[HN Gopher] Moderna raises 2021 vaccine output forecast to at le...
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Moderna raises 2021 vaccine output forecast to at least 600M doses
Author : KoftaBob
Score : 192 points
Date : 2021-01-04 15:32 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| xenocratus wrote:
| It's worth remembering that there's a need for 2 doses per person
| to vaccinate - don't think the article talks about dose as "the
| amount needed to fully protect one person"
| testplzignore wrote:
| This particular points concerns me the most. All the numbers we
| have now should be considered "half vaccinations". Very soon
| (if this hasn't already happened), we'll be hitting the point
| where people start getting the second dose. Assuming the second
| dose takes as long to administer as the first dose, the rate of
| people getting the first dose will be cut in half.
|
| I think the logistical challenges of administering the second
| dose will be even worse. You have to contact and schedule all
| of the first dose people, you need to have them actually show
| up when they are supposed to, and you need to have sufficient
| doses on hand.
|
| I am expecting that a large number of people will, voluntarily
| or otherwise, either not receive the second dose or receive it
| later than they are supposed to.
|
| Areas of the US that are looking "good" now in terms of the
| rate of vaccinations may look far worse very soon.
| mynegation wrote:
| I believe it is a first case of hopefully many others of vaccine
| producer coming up with conservative estimate and then increasing
| it as they optimize the production process and remove the
| bottlenecks in the supply chain. One example of the bottleneck
| would be a limited supply of special glass vials produced
| somewhere in China.
|
| https://news.cgtn.com/news/3355544f34514464776c6d636a4e6e626...
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Sounds like they're also made in other countries
|
| > Most of the tubes are imported from other countries, like
| Germany and Japan
| blywi wrote:
| It seems more like the majority of borosilicate vials are
| produced outside of China. It doesn't even look like China
| has any significant domestic production capacity for the type
| of high quality chemically inert glass needed for vaccine
| vials, that's why the tubes for production are mostly
| imported.
|
| Main producers of vials seem to be SCHOTT, Stevanato Group,
| Gerresheimer, Corning, and DWK Life Sciences, from Germany,
| Italy and the US.
|
| SCHOTT alone is looking to increase production until the end
| of 2021 by about seven billion vials [1], which would be 3.5
| times more in additional production output than the complete
| annual production capacity of Zhengchuan Pharmaceutical,
| which according to the article is one of China's largest
| producers.
|
| [1] https://www.pharmtech.com/view/readying-glass-vials-for-
| vacc...
| dmix wrote:
| It also says there are 60 other companies working in China.
|
| > China has some 60 glass medicine container providers
|
| Plus we've seen markets adapting really quickly already a ton
| of times through out the pandemic.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| My understanding is that the primary bottleneck is clotting
| factor, which is still harvested naturally from horseshoe
| crabs. So it's a balancing act between maximizing yield while
| not collapsing the population.
|
| There's an artificial version, but it was only recently
| approved by the FDA, so there's not significant industrial
| capacity.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| Artificial version was denied by the FDA I believe
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/31/crab-
| blo...
|
| Unless it has since been reversed?
| retSava wrote:
| I love when things like this gets visible (even if I may not
| love why, or the result from it).
|
| Eg how a very large percentage of the worlds christmas
| decorations are made in one Chinese city, or large % of
| harddrives in Thailand, or quartz movements for basically all
| of the worlds watches are from one-two suppliers, etc etc.
|
| Opens your eyes to both how fragile some niches of the world
| are, and to how some markets are completely commoditized under
| a shallow layer of branding (most headphones, many phones,
| etc).
| Cerium wrote:
| Fragile, yes, but also beautiful. The Chinese "single product
| city" is something of a free-market wonder. I visited Dehua
| (a ceramics city) and spent the time fascinated at how
| anything related to ceramics production is cheap in that
| city. It is no one individual factory that achieves economy
| of scale, but rather the full city, and everyone in it
| benefits. Small producers can achieve globally competitive
| pricing on their goods without having to take delivery of
| truckloads of input materials.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| This works really really well until it really really
| doesn't. There's a reason why these towns don't exist in
| the West anymore, Detroit being the biggest example (though
| they got out of their predicament by trying to diversify).
| maxerickson wrote:
| There's still a pretty huge concentration of automakers
| and suppliers in the greater Detroit area.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Hence the keyword "trying".
| maxerickson wrote:
| When I started composing my reply, your comment read
| "This works really really well until it really really
| doesn't. There's a reason why these towns don't exist in
| the West anymore, Detroit being the biggest example."
|
| Perhaps our edits overlapped.
| afandian wrote:
| Reminds me of Tula, the Russian city where a huge number of
| accordions were made. I'm not sure if it was dictated by
| the Soviet government or whether it happened organically,
| but I'm not sure it was due to a free market.
| mynegation wrote:
| If anything, Tula is famous for metalworking, weapons,
| and gingerbread before anything else.
| fermienrico wrote:
| There is nothing beautiful about this I see.
| ac2u wrote:
| Yeah there's a part of AntiFragile that I'm reading right now
| about the average calories burned to transport consumable
| calories on average.
|
| The soviet union focus on agricultural production efficiency
| achieved the opposite effect right after the breakup.
|
| Crops were produced inefficiently compared to centralisation,
| but after the breakup the calories to transport vs consumable
| calories ratio was close to 1:1, compared to a 12:1 in the
| USA at the time, because the crops were grown super close to
| where they were consumed.
|
| Same with toilet roll availability in lockdown... lots of
| control built in over the years to give the appearance of
| reduced volatility.
|
| So when relatively minor real volatility came in the form of
| an uptick in demand over a shorter period of time, it had a
| drastic effect.
|
| We should be thankful these lessons are being doled out in
| the form of toiler paper, Christmas decorations and hard
| disks instead of food and meds.
| credit_guy wrote:
| > compared to a 12:1 in the USA at the time
|
| That doesn't sound quite right.
|
| After a quick google, here's some typical numbers for
| shipping meat: a big rig with refrigeration can transport
| more than 40000 pounds of meat; at about 1000
| (kilo)calories per pound, that's abotu 40 million kcal.
| Such a rig travels about 500 miles per day, has a fuel
| economy of about 6 mpg and burns an extra 15 gallons for
| the refrigeration, all in all, about 100 gallons per day.
| At about 35000 kcal/gallon, that's about 3.5 million kcal
| to travel for one day. So you need to move around for more
| than 11 days to get just to a 1:1 ratio.
| ac2u wrote:
| >at the time
|
| Your numbers need adjusted for 30 years of fuel
| efficiency improvement (but to be honest I think your
| calculations would still illustrate the same point).
|
| The passage I'm reading doesn't cite an exact study/paper
| except to cite that it's from the works of Dmitri Orlov.
|
| I think the point was more likely centred upon 1:1
| calorie transport/consumption of the variety of staples
| needed rather than taking one of the most calorie dense
| categories of food like meat for the purpose of back of
| the envelope math. I also took a quick glance at a
| passage from Google from Orlov's book which takes all the
| calories involved in the growth of the food as well, so
| there's probably a little more to it.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Most people don't realize how huge chemical energy is
| compared to mechanical energy.
|
| Here's a different way to look at the same thing: one
| gram of carbs has an energy content of 4.2 kcal. That's
| about 18000 Joules. One Joule is the same as 1 kg*m2/s2;
| it takes one Joule to lift a mass of 1kg to a height of
| about 10cm (because the gravitational acceleration is
| about 10m/s2). So, with 1 Joule you can lift one gram to
| a height of about 100 meters. With the energy content of
| 1 gram of carbs, you can lift 1 gram of matter to a
| height of 1800 kilometers, i.e. more than 4 times higher
| than the orbit of the International Space Station. When
| shipping things around, we don't change the elevation too
| much, for the simple reason that the highest elevation on
| Earth is less than 10km. Moving 1g of matter 1km in the
| horizontal direction requires much, much less energy that
| 1km on the vertical.
|
| Now food has some water content, the energy does not get
| converted with 100% efficiency, etc. But the idea that
| the energy used in transportation is anything close to
| the energy content of food is quite far fetched.
|
| Let's put it differently: it's hard to lose weight. It's
| damn hard. Precisely because the energy content stored as
| chemical energy in our fat cells is so large compared to
| how much we burn by performing mechanical actions. For
| example, an average runner burns about 100 (kilo)calories
| per mile. Since one pound of fat has about 3500 kcal, you
| need to run about 35 miles to burn that. If you want to
| burn all the energy stored in all your body, you need to
| run more thousands of miles. And we humans, are very
| inefficient. We don't have wheels in particular.
|
| Or, let's put it yet another way. One of the most
| inefficient ways to transport things around is by rocket.
| The planned Starship will have a launch mass of about
| 5000 tons and a payload of 100 tons in orbit. That's a
| ratio of 50:1. So, to take one gram of stuff from being
| stationary on Earth to moving at orbital speed (8km/s)
| perpetually in the sky it takes about 50g of propellant
| (fuel plus oxidizer). When we move things on Earth, we
| obviously can use the Oxygen that's all around us. Of the
| 50g of propellant, only about 11g are actual fuel, so you
| end up with a ratio of about 11:1 of fuel vs payload,
| using the most inefficient way of moving things around.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I think in their metric, the wheat that the US
| occasionally shipped to the USSR counts as a downside to
| US agriculture.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I suspect warehousing and other distribution logistics
| factor in as well. 'Transport' is from farm to plate.
| vidarh wrote:
| Makes you wonder, though, to what extent there are market
| opportunities in identifying weak product chains like that,
| preparing to look like a viable alternative, and then staging
| a marketing campaign based on drawing public attention to the
| risk and pushing demand for second source contracts.
| hnsr wrote:
| This could be wishful thinking, but it would not surprise me if
| these numbers will go up for many or all of the vaccines. If
| the numbers of doses we've heard so far are contractually
| agreed upon, I would make sense that the manufacturers erred on
| the safe side regarding the number of doses they promise to
| deliver.
| oli5679 wrote:
| I am so grateful for their hard work.
|
| They developed a 90% effective vaccine in weeks, before proving
| safety and efficacy, and scaling up to 600M doses in months.
|
| It makes me emotional to think of the number of lives they will
| save.
|
| I didn't think this was possible and I hope I one day get the
| chance to thank some of the people that worked on this in person.
| parimm wrote:
| It took 25days from the time the Covid-19 sequence was
| published to make the Moderna vaccine.[1]
|
| [1]https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2020/06/04/moderna-
| cor...
| jjice wrote:
| Holy cow. That's absolutely incredible. Does the use of mRNA
| make these vaccines faster to develop?
| choeger wrote:
| There is a large caveat, though: The virus is a SARS
| variant, which in turn is well-studied. Prior research sped
| up sequencing and analysis significantly. I think we had
| the first PCR test even _before_ the full genome was
| sequenced. It is also somewhat easy to target with the mRNA
| approach. So don 't expect the same speed for everything
| else.
|
| I think this particular virus was one of the best possible
| for a pandemic. One the one hand it causes a serious,
| potentially deadly, illness. But on the other hand the
| illness does not immediately destroy our health system, let
| alone our industrial basis. It is also ideally suited for
| the relatively new mRNA vaccines.
|
| This might be cynical, but the whole thing might turn out
| to be a net positive. Many more viruses could be attacked
| now. Personalized, immediate cancer treatment could be just
| one step away after this. Heck, we might even have found
| the solution to the problem with antibiotics resistent
| bacteria.
| blhack wrote:
| Yes. You could almost think of the mRNA as being "printed".
|
| The real technology in these vaccines is actually encasing
| them in a lipid, which prevents your immune system from
| attacking the mRNA.
| sytse wrote:
| mRNA vaccines can be printed on a DNA printer! You might be
| interested in this article: Reverse Engineering the source
| code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
| https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1345854099464470528 It
| lets you see the exact mRNA contents of the BNT162b2
| vaccine, and for most parts understand why they are there!
| fassssst wrote:
| NIH developed the vaccine, Moderna and Pfizer are manufacturing
| it.
| jonplackett wrote:
| And monetising it.
|
| Oxford vaccine is slightly less effective, but about an order
| of magnitude more affordable.
| esja wrote:
| They are all incredibly affordable, measured against the
| benefits to individuals and society.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I agree, but those are not in contradiction. 1000x
| affordable vaccine is still an order of magnitude more
| affordable than 100x affordable vaccine.
| jonplackett wrote:
| You can say they are cheap compared, but affordable is
| what can actually be afforded. And for a country like
| India with a billion people, paying ~$1 per dose VS
| something like $15 for moderna is a huge difference.
|
| All I'm saying is you should give more credit to
| companies doing the right thing and essentially giving
| the vaccine away at cost while there's a pandemic, even
| if their vaccine isn't quite as good.
| valarauko wrote:
| In India the Pfizer vaccine works out to $35 per dose,
| and AstraZeneca at $3
|
| * [Pfizer Vaccine's Price May Be Throwing off Indian
| Government, Report Says - The Wire
| Science](https://science.thewire.in/health/pfizer-
| vaccines-price-may-...)
| esja wrote:
| The companies giving this away at cost are obviously
| doing something good for the world. That's not my point.
|
| I just find it odd that companies like Pfizer and Moderna
| are about to lift the world out of a catastrophe in
| unprecedented fashion, and we have people complaining
| about prices which are not overly high when compared to
| the benefit, even in the developing world. India's GDP in
| 2019 was almost 2.9 trillion and the virus has knocked
| 300 billion or more off that just this year. Even under
| your extreme example they aren't going to care about
| spending an "extra" 14 billion.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I'm not complaining about the prices. I think they've
| done something amazing for sure. I just think the
| companies doing that same thing, and at cost are more
| amazing.
|
| Without the Oxford one, a lot of countries around the
| world would still be just as screwed as they are today.
|
| But don't get me wrong I think what they all have done is
| amazing. And it makes me happy.
| mongol wrote:
| This is the list of what the EU is paying:
|
| Oxford/AstraZeneca: EUR1.78 (PS1.61). Johnson & Johnson:
| $8.50 (PS6.30). Sanofi/GSK: EUR7.56. Pfizer/BioNTech:
| EUR12. CureVac: EUR10. Moderna: $18.
|
| Compare with the price of 1 liter of hand sanitizer. These
| vaccines are incredibly affordable.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Yes, they are, but companies doing it at cost should get
| more credit than those doing it for profit.
| cipher_system wrote:
| Maybe some vaccines are more expensive to produce? Do we
| know the profit margins on each of these vaccines?
| jonplackett wrote:
| From wikipedia, comparing it to the old fashioned method:
|
| > RNA vaccines can be produced faster, more cheaply, and
| in a more standardized fashion
|
| So should be cheaper if anything rather than more
| expensive.
| tlb wrote:
| Given a choice between producing enough doses in 1 month
| for $10 each, and producing enough doses over 10 months
| for $1 each, which would you prefer they do?
|
| The cheap-slow version costs a million lives, and several
| billion extra man-months of lockdown, in return for a
| globally insignificant cost savings. Valuing lives at
| maybe $1000 each.
|
| Increasing production 10x for 10x the cost is pretty
| typical of things where you build a lot of special-
| purpose equipment which is then worthless after the
| production run.
| jonplackett wrote:
| That isn't the calculation though.
|
| No-one is saying make it slower for less money. The
| Oxford vaccine is being rolled out fast, millions of
| doses available - actually millions more because, since
| they aren't so concerned with making money, India are
| able to make their own locally.
|
| This isn't a questions of scale - everyone is doing this
| at maximum scale. Some are just making more money from it
| than others. The Moderna one is more expensive because
| it's for-profit not because they've spent more money
| scaling up.
|
| If anyone knows otherwise let me know.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Nothing is true about this statement.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| My Understanding is that the stabilized Spike Protein
| sequence was developed and patented by UT Austin and the
| NIH. This was hen encoded using Moderna's mRNA delivery
| technology. I'm sure there were also countless other
| technology innovations that contributed to the quick
| rollout. It seems very reductive to attribute credit to one
| individual or organization over another.
| iridium_core wrote:
| As of December 18th, 2020 deaths in Sweden are only the 3rd
| highest for the past decade:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
|
| So its unlikely that COVID has lead to much excess death
| outside of what could be expected from an unusually strong 'flu
| year'.
|
| However the avoidable major driver of death is lockdown (from
| suicides, overdoses, homicide, destitution, interrupted medical
| care) and mismanagement (eg. sending symptomatic people back
| into nursing homes as in New York).
|
| This whole state of affairs has been great for Billionaires
| though - who have increased their wealth by 36% in the past 9
| months thanks to egregious money printing and economic
| disruption:
|
| https://yubanet.com/usa/net-worth-of-u-s-billionaires-has-so...
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| From the WHO (https://www.who.int/news/item/13-12-2017-up-
| to-650-000-peopl...)
|
| > Up to 650,000 people die of respiratory diseases linked to
| seasonal flu each year
|
| Current COVID-19 deaths: 1.85 million. That's more than
| double the flu. This is not the flu. Sweden is not
| representative of the rest of the world. You do not know what
| long-term complications to longevity COVID-19 has. It's quite
| possible you live a full healthy life or it's possible you
| drop dead in 5 years because of permanent damage to the lungs
| and/or cardiovascular system.
| jonathanjaeger wrote:
| Deaths from the current year can take a while to be
| finalized, and Decembers can be one of the deadliest months.
| If the U.S. hits 500k excess deaths this year, that's still a
| 20-25% hike on our normal death rate (2.7M give or take).
| Seems like Sweden will surpass past years in the end, perhaps
| by a similar percentage.
| iridium_core wrote:
| If we linearly extrapolate the December 18 data to December
| 31st, we get 91773 * (366/353) = 95,152.
|
| Which would indeed be the highest level this decade, but
| still only 3.2% higher than 2018.
|
| Sweden's 2019 deaths were also the lowest in the decade, so
| there was a lot of built up 'dry tinder'. In fact the
| excess deaths in 2020 match up almost exactly with the
| 'non-deaths' of 2019.
|
| This concept is also matched by research:
|
| https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-
| de...
|
| "In Sweden, the observed increase in all-cause mortality
| during Covid-19 was partly due to a lower than expected
| mortality preceding the epidemic and the observed excess
| mortality, was followed by a lower than expected mortality
| after the first Covid-19 wave. This may suggest mortality
| displacement."
| djsumdog wrote:
| Thanks for posting this. I do think we are greatly
| overreacting to this. The drug industries have wanted to
| push mRNA treatments for years and have never been able
| to get them approved. They have a vested interested in
| leveraging this perceived crisis.
|
| Vitamin D, ivermectin and even some inhaled steroids have
| all shown to been effective in treating the worst cases.
| The insanely high amplification of PCR assays are padding
| case numbers with false positives. Any contradictory
| information and academic viewpoints are getting censored
| on every major platform. This is totally madness.
| strictnein wrote:
| Referring to fragile humans as "dry tinder" is really
| something.
| rhacker wrote:
| I'm very much opposed to the current news cycle about the
| vaccine when the much more immediately available fix is
| available on the shelf at any store that carries vitamins or
| milk.
|
| https://vitamind4all.org/letter.html
| dsjoerg wrote:
| The evidence for the effectiveness of the vaccine is stronger
| than this: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.08
| .20222638v...
| rhacker wrote:
| The vaccine won't be available to 10% of the world's
| population for at least 1 year.
| wang_li wrote:
| Pfizer is aiming for 1.3 billion doses this year. That
| alone gets us to 10%. The WHO also rough guessed that
| there are already 750 million people who have been
| infected with the virus. So that's another 10% who likely
| don't need a vaccine this year. Then there's the 600
| million from Moderna. AstraZeneca is aiming for a billion
| doses plus partner producers, e.g. Siam Bioscience to
| produce 200 million doses. We're probably getting to
| 30%-40% globally by the end of the year. Less populous
| western countries will probably be fully vaccinated by
| the end of the year.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/14/us/pfizer-ceo-albert-
| bourla-v...
|
| https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30400664
| rhacker wrote:
| That still doesn't help the hundreds of thousands of
| people that will be dead because they or their doctor
| didn't know that vitamin D is actively saving people's
| lives right now. Even after a diagnosis. This advice will
| save more than one life right? I think that's more
| important than just pushing the vaccine.
| polote wrote:
| One thing I don't understand, is why government don't give free
| money to manufacturers ? Locking down is costing so much to
| society and governments. Instead of giving money to people who
| don't work, just give money to produce vaccines faster and let
| those people work ASAP.
|
| Why we don't do that ?
| testfoobar wrote:
| It is the rate of vaccination that is interesting to me. Doctors
| and nurses are turning down the shot at rates that are
| surprising. These are supposedly the most informed group - the
| group that counsels everyone else.
|
| Why?
|
| Look at these death totals by age
|
| Age 25-34: 2087 deaths. Age 35-44: 5398 deaths. Age 45-54: 14496
| deaths.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
|
| These are small numbers.
|
| I don't think we're going to get herd immunity without vaccine
| mandates.
| viggity wrote:
| I too have been surprised. I'm more surprised about physicians
| turning it down than nurses. I love nurses, we've got 15 on our
| payroll, they're kind and wonderfully exceptional people. But
| they operate heavily under various protocols outlined for them,
| and while they have more health knowledge than your random
| person when it comes to the nitty gritty details they are
| naive.
|
| The number of nurses who think that the mRNA vaccines
| permanently alter your DNA would surprise you.
|
| My hope is that after the roll out and the number of serious
| adverse events is shown to be miniscule, people will be less
| reluctant to take the vaccine.
| testfoobar wrote:
| IMHO, there either has to be a mandate or a personal
| incentive to get to herd immunity faster. With the low
| fatality rates for younger people, the personal incentive to
| get the vaccine is not high. This leaves mandates. Workplaces
| and schools can do this.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I'm not even in health care and I have a reasonable
| understanding of how dna, rna, translation and transcription
| work. Do nurses not learn this stuff?
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Not sure about nurses, but a broad section of the
| population _does not know how percentages work_. This is
| true for almost all countries. The width in science skills
| is breathtaking.
| f6v wrote:
| You'd be surprised how many software developers have no
| idea how https works.
| viggity wrote:
| lol. no. no way. I would guess that about 2/3 of our nurses
| could give you the 8th grade explanation of dna - "a sperm
| and an egg each contribute half of each chromosome and that
| is the instruction book on how to make every cell blah blah
| blah". rna, translation and transcription. I don't think a
| single one would know. They need to know the common drugs
| in their field, how to take vitals, when to raise the red
| flag to a physician. That's it. That is all still super
| important, if they don't use it at least once a year,
| they're not going know.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > Why?
|
| overall rates for a group contain millions or tens of millions
| of people probably aren't going to be dominated by a single
| explanation. maybe they want to leave them free for groups that
| are at higher risk? not every kind of doctor is dangerously
| exposed to risky patients.
| testfoobar wrote:
| Any group that is offered the vaccine but turns it down at
| any significant rate is a useful data point in projecting the
| date date we reach herd immunity.
|
| For example, consider if vaccine uptake was 100% - we would
| immediately know that we were supply and rate of delivery
| limited. Alternative consider if the vaccinate uptake rate
| was 10% - then we have the opposite problem. Demand is too
| low.
|
| In this case, with some doctors and nurses rejecting the
| vaccine, it is reasonable to project that overall demand for
| the vaccine across the general population will be low. This
| means that the date we reach herd immunity is farther in the
| future than if the uptake rate was 100%.
| sigstoat wrote:
| i was quoting your "Why?", not asking you a question.
|
| and if you continue to treat a group of millions as a
| homogenous unit, you can't have thoughts like "maybe the
| doctors turning it down right now will accept it after the
| elderly are all vaccinated" which wouldn't slow down the
| overall vaccination rate.
| [deleted]
| testfoobar wrote:
| "maybe the doctors turning it down right now will accept
| it after the elderly are all vaccinated" - This is a
| conjecture and not a fact observable in any collected
| data about vaccine uptake.
|
| What your thoughts or my thoughts are really don't
| matter. What matters is observable facts and how they
| inform us about future policy decisions.
|
| To me, medical professionals turning down the vaccine
| when offered suggests that public policy makers should
| consider vaccine mandates if we're to reach herd immunity
| faster.
| hhkb wrote:
| At current rate of vaccination in the US, it's going to take more
| than a full year to get it done.
| colincooke wrote:
| This is a bad take, vaccinations are rapdily increasing in the
| USA and around the world:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-19-vaccinatio...
| standardUser wrote:
| Using the current rate as the constant rate over the next 12
| months makes absolutely no sense.
| blhack wrote:
| Why? States have known since _this summer_ that a vaccine was
| coming, likely by the end of the year, and somehow they have
| all neglected to prepare.
|
| We've got what is by all measures a modern _miracle_ , an
| answer to the most horrifying global event of the last
| century, given to us by a bunch of scientists who have been
| working nonstop for the last year to give it to us, and state
| health workers are doing things like taking weekends off and
| only opening a single vaccine site.
|
| And then they also seem to concerned about _fairness_ WRT to
| the vaccine distribution that they are willing to simply let
| this _literal miracle_ go to waste on a shelf, rather than
| accidentally give it to somebody who didn 't deserve it.
|
| The way that almost every state seems to be treating these
| vaccines are not in any way in alignment with what I would
| expect from _the worst pandemic in the last 100 years_. It is
| _infuriating_.
| hhkb wrote:
| And why not? What makes you think it will improve? Specialty
| distribution is not something you can easily scale in a short
| period of time.
| oblio wrote:
| I think Pfizer has already found a cheaper and easier to
| manage dry ice based distribution method. If there's a
| will, there's a way.
| JosephRedfern wrote:
| > Specialty distribution is not something you can easily
| scale in a short period of time
|
| That doesn't mean that you can't scale it at all, and one
| would assume that scaling over a super short period of time
| (like, weeks) is harder than scaling over a slightly longer
| time span (like months).
|
| On that basis, is it not fair to assume that there'll be at
| lease some non-linearity in production and distribution
| rates over the next year or so?
| mrosett wrote:
| For starters, distribution is currently restricted to a
| very small slice of the population.
| markkanof wrote:
| Yes, it seems like ultimately the distribution problem
| will come down to communicating who can get vaccinated
| and when. Like right now I have been hearing scattered
| reports that there are places where doses of the vaccine
| are available and not being used. So if I wanted to go
| get one could I? I'm certainly not in any demographic
| that should be prioritized, but if it's just sitting
| there then someone should use it.
| standardUser wrote:
| "Specialty distribution is not something you can easily
| scale in a short period of time."
|
| You admit distribution is something that can increase over
| time, so it should be plainly obvious that capacity will
| increase as time moves on (as opposed to staying stagnant
| or slowing down), especially considering everyone involved
| in the process has explicitly stated it will.
|
| The additional vaccines that are close to approval give us
| further reason to expect the rate of vaccinations to
| increase significantly.
|
| We have no reason to believe the current rate of
| vaccinations will remain stagnant or slow down, and many
| reasons to believe it will increase significantly in the
| coming months.
| icedchai wrote:
| It's a logistical nightmare. It won't be improved. It could
| be, but it won't. At least, not in time for it to matter.
|
| We're only about half way done with this.
| eganist wrote:
| Is this in response to reports the US is considering cutting
| dosing requirements? The Reuters story is pretty bare (the title
| of this HN post essentially covers it), so without added context,
| this really feels like the cause.
|
| In re: dosing - https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-
| pandemic-vac...
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| It's probably in response to the entire planet wanting as many
| doses of vaccine as they can possibly get their hands on.
| maxerickson wrote:
| This is the first large production run Moderna has managed,
| there's not much reason to assume it is anything more than
| their information about supplies and so on firming up.
| packetlost wrote:
| Unless they're counting both doses as a single "dose" in their
| announcement, I doubt it.
| fareesh wrote:
| Is this vaccine immunity lifelong ? Or do you have to take it
| every few months/years?
| Symmetry wrote:
| With common cold coronaviruses we see that reinfection is
| possible for many people after a year, though they don't seem
| to develop symptoms if they get it again so quickly. I'm sure
| if you look at enough people you'll see a wide variation in
| response though.
| tonyhb wrote:
| We have only had the vaccine for 9 months so there's not enough
| data to know.
| wang_li wrote:
| Natural anti-bodies to other coronaviruses in the same group
| seem to last more than a decade. People who had SARS in 2003
| still show an immune response 17 years later. There's a good
| chance this vaccine is a one-time thing or perhaps just a
| couple of times in your life.
|
| https://gulfnews.com/uae/how-long-does-immunity-to-sars-coro...
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z_reference....
| luto wrote:
| last time I checked, the answer was "we don't know". There
| seems to be a >=8 months figure floating around now, though.
|
| https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/12/two-stud...
| rcardo11 wrote:
| Are these US only numbers? 600M sounds like very very few doses
| given worldwide population and even western world population.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Total production. It's an increase of their previous estimates.
| It's enough for 300 million people following the schedule
| studied in the US trial that led to FDA emergency use
| authorization.
|
| Pfizer projects making more than that.
|
| The AstraZeneca vaccine has much larger production, and the J&J
| vaccine will also, if it is approved.
| SamBam wrote:
| My understanding is that both the Moderna vaccine and the
| BioNTech one are being made in only a couple sites each.
|
| Is there any reason why more labs across the globe couldn't
| start producing the vaccines, under a license from those
| companies? Is the technology needed to create them so unique
| that it literally can't be made anywhere else?
| epistasis wrote:
| It's more the difficulty in standing up a new site for GMP
| (good manufacturing practice). Closest analogy in the tech
| word would be standing up a new fab, but quite a bit
| cheaper. It takes time to iron out all the kinks and show
| that everything is being produced correctly and safely. And
| skipping this would be disastrous, since we are already
| reaching dangerous amounts of vaccine hesitancy.
| pvarangot wrote:
| The Sputnik adenovirus vaccine is easier to manufacture and
| they are allowing some countries to install their own
| capacity. I don't know if they improved the accuracy of
| their tests, they were kinda sketchy when they announced
| it.
|
| The PR and marketing is not targeting the US for some
| reason, maybe because they think no one will want a
| "Russian" vaccine in the US or maybe because it's more
| expensive... but in other countries it's going to be "the"
| vaccine, so I hope it works.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I suspect that the Chinese vaccine will be the most used
| outside of US and Europe.
| maxerickson wrote:
| They would need to do an FDA supervised trial.
|
| Edit: the Oxford AstraZeneca and J&J vaccines are
| adenovirus and are nearing completion of their trials, so
| we are on track for much wider availability.
| mchusma wrote:
| In this particular case the mRNA technology Moderna (and
| Pfizer) is completely new, these are the first two vaccines
| approved. Yes they spent a lot (including OWS money) to
| ramp production, all previous mRNA vaccine production was
| <1M doses per year in 2019 and before. So between Moderna
| and Pfizer, we are looking at probably 1.8 billion - 3
| billion doses produced.
|
| There are many genuine complaints about the vaccine ramp
| up, but this is one of the few cases where these numbers
| are a "good job".
|
| This is why its so important for the FDA to give EUA to
| Astrazeneca now, that is a technology that can be scaled
| quickly. They should also encourage a readout now of J&J,
| which is almost certainly over the efficacy threshold and
| can also be scaled. With these two approvals, we can have
| enough vaccine for a 1st dose for everyone within the next
| 60 days.
| marcinzm wrote:
| That depends on what the bottleneck is. If it's a precursor
| or component then more sites won't help at all. Others have
| commented that it's either vials or clotting factor.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Yes. I've got relatives in the Philippines and they're not
| expecting to get vaccinated until 2023/2024, assuming the virus
| doesn't get to them first.
|
| We're amazingly lucky in the developed world and U.S. in
| particular. Wealth makes it possible to buy up all the supplies
| (which, reportedly, the U.S. has done) and make sure your
| people get first in line for it. This is also why the U.S. is
| both idolized and hated in much of the world.
| nend wrote:
| >600M sounds like very very few doses given worldwide
| population and even western world population.
|
| Which is why people are so keen on getting more vaccines
| approved (in the US and abroad). Pfizer is targeting 1.3B doses
| manufactured in 2021, 600M from Moderna, which still leaves the
| world plenty short (remember each person needs 2 doses). It's a
| group effort, and there are additional vaccines under
| development/review that will hopefully contribute to the
| effort.
|
| There's also discussion around whether Moderna's vaccine can be
| reduced from 100ml to 50ml while retaining the same efficacy,
| which would obviously double the amount of doses provided by
| Moderna.
| lisper wrote:
| > each person needs 2 doses
|
| That's not quite true. You need 2 for full effectiveness, but
| it's not like missing the second dose leaves you with no
| benefit at all. In fact, it's far from clear, from a global
| perspective, that having twice as many people with less-than-
| full-effectiveness would not better than half as many people
| with full effectiveness.
| mullingitover wrote:
| I'm not so sure that a less effective vaccine is better
| than no vaccine at all. If the virus has a less-effective
| immune response, it could have a better chance of mutating
| into something that's resistant to the vaccine, in which
| case all the work creating the vaccine goes out the window.
| andybak wrote:
| I vaguely remember reading something along the lines of
| "You're thinking of antibiotics. Vaccines and viruses are
| different".
|
| Anyone got any solid insight into this?
| mullingitover wrote:
| I found the article.
|
| > "My concern, as a virologist, is that if you wanted to
| make a vaccine-resistant strain, what you would do is to
| build a cohort of partially immunized individuals in the
| teeth of a highly prevalent viral infection," Bieniasz
| told STAT. Even rolling out the vaccine at all when there
| is so much transmission occurring is far from ideal, he
| said, suggesting it would have been safer to beat down
| the amount of virus in circulation before beginning the
| vaccine deployment.
|
| >"You are essentially maximizing the opportunity for the
| virus to learn about the human immune system. Learn about
| antibodies. Learn how to evade them," he said.
|
| [1] https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/04/britain-takes-a-
| gamble-w...
| valarauko wrote:
| That's true, but the FDA EUA specify that Pfizer & Moderna
| stick to the dosage regime as tested. It's very likely that
| a half dosage/reduced dosage might be deemed acceptable,
| but AFAIK no national authority has allowed a dosage regime
| deviation from what was tested in the Phase III trials. The
| closest would be the UK allowing upto a 12 week gap between
| doses of the Oxford vaccine. I agree that it's probably
| worth it to half the dosage and double the number of people
| who can be covered when initial supplies are so limited,
| but till the FDA makes that call, we have to stick to the
| dosage as specified.
| lisper wrote:
| No national authority has had to deal with a world-wide
| pandemic for the last 100 years. Treating this situation
| as if it were business as usual and following the normal
| rules may not lead to the best outcome.
| valarauko wrote:
| I don't disagree with you, but they also have to balance
| risk. They need numbers to work on, and those numbers
| barely even exist right now. The 2K in the Moderna trial
| who received the single dose is a statistical blip
| compared to the hundreds of millions for whom the FDA
| would make decisions.
|
| The EUA is their attempt to manage the health risk to the
| population - an investigational vaccine using an entirely
| unproven novel technology stack poses some unbound risk
| (likely small), vs the benefit of an effective vaccine.
| Once we change the dosage, the effectiveness also become
| unclear, while the risk remains (eg, potential trace
| contamination with precursors in the lipid carriers
| triggering shock in a untested population subset. Perhaps
| prescription statins greatly reduce the effectiveness of
| the vaccine, etc etc). It's the job of the FDA to err on
| the side of caution and see risks where we would not. I
| agree with you that the situation is unprecedented, but I
| also do not blame the FDA for only working with the data
| they have. I suspect that Pfizer & Moderna will conduct
| Phase IV trials with different dosage regimes based on
| which the FDA can modify the terms of the EUA.
| jhowell wrote:
| > In fact, it's far from clear
|
| Seems clear from my perspective. Two doses are recommend by
| manufacturers. Anything more or less is pure speculation at
| best. Why speculate in absence of a way to test your
| hypothesis?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The manufacturer doesn't know anything about this that
| isn't public information.
|
| Yes, two doses are almost certainly better than one. But
| those are not the choices.
|
| When there are far fewer doses than the number of people
| to vaccinate, the question is if it's better to give N
| people 2 shots, or 2N people 1 shot.
|
| The test data looks like 1 dose gives ~80% protection vs
| ~95% for 2 doses. The 2x80% scenario is clearly better
| than 1x95%.
|
| And, of course, everyone would get the second dose as
| soon as production catches up.
| pavelrub wrote:
| The main unknowns aren't around short-term efficacy, but
| long term immunity. If it turns out that a single dose
| provides ~80% protection but only for 3 months, whereas
| the second dose provides strong long-term protection, the
| one-dose scenario would be significantly worse.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Longer term, everyone gets a booster shot as soon as
| they're available.
| Bootvis wrote:
| What if it takes 9 months to have the booster shots
| available? People will be vulnerable for 6 then.
| Exmoor wrote:
| Vulnerability isn't binary. You're not immune one day and
| susceptible the next. It's much more likely that immunity
| to getting sick might start decreasing over time, but
| still remain relatively high. So, perhaps 80% in 3
| months, 60% in 6 months, and 30% in 9 months to use made
| up numbers. Additionally, production is still ramping up
| so it's highly unlikely that we'll have less vaccine in 3
| months than currently. We'll also likely have 1-3 more
| approved vaccines by then as well.
| Bootvis wrote:
| Unfortunately, we don't know the exact numbers so
| following this strategy (which I agree might make sense)
| is somewhat of a gamble. Maybe the numbers are not very
| favourable therefore the choice shouldn't be portrayed as
| such a simple one as in the comment I replied to.
| lisper wrote:
| Because the manufacturer recommendations are based on
| achieving the best outcome for the individual receiving
| the treatment. But we're in a global pandemic, a
| situation the world has not faced in living memory. A
| different quality metric might be appropriate under these
| circumstances.
| mns wrote:
| So even though the manufacturers (the companies that
| developed the vaccines, the scientists, the people
| running the trials, the ones that know the data and went
| through a full year of tests) keep on recommending 2
| doses and the advice given to the UK government was still
| to stick to the 2 doses, we're now going the way that "we
| think we know better and it's better to try something new
| and untested because it's a pandemic and it might be
| better to have less efficiency to more people, than full
| efficiency to less people", even though it's, again, not
| tested and a shot in the dark?
| jjeaff wrote:
| Was there any testing done comparing 2 doses to one? I
| think it was speculation that led us to test with 2 doses
| because we'll, we don't have much time, 2 must be better
| than one.
| lisper wrote:
| https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/12/18/coronavirus-
| vac...
| freeone3000 wrote:
| The study we have of a two-dose COVID-19 vaccine with one
| dose administered showed 67% effectiveness, in line with
| vaccines for other diseases (including eradicated ones -
| polio vaccine is 80%).
| cltby wrote:
| > Anything more or less is pure speculation at best
|
| There are two lines of evidence. The first is empirical.
| It It appears that one dose of Moderna _is_ highly
| effective, perhaps 85% or more. Note the treatment-
| control divergence after about fourteen days [1]. The
| second is theoretical. From our ample medical experience
| with other vaccines, there is strong prior reason to
| think that one dose is likely to work well, and that a
| second shot in the distant future would be even better
| than a second shot after three or four weeks. Booster
| shots are given a.) as backup for people who don't
| seroconvert after one dose b.) to trigger a secondary
| immune response. In light of a.), we shouldn't be
| surprised by the 85% number (most people seroconvert;
| there's no partial immunity, you either seroconvert or
| you don't). In light of b.), we should be very skeptical
| of the four week interval, especially since the secondary
| response takes about two weeks to develop. It's shorter
| than the interval for every other vaccine.
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/12/fda-releases-
| data-on... [2]
| https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-
| adolesc...
| Exmoor wrote:
| Agreed. It's also important to remember that the 3/4 week
| dates for the second dose were not chosen based on it
| being the most effective timeline, but because it was the
| minimum time needed to complete the studies as quickly as
| possible. If they'd chosen 8 weeks we wouldn't have US
| approval yet. If they'd chosen 12 weeks we wouldn't even
| know if they were effective yet.
| Bootvis wrote:
| Giving one dose increases the probability of someone
| catching COVID and the virus evolving resistance within
| this person. I don't know how likely that is but the impact
| could be huge.
| valarauko wrote:
| Is there evidence of this?
| Bootvis wrote:
| I think it's too early to have evidence of this I think
| but knowledgeable people seem to have some concerns:
|
| https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/04/britain-takes-a-
| gamble-w...
|
| That the impact could be huge doesn't take much
| imagination: We could be back to square 1 with the
| vaccination process and the evolved virus might be more
| dangerous.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| People tend to forget the ex-us vaccines.
|
| SinoVac Planned to have capacity for 600 million doses/yr in
| China by the end of 2020, with more production in Indonesia,
| Brazil, and India.
|
| Russian Sputnik V also will have several hundred million dose
| production.
|
| It is quite likely this will already surpass our ability to
| administer the vaccines or the willingness of people to take
| them.
| standardUser wrote:
| To add to the list, India plans to domestically produce 1
| billion doses of AstraZeneca this year, with 50 million
| already produced.
| getpolarized wrote:
| Noe that when deployed properly, we MIGHT not need 85% if we have
| secondary protocols to inhibit the growth of covid.
|
| For example, requiring all airline passengers or anyone leaving
| their state to be vaccinated and vaccinating frontline workers
| including those that work at grocery stores, etc.
| cadence- wrote:
| Let's hope this is also going to be the case for all the other
| companies producing Covid-19 vaccine. Hopefully we will have
| enough vaccine manufactured in 2021 to significantly slow the
| spread of this virus around the world.
| falcolas wrote:
| That's a lot; yet it's still nowhere near enough. We've got ~over
| 9~ around 8 billion who need vaccinations.
|
| EDIT: Even with 5+ different vaccines hitting 600M (some of which
| require multiple doses per person), we're still talking years to
| achieve herd immunity. Years of continuing our current
| conditions.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Not sure I understand you. If most of the US is vaccinated, do
| you think the US will have to continue lockdown simply because
| most of Africa hasn't yet gotten the vaccine? Substitute
| whatever country you are worried about.
|
| I fully suspect that once the older folks and health care get
| vaccinated, at some point ICUs will start clearing out and
| lockdowns will start coming off.
| falcolas wrote:
| > If most of the US is vaccinated
|
| These vaccines aren't all going to the US (or at least, not
| that I've heard about). I've been hearing 600,000
| vaccinations (granted, this is from politicians, so ready
| your salt) this year in the US.
|
| > ICUs will start clearing out and lockdowns will start
| coming off
|
| In which case they'll fill right back up (as is being aptly
| demonstrated in the US _right now_ ). It's not just the
| elderly who are filling those beds - slightly over half of
| the hospitalizations are under 65, pretty consistently
| throughout the pandemic.
| wang_li wrote:
| > I've been hearing 600,000 vaccinations (granted, this is
| from politicians, so ready your salt) this year in the US.
|
| I don't know where you're hearing that, but the US is
| already doing more than 300,000 vaccinations per day
| (302,000 on 1/1 and 325,000 on 1/2.) If we maintain that
| rate we'll have 100% vaccination before the end of the
| year. Of course not everyone will take the vaccine, but
| "600,000 vaccinations this year" is wrong.
| glouwbug wrote:
| You mean 8 billion?
| londons_explore wrote:
| 2 doses per person... No need for 100% vaccination (some will
| die before being vaccinated, some immunity from already being
| infected, some too poor to buy it, etc.)
| falcolas wrote:
| > some will die before being vaccinated
|
| And their replacements (plus a few) will be born, also
| requiring a vaccination until we hit herd immunity.
| standardUser wrote:
| To be clear, none of these vaccines are approved for
| young children (though it helps that they are poor
| vectors and super low-risk).
| falcolas wrote:
| It doesn't have to be newborns who replace the dead from
| the vaccination pool - it can be children outside of the
| age range growing into the vaccination range.
| standardUser wrote:
| It's one of 5 vaccines currently in use, with at least a couple
| more expected to be approved in various countries this and next
| month. So it does not need to be enough.
| falcolas wrote:
| Even if all 5 produce 600M doses a year, it'll still take
| _years_. Some of those also require two doses per person.
| standardUser wrote:
| India alone plans to produce 1 billion doses of the
| AstraZeneca vaccine this calendar year, with 50 million
| already produced. These vaccines were _just_ approved in a
| few countries and production is _just_ starting to ramp up.
| Not a great time to be making projections. Give it a month.
| oblio wrote:
| Yeah, but they don't all need it at the same time. Plus there
| are multiple companies producing vaccines. There's Moderna,
| Pfizer/Biontech, Astra Zeneca/Oxford, the Russian one, the
| Chinese one.
| falcolas wrote:
| > they don't all need it at the same time
|
| We're talking about years, even if all of the existing
| vaccines can hit the same or similar production quotas.
| Compounded by individuals requiring multiple doses of some of
| the vaccines.
|
| Years is a long time to wait for herd immunity.
| [deleted]
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I am hoping the incoming administration invokes the defense
| production act to help with production of vaccine and testing
| supplies, as well as providing a comprehensive policy at the
| federal level regarding vaccine distribution. The current admin
| is basically letting things roll out on their own. What I am
| seeing is that if we do everything right, which up to now we have
| not, early fall is a good target for things starting to turn back
| to normal. I wonder if a more concentrated effort could shave a
| month off that. And given the projected estimates of how many
| tens of thousands will die in the next few weeks, and the
| additional surge after everyone decided to travel for the
| holidays, February is likely to be straight up lethal.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Even with vaccinations, this virus will be around for another
| 10 years. It took 185+ years to eradicate smallpox (mostly from
| a big WHO push in the 60s/70s). It's still not possible to
| eradicate Polio. Even with a massive push, it's not like a
| vaccine will make this go away.
|
| We have a lot of information now about how to treat and not
| treat this virus. A bunch of early deaths were due to overuse
| of high pressure ventilators and the Governess of NY and
| Michigan putting sick elderly people with healthy elderly
| people in nursing homes without adequate isolation (most had 2
| or more people per room) killed a lot of people in the first
| three months. We overreacted to the virus, like a social auto-
| immune response.
|
| We also know the fatalities are 95% over 55. This virus has
| mostly reduced our life expectancy. By 5 years? 1 year? That's
| difficult to determine at this point. Everyone is going on
| about "long covid" now, but if you actually read the papers,
| the whole things starts to break down to a couple of case
| studies of 40~50 people each. There may be long term effects
| for heavily exposed people (health care workers) and the
| elderly, but the "long covid" narrative is another one if abuse
| and fear; not grounded in hard science and accurate risk
| analysis.
|
| For things to go back to normal, the vaccine is not the
| solution. The solution is to stop spreading constant fear. The
| Great Barrington deceleration has been shunned and dismissed by
| all major media outlets, yet it's signed by many doctors,
| academics and professionals and it makes a lot of sense.
|
| Humanity has a new virus and we need to learn to live with
| that. The countries who have avoided it can keep shut down, but
| at some point it's no longer going to be feasible to do so.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| The top infectious dresses expert in the country certainly
| disagrees with a lot of what you are saying. Yes it will
| stick around. Yes the vaccine will help a great deal. What
| exactly is your point? That there is no reason to rush?
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/04/us/coronavirus-pandemic-
| year-...
| djsumdog wrote:
| and meanwhile people are losing this businesses, their
| livelihoods, their mental health and absolutely everything.
| A women in California invested heavily in outdoor dining
| equipment, only to be shut down, and then she sees a movie
| production company setup a full catering set right next to
| her restaurant.
|
| The top infection dresses experts can be wrong. Don't
| appeal to authority. There are literally thousands of other
| doctors and scientists who say further lockdowns are not
| helping. The WHO is saying lockdowns should not be used
| except as a last resort!
|
| Don't listen to just one person. Look at all the options.
| Lockdowns don't work.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Seatbelts don't work. Lots of people die in car crashes
| and lots of them were wearing seatbelts. Stop wearing
| seatbelts. Some doctors believe this. Don't believe the
| experts. Be your own researcher. Your Google Fu is
| certainly a match for the CDC and its $6.5b yearly
| budget.
| djsumdog wrote:
| It's not remotely comparable. You can test seat belts
| with crash dummies. It's a clear experiment, and yes,
| people should have been skeptical of seat belts until
| they were proven to be effective. Auto companies were
| pushing against seat-belts and safety. Today big industry
| is pushing for lockdowns (and we should question those
| motives).
|
| It's a bad argument. There are literally thousands of
| people in the Great Barrington Declaration, who have
| sound arguments for ending lockdowns. We can literally
| look at the numbers across the globe from different
| policies in different countries and see there is no
| direct correlational between any government action and
| fatalities. Correlation isn't causation, but we DO NOT
| even have correlation!
|
| Scientists and doctors are saying we need to end this
| mass hysteria. We should listen to all the experts, not
| only the ones we agree with.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| > Scientists and doctors are saying we need to end this
| mass hysteria. We should listen to all the experts, not
| only the ones we agree with.
|
| To quote Wikipedia, citation needed. And please don't
| like to a YouTube/Facebook/Instagram whatever of someone
| in a white coat. I have not seen this from anyone with
| any reasonable credentials.
| djsumdog wrote:
| The Great Barrington Declaration:
|
| https://gbdeclaration.org/
|
| Signed by literally thousands of experts, doctors and
| virologists.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I was just able to sign it as a medical professional. I
| am not one. Literally nothing on that site is verified. I
| keep seeing you quote things in this thread related to
| this site, which as far as I can tell has zero
| authenticity, and to random YouTube videos. Hint: if a
| doctor or researcher can only publish their findings on
| YouTube/Facebook/Instagram, they don't have anything
| worthwhile to say.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Alright, so lets not look at the signers, let's look at
| the clearly listed authors on that page:
|
| > Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard
| University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist
|
| > Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an
| epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine
| development
|
| > Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University
| Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health
| economist, and public health policy expert
|
| > Dr. Alexander Walker, principal at World Health
| Information Science Consultants, former Chair of
| Epidemiology, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health
|
| Some of these people have done interviews too. You can go
| look them up on major news programs.
|
| > Hint: if a doctor or researcher can only publish their
| findings on YouTube/Facebook/Instagram, they don't have
| anything worthwhile to say
|
| We're talking about an ongoing crisis where we see clear
| censorship in media, big tech and academic publications.
| People are basing world changing decisions off pre-prints
| and pre-pubs. Does it really matter where a doctor or
| researcher publishes their views so long as it is a real
| doctor or researcher? Why does the platform make their
| opinion invalid?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I repeat, I was just able to use a fake name to sign that
| document. Nothing prevents anyone from signing it as any
| of those people. Just for giggles, I just literally
| signed it a second time as "Dr. DJ Sumdog, PhD, associate
| professor at Hacker News". Check your email to complete
| the process.
|
| Furthermore, the people you listed above have been found
| to have conflicts of interest regarding this declaration.
| The medical and public health communities have soundly
| rejected this declaration. This declaration makes no
| sense if you examine it with any kind of critical eye.
| Start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington
| _Declaration#R... and from there check the linked
| sources.
|
| There is no censorship in the media regarding medical
| research of COVID-19. There is fact checking. Just
| because _you_ believe something that is false and the
| media isn 't reporting that falsehood as fact does not
| mean the media is censoring you. It means it's false.
| Occam's Razor will quickly tell you that the chances of a
| global conspiracy are much lower than the chances of what
| you are saying here being false. Think about just how
| many people would have to know about this conspiracy and
| all of them would keep it perfectly secret. Every news
| organization in the world would have to collectively
| conspire to keep the truth from us, right? Every
| journalist, every editor, every publisher, every news
| anchor, every weatherman, every sportscaster, every
| public official. Do you know how quickly that would
| unravel? I know it's easy to believe a conspiracy because
| it's so appealing but it's just not what is going on.
|
| The platform is an indirect indication: if the scientific
| community rejects your hypothesis, it's most likely
| because your hypothesis is bullshit. Think critically for
| a moment the way they taught in you middle school and
| realize that what you are quoting are unverified
| unreliable sources and fringe ideas. If you were saying
| that drinking motor oil cures COVID you'd have about as
| much credibility. I am done trying to argue with you
| because you are not worth arguing about, but I do beg you
| to use your head and think instead of falling for every
| damn hoax out there like you seem to have. Happy New Year
| and stay safe.
| djsumdog wrote:
| > Furthermore, the people you listed above have been
| found to have conflicts of interest regarding this
| declaration
|
| There are also conflicts with Fauci has his strong
| connections to the Gavi health alliance and many big
| pharma companies. Some of them might have conflicts, but
| all of them? And even if they do, what about the
| arguments themselves? Science is not a consensus.
|
| > There is no censorship in the media regarding medical
| research of COVID-19. There is fact checking
|
| You have got to be fucking kidding me?! The Hunter Biden
| story, published by one of the largest newspapers in the
| United States (the NY Post) was censored on every major
| platform (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and was it was later
| found that he was under active investigation by the FBI.
| We are in one of the absolutely worst eras of censorship
| of our times. It has grown ti 1984 levels of insanity by
| Big Tech and Big Media.
|
| You cannot possible be saying there is no big media
| censorship and it's all "Fact Checking". That's total
| fucking bullshit. We have cases where the news media
| contradicts their own headlines within their own articles
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmgMu5sefzA) and
| literally fact checks opinions and hyperbolas
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPruYq320MM)
|
| > The platform is an indirect indication: if the
| scientific community rejects your hypothesis, it's most
| likely because your hypothesis is bullshit.
|
| You are essentially saying "The Media is the Message."
| It's a massive logical error. Remember at one time, the
| major scientific publications said black people were
| inferior to whites due to their skull size. It was
| provable science at that time. Science is not about
| majority rule, it's about examination and facts that can
| be reproduced by others.
|
| > it's most likely because your hypothesis is bullshit
|
| That's assuming the result based on the medium. You
| realize a bunch of researches got totally baseless papers
| published in respected grievance study journals, right?
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2018/10/10/
| gri...
|
| furthermore, there have been many cases where the medium
| has been banned throughout history, by the academic and
| scientific communities, for things that are commonly
| accepted as fact today:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA
|
| I feel like your arguments are very similar to those that
| advocate creationism. It's religion in the guise of
| science.
| djsumdog wrote:
| In addition, early on we had statements from two front-
| line doctors in Bakersfield which were pulled from
| YouTube:
|
| https://www.turnto23.com/news/coronavirus/video-
| interview-wi...
|
| and we had professor Karol Sikora, who former ally worked
| at the WHO, discuss what he saw in his on oncology clinic
| (also censored on YouTube)"
|
| https://unherd.com/thepost/professor-karol-sikora-fear-
| is-mo...
| oblio wrote:
| Lockdowns 100% work. Just like the medieval term
| "quarantine" proved that it works, 500 years ago. They're
| very effective at stopping infectious diseases. You don't
| have to be a brain surgeon to figure out why they work.
|
| The side effects of lockdowns suck A LOT, but less than
| uncontrolled spread of a virus amongst 8 billion people.
| Besides the fact that it would completely destroy out
| healthcare systems, in which case we're back to the
| Middle Ages, we're a few mutations away from a much
| deadlier disease. It would be ultimately irresponsible to
| allow Covid to run rampant.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Show me the evidence. You look from nation to nation,
| region to region, and there is no effect at all from
| masks or lockdowns. You are imagining they work because
| the TV tells you to, but they don't.
| danhor wrote:
| Here is the first result from google scholar: https://aca
| demic.oup.com/jtm/article/27/3/taaa037/5808003?lo....
| Seems pretty effective to me
| djsumdog wrote:
| > The positive impact of lockdown in Wuhan on containing
| the COVID-19 outbreak in China
|
| Wuhan, where they literally welded people in their
| homes?!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meRUCxlleUc
|
| Are you seriously advocating for elimination this virus
| by eliminating people's basic human rights?!
| IgorPartola wrote:
| What tells you that what you are seeing there is them
| welding people inside their apartment buildings? I see
| someone welding something. I don't see how you can tell
| who they are or what they are doing or why based on this
| video.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Um, the part where the guy opens the door and sees a bar
| welded in front of it?! There are Chineese sources that
| show bars being put up against peoples' doors:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfzQ8Dag8V8
|
| There are tons of these videos by the way:
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/is-china-locking-up-
| ent...
|
| But they are difficult to confirm because China heavily
| restricts all coms in and out of the country, or are you
| going to try to deny the Great Firewall of China or
| extreme media censorship exists next?
|
| Here's an opinion piece from the WaPo by a Chinese
| citizen also stating people were welded into their homes:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/06/warnin
| g-c...
|
| and here are a list of Chinese sources as well:
|
| https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/46045/15222
| oblio wrote:
| Every time they impose a stricter lockdown where I am,
| numbers go down. They relax it, they go up.
|
| It's a roller coaster of disease.
|
| What have you got against lockdowns? Is it some
| philosophical hatred? You're not alone, governments also
| hate them. They do it because they have to.
| djsumdog wrote:
| The actual numbers are totally opposite of what you say.
| Please show some sources. I think Shapiro covers the
| arguments against lockdowns very well:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymD9ipSm-eg
|
| I'm against them because they literally do not work, and
| they violate our basic civil rights. A man in Canada was
| shot months ago for not wearing a mask, after he left the
| store, outside his own home. In Quebec over New Years
| Eve, police arrested someone for having more than five
| people in their homes. New York wants to pass ordinances
| that lets them put people in camps if they're infected.
|
| This is absolute insanity. The virus is an excuse to
| violate all our basic human rights. The United States
| constitution is basically suspended at this point.
|
| Look at this woman who was arrested for trying to save
| her deteriorating mother locked in a care home:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1E390UHzTY
| oblio wrote:
| There you go, see the links and abstracts below.
|
| But you're emotional, I doubt these sources will change
| your mind. Have a nice day!
|
| https://www.benjaminborn.de/publication/bdm_lockdown_2020
| /
|
| > While most countries imposed a lockdown in response to
| COVID-19, Sweden did not. To quantify the lockdown
| effect, we approximate a counterfactual lockdown scenario
| for Sweden through the outcome in a synthetic control
| unit. We find, first, that a 9-week lockdown in the first
| half of 2020 would have reduced infections and deaths by
| about 75% and 50%, respectively. Second, the lockdown
| effect starts to materialize with a delay of 3-4 weeks
| only. Third, the actual adjustment of mobility patterns
| in Sweden suggests there has been substantial voluntary
| social restraint, although the adjustment was less strong
| than under the lockdown scenario. Lastly, we find that a
| lockdown would not have caused much additional output
| loss.
|
| https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)32034-1/f
| ull...
|
| > Lockdown therefore appears to have been successful not
| only in alleviating the burden on the intensive care
| units of the two most severely affected regions of
| France, but also in preventing uncontrolled epidemics in
| other regions. These simple observations support results
| from other studies which have estimated the impact of
| lockdown on SARS-CoV-2 spread to be strong.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S204908
| 012...
|
| > COVID-19's daily increasing cases and deaths have led
| to worldwide lockdown, quarantine and some restrictions.
| This study aims to analyze the effect of lockdown days on
| the spread of coronavirus in countries. COVID-19 cases
| and lockdown days data were collected for 49 countries
| that implemented the lockdown between certain dates
| (without interruption). The correlation tests were used
| for data analysis based on unconstrained (normal) and
| constrained (Tukey-lambda). The lockdown days was
| significantly correlated with COVID-19 pandemic based on
| unconstrained (r = -0.9126, F-ratio = 6.1654; t-ratio =
| 2.40; prob > .0203 with 49 observations) and based on
| Tukey-lambda (r = 0.7402, l = 0.14). The lockdown, one of
| the social isolation restrictions, has been observed to
| prevent the COVID-19 pandemic, and showed that the spread
| of the virus can be significantly reduced by this
| preventive restriction in this study. This study offers
| initial evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic can be
| suppressed by a lockdown. The application of lockdown by
| governments is also thought to be effective on
| psychology, environment and economy besides having impact
| on Covid-19.
| djsumdog wrote:
| > https://www.benjaminborn.de/publication/bdm_lockdown_20
| 20/
|
| Literally a pre-print. There's only an abstract. I don't
| see the actual one on Sci-Hub or anywhere. I can read it.
|
| > https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736
| %2820...
|
| The full text of the 2nd paper is literally only two
| pages and only appears to look at regions in France and
| not other countries. There are literally no graphs, no
| detailed explanation of the methodology and the very next
| article is literally "Is COVID-19 being used as a weapon
| against Indigenous Peoples in Brazil?" which speaks of
| this very weird identity politics finding its way into
| major academic journals. There are references to an
| Appendix that I can't seem to find the full-text of, but
| it bothers me the paper itself doesn't seem to have a
| detail methodology section, risk analysis and also lists
| some pretty big financial incentives/interests.
|
| The 3rd study is the only really detailed source
| provided, yet it only covers data up to May 5th. It also
| has this interesting quote:
|
| > In addition, it is claimed that, besides the positive
| aspects of the lockdown, people who comply with this
| restriction cause a weakened immune system. The main
| reason for this is that there is too much food
| consumption and limited mobility. The effect of the
| lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on human health
| may be the subject of future work
|
| It also tries to look at environmental impacts and
| mentions the inconsistency of lock-downs across all
| areas. I'm also having a hard time understand the
| "Transformed data" as it doesn't seem to correlate to
| either of the two preceding graphs at all. Also keep in
| mind, correlational near r=1 shows that Ice Cream sales
| can lead to Polio:
|
| https://external-
| content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
|
| That combined with the limited window and inconsistent
| lock-downs should at least throw question on this study.
| oblio wrote:
| I want your sources.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| We should be careful here because a lockdown and a
| medieval quarantine are not the same. In the middle ages
| quarantine typically meant keeping a ship at port and
| preventing from landing - and that's a very doable thing.
| You literally just prevent them from dropping their gang
| plank, and they have supplies and everything they need on
| board.
|
| The same does not apply to lockdowns. People need
| groceries, many people have limited cooking capabilities,
| and homes are not self sufficient - you need maintenance
| people, regular supplies, so on. And, those people who
| live in apartments and other small domiciles are not
| going to stay cooped up forever on end - they are going
| to go get food and visit people and no amount of threats
| is going to prevent that.
|
| And that's the issue. Lockdowns always have a maximum
| timetable that they're effective for and then they
| suddenly become less effective - and you don't get to
| reset that timer all that easily. Masks help but they are
| a partial solution - they have a relatively low
| effectiveness rate that is fine individually but in mass
| don't hold up.
|
| Many governments - and I'll pick on California
| specifically - keep locking down tighter and tigher.
| Curfews, dining restrictions, gathering restrictions and
| more that have been going on for more than 6 months now.
| Do you really think getting more restrictive will be
| helpful at all?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Right. Quarantine that is suggested, like it's been in
| the US, and quarantine that's enforced are very
| different. Again, national strategy for "let's all stay
| exactly where we are for four weeks while people in
| hazmat suits deliver you groceries" would have been
| closer to medieval quarantine.
| wasdfff wrote:
| The reality is that today in southern california, ICUs are at
| capacity. Most people end up ok. My whole family got it and
| had basically just congestion for two weeks, including the 90
| year old ancients we though were sure goners when they
| contracted it (we just turned up their oxygen and they were
| feeling a lot better).
|
| That being said, enough people do need medical care, and
| thats enough people to entirely burden our capacity to treat
| any sort of medical emergency, and cases are still going up.
| It's not good right now.
| djsumdog wrote:
| California had some of the strongest lockdowns and stay-at-
| home orders of any state and they're still having ICU
| issues, meanwhile Florida is not? Tennessee has similar
| policies to Florida and they have high cases .. Sweden has
| meanwhile dropped to zero.
|
| If you really look across the board at all countries, there
| is ZERO corroboration between any of these arbitrary
| measures and the results. It's all complete random
| superstition nonsense. COVID response is a new religions
| ideology, and ideology is "doing without knowing."
|
| Also, why are ICU beds at capacity? Is it all COVID, or
| tons of people who didn't get the heart surgery they
| needed?
|
| Your own experiences show that your family survived this
| and likely has long term immunity (and will continue to do
| so as long as they get exposed at regular intervals).
|
| The alternate reality is that the virus is real, but the
| way we've reacted to it will kill more people in the long
| term. I wrote about this back in March, COVID19 is two
| diseases. The virus and our over-reaction to it:
| https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/covid-19-is-two-
| disease...
| standardUser wrote:
| "If you really look across the board at all countries,
| there is ZERO corroboration between any of these
| arbitrary measures and the results. "
|
| Care to link a published study or a report from a
| reputable agency? Because it sounds like this is just
| your hunch.
| oblio wrote:
| Check out newer sources for that Sweden claim. They've
| both admitted that the strategy failed plus their
| measures are now at least equivalent to those of their
| neighbors.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SSkGkmY9FcM
| IgorPartola wrote:
| You are so wrong about this I am not even sure how to
| start. It's like trying to explain physics to a goldfish.
| We just can't understand this for you.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I have a masters degree and three publications. I'm not a
| fool or an idiot. Your attack is an ad hominem and your
| divisiveness is patronizing.
|
| "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to
| entertain a thought without accepting it." -Aristotle
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| Your credentials aren't what prevent you from being a
| fool or an idiot. However, your bizarre beliefs surely
| put you in that category.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I'm not a fool or an idiot, and those types or attacks
| are not allowed on HN. You don't know a damn thing about
| me. I don't know about you either. You're not even
| addressing the argument.
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| your argument has been addressed dozens of times. your
| credentials are meaningless. seek help, you clearly need
| it
| djsumdog wrote:
| Accusing me of mental illness is against HN rules, not to
| mention it makes you look like an asshole. Just because
| an argument has been "addressed" doesn't make it wrong.
|
| Your dismissal shows your religion devotion to your
| viewpoint. Maybe I'm religiously devoted to mine too at
| this point. If anything, it shows neither of us can be
| objective. You just wanted to get the last word in. It
| furthers my belief you're an asshole.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| > Don't appeal to authority.
|
| > I have a masters degree and three publications.
|
| Enough said.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I wasn't stating my authority. My degree and papers are
| in totally unrelated fields. I was stating I'm not
| uneducated.
|
| Your interpretation speaks volumes.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I don't think anyone is talking about 100% eradicating the
| virus.
|
| Getting old people and people at risk vaccinated basically
| means 99% of death would be avoided and hospital would go
| back to pre covid numbers. Once people over 40-50 are
| vaccinated it's game over for covid and most of things will
| go back to normal.
|
| Of course the virus won't totally disappear and people will
| still die of it.
|
| > Humanity has a new virus and we need to learn to live with
| that.
|
| The lockdowns / travel restrictions are part of the "learn to
| live with that", you can't just ignore it and run major
| hospitals at 110% capacity forever.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Even if 100% of the dead are in the risk/old group (which
| is not true), it's hard to achieve a 99% reduction with a
| 95% efficient vaccine. For that to work, you have to assume
| that the main way of infection is from inside the group. I
| think this is highly unlikely in a scenario where you say:
| protect the weak, let everybody else just get it.
| maxerickson wrote:
| We should 100% eradicate the virus. We have inexpensive
| vaccines available. Like you say, much of the harm is
| controlled well short of eradication, but it wouldn't be
| expensive to do it (it may even be cheaper to eradicate it
| than to continue to deal with it).
| standardUser wrote:
| That may be an unrealistically high bar. Only smallpox
| has ever been successfully eradicated, which speaks to
| the difficulty in completely eradicating a disease. And
| since some animals can carry and spread the virus,
| eradicating this virus may be impossible with current
| technology.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Let's try it and find out if it is realistic or not.
| standardUser wrote:
| What part of hospital over-crowding are you having difficulty
| understanding? I am sure someone here can explain it to you.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Some of these hospitals are being over-crowded because
| people haven't been able to come in for basic surgeries.
| People have died because they haven't gotten heart
| surgeries. If someone comes in for getting their wisdom
| teeth out, and tests positive for CoV2, they're listed as a
| COVID case, even if they have zero symptoms (and with 40+
| PCR amplifications for each test, the false positives are
| high).
|
| Hospitals are over-crowded ever year in the winter for all
| kinds of seasonal illnesses including flu, strep and
| others. The Bakersfield doctors said as much back in March
| and were censored on all platforms for it. They're also
| overcrowded because America's health system is just bad as
| expanding care for bad seasons in general, and we haven't
| really noticed until this crisis.
| hhkb wrote:
| It's almost as if the current administration is doing it on
| purpose in order to make the situation far worse than it needs
| to be.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| The only plausible reason I can see for the current admin to
| not invoke the DPA is because it would hurt short term
| corporate profits. Long term it makes sense that the sooner
| we contain the pandemic and open up the economy that those
| same companies would benefit greatly. I have no explanation
| for why the current admin isn't spearheading and funding a
| federal strategy for vaccine distribution.
| faitswulff wrote:
| It's ridiculous how you're being downvoted for speaking common
| sense.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| There is a surprisingly large number of people on HN that
| cannot stand seeing criticism of anything that Dear Leader
| does.
| dragontamer wrote:
| It's not production that's the problem. It's distribution right
| now.
|
| We can see states with good resources are vaccinating as
| quickly as the doses come in (a few days of lag time, but
| otherwise doing good).
|
| But many states are stuck in logistics hell. These vaccines
| need -80C or -20C storage to remain unspoiled. And the
| administrators are overworked nurses who haven't had rest for
| months, due to the pandemic.
|
| Once a dose leaves the -80C or -20C storage center, you only
| have a few days before the dose is ruined. So you need careful
| planning, maybe even allow a bit of waste for easier
| distribution.
|
| The military / national guard can help with distribution, but
| once again the nursing shortage is biting America in the ass.
| I'm not really sure how to solve that issue. (Well... I dunno
| how to solve it this year. Ultimately we just need more
| immigrants and/or students)
| maxerickson wrote:
| They aren't seperable. If you have lots of vaccine, there is
| no reason to do prioritization and things will inevitably go
| faster. I'd put myself on a list for the hospital to call me
| any time to come in for a vaccine, but they don't have
| anywhere near enough vaccine to spend the time making that
| list (doses for about 5% of the county available, I'm towards
| the end of prioritization).
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Investing in the education of your citizens is a proven and
| popular technique for having a higher quality and quantity of
| work force.
|
| Both production and distribution are problems. Hence why I
| hope the new admin addresses both with DPA and a
| comprehensive strategy respectively.
| dragontamer wrote:
| It'd be late for that. Logistics takes weeks, or even
| months, to ramp up.
|
| This is stuff that needed to be planned out last October if
| we wanted it working this month or next month.
|
| I guess better late than never. But... don't hold your
| breath. We're going to be having these logistic /
| distribution problems for many weeks moving forward.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Right. Should have done this 20 years ago so we would
| have plenty of nurses today. Should do this today so that
| when the next pandemic hits in 20 years we are better
| prepared.
| loceng wrote:
| Upvoted because although I agree with your sentiment, the
| arguably free market in this case, at this point is going to
| ramp up production as efficiently as possible. I assume all of
| these companies are each going to make $ billions even if they
| overproduce. They're also making a name for
| themselves/furthering their brand awareness, no doubt every
| 5-10 years we may have a similar pandemic to counter if bad
| actors rally to spread viruses, at an exponential rate too via
| different factors. The best defense is a good offense: UBI so
| people can survive regardless of working, and culturally people
| not believing that being safe and wearing a mask isn't
| preventing their freedoms; culturally that this is an issue is
| a sign of multi-generational dis-ease progression from citizens
| not being given enough, organized suffering/suppression of the
| masses for control/submission purposes. Andrew Yang's core
| policies will break apart the duopoly and "take the boot off of
| people's throats" - and then people can start to heal these
| deep wounds, open their hearts, allow their IQ and reasoning
| skills to open up/develop, to develop empathy, etc.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Pfizer is reporting that they have vaccine doses ready that
| nobody is picking up. Besides, I personally don't believe the
| free market is capable of telling states what to do or even
| knows what would be the most efficient way to distribute the
| vaccines.
| loceng wrote:
| Right, I remember seeing that headline - that's due to the
| Trump administration's incompetence and/or treason; can't
| do much about that except correct the system, break apart
| the duopoly and the power of what has become the limited
| players in mainstream media; Andrew Yang's Journalism
| Dollars and Democracy Dollars both would help counter this
| adequately, along with his UBI/Freedom Dividend policy and
| Ranked Choice Voting - 4 simple policies, along with
| government option for healthcare - would powerfully shift
| the system immediately, and put the US on an exponential
| path again, without so much friction, allowing thriving for
| everyone; the buying power of "$1,000"/month increases
| exponentially as we automate more and more processes.
|
| Edit to add: Sorry about lazy people downvoting you,
| whenever I talk about Bitcoin - pro-Bitcoiners don't
| qualitatively engage, just a quick hit of dopamine
| satisfies them and suppresses contrarian thoughts that
| aren't financially incentivized like their Bitcoin
| propaganda and behaviour is.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > I personally don't believe the free market is capable of
| telling states what to do
|
| States, as functional governmental bodies, are supposed to
| be able to handle this.
|
| The free market is a tool and it's a good tool for some
| things like maximizing vaccine production. It's not the
| best tool for things like resource distribution when those
| resources need to be distributed at a loss - we literally
| want to spend money to fix this and it's ok to be less
| efficient on the cost side if it leads to better immunity.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Let's make this simpler and more accessible. You are the
| CEO of Google you wake up on March 1, 2020 and realize
| that a malware worm is spreading across your servers,
| damaging systems and in some cases even the hardware. The
| long term impact on the systems that are infected and
| later recovered is unclear but early evidence already
| suggests it's not good. Do you:
|
| (a) Drop everything and concentrate all your resources on
| containing and eradicating the worm, using all available
| internal and external methods.
|
| (b) Tell each department head that the worm is their
| problem and continue to pretend that it's business as
| usual. The subcontractors will figure this out because
| it's in their best interest to do so. Free market works.
|
| If you choose (b) please show your work.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Do you have any evidence that suggests Pfizer is
| pretending that it's business as usual or is doing
| anything short of producing and distributing vaccine as
| fast as they possibly can?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I am making the analogy to the federal government, not
| Pfizer.
| lostapathy wrote:
| The problem with that line of logic is that states are a
| lot more like contractors than employees - the feds can
| only exert so much control. And a lot of the states are
| frankly incapable of taking direction even if they wanted
| to.
|
| These are entities that run DMVs like, well, DMV offices
| - no amount of oversight/yelling/etc from the feds is
| going to get new IT systems online at the state level in
| short order in many states.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| That's just incorrect. This isn't an issue of states'
| rights. This is an issue of e.g. the federal government
| directly distributing vaccines/PPE/testing supplies to
| hospitals: something they can absolutely do. Think about
| it: a hurricane hits Florida. Can FEMA respond? What do
| you think "national emergency" means?
| lostapathy wrote:
| I didn't say anything about states rights - I was
| speaking to incompetency in state government.
|
| I worked for years in state government IT and with a
| contractor that worked with state IT in most states.
| Their ability to make and perpetuate messes is almost
| incomprehensible to the crowd here - it's that bad.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Imagine if you as the CEO actually started ripping
| servers out of the data center and erasing them! Of
| course you're supposed to work with your department heads
| to allow them to run a response - and your departments
| with 4000 employees are going to handle that task
| differently than the departments with 40.
|
| Even your example is flawed. The United States is not one
| giant government - it's a collection of smaller
| governments. The President does not pass laws in Texas or
| North Dakota. The Fed has no power on internal state
| matters.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Work with, not say "just handle it". The CEO is playing
| golf.
|
| The federal government funds states. States like KY and
| TN for example are a net negative money-wise for the USA.
| They take in more money than they produce in tax revenue.
| States like NY, TX, and CA fund their operations.
| Moreover, the federal government can use its resources to
| physically drive the vaccines around, help set up
| vaccination and testing sites, etc. In your worldview,
| what is the purpose of the USA as opposed to 50 separate
| countries?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > The federal government funds states.
|
| Wrong, try again. States are self funding entities. The
| fed does give grants for some projects (bridges, rails,
| etc). Some states do receive more tax/grant benefits than
| they give, but those funds are earmarked - states can't
| use that money for any old reason.
|
| > Moreover, the federal government can use its resources
| to physically drive the vaccines around...
|
| Correct, the Fed can help make resources available to the
| states but the states have to request and allow the
| resource. The fed for instance can have the military
| perform interstate logistics, or rent out all the frozen
| delivery trucks and lend them to states.
|
| The fed can not force states to take the grants, or
| perform operations in the state without approval.
|
| > In your worldview, what is the purpose of the USA as
| opposed to 50 separate countries?
|
| Alaska isn't overly qualified to run a military, form
| treaties with foreign powers, regulate interstate
| commerce or run the FDA. The fed does have a place, but
| the fed doesn't have the power to control states or boss
| them around (in theory - in practice federal grants do
| give a fair amount of power over many states). The fed is
| limited to interstate (that is, things involving multiple
| states) actions, and can't dictate the internals of a
| state.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| The federal government effectively controls things like
| highways speed limits in all the states. The department
| of education does a whole lot of wealth redistribution
| and exerts a ton of control over every single public
| school in the country. Just some examples. The federal
| government is also the largest employer in the country.
|
| > The fed can not force states to take the grants, or
| perform operations in the state without approval.
|
| Fine. States that don't want the vaccine are free to
| refuse it. Do you think they won't play ball if the fed
| says "we will deliver and distribute the vaccines and you
| don't have to pay for them"? In what universe will this
| be something a state refuses saying "we want to pay for
| this ourselves"?
|
| If it helps your mental model, you are the CEO of
| Alphabet, and Google is California, yet the worm is
| affecting all your subsidiaries.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| The highway near my house runs at 70 and goes up to 80 in
| parts. Grants are conditional but also optional and that
| matters.
|
| In general yes, the Fed does have an important part in
| what are basically non-capitalist practices - foodstamps,
| WIC, social security, etc etc. There are also state
| programs that are non-fed and also occupy a similar role.
|
| None of that disagrees with the basic assertion - the Fed
| does not fund states general revenue. States are supposed
| to manage their own budgets and collect their own income.
| The fed is not an endless income stream.
|
| Nobody is saying the fed shouldn't assist states with the
| vaccine. The states shouldn't however be entirely
| dependent on the fed for that help - they are supposed to
| be functional on their own. If the state is not
| functional without the fed then the state has screwed up.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Fine, semantics aside, the federal government is in a
| unique position to distribute vaccines and testing
| supplies and PPE with a higher efficiency coefficient
| than the collection of the states and territories
| individually. There are people arguing against this in
| this very thread. In generally, sure the states shouldn't
| rely on the fed to do everything. In this case it's
| better for the states to let the fed handle this. If not,
| why not?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Well, we only need to look at the last time there was a
| mass vaccination drive. New York City had a smallpox
| outbreak and administered millions of doses in record
| time.
|
| https://twitter.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1345407042769580
| 032
|
| The city was able to mobilize hundreds to thousands of
| distribution points, call up city workers (who the Fed
| has no power over) and run vaccine administration 24/7.
|
| The state knows more about their interior, they have more
| resources on the ground and more control over schools and
| other public buildings (libraries, community centers,
| etc), more ability to use private businesses if needed,
| and control the local health infrastructure.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Did the whole country have a smallpox outbreak? No? So it
| sounds like it was localized to one state.
|
| The point is that this is a nation-wide problem, and the
| federal government is in a unique position to be the most
| efficient at handling production and distribution of
| vaccine/testing supplies/PPE. What exactly is your
| argument around why it should have little or no role?
| There is a shortage of these things and production
| happens in a few centralized places. It makes sense that
| one centralized entity coordinate the production and
| distribution. What is the problem with that? Please show
| your work on how 50 states plus territories would handle
| it better.
| godtoldmetodoit wrote:
| Many, if not most, state level public health authorities
| have been chronically underfunded. States are facing
| massive budget shortfalls. Congress has given states and
| cities approximately 0 relief.
|
| State and local governments are struggling right now.
| "Supposed to be able to handle" and "actually able to
| handle" are two different things.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| You realize states are supposed to fund their own public
| health authorities right?
|
| States also collect their own taxes. It's on the state to
| manage their own budget by passing taxes and limiting
| expenses.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| That's not how the US actually works. The federal
| government does quite a bit of wealth redistribution from
| the states that are net producers to states that cannot
| generate enough revenue on their own: https://www.usatoda
| y.com/story/money/economy/2019/03/20/how-...
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I encourage you to read your own sources:
|
| > Money from the federal government is redistributed back
| to states in the form of grants, aid programs for the
| needy and payments to major government contracting firms
| such as defense companies.
|
| That isn't open funds, it's earmarked grants and things
| like foodstamps.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| So earmarking money for specific programs for testing and
| PPE and vaccine distribution is possible and quite
| normal?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Yes but states should not depend on the fed as the basis
| of their budget, and should instead be responsible enough
| to have their own budgets and planning for the vaccine.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| But we are not talking about states budgets in general.
| We are talking about the COVID-19 vaccine.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > You realize states are supposed to fund their own
| public health authorities right?
|
| States can't deficit spend, which is why the Feds tend to
| step in for natural disasters - hurricanes, floods,
| pandemics, etc.
| Exmoor wrote:
| I don't really think production of vaccines or test supplies is
| limited in a way that could be improved significantly with DPA.
| Vaccine production for both the US approved mRNA vaccines is
| highly specialized and those companies are heavily incentivized
| to deliver vaccines as soon as possible since they have a de-
| facto duopoly for an unknown amount of time. Testing supplies
| are a probably a lot more scalable, but I haven't heard about
| supply shortages with tests in months.
|
| The areas where executive policy _could_ make a difference are
| timelines for approval of additional vaccines and optimizing
| vaccine delivery to hit the highest number of individuals as
| soon as possible. Prioritizing quick approval and distribution
| of the Oxford /AZ vaccine and doing the same for the Johnson &
| Johnson vaccine when data becomes available would likely save
| thousands of lives over the next few months, but neither the
| current nor future US administrations seem to be taking an
| interest in this.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| There are lots of things the DPA can help with. Testing for
| one. PPA. Cold storage pods needed for vaccine distribution.
| Raw materials for any of the above.
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