@TLS Guy – Thanks for the summaries.
A long-held adage concerning large-scale Phase 3 clinical trials is that you should try your best to nail down the dosage & schedule before starting that trial. Otherwise it can cause confusion and delay. That's what has happened with the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. During the earlier smaller clinical trials, there was not time enough to realize we needed to answer such questions about vaccine doses or one vs. two injections. If that's the only price we pay for the extremely rapid clinical development of these vaccines, we will be very lucky.
It's also very lucky that the corona virus Spike protein has been so potent at stimulating an immune response.
Of course, the harder you work, the luckier you become. High praise goes to the Jenner Institute at Oxford University in the UK, as well as the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in the USA. Their decades-long efforts to develop new scientific discoveries, leading to new technologies, made possible the rapid development of these effective vaccines. The NIAID's efforts go back to the mid 1990s when a Vaccine Development Lab was created (at the direction of Anthony Faucci) to perform research on new ways to create vaccines. Their direct work, as well as the research they sponsored in other labs around the country, led to the formation of both Moderna and BioNTech as new start up R&D companies. The senior scientists behind these companies started their careers because of the NIAID research grant support 20-30 years ago.
This kind of R&D took many years before we could see any pay-off. That's how scientific progress happens. Short-sighted politicians take note!
Thank you for your kind words. I hope I did manage to condense a lot of data succinctly and pull out the chestnuts.
You are correct, without a lot of work over years from scientists in the US and UK mainly, we would not be where we are now with these vaccines. This really can not be over emphasized to our rulers, who like the captains of industry are focused on short term goals, and not the long haul.
This pandemic should be a wake up call in so many ways.
This means reducing the way we share air, as Mike Osterholm puts it. That means as job one every building needs Energy Recovery Ventilation. That means installing ERV units in ALL buildings, not just new ones. It is code here and I have one. I have it set to exchange all the air in the house every hour. I can go to 130%. The units heat incoming air with the exhausting air in the winter and reverse it in summer. My unit is 85% efficient. The ultra quiet air handler fan never shuts off. You never hear it. Also maintaining around 40% humidity year round helps. I have it 38% in the winter and 42% in the summer. The Aprilaire units, humidifier for the winter and dehumidifier for the summer keep those parameters rock steady. Dehumidifiers really help off load the AC systems and make them more efficient.
The other thing we need is skilled virus hunters stationed around the world for an early warning systems. We have a new strange evolving illness in India right now, but no International teams to do rapid analysis. The cause has not been nailed down after several days. They are not all in one town but a region around Andhra Pradesh.
546 people have been ill enough to be hospitalized and one has died. It affects people of all ages, including children. This is the sort of thing WHO needs to be nimble enough to be all over. All countries must allow access or pay severe consequences. We also need to lock down areas like that hard until the cause is found.
We need to continue research on Vaccines and certify them mainly by the technology they use. We do this with flu vaccines every year. We do not trial each new yearly batch. If we did, the way influenza undergoes antigenic mutation, they would be useless.
If we do not do this we will be going though this all over again.
Remember just because it is 102 years since the last pandemic it does not mean it will be 100 years until the next one. The chance of a new pandemic is the same one year to the next, and actually the risk is more likely than not on the increase. Changes need to be made and promptly. We can not let this happen again.
Before closing there have been two severe allergic reactions to the Pfizer vaccine in two NHS staff in the UK. Both had to be given adrenalin. So this sounds like an anaphylactic reaction. Both subjects have a known propensity for this, and both routinely carry adrenalin. There is a lesson here, as an allergic history was an exclusion criterion for entering the Pfizer study. So be careful not to have your exclusions too broad. This should have been known before release in my view. So the UK have made a history of severe allergies an exclusion to receiving the vaccine. So what other shoes will drop?
