Tavern on the Meta

12:50 AM

@M.A.R. That's fairly expensive (compared to the slightly more effective AstraZeneca), so at least the government didn't get the cheapest stuff: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccine#Efficacy biospace.com/article/…

M.A.R.

4:31 AM

@Braiam Now you wanna buy a Huawei phone from Alibaba

@MadScientist It's great! I let my body's dead Coronavirus inhabitants vibe to old music on YouTube

@Rob from my naive understanding of the subject, isn't efficacy pretty unimportant, population-wise, after a certain threshold?

Say, 85% and 88% percent efficacy shouldn't be really different in helping control the pandemic

Rob

6:52 AM

@M.A.R. The difference between 85 and 88 percent is probably quite low, the difference between 50.38 percent and 95 percent is likely important; what strikes me as most important, at this late stage, is not the effect on the original virus but the effectiveness of it against the variants (the so-called 4th wave).

M.A.R.

@Rob Eh, AFAIK there have been quite a few different trials in different countries and reporting possibly the lowest number is a bit of a bias

Though I haven't been following it really closely

The Russian vaccine got really bad press initially too, so I'm really cautious about undermining any vaccine from any country because of all the BS out there

Rob

7:07 AM

The first link in the prior comment says it was tested in Brazil; a properly conducted test should remove bias by retesting and reporting correctly. The reason that the Russian vaccine was commented on was that they tested it on 38 patients, scientists thought that a larger test would be correct.

M.A.R.

Reuters (second and third Google results) says Sinovac is effective against the new variants, the first result from a news website I'm not familiar says it "might not be"

It feels like some politicized fearmongering

@Rob Yeah, that criticism is valid, but if you go back to news articles from that time, their skepticism was hardly scientific

They had already decided that the Russian vaccine will turn you into a communism-lover or something.

Rob

Link to source

M.A.R.

Hmm?

Aibobot

@M.A.R. Its also based on fairly conventional vaccine tech, with a twist... Part of the problem though is everyone was in a bit of a rush, and a process that usually takes years took less, and there were a bunch of competing options all at once.

M.A.R.

You mean the Wikipedia link?

@Aibobot well, thing is, the reason scientists are usually afraid of things is an odd conviction to try to find an anomaly in case we might miss it. That's now how the general populace looks at it though

So when you get nutjob articles from Brietbart or what that say the vaccine killed like 30 people and they're covering it up, that's not what scientists are afraid of

When they say "We won't be sure if the vaccine won't melt your eyes in 10 years", it's because as a scientist they have to say that absolutely. Other public speakers have spoken with such certainty over the years that the public perception is often tainted. That's how I see it anyway, I'm not really a scientist yet myself

So "conventional method" schmonvential method. That's not a good or a bad thing

Aibobot

7:17 AM

Oh, more that its 'lower risk' - and well, a lot of this is nationalistic chestbeating.

M.A.R.

And about the process, AFAICT they started phases 1 and 2 together, and phases 3 and 4 together?

Aibobot

I went with whatever vaccine was offered.

M.A.R.

So I don't see why that's immediately a problem if it hasn't been till now.

Say, you start phase 1 and phase 2 of a new drug together. Phase 1 is to see if the drug kills normal people, if it's teratogenic etc., phase 2 is to see, with a largish sample size of the diseased population, if it works

If they're done together, you do run the risk of harming more people, especially that a diseased population tends to be more vulnerable to lots of harmful things

How different is the process with biologic drugs and vaccines, I dunno

But the thing is, usually there's a painstaking process where the FDA (in drugs' case) reviews all the documents gathered in a phase before you move forward, and making a drug (meaning from synthesizing it till it gets to the market, if it does) takes like 15 years, even then you have lots of drugs being recalled because the market is an unbelievably large sample size

So the morale of the story is a scientist has a moral obligation not to be sure about anything, while politicians love it if we quote numbers and stats to say "WOW, CLEARLY YOUR TEAM SUCKS"

And yet, almost certainly the danger has passed because these vaccines didn't run into a problem during their phases, even if it was simultaneous

@Aibobot They had Sputnik and Sinovac AFAICT, but I was there and even the medical personnel were saying how Sputnik must be inferior compared to Pfizer's vaccine

Aibobot

._.

M.A.R.

And a little bit of background, our government is pretty pro-communist while the people buy into lots of American propaganda, probably out of spite

Didn't people in Europe do the same thing about AstraZeneca and Pfizer's vaccine?

Aibobot

7:36 AM

Pretty much - AstraZenca did all sorts of wierd stuff in testing - like accidentally working out a smaller second dose worked better

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