Sounds hopeful - as do many of these trials do. I'm always fascinated when I read these drug combinations that are under test. It'll be interesting to see the actual report.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik @Rood and Imran @Annihilate Now! start with the good news by celebrating Manchester United Women's emphatic FA Cup win over Spurs at Wembley and the future of manager Marc Skinner.
Then it's the bad news and the ever worsening form of our Men with losses to Arsenal and Palace.
Finally the main debate - ETH Out now or keep him until the end of the season - if not longer. Are you Team Nik or Team Imran?
If it helps with pneumonia doesn't it make it less deadly?
Isnt coronavirus the same as the common cold, its never going to be vaccinated. However hopefully the payload of Covid-19 maybe.
To be fair, the Forbes article takes an extremely pessimistic view. The study shows that the vaccinated monkeys suffered no lung damage or pneumonia despite being infected with a large amount of the virus. A similar result in humans would be pretty damn good. Where it falls down is that it doesn't completely prevent infection and then it''s still contagious, although quite possibly to a lesser extent.
We don't always find perfect vaccines but they don't always need to be perfect to eradicate something as a real threat.
That’s true. And a good point. I’m actually starting to wonder if we won’t end up with one “super virus” for the whole world but a hotch potch of different ones, with different pros and cons, that won’t end up eradicating the virus but do make it easier to live with.
We still don't have a vaccine. All the promising results and optimism in the world means feck all until a vaccine passes stage 3 human trials. So caution is sensible.
nah they smashed it and no one is questioning that
Standard compulsory protocols I'd suspect. Enough to allow human trials without being as informative as can be the case is the way I read it.
The choice of animal model to use and frequency of dosing won’t be compulsory. That’s all part of the ‘art’ of drug development. The regulatory framework allows for a fair bit of autonomy. Getting those things wrong can set a project back years, or even kill it altogether.
Having said that, I’m not going to pretend to know more than the boffins developing this drug. I’m just not accepting the idea that results would be better if only they’d gone with a different type of monkey.
There's not much point in a common cold vaccine as it's a very mild disease. There's too many different strains and a vaccine targets a specific type...We could develop a vaccine for one strain of the common cold I'm sure, but that would be pointless.
I'm confident we'll get a vaccine for COVID-19 - but it could take a while!
The common cold is mainly rhinoviruses but i think i read around 15% are coronaviruses yeah.
I ended up reading a paper about SARs vaccines a few weeks ago and they were targeting the same spikes as research now appears to be focused on. It obviously never came to fruition but they they did speculate in the paper that it could kill off some of the common cold strains at the same time.
If this new vaccine did wipe out just some common cold strains they'd be huge economic benefit.
I mean, if it prevents the more serious complications from this virus and instead results in a mild illness for everyone, then it's done it's job really hasn't it.
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Hardware shops opened in Ireland today. Looks like a lot of folk have been absolutely jonesing for a bag of nails and some 4x2.
Such a hard balancing act isnt it , to be fair . Providing social distance is practiced i have no real problem with such as b and q . There is a very small hardware shop near us which has been open throughout this and no way is it possible to be six foot from anyone in there . Its been packed from what ive seen if ive ridden by and no way would i go in there . In England we are kind of in no mans land at the moment . Places are trying to open up slowly and safely but mistakes will be made . Dropped my daughters car off at halfords this morning for its mot and they are rightly being very very cautious about dealing with the public . She needs a new number plate though and the guy was saying they are really struggling to get hold of them for some reason , so supply chain issues may be a problem .
As we drove back from the garage we were speaking about how many shops were closed , particularly hair dressers and nail bars . The daughter was telling me she knows of a nail bar pre painting nails and sending them in the post for those women really needing to keep up appearances during covid !
This article got a lot of criticism on twitter. Basically stating that monkeys were only given 1 dose, which would never be the plan, a vaccine would include more than 1 dose.
Also, one of the scientists from oxford was on tv the other day saying, “yeah, there was still evidence of the virus in the vaccinated monkeys, however it was 10000 times less than non vaccinated
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Is this just because England is a lot more urban than Wales, Scotland and NI? Or is something else causing the difference?
Spending so much time at home made me notice a lot of things in my home that need sorting. And our place was only built a few years ago! Can only imagine all the shit some people realized needs fixing in their auld Celtic Tiger builds.
Can't believe how difficult it is to get shit online, still, though.
Could be - also could be that perhaps there is a higher percentage of BAME people living in England?
yeah ideally I’d love to get a few bags of decorative stone and a few bags of compost to finally sort out a few bits. Can find the latter online for delivery but not the former
Some of them probably have stuff that's broken or broke during this time and if you're still off work then why not pass the time by fixing a few things.
Although it’s still being worked out it seems that BAME is only correlative to Covid 19 mortality.
The causal factor is low socio economic status, which of course is higher among BAME people. So in effect no, more BAME people should make no difference on its own, but more poverty will.
I despise the term ‘BAME’.
I get that. And I can relate to it. But they’ve been waiting weeks for this. Another few days wait wouldn’t kill them. Whereas queuing up in a massive crowd to be the first people through the doors on Monday morning could literally do exactly that.
They haven’t unpicked those two factors yet. Not from what I’ve seen anyway. Apart from anything else, how do you explain the fact that almost all the dead doctors in the UK are BAME? Not exactly a profession known for its low socioeconomic status.
Me too.
Thanks @Rado_N . I cant believe it but it passed !
good stuff!The BAME thing is a bit tricky
The Royal College of psychiatrists has said that disproportionately high death rates due to health factors, demographics, gender etc only partially explains higher death rates and has suggested possible exacerbation of racial inequalities documented in official NHS WRES data 2019. But a lot of it is more conjecture than anything.
BMA have taken potential discrimination being a factor with an ITV survey of over 2000 BAME workers which admittedly I haven't read all about. There were suggestions that managers are pushing them towards higher risk roles during the pandemic
https://www.itv.com/news/2020-05-13...black-minority-ethnic-bame-deaths-nhs-racism/
I say its a tricky subject because of lived experience, accusations of political correctness but I have a lot BAME colleagues in various capacities in the NHS and care sectors and I've not personally dismissed racism as being a significant problem in the NHS but its a complicated topic that I don't actually think will be possible to be objective about due to lack of evidence-base as its primarily qualitative etc.
Mind you I haven't heard a lot of solid aetiological or pathophysiological science explaining death discrepancy other than "I'm sure there's a scientific or genetic cause" that isn't along the simplistic line of brown people are more diabetic and black people are more hypertensive and that leads to covid badness, probably.
Is there not a suggestion that vitamin D could play an important part in all this and people with a darker skin pigmentation generally do not absorb vit D as well as those with lighter skin?
Wouldn't you then expect countries with a white minority to have a noticeably higher death rate?
Well it's just one in what is no doubt a multitude of factors - pretty sure I have seen some stuff about vitamin D in relation to severity of illness though probably still in the theory stages rather than anything concrete.
70 cases of COVID-19 at French schools days after re-opening
Just one week after a third of French children went back to school in an easing of the coronavirus lockdown, there’s been a worrying flareup of about 70 COVID-19 cases linked to schools
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/70-cases-covid-19-french-schools-days-opening-70740749
Just one week after a third of French children went back to school in an easing of the coronavirus lockdown, there’s been a worrying flareup of about 70 COVID-19 cases linked to schools
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/70-cases-covid-19-french-schools-days-opening-70740749
Yeah I mean I take that seriously enough to take vitamin D myself - having previously thought it was just a "trendy" thing.
There was some earlier indication that BCG vaccinations and mandatory vaccination policy for BCG vaccine being protective in terms of mortality and there's an Australian trial of healthcare workers going on to look into BCG vaccine (over 4000 participants) to see if its beneficial
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31025-4/fulltext
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04327206
However a lot of south asians certainly but other BME workers come from countries where TB has been endemic and we've shown off our left shoulders to occu-health or had quantiferon tests to showcase our previous BCGs. So not sure about that theory.
There might be something to do with multi-generational households possibly that are more prevalent in diaspora, immigrant communities who've produced BAME sons and daughters now working in the NHS. But I'm not sure how much of that is stereotype or not.
Just anecdotally when this started a lot of my family weren't taking this seriously until we had one or two people fall sick and its a month or so later and this will be the first ever Eid "party" I've had on Zoom. Fastings a bitch with stinky rebreathable ramadan breath throughout the day and not even a proper iftaar or Eid celebration to look forward to in the end of it
I was startled when I saw the hospital doctor deaths in particular, which did set me thinking. As the other risk issue is age, I did wonder if it came down to - white hospital doctors of that age having migrated up the ladder either out of clinical roles, or into consultant and similar second line roles - where they'd be less likely to be shifted to the triage/front line roles. In particular less exposed to those roles where significant numbers of undiagnosed covid patients might pass through. A kind of built-in discrimination.
No discussion on Moderna claims?
I think it might be a stereotype with a basis in reality underpinning it. Though, of course, we won't really know unless/until a proper study of the individual fatalities is done (particularly amongst hospital doctors as there aren't many obvious socio-economic deprivation links there). If the virus was contracted at work was it during interaction with a patient (inadequate PPE and all) or in some other way.
I do wonder about some of those more random things as well - like membership of a choir, or a similar activity where we know anecdotally there have been high infection rates amongst groups of people. Also stereotypical of course!
Seems promising
https://investors.modernatx.com/new...ositive-interim-phase-1-data-its-mrna-vaccine
I was always fascinated by the novel mRNA technology for vaccinations
Sounds positive that they have seen serum antibiodies in serology that's comparable to those who have recovered from COVID. IM injection as well but seems to have a good safety profile.
Still though I think we need larger sample size, phase 2 to come and phase 3 by July and also demonstrable clinical efficacy with none of those patients who they've injected getting COVID. Annoyingly also can't see any details of how their control group did (did they even have a control group?)
Addendum: Can't see any mention of a control here https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04283461
Still though its promising
I also can forsee Trump being even more of a dick than usual if the Americans get to a vaccine first in terms of mass production and provision overseas