Tag: Vaccines

Data Emerging about Effect of Israel’s Vaccination Effort

Israel currently leads the world in per-capita COVID-19 vaccination by a wide margin. As of this writing, Israel has administered 46.7 doses per 100 people, compared to second-place United Arab Emirates at 27.1 doses per 100 population. The United States, in comparison, has only administered 7.1 doses per 100 people.

Initial reports from Israel suggest the vaccine is preventing both new infections and new hospitalizations.

A preliminary study by Israeli HMO Maccabi showed that only 20 people out of 128,600 who received both shots of the Pfizer vaccine had become infected with COIVD-19. None of those cases were severe enough to require hospitalization.

According to Maccabi’s experts this is preliminary data but the numbers are very encouraging,” Maccabi said in a statement.

“Maccabi reports that out of the 20 people infected, 50% suffer from chronic illnesses. All patients experienced a mild illness with symptoms including headaches, cough, weakness or fatigue. No-one was hospitalized or suffered from a fever above 38.5C. Most patients tested for COVID-19 due to exposure to a verified patient,” it said.”

All Four Nurses in Coffey County, Kansas Health Department Refuse to Administer COVID-19 Vaccines

This is shameful.

The woman speaking without a mask is Coffee County, Kansas, Health Department administrator Lindsay Payer informing the Coffey County Board of Commissioners that they will have to pay to hire contract nurses to administer the COVID-19 vaccine because all four of the county’s nurses refused to do so.

Payer herself spreads misinformation about the virus, comparing it to colds and the flu.

She outright lies when she claims that the vaccine was only studied in 45 people before it was approved. She is referring to the small Phase 2 study that Moderna did of its vaccine, which involved 45 people and found that the vaccine provoked an immune response in all the subjects who were given it.

That result was used to justify going forward with a Phase 3 study that began on July 27, 2020, and involved 30,000 people.

I’d be concerned if I had a relative living in Coffey County, Kansas, knowing this idiot was in charge of the County Health Department.

Public employees like Payer who do not want to do their jobs should be fired and replaced with people who will.

How the US Screwed Up Its Vaccine Rollout

The US rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine has not gone well. As of this post’s writing, the United States has only administered 3.71 doses of vaccine per 100 people.

Israel currently leads the world at 29.43 vaccine doses administered per 100 people, and even the United Kingdom is at 6.65 doses administered per 100 people.

Writing for Business Insider, Aylin Woodward suggests that US health officials spent too much time creating complex prioritization schedules to determine who could be vaccinated. Those rules, in turn, have created uncertainty and hesitancy on the part of health care providers who, in some cases, have destroyed vaccines rather than risk administering them to the “wrong” people.

Experts like Dr. Peter Hotez, a molecular virologist from Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, also argue that the complicated CDC guidelines of which Americans should have priority access, and when, have scuttled the US’s vaccination efforts.

“A massive vaccination campaign won’t work with our current fussy and intricate criteria for who gets a shot and when,” Hotez wrote in a piece for The Washington Post Monday.

Instead of hiring ethics experts to create Byzantine rules on who should get the vaccine first, the US should have hired logistics experts to create a plan to get the vaccine administered as fast as possible nationwide.

Hospital Says Employee Intentionally Destroyed Moderna Vaccines

NPR reports that an employee at Aurora Medical Center in Wisconsin intentionally destroyed almost 500 doses of the Moderna vaccine that were stored at the hospital. It looks like the employee was fired or resigned, but it’s not clear from the story what motivated the person to engage in such a senseless act of destruction.

A now-former employee at a Wisconsin medical center “intentionally removed” 57 vials of a coronavirus vaccine from refrigeration, forcing officials to throw out nearly 500 doses, according to an internal investigation.

Aurora Medical Center officials had initially suspected the Moderna vaccines, which must be kept between 36 and 46 degrees Fahrenheit, had inadvertently been left out at the Grafton hospital on Dec. 26. But an investigation found the individual “acknowledged that they intentionally removed the vaccine from refrigeration,” officials said Wednesday.

Is the FDA Dragging Its Feet on Vaccine Approval for PR Reasons?

One of the stranger episodes in a rush to get a COVID-19 vaccine is the FDA’s apparent lack of urgency to meet regarding the Emergency Use Authorization for a vaccine.

On November 20, Pfizer submitted safety and efficacy data related to its COVID-19 vaccine. Rather than schedule a prompt meeting to review the data, the FDA at that time announced it would convene on December 10 to review the data.

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine professor Marty Markary argued in The Dispatch that the delay is unnecessary,

As a Johns Hopkins scientist who has conducted more than 100 clinical studies and reviewed thousands more from the scientific community at large, I can assure you that the agency’s review can be done within 24 to 48 hours without cutting any corners. They just need to work harder.

Contrary to popular belief, the FDA process is not hands-on—it does not interview vaccine trial patients or look under a microscope at the immune cells. It’s doing a statistical analysis and looking at data. For the vaccine trial, the data set is small and straightforward. If my research team, normally tasked with analyzing data on millions of patients, was asked to review the smaller Pfizer vaccine study of 43,000 patients, it would take about one hour.

There may be very good scientific reasons to delay the review for three weeks, but Anthony Fauci has come close to saying that the delay is essential to reassure vaccine skeptics. According to a CNN story on Fauci’s comments to Fox News,

“The way the FDA is, our FDA is doing it, is the correct way,” Fauci said in an interview on Fox News.

“We really scrutinize the data very carefully to guarantee to the American public that this is a safe and efficacious vaccine,” he said.

“I think if we did any less, we would add to the already existing hesitancy on the part of many people to take the vaccine because they’re concerned about safety or they’re concerned that we went too quickly.”

. . .

“So, it’s almost a damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t, because if you go quickly and you do it superficially, people are not going to want to get vaccinated.”

Fauci initially criticized the UK for approving the Pfizer vaccine so quickly, but then walked back those claims, telling NBC News that “The Brits are good, they know what they’re doing, they’re really pros.”

Writing for Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok argues that if the delay is intended to signal that the vaccine is safe, that this is likely an approach that will fail.

If the intent is to simply reassure hestitant Americans that the vaccine is safe by unnecessarily prolonging the review period, Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution notes that this is an unconsionable practice that is unlikely to succeed.

Second, there is no guarantee that the risk averse, fearful and scientifically illiterate will be convinced by extra FDA investigation and there is plenty of evidence that they won’t be. Dozens of well-done studies have found no link between vaccines and autism. The scientific evidence that vaccines don’t cause autism is very strong. Yet many people don’t care. Moreover, I bet there is a significant overlap between those who think or fear that vaccines cause autism and those who fear a COVID vaccine. Will a few weeks of extra FDA investigation win these people over? No. More science won’t end science denialism.

Third, rather than alleviating fear, FDA delay may increase fear. People may reason, if the FDA is taking this long to review the evidence when thousands of people are dying every day it must be a hard decision. Delay also makes the vaccine less useful and less obviously useful. Thus, if vaccines come too late people will say that we were reaching herd immunity anyway and that vaccines are useless.

Trump Lies About COVID-19 Vaccine Development

In the clip below, Donald Trump lies by taking credit for the COVID-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca.

And what did I do? I came up with vaccines that people didn’t think we’d have for five years.

It is worth remembering that, unlike Trump, companies like Moderna got to work right away to try to do something about the COVID-19 outbreak. By February 24, 2020, Moderna had actually begun shipping out samples of its experimental vaccine to US government researchers.

Meanwhile, in late February 2020, Donald Trump was still trying to bullshit his way out of the pandemic, dismissing the threat of the disease by saying things like this on February 26, 2020,

. . .when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.

Trump doubled down on this statement on the following day on February 27, 2020,

It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.

The main thing Trump did through his longstanding denial and sabotaging o public health efforts is guarantee that Americans who might have lived long enough to receive a vaccine instead died prematurely from the disease.