The vaccine doesn’t seem to protect the people in the study (young people). Young people don’t tend to die from covid. They don’t know if it would work on older people but I would think it wouldn’t either. This doesn’t look like it actually saves lives.
The study may be early to really tell but so far there is no evidence that the vaccine works at all against the variant that is widespread in South Africa.
The trial in question was conducted on younger people who generally don't get severe cases, so they have no evidence either way on that. However, the trial showed that that the vaccine appeared to nearly completely ineffective in preventing infection:
> Nineteen of the 748 people in the group that was given the vaccine were infected with the new variant, compared with 20 out of 714 people in the group that was given a placebo.
The sample sizes here are small and the results have not been published, so it's too early to draw any major conclusions, but it certainly doesn't look great.
I think they are referring to the tests in South Africa on young people that show it has very low effectiveness against the variant that is prevalent there:
Most deaths are in over 65s. If the confidence interval on the vaccine working on over 65s is -130% to 90%, how can you possibly claim this vaccine will do anything. Their conclusions were based on data submitted by Astra Zeneca and data Astra Zeneca did not initially submit.
Breaking news this AM: South Africa just halted the use of the Astra Zeneca vaccine. It's being spun as being done because of evidence it doesn't work on the new strain. I strongly suspect once all the data is in, this vaccine will be found to be indistinguishable from placebo.
> In the AstraZeneca-Oxford trial in South Africa, roughly 2,000 participants were given either two doses of the vaccine or placebo shots.
> There was virtually no difference in the numbers of people in the vaccine and placebo groups who were infected with B.1.351, suggesting that the vaccine did little to protect against the new variant. Nineteen of the 748 people in the group that was given the vaccine were infected with the new variant, compared to 20 out of 714 people in the group that was given a placebo.
> That equates to a vaccine efficacy of 10 percent, though the scientists did not have enough statistical confidence to know for sure whether that figure would hold among more people.
The dominant strain of Covid in South Africa is different and existing vaccines are far less effective at countering due to changes in the spike protein which these vaccines target. The effectiveness against this strain is not 60-80% as it is against the other strains but below 50% which was the standard the WHO chose as a acceptable vaccine.
South Africa has limited health resources and spending them rolling out an ineffective vaccine when they have orders for the Johnson and Johnson one coming next month doesn't make sense.
Test subjects were 18-55 — I guess I wouldn't say that's exclusively "healthy young people" other than in comparison to the 80+ group which is most in danger. But we are mostly on the same page — is the cure worse (or equally bad) as the disease for the 60-70, 70-80, 80+ populations?
Even if the vaccine is not suitable for the older groups, high vaccination rates in younger people may be enough to drop the rate of infection significantly below 1.0, eventually conferring herd immunity for the immunocompromised.
There are two ways to do clinical trials on vaccine effectiveness. One is to vaccinate someone and then deliberately infect them; this gives you good data quickly, but due to the deadliness of COVID-19, this is generally regarded to not be an option. Another is to vaccinate a very large number of people and wait to see if they get sick with the virus from natural exposure. This is ongoing right now on a very large scale; millions of people have been vaccinated, and sooner or later people will come in contact with these new variants. However, it takes time to collect enough data with this approach to provide useful results, and in this case it can be confounded by the lack of a control group (you don't know how many exposure events happened that did not lead to infections).
Regardless, the current vaccination campaign is highly effective against the original - still very widespread and deadly - virus, so it's worth getting it, and as people get vaccinated with it, it will eventually be apparent whether it works against various variants as well. If it doesn't, it's likely that a booster vaccination can be developed for these variants (and indeed, Moderna has begun work, as an insurance policy, on a booster for the south african variant).
Instead, the vaccine and control groups were about the same until roughly day 10-12 after the first dose, and then dramatically diverged (though not as decisively as after dose 2).
It would be more accurate to say that currently limited findings show that all of the available vaccines have greatly reduced effectiveness against the South African variant. Given the scale of this tragedy a vaccine that has limited effect could still save a great many lives and also slow the spread.
So, you cite data showing very high efficacy of the vaccine, and are like -- look at it in a few weeks!
Omicron is going to make it worse, but even unboosted folks in South Africa seem to enjoy about 30% efficacy against infection and much higher efficacy against hospitalization and death. But your gossip trumps the data, I guess...
unfortunately the source eludes me for my paragraph, but this https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10810638/ is some light reading although it has been retracted. however, it mentions a bit about it (such as moving people from placebo to treatment cohort and using those people in the data for the treatment cohort.)
I never made the statement that this was their South Africa (or africa) study. It isn't difficult to find the CEO of Pfizer saying their vaccine was "100% effective" in africa on twitter (there was a video, as well). that was my first claim.
Then i said "Now pfizer did this a different time ..."
edit: the source eludes me because i originally saw it on my cellphone in a video (the paper) and the bullet points were being read by an asian female. I failed to bookmark/save the video, and i have a hard time chasing down research that is this controversial without a DOI or PMC due to the ... tens of thousands of papers containing the same keywords.
I'm not claiming it's "buried" or "being kept from us" or anything conspiratorial, but it never got any play on mainstream media and would obviously get shadowbanned on any large site with funding from pfizer (et al) because of the "fact checkers want you to know that the vaccine has been proven safe and effective!" modal.
but i am done for today, i have to crack some hydrogeology textbooks so i hope this stays up so i have my own reference for the next time i mention this
Yes, but it doesn't follow that someone with this vaccine is more dangerous than someone without one. The result of this study is not that this vaccine is totally useless, just that its not ideal. There is big gap between what is reported here and having nothing. Its still likely to be beneficial.
As far as I know, they don't inject people in the trial with Covid, instead they wait long enough and use statistics to asses how many should have gotten Covid by now and if they didn't attribute it to the vaccine working.
Since healthy young people are more likely to get Covid, it might be this is the fastest avenue to knowing how effective the vaccine is.
But I am not a doctor or infectious disease expert or vaccine researcher.
The vaccine doesn’t seem to protect the people in the study (young people). Young people don’t tend to die from covid. They don’t know if it would work on older people but I would think it wouldn’t either. This doesn’t look like it actually saves lives.
The study may be early to really tell but so far there is no evidence that the vaccine works at all against the variant that is widespread in South Africa.
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