Even JVT is sounding positive about vaccine roll out....

[MarcelineMissouri]

It’s behind a paywall but you can read enough to get the gist!
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hope-for-covid-vaccine-at-new-year-25b52b86s

Well there are 6 vaccines in phase 3. The research has been done and most of the testing.

3-6 months is now a probability. But it’s not a magic bullet.

Fingers crossed!!!! We need that light at the end of the tunnel to get a lot closer.

Thanks for posting. That sounds really positive.

As was Jeremy Farrer just now on Sophy Ridge

I don't understand when people say vaccination isn't a magic bullet, what does that mean? Obviously it won't cause the virus to disappear in a puff of smoke but if vaccination drives the R rate down sufficiently so that all social distancing/mitigation measures can be abandoned (within a sensible time frame) and level of illness/deaths kept at levels akin to other infectious diseases then I'd consider that to be a pretty spectacular result!

The virus will become endemic and we will have some cases and some (hopefully not many) deaths every year the same as we do with numerous other infectious diseases. In time, vaccinations/treatments will improve and we will continue to drive down the numbers affected and mitigate the effects for those that are.

Exactly @Sunshinegirl82! I don’t think there are many people who are silly enough to think that a vaccine means it will just all go away, but any development in treatment or prevention is a big positive!

@Sunshinegirl82 the early vaccines are unlikely to limit transmission just reduce severe disease so it means we won’t magically be back to pre Covid days without other tools such as therapeutics/testing etc.

I'm all for a vaccine, but if everyone just wore masks we'd be so much better off - the director of the CDC says a mask is more guaranteed to protect against covid than a vaccine (given vaccines vary in how much of an immune response they create in each individual) - link below. Obviously both would be best. But we seem to STILL be avoiding masks as a country (none in schools for a start, other than corridors where there's the lowest duration of exposure).

www.theguardian.com/world/video/2020/sep/16/face-masks-coronavirus-cdc-robert-redfield

masks reduce severity of disease for the mask wearer, so if we had a vaccine AND all wore masks everywhere in public, I think we could get this under control.

Graph of mortality rates in countries that adopted universal mask wearing early vs countries like us. It's a stark difference - up to a hundred times lower mortality. A hundred times lower mortality for us would mean around 500 deaths rather than around 50,000. I suspect our economy might be doing a lot better if this were the case too.

news.vcu.edu/article/Early_face_mask_policies_curbed_COVID19s_spread_according_to

I don't understand when people say vaccination isn't a magic bullet, what does that mean? Obviously it won't cause the virus to disappear in a puff of smoke but if vaccination drives the R rate down sufficiently so that all social distancing/mitigation measures can be abandoned (within a sensible time frame) and level of illness/deaths kept at levels akin to other infectious diseases then I'd consider that to be a pretty spectacular result!

Yes! I get the feeling that ‘not a magic bullet’ is going to be the new ‘new normal’ - a phrase that presumably seemed helpful at the time(?) to manage people’s expectations, but ends up causing ten times more trouble than it’s worth because it’s very unclear what expectations were being managed.

I think there probably are plenty of people who think it’s that simple and I can well imagine a general abandoning of caution by many people as soon as it’s announced the vaccine is rolled out, followed by a severe outbreak in the time it takes to get everyone vaccinated and for the vaccine to take effect. If I was in charge that’s what I would be worried about.

the early vaccines are unlikely to limit transmission just reduce severe disease

That’s possible, but it’s not a known thing about the early vaccines. We don’t know how effective they are until we can see the results of the Phase III trials. There’s nothing that the ‘early vaccines’ are all doing one way and the ‘later vaccines’ are all doing another, it’s just that the more vaccines we test, the better a chance we have of getting a really effective one.

[quote Oaktree55]@Sunshinegirl82 the early vaccines are unlikely to limit transmission just reduce severe disease so it means we won’t magically be back to pre Covid days without other tools such as therapeutics/testing etc.[/quote]
According to the Times article Van Tam does say the vaccine stops the virus shedding in the young

This is very good news. A vaccine is the way out of this and it's the hope of things improving in a roughly known time frame that will help people cope in the meantime.

@TheCountessofFitzdotterel

I think there probably are plenty of people who think it’s that simple and I can well imagine a general abandoning of caution by many people as soon as it’s announced the vaccine is rolled out, followed by a severe outbreak in the time it takes to get everyone vaccinated and for the vaccine to take effect. If I was in charge that’s what I would be worried about.

Yes, that’s a worry. I don’t think saying ‘vaccines are t a silver bullet’ is going to help woth it though. Probably what we need are ‘vaccines will be the thing that gets us back to normal, but not until enough of us have actually had them, do bear with us on that and also we’re still going to keep working on testing and treatments because the virus won’t have all gone away’ but that’s not exactly snappy.

I was encouraged by JVT saying he expected results of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine some time between the end of this month and the end of next.

You’re right GoldenOmber, ‘vaccines aren’t a silver bullet’ isn’t the clearest and least ambiguous way to communicate.

Yes, I worry we're going to see double the protests, half of them from the "we started vaccinating people last Tuesday so why do we still have to wear masks?" people and the other half from the "why do They want us to get a vaccine when they've admitted themselves it's not a silver bullet for covid, it's all about Bill Gates and his 5G microchips!" people.

You can have a vaccine in China for 45 quid. Presume its a lower standard of licensing or something there? People are queuing up for it.

The vaccine itself might not be a magic bullet, but any significant positive development brings the threat down from terrifying to tolerable. We're already much better off than we were in the spring, and with each month we'll have more ways of tackling the virus.

All we need is hope. It's going to be a ghastly winter, but the light is at the end of the tunnel. It's a huge psychological advantage.

What he has said about vaccines preventing shedding sounds positive, but it's slightly alarming that he is repeating what Kate Bingham said that most people will not be getting the jab.

Looks like this is the same article?
eastdevonwatch.org/2020/10/18/hope-for-covid-vaccine-at-new-year/

@BlueBlancmange it’s order of priority though. I don’t take to mean that some people will never be offered a vaccine but obviously there will be limited resource and supplies so it should go to those most at risk first. That could be months or years away, but if we’re able to protect those most at risk of serious illness or death then that will make a huge difference!

Pfizer have released video to the media of their factory in Belgium producing thousands of doses of their vaccine. These people are obviously not stupid, so they must be very, very confident in order to go public in this way. 🤞

I hope so. Hope JVT right this is what we need, some light

Such positive news. I read yesterday that some extremely vulnerable could be vaccinated in December. Although no guarantees at least there is hope for 2021.

@Sunshinegirl82

I don't understand when people say vaccination isn't a magic bullet, what does that mean? Obviously it won't cause the virus to disappear in a puff of smoke but if vaccination drives the R rate down sufficiently so that all social distancing/mitigation measures can be abandoned (within a sensible time frame) and level of illness/deaths kept at levels akin to other infectious diseases then I'd consider that to be a pretty spectacular result!

The virus will become endemic and we will have some cases and some (hopefully not many) deaths every year the same as we do with numerous other infectious diseases. In time, vaccinations/treatments will improve and we will continue to drive down the numbers affected and mitigate the effects for those that are.

I agree.

It doesn’t need to be a magic bullet. It just needs to be good enough to protect the particularly vulnerable and slow the spread so we can lift measures and keep working on better vaccines and treatments

Great news. However given that I fear it will be a long time before under 50s get vaccinated and that masks reduce the severity of the disease I would be reluctant to see a rapid ditching of mask wearing. Knowing someone who suffers from long covid in their thirties I’m in no rush to catch covid. However I fear once the vaccine starts to be rolled out younger people (I’m in my forties) will be ridiculed for still being cautious.