Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by shpalman » Fri Jul 02, 2021 3:47 pm

Italy was making noise about getting the Sputnik back when AstraZeneca was failing to deliver, before we gave up on AZ anyway and plenty of Pfizers started arriving. San Marino did buy Sputnik but their population is barely bigger than the AZ Phase III trials. Anyway, it's a similar technology to AZ (adenovirus vectors except that it's different ones in the two doses) so I wouldn't be surprised if it had similar adverse effects.

Now that the death rate has dropped right down there's a different balance regarding how many serious side-effects from the vaccine anyone is willing to accept.

The EMA said that it started a rolling review of Sputnik V in March but not whether any more data was actually submitted, of course.

See also https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regu ... evaluation
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Herainestold » Fri Jul 02, 2021 5:05 pm

tom p wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 3:19 pm
We do look at the details. Details are important. That's where the devil lies, and where you find out whether things actually work as well as claimed. And that's why nobody will be rushing to approve sputnik with undue haste.
There are already plenty of alternatives and so there is no urgent rush to stick any old stuff in our citizens.
Oh, and it is impossible to approve something that hasn't been submitted for approval. Since no Chinese or Cuban vaccines have been submitted for approval, they cannot be approved.
You will hear all about it when (if) they are ever submitted for approval. Until then, banging on about how Europe should approve them is utterly pointless.
Well, okay. I just think we should be looking at all our options, but I defer to your superior knowledge
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Herainestold » Fri Jul 02, 2021 5:09 pm

It would be nice to see some non big Pharma options. It just galls me to see those bastards making billions off of human tragedy.
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by shpalman » Fri Jul 02, 2021 5:11 pm

Vaxzevria was already the plucky underdog with AstraZeneca not your usual vaccine manufacturer agreeing to do it not-for-profit.

How did that work out?

When you're talking about vaccinating the entire population of the world it needs to be big f.cking somebody.
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by WFJ » Fri Jul 02, 2021 5:26 pm

Herainestold wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 5:09 pm
It would be nice to see some non big Pharma options. It just galls me to see those bastards making billions off of human tragedy.
BioNTech are not Big Pharma. But, as a small biotech firm, they cannot handle the manufacture and distribution necessary to supply a large fraction of the world's population with vaccine, so partnered with Pfizer to get the vaccines out.

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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Herainestold » Fri Jul 02, 2021 6:55 pm

shpalman wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 5:11 pm
Vaxzevria was already the plucky underdog with AstraZeneca not your usual vaccine manufacturer agreeing to do it not-for-profit.

How did that work out?

When you're talking about vaccinating the entire population of the world it needs to be big f.cking somebody.
You need lots of options because you don't know which one is going to work out. What happened to Merck and Glaxo's vaccines?
Covishield ( the other AZ that lpm got) looked like it was doing okay, but they need every dose in India.

Find one that works and then scale it up.
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by sTeamTraen » Fri Jul 02, 2021 10:08 pm

Herainestold wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 6:55 pm
Find one that works and then scale it up.
Please show us how you "scale something up" - anything at all - to the billions.

A glass vial that holds 5 doses of the Pfizer vaccine weighs about 20g. To give two doses to 7 billion people you need 56,000 tons of surgical-grade glass. You can't get that from Amazon your local artisan glassblower.

I think we need to accept that only large commercial companies could have built this. Pfizer invested a lot of money and will make a lot of profit, but in the process they will have saved millions of lives, and I don't begrudge the shareholders their gains.

Of course, the trick is to have them pay their taxes so the right infrastructure is in place for this agility to run on top of: Schools and universities to produce skilled workers, roads to transport stuff, fibres to send the data. And I'm sure Pfizer has several evil ways to pay as little tax as possible. But we need Big Pharma, because it's a big part of our ability to keep people healthy and with a reasonable quality of life into old age. (Conflict of interest declaration: I am 60, have been hospitalised urgently twice in the last 10 years, and am starting to get arthritic twinges.)
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Gfamily » Fri Jul 02, 2021 10:44 pm

As an aside, I have eye drops that hopefully will stop be developing glaucoma.
Clearly, the bnf prescription cost isn't just the cost of making the active ingredient, but if it was, it would be about £100,000,000 for a litre of the stuff.

Now, it's come out of patent protection now; but its still about £25,000,000 per litre. Making this stuff suitable for mass distribution isn't cheap
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Millennie Al » Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:00 am

Herainestold wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 5:09 pm
It would be nice to see some non big Pharma options. It just galls me to see those bastards making billions off of human tragedy.
What amazes me is the colossal ingratitude towards organisations which save so many lives. Are treatments which save so many not worth a few pounds each?

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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Millennie Al » Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:05 am

sTeamTraen wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 10:08 pm
Of course, the trick is to have them pay their taxes so the right infrastructure is in place for this agility to run on top of: Schools and universities to produce skilled workers, roads to transport stuff, fibres to send the data. And I'm sure Pfizer has several evil ways to pay as little tax as possible.
Well, in the UK taxes on this kind of vaccine are irrelevant. They are paid for out of public money, so any tax is merely money that is paid only to be returned in tax. Might as well just negotiate a bulk discount. For vaccines which are pad for by the recipient, then taxes can be meaningfully levied to make the recpients pay towards whatever the government likes to spend money on.

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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Herainestold » Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:43 am

sTeamTraen wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 10:08 pm
Herainestold wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 6:55 pm
Find one that works and then scale it up.
Please show us how you "scale something up" - anything at all - to the billions.

A glass vial that holds 5 doses of the Pfizer vaccine weighs about 20g. To give two doses to 7 billion people you need 56,000 tons of surgical-grade glass. You can't get that from Amazon your local artisan glassblower.

I think we need to accept that only large commercial companies could have built this. Pfizer invested a lot of money and will make a lot of profit, but in the process they will have saved millions of lives, and I don't begrudge the shareholders their gains.

Of course, the trick is to have them pay their taxes so the right infrastructure is in place for this agility to run on top of: Schools and universities to produce skilled workers, roads to transport stuff, fibres to send the data. And I'm sure Pfizer has several evil ways to pay as little tax as possible. But we need Big Pharma, because it's a big part of our ability to keep people healthy and with a reasonable quality of life into old age. (Conflict of interest declaration: I am 60, have been hospitalised urgently twice in the last 10 years, and am starting to get arthritic twinges.)
Well, yeah, that is the trick isnt it? You need to make billions of doses.

I would like to see some non capitalistic countries take something like the Cuban Abdala vaccine, 92% efficacy and produce it in scale for the developing world, and the developed world as well if we want it. It would help vaccine acceptance if it came from a non Big Pharma source.
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Martin_B » Sat Jul 03, 2021 2:55 am

Herainestold wrote:
Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:43 am
Well, yeah, that is the trick isnt it? You need to make billions of doses.

I would like to see some non capitalistic countries take something like the Cuban Abdala vaccine, 92% efficacy and produce it in scale for the developing world, and the developed world as well if we want it. It would help vaccine acceptance if it came from a non Big Pharma source.
Would it, though? Big Pharma gets to be Big Pharma by developing working products. That means that they know how to conduct trials which are both auditable and meaningful. Non Big Pharma often don't know how to conduct those trials, so even if they come up with a perfect vaccine which has no side-effects, very few people are going to trust them until they conduct a trial which meets the standards we have come to accept in medical trials (the ones Big Pharma are good at conducting).

A vaccine which came out of the developing world (where generally little money is spent on R&D anyway), or even non-capitalistic countries, would probably be viewed with great suspicion by anyone (including the developing world governments, who aren't going to let just anything get injected into their people) until it gets proven to be efficacious.

So the 'perfect vaccine' company would probably have to team-up with a Big Pharma (or similar) to: a) conduct the necessary trials, and b) make and distribute the vaccine.

As WFJ said above, this has already happened; BioNTech are not Big Pharma but needed to partner with Pfizer.
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Sciolus » Sat Jul 03, 2021 9:48 am

Herainestold wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 5:09 pm
It would be nice to see some non big Pharma options. It just galls me to see those bastards making billions off of human tragedy.
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by tom p » Mon Jul 05, 2021 8:54 am

sTeamTraen wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 10:08 pm
Herainestold wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 6:55 pm
Find one that works and then scale it up.
Please show us how you "scale something up" - anything at all - to the billions.

A glass vial that holds 5 doses of the Pfizer vaccine weighs about 20g. To give two doses to 7 billion people you need 56,000 tons of surgical-grade glass. You can't get that from Amazon your local artisan glassblower.

I think we need to accept that only large commercial companies could have built this. Pfizer invested a lot of money and will make a lot of profit, but in the process they will have saved millions of lives, and I don't begrudge the shareholders their gains.

Of course, the trick is to have them pay their taxes so the right infrastructure is in place for this agility to run on top of: Schools and universities to produce skilled workers, roads to transport stuff, fibres to send the data. And I'm sure Pfizer has several evil ways to pay as little tax as possible. But we need Big Pharma, because it's a big part of our ability to keep people healthy and with a reasonable quality of life into old age. (Conflict of interest declaration: I am 60, have been hospitalised urgently twice in the last 10 years, and am starting to get arthritic twinges.)
One of their attempted ways was to use some of the 10s of billions profit they made from Viagra to buy the Irish Pharma Co Elan Pharma. They then tried to turn it into something called a reverse takeover, by transferring their HQ from USA to Ireland (ie making Elan Pharma's HQ their official global HQ) to take advantage of Ireland's obscenely low corporation tax. The US government banned them from doing so, which was pleasantly surprising.

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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by tom p » Mon Jul 05, 2021 9:24 am

Herainestold wrote:
Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:43 am
sTeamTraen wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 10:08 pm
Herainestold wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 6:55 pm
Find one that works and then scale it up.
Please show us how you "scale something up" - anything at all - to the billions.

A glass vial that holds 5 doses of the Pfizer vaccine weighs about 20g. To give two doses to 7 billion people you need 56,000 tons of surgical-grade glass. You can't get that from Amazon your local artisan glassblower.

I think we need to accept that only large commercial companies could have built this. Pfizer invested a lot of money and will make a lot of profit, but in the process they will have saved millions of lives, and I don't begrudge the shareholders their gains.

Of course, the trick is to have them pay their taxes so the right infrastructure is in place for this agility to run on top of: Schools and universities to produce skilled workers, roads to transport stuff, fibres to send the data. And I'm sure Pfizer has several evil ways to pay as little tax as possible. But we need Big Pharma, because it's a big part of our ability to keep people healthy and with a reasonable quality of life into old age. (Conflict of interest declaration: I am 60, have been hospitalised urgently twice in the last 10 years, and am starting to get arthritic twinges.)
Well, yeah, that is the trick isnt it? You need to make billions of doses.

I would like to see some non capitalistic countries take something like the Cuban Abdala vaccine, 92% efficacy and produce it in scale for the developing world, and the developed world as well if we want it. It would help vaccine acceptance if it came from a non Big Pharma source.
I understand your gut reaction about big pharma making big profits from a pandemic; however I have come to the conclusion that actually having companies* making medicines is the best scenario.
The reason for this is that there is no motive for the regulator to hide side effects or lack of efficacy that way.
We need regulators to be entirely independent of manufacturers as the only way of ensuring this. We already saw how HMG was able to lean on the MHRA to persuade them to rush the approval of AZ's vaccine (even though it inevitably led to some antivaxxers using this as a stick to bash the vaccines with) in order to score cheap political points & permit Johnsons to repeatedly lie about Britain having left the EU being the cause of how well-vaccinated the UK is. If the government was making the Oxford vaccine, do you think for one second that Johnson's office wouldn't be on the blower to the MHRA daily, trying to get them to downplay the side effects? I know the MHRA would try and resist, and there would definitely be leaks from the very good people who work there if there were such a request made; but I would stake my mortgage that in this alternative reality, the pressure would be there.
Regarding profit, the likes of Pfizer (and other manufacturers who have been subcontracted to make these vaccines) didn't just have factories lying around idle, with highly skilled & paid workers sitting around twiddling their thumbs. They were making something else & then they switched to these vaccines. So they lost out on the profits from those other medicines in order to make this one. If they don't make profits, their share price falls & then venture capitalist scumbags swoop, buy it cheaper than it should be and gut the company and make a quick buck. The governments in the countries where they are headquartered could have said that any pharma company supplying vaccines at a reduced cost would have been protected from takeover for n years, but they didn't. So it's ultimately the people's fault for not electing intelligent compassionate governments willing to use the powers of the state to intervene to prevent inequitable outcomes.


*they don't have to be big pharma companies, and they don't have to be capitalist institutions - they could be workers cooperatives**; however they do have to be at least biggish in order to afford all the equipment necessary to safely & reliably manufacture medicines & to perform all the post-authorisation safety monitoring; and if they come up with a very successful medicine, even by accident, then they will become a big pharma company by dint of having to build more factories and employ more people.
**In practice, however, there's going to be a lot of capitalism involved because it requires a lot of capital. It costs at least $250 million and (normally) 10-15 years to bring a medicine to market from first discovery to selling the first dose. That's necessary to ensure the safety and efficacy of medicines. With the best will in the world, I don't think that there are many workers cooperatives that can afford that sort of money, unless the workers include F1 drivers, premier league footballers & hedge fund managers; but their expertise in drug discovery & pharmaceutical development is necessarily rather limited.

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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by noggins » Mon Jul 05, 2021 4:31 pm

Millennie Al wrote:
Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:00 am
Herainestold wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 5:09 pm
It would be nice to see some non big Pharma options. It just galls me to see those bastards making billions off of human tragedy.
What amazes me is the colossal ingratitude towards organisations which save so many lives. Are treatments which save so many not worth a few pounds each?
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Vertigowooyay » Mon Jul 05, 2021 7:25 pm

Millennie Al wrote:
Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:00 am
Herainestold wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 5:09 pm
It would be nice to see some non big Pharma options. It just galls me to see those bastards making billions off of human tragedy.
What amazes me is the colossal ingratitude towards organisations which save so many lives. Are treatments which save so many not worth a few pounds each?
Not to mention that there’s far more money to be made in treating a disease rather than preventing it in the first place. If vaccines are part of an evil business plan, it’s not a good one.
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Herainestold » Mon Jul 05, 2021 7:54 pm

noggins wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 4:31 pm
Millennie Al wrote:
Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:00 am
Herainestold wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 5:09 pm
It would be nice to see some non big Pharma options. It just galls me to see those bastards making billions off of human tragedy.
What amazes me is the colossal ingratitude towards organisations which save so many lives. Are treatments which save so many not worth a few pounds each?
Herainestold is bizzaro-sheldrake
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Herainestold » Tue Jul 06, 2021 2:57 am

tom p wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 9:24 am
Herainestold wrote:
Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:43 am
sTeamTraen wrote:
Fri Jul 02, 2021 10:08 pm


Please show us how you "scale something up" - anything at all - to the billions.

A glass vial that holds 5 doses of the Pfizer vaccine weighs about 20g. To give two doses to 7 billion people you need 56,000 tons of surgical-grade glass. You can't get that from Amazon your local artisan glassblower.

I think we need to accept that only large commercial companies could have built this. Pfizer invested a lot of money and will make a lot of profit, but in the process they will have saved millions of lives, and I don't begrudge the shareholders their gains.

Of course, the trick is to have them pay their taxes so the right infrastructure is in place for this agility to run on top of: Schools and universities to produce skilled workers, roads to transport stuff, fibres to send the data. And I'm sure Pfizer has several evil ways to pay as little tax as possible. But we need Big Pharma, because it's a big part of our ability to keep people healthy and with a reasonable quality of life into old age. (Conflict of interest declaration: I am 60, have been hospitalised urgently twice in the last 10 years, and am starting to get arthritic twinges.)
Well, yeah, that is the trick isnt it? You need to make billions of doses.

I would like to see some non capitalistic countries take something like the Cuban Abdala vaccine, 92% efficacy and produce it in scale for the developing world, and the developed world as well if we want it. It would help vaccine acceptance if it came from a non Big Pharma source.
I understand your gut reaction about big pharma making big profits from a pandemic; however I have come to the conclusion that actually having companies* making medicines is the best scenario.
The reason for this is that there is no motive for the regulator to hide side effects or lack of efficacy that way.
We need regulators to be entirely independent of manufacturers as the only way of ensuring this. We already saw how HMG was able to lean on the MHRA to persuade them to rush the approval of AZ's vaccine (even though it inevitably led to some antivaxxers using this as a stick to bash the vaccines with) in order to score cheap political points & permit Johnsons to repeatedly lie about Britain having left the EU being the cause of how well-vaccinated the UK is. If the government was making the Oxford vaccine, do you think for one second that Johnson's office wouldn't be on the blower to the MHRA daily, trying to get them to downplay the side effects? I know the MHRA would try and resist, and there would definitely be leaks from the very good people who work there if there were such a request made; but I would stake my mortgage that in this alternative reality, the pressure would be there.
Regarding profit, the likes of Pfizer (and other manufacturers who have been subcontracted to make these vaccines) didn't just have factories lying around idle, with highly skilled & paid workers sitting around twiddling their thumbs. They were making something else & then they switched to these vaccines. So they lost out on the profits from those other medicines in order to make this one. If they don't make profits, their share price falls & then venture capitalist scumbags swoop, buy it cheaper than it should be and gut the company and make a quick buck. The governments in the countries where they are headquartered could have said that any pharma company supplying vaccines at a reduced cost would have been protected from takeover for n years, but they didn't. So it's ultimately the people's fault for not electing intelligent compassionate governments willing to use the powers of the state to intervene to prevent inequitable outcomes.


*they don't have to be big pharma companies, and they don't have to be capitalist institutions - they could be workers cooperatives**; however they do have to be at least biggish in order to afford all the equipment necessary to safely & reliably manufacture medicines & to perform all the post-authorisation safety monitoring; and if they come up with a very successful medicine, even by accident, then they will become a big pharma company by dint of having to build more factories and employ more people.
**In practice, however, there's going to be a lot of capitalism involved because it requires a lot of capital. It costs at least $250 million and (normally) 10-15 years to bring a medicine to market from first discovery to selling the first dose. That's necessary to ensure the safety and efficacy of medicines. With the best will in the world, I don't think that there are many workers cooperatives that can afford that sort of money, unless the workers include F1 drivers, premier league footballers & hedge fund managers; but their expertise in drug discovery & pharmaceutical development is necessarily rather limited.
tomp, what do you think about the Cuban pharmaceutical industry and their vaccines? The Cubans are known throughout the devel;oping world for their medical aid and expertise. They have produced several vaccines and tested them and are administering them to their own populations. Do you think they would be able to get WHO approval for them? Would their manufacturing plants pass muster? Could they be an alternative to big Pharma produced vaccines? Or will the capitalists keep them on the sidelines?
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by tom p » Tue Jul 06, 2021 8:31 am

Well, the WHO don't really approve medicines as such. They give an opinion, rather than an authorisation (the terminology is often misused); but many poorer countries rely on that and treat it like an approval.
I don't know enough about Cuba's medicines manufacturing facilities to be able to offer an opinion, but I have heard that their biotech industry is producing fascinating results and, having been partly cut off from much of the rest of the world, they often approach things from a different angle to European/US researchers.
If they had a proven good enough vaccine & could produce enough of it, then I don't think that anyone other than the merkins would hesitate to have it. I suspect they are presently just about able to produce enough for their own people & then will spread out to the rest of the world in due course. Presumably they will offer it to their neighbours first, in line with their standard foreign policy of swapping healthcare services for goods.

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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Chris Preston » Tue Jul 06, 2021 9:54 am

The Soberana 02 vaccine is reported by Cuban authorities as 62% effective after 2 doses. It has received emergency approval in Cuba. The Abdala vaccine is reported by Cuban authorities as 92% effective after 3 doses. I can't find that it has received local emergency approval yet.

No data has been made available about either vaccine yet. There will be challenges to get countries with access to other vaccines to choose a three dose schedule at the outset, given there will be a requirement for a booster to deal with variants.

Papua New Guinea is stalling approving the Sinopharm vaccine, because it sees the opportunity to get more of the Astra Zeneca vaccine manufactured in Australia, as Australia moves away from that vaccine.
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by jdc » Tue Jul 06, 2021 4:21 pm

Chris Preston wrote:
Tue Jul 06, 2021 9:54 am
The Soberana 02 vaccine is reported by Cuban authorities as 62% effective after 2 doses. It has received emergency approval in Cuba. The Abdala vaccine is reported by Cuban authorities as 92% effective after 3 doses. I can't find that it has received local emergency approval yet.

No data has been made available about either vaccine yet. There will be challenges to get countries with access to other vaccines to choose a three dose schedule at the outset, given there will be a requirement for a booster to deal with variants.

Papua New Guinea is stalling approving the Sinopharm vaccine, because it sees the opportunity to get more of the Astra Zeneca vaccine manufactured in Australia, as Australia moves away from that vaccine.
I found this which said they'd vaccinated (1st dose) nearly 20% of the population https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-07- ... id-19.html
Moya, who has closely followed the development of the Cuban formulas, said the Cuban state medicine regulator CECMED would soon approve the emergency use of Soberana 02 and Abdala, which is named after a poem by Cuban leader José Martí. The two vaccines, however, are already being administered on the island as part of an “intervention study in populations and territories at high risk” of Covid-19, said Moya. As of June 19, 2,244,336 people in Cuba had received at least one dose of the country’s vaccine candidates, the equivalent of 19.9% of the population.
It also says participants in the phase 3 trial of soberana 02 will receive a third dose (though they don't make clear whether of soberana 02 or soberana plus - I think the phase 2 trial tested both as the third dose for participants and found plus better than 02).

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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Herainestold » Wed Jul 07, 2021 2:26 am

Heartening to see an alternative to big Pharma vaccines.
Neither Abdala nor Soberana 02 needs specialist refrigeration, but people may need to be given three doses of them.

That the 11-million-strong island is the leader in the regional vaccine race has raised some eyebrows, but Cuba has a strong reputation for vaccinology, says Helen Yaffe at the University of Glasgow, UK, who studies Cuba's biotech history.

Cuba has eliminated five diseases through vaccination… polio, diphtheria, measles, rubella and whooping cough. Every year, it exports hundreds of millions of vaccine doses to more than 40 countries. Its biotech sector, which was set up by former president Fidel Castro, receives plenty of investment and is based on a collaborative model directed at public need rather than profit. “The different institutes don't compete for resources and information, they share them and coordinate between themselves,” says Yaffe.

If Cuba succeeds in its efforts, it could bring much relief to the wider region, which is facing a scarcity of jabs while reporting 1 in 3 global covid-19 deaths. On 1 May, it was announced that there would be delays to manufacturing the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in Central and South America.

However, if Cuba's vaccines aren't approved, or aren't effective, it would be a disaster. Cuba isn't engaged in negotiations with international pharmaceutical companies or with COVAX, a scheme co-led by the World Health Organization to help all nations who sign up to acquire vaccines (see page 8).

1.7 million Number of people in Cuba who will receive its Abdala vaccine

Dagmar García Rivera at the Finlay Vaccine Institute in Cuba, which developed Soberana 02, is confident that the high-risk strategy will pay off. “Betting on the development of our own vaccines rather than buying them was a strategic decision supported by the scientific and technological development of the Cuban biotechnology industry, and at the moment, we are on the way to prove that it was a wise one,” she says.
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8139812/
Masking forever
Putin is a monster.
Russian socialism will rise again

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bob sterman
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by bob sterman » Thu Jul 08, 2021 4:01 pm

Herainestold wrote:
Wed Jul 07, 2021 2:26 am
Heartening to see an alternative to big Pharma vaccines.
Things not going so well for the other "non-capitalist" vaccine programme...

Lead Sinovac vaccine scientist in Indonesia dies of suspected Covid-19, media say
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/08/asia ... index.html

Herainestold
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Re: Is it all over for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

Post by Herainestold » Thu Jul 08, 2021 4:22 pm

bob sterman wrote:
Thu Jul 08, 2021 4:01 pm
Herainestold wrote:
Wed Jul 07, 2021 2:26 am
Heartening to see an alternative to big Pharma vaccines.
Things not going so well for the other "non-capitalist" vaccine programme...

Lead Sinovac vaccine scientist in Indonesia dies of suspected Covid-19, media say
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/08/asia ... index.html
We are seeing that the vaccines, although effective, are the not the miracles they were promoted to be.
Over confidence in one of the tools in our kit, is causing us to neglect the others. We know what they are and we are going to have to use all of them to naviagate the coming years.
Masking forever
Putin is a monster.
Russian socialism will rise again

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