A vaccine is very likely to happen

[FreierFall]

I've worked in big Pharma for years. I am 99% sure an effective vaccine will be produced this year. It's gonna happen, have faith in scientists. They will be working their butt off....

"Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told The Wall Street Journal the company's COVID-19 vaccine could be ready for emergency distribution by the fall. The company could further be ready for a broader rollout by the end of the year, he added"

@squishee

I wouldn't say so, no. A lot of the big Pharma have labs and operations in China as any international company but generally speaking the Chinese market is a lot of biosimilars and generics i.e. drugs that are off patent they're now manufacturing.

I also trust the scientific community on this, and think a vaccine is likely to be rolled out this year. I would assume it’s going to be an individual decision to get it or not, and I think that’s ok. If you’re protected you’re protected, if you’re not then you take your chances.

Knowing what you do OP, would you receive the vaccine? As personally I'd be reluctant for me and DC. It seems incredibly rushed however I feel your more qualified to judge?!

Sorry I see your already answered, awful internet and didn't wait for comments to load

So pleased I found this thread. Offers some good info without a load of doom and gloom and scaremongering.

In the meantime, supplement D3 and safe sunshine.
The third study in the world that shows a clear relationship with vitamin D deficiency and covid 19 severity has been published. It's a study from Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, New Orleans.
20 patients, randomly sampled.
Conclusions:

''Strikingly, 100% of intensive care patients less than 75 years old had vitamin D deficiency. Among these, 64.6% had critically low (less than 20ng/mL) and three had less than 10 ng/mL.''

Only one of the randomly sampled patients was caucasian - the other 19 were afro american and hispanic.

The study also cites 33 references of causal evidence.

Here is the link.

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.20075838v1.full.pdf

A number of the patients were taking vitamin D supplements. So safe sunlight exposure must be more important and the much lower deaths rates in equatorial and southern hemisphere regions are surely explained by this.

SAGE, the group of scientists that advises Public Health England only meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so they will not have seen this study. I doubt whether they have read the previous two conclusive blood studies.

Even if SAGE does read these three studies, they do not have any specialist molecular virologists or immunologists to professionally interpret and evaluate the scientific evidence:

'Government rushes out request for experts to work with Sage panel Notice sent to universities amid concern over lack of expertise in parts of Covid-19 advisory group''

''The government's secret science group has a shocking lack of expertise''

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/27/gaps-sage-scientific-body-scientists-medical

www.theguardian.com/science/2020/apr/29/government-rushes-out-request-for-experts-bolster-sage-panel

In the meantime thousands of elderly are dying in care homes. The government can't even be bothered to test all of them for covid and vit D def. and administer any vitamin D3 supplements. If only they knew.

This is great news. I've been feeling really down. It's nice to have some hope.

More good news on the Oxford vaccine

www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-04-30-landmark-partnership-announced-development-covid-19-vaccine

Good! There's one of the potential answers re professional distribution.

I would love it if the Oxford vaccine is successful because I think it’s one of the best chances for the U.K, but also for some of the lower income countries, to have prompt access to the vaccine.

And positive news from Pfizer

edition.cnn.com/2020/04/29/europe/germany-pfizer-coronavirus-vaccine-test-intl/index.html

Thank you for this OP. I am optimistic as well. And I’ll absolutely have it the moment it’s offered to me. Same with my husband, my baby daughter and my parents. I have asthma and a heart defect, and my parents both have significant heart disease. I’m terrified of this virus. Whereas I have every faith in the scientists working on it. I just hope they’ll offer it to babies and children too.

Some hopefully positive news on the issue of antibodies/immunity

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-south-korea-patients-infected-twice-test-a9491986.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1588251017

I saw that too---very good news to end the week on!

And how extra wonderful it would be if UK scientists were to create the first vaccine---would be nice to feel that our country can get some things right!

As John Campell (reg. nurse) pointed out on his Youtube talk---scientists tend to be very cautious on this kind of this. If the scientists are making "hopeful" noises, that is really very good news and suggests that a successful vaccine is in the pipeline.

I really hope we develop it in Scotland another thing we can say we invented

The MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research is doing loads of work on Covid-19.

I'm a senior scientist in pharma, I agree with the PP who said we'll have treatments in place much quicker than a vaccine. There are a range of anti-virals on the market already, it's just a matter of proving they work against Covid-19, we already know a lot about their safety profiles and they have robust manufacturing processes in place. My LinkedIn feed is full of Covid-19, every company is discussing what they are doing to find a treatment or vaccine. And while I agree to a certain extent that academics and small biotech in particular want to shout about their achievements so they can get funding the power of science is that someone will achieve the goal everyone is chasing.

Oh, I was going to talk about speeding up the process. There are a few strands to that. Firstly, the regulatory authorities already have a process for fast tracking orphan drugs, basically potential treatments for diseases with no licensed treatment go to the front of the queue for review and approval. This process will be speeded up even more for Covid-19, suspect the MHRA and FDA etc will only be processing Covid-19 paperwork at the moment. Secondly, manufacturing facilities will be moved across to producing Covid-19 anti-virals and vaccines, there's lots of parallel development going on at the moment so when manufacture is needed it can happen immediately, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are doing some amazing work here. Thirdly there are a large pool of people who are at risk of this disease and so are willing to take part in the clinical trials, recruiting participants usually takes a long time, this process is much easier at the moment.

CountFosco Treatment or Vaccine I'll take either.

I'll pray that something comes along to get us out this hole. I've counted my blessings a few times before for Iiving in a time of modern meds and in a country with access to them. But this feels like we have turned the clock back 300 years.

**this feels like we have turned the clock back 300 years.

Exactly.

This is also a game-changer, providing it pans out
and the US scientists publish details quickly for other countries to use

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/us-germ-warfare-lab-creates-test-for-pre-infectious-covid-19-carriers

Scientists working for the US military have designed a new Covid-19 test that could potentially identify carriers before they become infectious and spread the disease,
the Guardian has learned.

In what could be a significant breakthrough, project coordinators hope
the blood-based test will be able to detect the virus’s presence as early as 24 hours after infection
– before people show symptoms and several days before a carrier is considered capable of spreading it to other people.

I know science cannot find an answer to everything but I really do feel so hopeful they will find ways to manage this and really bring it under control while we wait for the vaccine which I’m also so hopeful for even if it’s not as quick as they’re saying it could be.

Absolutely. I'd settle for an effective treatment right now.

The amount of work going into finding treatments and vaccines for this , I also believe it is highly likely there will be a breakthrough soon. 🤞🏻

this feels like we have turned the clock back 300 years

I understand why you feel like that but 300 years ago all we had was quarantine. We had no idea about germ theory or that viruses even existed. In 1918 they tried to isolate the causative agent of Spanish Flu but just found all the secondary bacterial infections, they didn't have the technology to find viruses. In the 1980s it took several years to isolate HIV. We had the full sequence of Covid-19 within weeks of the first infection. We will get either cheap and effective treatments or a vaccine for this. Science is so amazing and powerful.

Of all the gazillions of stuff that I've read about coronavirus this article in the NY TImes the other day is among the best - it just focuses on facts and data

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/science/coronavirus-mutations.html?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=74

The article explains how the virus mutates and spreads and highlights the importance of testing and tracing (especially in the early days) and explains how scientists are able to track where people have caught the virus from.

For example, the different mutations shows that most Covid-19 cases in California can be traced directly from China whereas most cases in New York came via Europe.

It also makes a convincing case that the virus is more widespread and has been around for a little while longer than 'official' sources suggest.

The main positive thing from the article is that it explains that the virus is actually mutating very slowly which means that the chances of a vaccine being developed, and working, is pretty high.