Oxford vaccine?

[FlorentineAz]

When can we expect to hear anything about the vaccine? I know it needs to be safe and effective but it just feels like a long time since there’s been any positive news about it.

Does anyone know anything? Thanks in advance.

@notevenat20

Currently it is looking like (from primate studies) that the vaccine may not be all that effective - the primate studies showed it did not stop someone catching covid-19 and did not stop them spreading covid-19, but did seem to stop covid-19 from developing i to a severe systemic illness.

If that is the final outcome, we should all start an Oxford worshipping religion. It’ll do for me.

Yeah it's not the worse outcome!

Interesting article in the BMJ on how the current vaccine prospects might be setting the bar too low:

But what will it mean exactly when a vaccine is declared “effective”? To the public this seems fairly obvious. “The primary goal of a covid-19 vaccine is to keep people from getting very sick and dying,” a National Public Radio broadcast said bluntly.6

Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said, “Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things . . . first, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital, and two, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.”7

Yet the current phase III trials are not actually set up to prove either (table 1). None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.

www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037

I'm reading lots of good things about the Oxford vaccine today.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8870023/Coronavirus-Oxford-vaccine-works-perfectly-safely-triggering-immune-response.html

@Char2015 fingers crossed!!

@ForBlueSkies: I broadly agree with these sentiments, we basically will not know whether COVID vaccines reduced the risk of death from COVID-19 by the time these become available. I think its probably unrealistic to expect this within this timeframe anyway, and the outcome we will have - a reduction in SARs-CoV-2-positivity on laboratory tests - will still be very helpful. My personal view is that, in this case, the inclusion of only mild symptoms or even lab-test-only positives, is an acceptable trade off in terms of accelerating vaccine availability.

Some Oxford vaccine info from the Guardian (also in the FT but article is paywalled).

The Covid-19 vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford produces a similar immune response in both older and younger adults, and adverse responses were lower among the elderly, British drugmaker AstraZeneca Plc said on Monday.

A vaccine that works is seen as a game-changer in the battle against the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 1.15 million people, hammered the global economy and shuttered normal life across the world.

“It is encouraging to see immunogenicity responses were similar between older and younger adults and that reactogenicity was lower in older adults, where the Covid-19 disease severity is higher,” an AstraZeneca spokesman told Reuters.

“The results further build the body of evidence for the safety and immunogenicity of AZD1222,” the spokesman said, referring to the technical name of the vaccine.

The news that older people get an immune response from the vaccine is positive because the immune system weakens with age and older people are those most at risk of dying from the virus.

The Financial Times reported earlier that the vaccine, being developed by Oxford and AstraZeneca, triggers protective antibodies and T-cells in older age groups – among those most at risk from the virus.
The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to be one of the first from big pharma to secure regulatory approval, along with Pfizer and BioNTech’s candidate.

If it works, a vaccine would allow the world to return to some measure of normality after the tumult of the pandemic.

Immunogenicity blood tests carried out on a subset of older participants echo data released in July which showed the vaccine generated “robust immune responses” in a group of healthy adults aged between 18 and 55, the Financial Times reported.

See also uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-astrazeneca-vaccin/oxford-covid-19-vaccine-produces-immune-response-among-elderly-and-young-astrazeneca-says-idUKKBN27B0IT