CV19 - Cure worse than the disease? (Vol 5)
Discussion
In view of the reservations that exist over both the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, surely it's only sensible and pragmatic leadership for every MP and their family to publicly receive it, observed by true independents. That could be quickly followed by anyone else that tells us what to do - so start with Council heads, Police chiefs, NHS Directors and Consultants, etc, then work down.
It would be mandatory for them to have the vaccine or they would need to relinquish their position. Or, to keep libertarians happy, you would give them the right to refuse and not have to justify it, to keep their job and go about their life as normal. Obviously, that would need to apply to every other citizen as well...
What will happen is that the plebs will be instructed to take the vaccine, which will be compulsory by stealth (no vax = no passport, etc) but our illustrious leaders will be able to do whatever they like.
It would be mandatory for them to have the vaccine or they would need to relinquish their position. Or, to keep libertarians happy, you would give them the right to refuse and not have to justify it, to keep their job and go about their life as normal. Obviously, that would need to apply to every other citizen as well...
What will happen is that the plebs will be instructed to take the vaccine, which will be compulsory by stealth (no vax = no passport, etc) but our illustrious leaders will be able to do whatever they like.
bodhi said:
I'm sure this will mark me down as a Tory boy, but I worked in Public Sector Procurement 10 - 15 years ago.
Nothing has changed in that respect.
Agree - giving contracts or planning permissions to your friends/donors/gift givers has been going on for a long long time. Why do you think companies have all that corporate entertainment......... maybe not so much now though.Nothing has changed in that respect.
alangla said:
While I agree that not closing schools is definitely a political decision, here's a thought. Given infection rates amongst typical University age individuals in areas with high student populations appear to be declining rapidly, that presumably leads to the conclusion that the virus has done what it was going to do with those students. Is it possible that it's largely done what it was going to do with the school-age population and we might see a significant decline there in the near future as well?
Let us hope so - it will be interesting to see what happens to the numbers in a couple of weeks time after half term.Boringvolvodriver said:
Agree - giving contracts or planning permissions to your friends/donors/gift givers has been going on for a long long time. Why do you think companies have all that corporate entertainment......... maybe not so much now though.
The difference is, there is law, a legislation and it was broken. Boringvolvodriver said:
bodhi said:
I'm sure this will mark me down as a Tory boy, but I worked in Public Sector Procurement 10 - 15 years ago.
Nothing has changed in that respect.
Agree - giving contracts or planning permissions to your friends/donors/gift givers has been going on for a long long time. Why do you think companies have all that corporate entertainment......... maybe not so much now though.Nothing has changed in that respect.
Covid legislation threw all that in the bin and now they can award without tender, including contracts that have nothing to do with the covid response.
Pupbelly said:
because the product data says in black and white it will not prevent Covid deaths but the perception by Joe Public that there is a vaccine means the end of Covid. A vaccine is not the end but it will give an possible exit strategy for Boris & Co.
read the data here:
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m4037.full...
As I understand the article you have linked to, that (ie: a vaccine will not prevent covd deaths) is an inaccurate conclusion to draw. read the data here:
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m4037.full...
Edited by Pupbelly on Thursday 29th October 09:47
Edited by Pupbelly on Thursday 29th October 09:48
First, as the table shows, each vaccine is being test to prevent "symptomatic disease in vaccine recipient". If a vaccine is shown to be effective in preventing symptomatic disease, one might assume or infer, even if there is no direct evidence, that that would reduce severe covid-19.
The legitimate follow up question is "why aren't these vaccine trials looking for that evidence?". The answer is in the BMJ article:
"In Pfizer and Moderna’s trials, for example, people with only a cough and positive laboratory test would bring those trials one event closer to their completion. (If AstraZeneca’s ongoing UK trial is designed similarly to its “paused” US trial for which the company has released details, a cough and fever with positive PCR test would suffice.) Part of the reason may be numbers. Severe illness requiring hospital admission, which happens in only a small fraction of symptomatic covid-19 cases, would be unlikely to occur in significant numbers in trials. Data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in late April reported a symptomatic case hospitalisation ratio of 3.4% overall, varying from 1.7% in 0-49 year olds and 4.5%
in 50-64 year olds to 7.4% in those 65 and over. Because most people with symptomatic covid-19 experience only mild symptoms, even trials involving 30 000 or more patients would turn up relatively few cases of severe disease.
...
Tal Zaks, chief medical officer at Moderna, told The BMJ that the company’s trial lacks adequate statistical power to assess those outcomes. “The trial is precluded from judging [hospital admissions], based on what is a reasonable size and duration to serve the public good here,” he said. Hospital dmissions and deaths from covid-19 are simply too uncommon in the population being studied for an effective vaccine to demonstrate statistically significant differences in a trial of 30000 people. The same is true of its ability to save lives or prevent transmission: the trials are not designed to find out."
Thus: the reason there is a row of "N"s in the table is because the drug cos are using sample sizes of individuals that do not turn up enough people who develop severe covid-19 to be statistically significant, and so there is no sufficient sample to test that outcome.
That is not the same as the conclusion you reach.
The Spectator have published SAGES reasonable worst case scenario for the winter:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/classified-cov...
Use Google incognito if it appears paywalled.
This is dated July 2020, which implies it has been deliberately withheld from publication with the other papers due to its sensitivity.
The interesting points for me are:
1. They are adding in 30% non-COVID excess deaths
2. The assumption is that we have some sort of further measures at the end of Nov, which are kept in place until March.
This seems to be the document that has been controlling our freedoms for months and is likely to do so for many more.
They talk about 2.4% of cases requiring hospitalisation, which is more reasonable than the original 4% assumption, but still a bit high. They also mention 359k cases in hospital implying that the anticipate 14.9 million people will be infected between July and March.
This graph is interesting:
The flat spot is presumably the modelling of a ‘circuit breaker’, which we know did not work in NI or Scotland and we will find out soon if it worked in Wales.
In fairness, If you factor out the flat spot, then our current scenario of 1000 admissions and 200 deaths per day is not far off their thinking. However, they saw this happening at 30,000 infections per week, whereas we are have 153k positive tests reported in the last 7 days.
So the Govt knew for months that this was going to happen, the circuit breaker idea has been kicking around since the summer and they deliberately kept it from us.
The thing that give me hope here is the discrepancy between the severity of the impact they predicted and the comparably low level of infections. I think they could easily be out by a factor of 5.
Watch for the peak!
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/classified-cov...
Use Google incognito if it appears paywalled.
This is dated July 2020, which implies it has been deliberately withheld from publication with the other papers due to its sensitivity.
The interesting points for me are:
1. They are adding in 30% non-COVID excess deaths
2. The assumption is that we have some sort of further measures at the end of Nov, which are kept in place until March.
This seems to be the document that has been controlling our freedoms for months and is likely to do so for many more.
They talk about 2.4% of cases requiring hospitalisation, which is more reasonable than the original 4% assumption, but still a bit high. They also mention 359k cases in hospital implying that the anticipate 14.9 million people will be infected between July and March.
This graph is interesting:
The flat spot is presumably the modelling of a ‘circuit breaker’, which we know did not work in NI or Scotland and we will find out soon if it worked in Wales.
In fairness, If you factor out the flat spot, then our current scenario of 1000 admissions and 200 deaths per day is not far off their thinking. However, they saw this happening at 30,000 infections per week, whereas we are have 153k positive tests reported in the last 7 days.
So the Govt knew for months that this was going to happen, the circuit breaker idea has been kicking around since the summer and they deliberately kept it from us.
The thing that give me hope here is the discrepancy between the severity of the impact they predicted and the comparably low level of infections. I think they could easily be out by a factor of 5.
Watch for the peak!
BlackTails said:
Pupbelly said:
because the product data says in black and white it will not prevent Covid deaths but the perception by Joe Public that there is a vaccine means the end of Covid. A vaccine is not the end but it will give an possible exit strategy for Boris & Co.
read the data here:
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m4037.full...
As I understand the article you have linked to, that (ie: a vaccine will not prevent covd deaths) is an inaccurate conclusion to draw. read the data here:
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m4037.full...
Edited by Pupbelly on Thursday 29th October 09:47
Edited by Pupbelly on Thursday 29th October 09:48
First, as the table shows, each vaccine is being test to prevent "symptomatic disease in vaccine recipient". If a vaccine is shown to be effective in preventing symptomatic disease, one might assume or infer, even if there is no direct evidence, that that would reduce severe covid-19.
The legitimate follow up question is "why aren't these vaccine trials looking for that evidence?". The answer is in the BMJ article:
"In Pfizer and Moderna’s trials, for example, people with only a cough and positive laboratory test would bring those trials one event closer to their completion. (If AstraZeneca’s ongoing UK trial is designed similarly to its “paused” US trial for which the company has released details, a cough and fever with positive PCR test would suffice.) Part of the reason may be numbers. Severe illness requiring hospital admission, which happens in only a small fraction of symptomatic covid-19 cases, would be unlikely to occur in significant numbers in trials. Data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in late April reported a symptomatic case hospitalisation ratio of 3.4% overall, varying from 1.7% in 0-49 year olds and 4.5%
in 50-64 year olds to 7.4% in those 65 and over. Because most people with symptomatic covid-19 experience only mild symptoms, even trials involving 30 000 or more patients would turn up relatively few cases of severe disease.
...
Tal Zaks, chief medical officer at Moderna, told The BMJ that the company’s trial lacks adequate statistical power to assess those outcomes. “The trial is precluded from judging [hospital admissions], based on what is a reasonable size and duration to serve the public good here,” he said. Hospital dmissions and deaths from covid-19 are simply too uncommon in the population being studied for an effective vaccine to demonstrate statistically significant differences in a trial of 30000 people. The same is true of its ability to save lives or prevent transmission: the trials are not designed to find out."
Thus: the reason there is a row of "N"s in the table is because the drug cos are using sample sizes of individuals that do not turn up enough people who develop severe covid-19 to be statistically significant, and so there is no sufficient sample to test that outcome.
That is not the same as the conclusion you reach.
BlackTails said:
Part of the reason may be numbers. Severe illness requiring hospital admission, which happens in only a small fraction of symptomatic covid-19 cases, would be unlikely to occur in significant numbers in trials. Data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in late April reported a symptomatic case hospitalisation ratio of 3.4% overall, varying from 1.7% in 0-49 year olds and 4.5%
in 50-64 year olds to 7.4% in those 65 and over. Because most people with symptomatic covid-19 experience only mild symptoms, even trials involving 30 000 or more patients would turn up relatively few cases of severe disease.
Is it not also the case that a lot of these study cohorts primarily involve younger people with no underlying conditions who would be very very unlikely to go to hospital anyway?in 50-64 year olds to 7.4% in those 65 and over. Because most people with symptomatic covid-19 experience only mild symptoms, even trials involving 30 000 or more patients would turn up relatively few cases of severe disease.
Pupbelly said:
Thank you for the clarity - I am no expert I will say. So on that basis how would a vaccine ever be determined to be good enough if it will or won't help the situation? Would it mean very large trials to be done to get sufficient data? Or is Covid not giving enough severe cases to work with?
The normal vaccine development time period would be something like 10-15 years... They're trying to do the same in under 12 months.Darth Paul said:
The French are usually pretty good at ignoring pointless laws and equally the French police are pretty good at not enforcing them either. I was surprised how readily they fell inline with the first lockdown so will be interested to see what happens on v2.0.
I wouldn't say that.I got a 35 Euro Fine for stopping on a hard shoulder for a wee (I shouldn't have drunk that can of Red Bull I guess).
It must have been rather important because they also took my passport.
df76 said:
The normal vaccine development time period would be something like 10-15 years... They're trying to do the same in under 12 months.
A lot of that timeline is waiting for approval and such. The length of the actual phase 2/3 trials for safety and efficacy isn't being shortened by anything like as muchPupbelly said:
Thank you for the clarity - I am no expert I will say. So on that basis how would a vaccine ever be determined to be good enough if it will or won't help the situation? Would it mean very large trials to be done to get sufficient data? Or is Covid not giving enough severe cases to work with?
Rushing through, with limited testing, treatment for a virus so very dangerous that they cannot find enough ill people to test it on to demonstrate if it works. 320d is all you need said:
Darth Paul said:
The French are usually pretty good at ignoring pointless laws and equally the French police are pretty good at not enforcing them either. I was surprised how readily they fell inline with the first lockdown so will be interested to see what happens on v2.0.
I wouldn't say that.I got a 35 Euro Fine for stopping on a hard shoulder for a wee (I shouldn't have drunk that can of Red Bull I guess).
It must have been rather important because they also took my passport.
Elysium said:
T
In fairness, If you factor out the flat spot, then our current scenario of 1000 admissions and 200 deaths per day is not far off their thinking. However, they saw this happening at 30,000 infections per week, whereas we are have 153k positive tests reported in the last 7 days.
So the Govt knew for months that this was going to happen, the circuit breaker idea has been kicking around since the summer and they deliberately kept it from us.
The thing that give me hope here is the discrepancy between the severity of the impact they predicted and the comparably low level of infections. I think they could easily be out by a factor of 5.
Watch for the peak!
When will ANYONE realise that SAGE are no good for anyone?In fairness, If you factor out the flat spot, then our current scenario of 1000 admissions and 200 deaths per day is not far off their thinking. However, they saw this happening at 30,000 infections per week, whereas we are have 153k positive tests reported in the last 7 days.
So the Govt knew for months that this was going to happen, the circuit breaker idea has been kicking around since the summer and they deliberately kept it from us.
The thing that give me hope here is the discrepancy between the severity of the impact they predicted and the comparably low level of infections. I think they could easily be out by a factor of 5.
Watch for the peak!
And do we think there is ANY way out of the current situation?
I genuinely don't see any way out within the next 5 years. I think the last 8 months is only the start of it.
Alucidnation said:
mondeoman said:
Alucidnation said:
Herd immunity is pie in the sky.
BOT BOT BOT
Sorry to be the voice of reason.
Why do you think we have vaccines for Flu every year?
H.I. isn't really working for that has it?
Next.
Elysium said:
In fairness, If you factor out the flat spot, then our current scenario of 1000 admissions and 200 deaths per day is not far off their thinking. However, they saw this happening at 30,000 infections per week, whereas we are have 153k positive tests reported in the last 7 days.
So the Govt knew for months that this was going to happen, the circuit breaker idea has been kicking around since the summer and they deliberately kept it from us.
The thing that give me hope here is the discrepancy between the severity of the impact they predicted and the comparably low level of infections. I think they could easily be out by a factor of 5.
Watch for the peak!
They seem to consistently overestimate hospitalisations.So the Govt knew for months that this was going to happen, the circuit breaker idea has been kicking around since the summer and they deliberately kept it from us.
The thing that give me hope here is the discrepancy between the severity of the impact they predicted and the comparably low level of infections. I think they could easily be out by a factor of 5.
Watch for the peak!
Incompetence? or because they know the government cant afford pictures of an NHS that has been overrun and lurid overestimates may give them the lockdown they crave.
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