in the US (all 330,000,000 of us) get the shot right away. While waiting in line 6 ft apart.
That’s the best case scenario.
I am not sure what you are smoking or drinking but I want some if that stuff
That whole paragraph was intended to be both facetious and sarcastic. Which I would think would seem obvious.
Less than 10% of the US population have been infected so far, and it’s ludicrous to think that we’ll reach 80% in two more months. Also, there’s no way that all of the additional 70% would would be asymptomatic. And the people suggesting that we’ll have a vaccine ready to go by January are the ones smoking something or drinking too much, IMO. Even if that miraculously happened and we had all the doses needed, the logistics of getting everyone in the country inoculated would take months, at least – and not everyone will even want to get the shot. But in fantasy-land, all of the above represent the best case scenario.
I was mainly responding to the curiously low percentage of people with antibodies in Denmark. I’d think it would be more like 8-10%, at least.
Sorry but you wrote some stuff before which was highly questionable that it wasn’t clear if this comment was serious or not.
It’s highly unlikely that on average 10% of the population in the US have already antibodies (beside in a few hotspots). Somewhere between 2-5% sounds reasonable from the currently available data (in addition there is also some (early) data emerging that for some people antibody titer could be quite short lived)
I read today that the federal government is considering “pool testing”, a mode that I hadn’t heard of before. It sounds interesting, but I still think that randomized testing is a better way to go.
Pool testing will be necessary to cover a large number of people. You put multiple samples (often 8-10) in the same testing well and you only deconvolute if there is a positive readout. If the overall well is negative you know that all 8-10 samples were negative and you saved 7-9 wells (and time).
