Covid-19: Treatments, Cures, and Vaccines

Moderna to file for EUA by the end of November and they have an FDA review date set for Dec 17, one week after the Pfizer date.

COVID-19 tracker: Moderna to submit vaccine by month’s end, Slaoui says; Merck buys OncoImmune for $425M

 

Manufacturing error leading to questions/concerns over Astrazenneca vaccine trial results.....

AstraZeneca manufacturing error clouds vaccine study results

 

First doses of the Pfizer vaccine candidate have started to arrive from the production center in Belgium. Let's hope, for once, United does not f'up the luggage handling!!

First doses of Pfizer coronavirus vaccine have flown to US from Belgium: report

 

I just found out my brother got the covid. He's ok for now, but in home lockup. Hopefully he'll get through this. He is at risk, he's in his 60's and can't stay put. It is going to be a challenge for him.

 

It's the opposite actually. Half dose followed by full dose had a 90% efficacy. Not only does this raise some questions, it also appears that the half dose patients were given it not as part of the protocol but due to manufacturing defects. It's a weird story, but really complicates the data for them. Either way though, 70 or 90 percent is a pretty good result.

 

OT question for you Doc. I was having a discussion with a friend and the topic of the vaccines came up. With both Moderna and Pfizer using mRNA but not the same technique or strand of mRNA, how will that affect a person latter on?

Once you get a Moderna vaccine you belong to them and can't take the Phizer vaccine?

Also if a male gets Moderna and a female gets Pfizer and then they have a child, is there a chance the child could end up with some type of auto immune disease because of the competing modified DNA strains?

Do you know if each company compared their strains for compatibility with the other?

 

Those things shouldn't be issues, as mRNA is degraded pretty quickly, and they shouldn't be integrated into your DNA. Your cells are constantly recycling RNA.

You need a reverse transcriptase to transcribe RNA back to DNA then integrate into your DNA (that's what HIV does). Even then, you'd need for this process to occur in germ line cells (i.e. sperms, eggs) in order for them to be passed on, which doesn't really happen to my knowledge (e.g. HIV doesn't do this even as a sexually transmitted disease). Of course, given this is a very new treatment/vaccine, I can't say for sure that this process can't happen.

As an aside, I don't know how different the mRNA sequences used by Moderna and Pfizer differ. My understanding is that the main difference is between how these mRNA sequences are packaged. It's almost a trivial process to make mRNA out of known DNA sequences for the virus, the tough part is finding a way to get the mRNA into your cells before they're degraded. The difference there is why Moderna's vaccine is stable at much higher temperature than Pfizer's.

 

Pfizer went with -70 degrees C storage out of an abundance of caution. The liposomal formulations for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are very similar (components purchased from the same supplier in actual fact). Pfizer is running a bridging stability study now to permit -20 degrees C storage.

 

Yep, the first link was not clear. My comments were from the first reported the story. I changed the link and story to one that more accurately reflected the situation but never altered my original comments.

I will go back and do that now. Thanks for the correction.

 

These kinds of posts are much appreciated.

 

More bad news for AstraZeneca and their vaccine candidate:

Indian regulators investigating claims of a man suffering severe physical and psychological symptoms from the AstraZeneca vaccine candidate shot. The man is seeking redress in an Indian court to the tune of 50Million Rupees (like $650k) and a halt to the vaccine trial in India.

India regulators probe alleged AstraZeneca shot reaction, trial continues

 

FYI we have 3 minus 90 freezers at our research site, many frozen specimens are stored at that level and shipped. Freezers like that aren't all that uncommon.

 

Has any data been released yet other than PR on the different trials

 

I find the thought of this fascinating. I cannot make any additional comments because it is mostly beyond my understanding level.

Wilson, Penn ink Regeneron pact to use gene therapy tech to deliver COVID-19 antibodies

 

No vaccine in history is without issues, not even the typical flu vaccine is 100% foolproof (the typical flu vaccine is normally 50 to 70% effective). There are some 80,000 that die every year around the world from the flu shot, but given how many shots are given, the likelihood that one of us gets a negative reaction is 0.00001%. Still if a media outlet wanted to scare people they could put all of their attention on those 80,000 and it would make things worse. Run a headline like Flu Vaccine Kills Tens of Thousands would scare enough people to never get the flu shot again, which would lead to nearly 10,000,000 more deaths due to the flu.

Even Chemo has issues and kills more people than it saves. But the possibility that it might put you into remission is greater than that fear. So, the question for this vaccine is do you want to take your chances with surviving Covid (97.5%) or suffering no ill affects from a vaccine (99.99999%)?

 

UK has approved Pfizer vaccine

 

40 million doses, or enough for 20 million people are alreading shipping to the UK.

 

Everyone understands that there are risks with everything. However, any small amount, and I do not care if was one small batch of 1000 shots that was manufactured incorrectly, but manufacturing defects have to call into question their entire production operation and quality controls. Which is probably the point in the case of the man in India. His lawyers found out about the AstraZeneca issues and are either attempting to parlay a real issue into a pay out or it is more of a con. Their regulators will have to sort it out. Either way, with the sudden bad press and AZ now admitting that they likely need to repeat a Phase 3 Trial, they certainly will need to win back the trust of people, thus the "bad news" headline.

Also, according to the latest CDC stats that I found third hand (as in, I admit I cannot produce the original source material), approximately 125 people die each year in the United States from the flu shot of the 140 million who get, that total includes deaths from reactions as well as the 2-5 cases in a normal year of death from Guillain-Barre Syndrome. That would mean to get to your 80,000 world wide, there would have to be a massive increase in death rates in other countries. Also, world wide, about 300,000-650,000 die from the flu each year. So, according to the number you have, the flu shot itself kills 1/4 the number of people who actually die from the flu in good year?? That is pretty difficult to reconcile the math, though I have nothing that directly refutes that number.

 

Agree with everything here, except I think you are drastically overstating how many die *FROM* the flu shot, unless you meant to say 80,000 die *despite* the flu shot, which would be more accurate.

People dying from the shot happens, but it’s exceedingly rare. Looking at CDC data looks like the true deaths from a reaction to the shot is around 1 per million, which puts it in the low hundreds per year on average (in the U.S).

 

Where did you get the info that 80k people die from the flu shot worldwide each year? I found that about 15 people die from it in the US yearly. I find the 80k number very hard to believe without proof.