I fucking knew it. Second vaccine dose.

[NiceGerbil]

News is that people who have had first dose are only getting second 3 months later. Against the guidelines of the org who made the vaccine.

I said this rush to push it out would result in, how are they going to follow up and make sure they get the second?

And here we go. Second dose not organised. UK govt say this is AOK.

FFS. I'd rather they took the time to do it properly. But hey. Pissup in a brewery situation again.

I said a few days ago to DH. Are they properly tracking this to make sure the follow up jab isn't missed?

I was too optimistic. Govt have decided second jab isn't that important.

FFS.

How many '50% protected' people are going to stop adhering to any guidelines, on the grounds that they have had the jab?

Why would they stop? If they are such stickler for the rules then they will continue to follow them.

@ancientgran

I wonder when it is 52% or 91% effective? Both could be true at different times e.g. 52% a week after the jab and 91% effective a month later or something like that.

It is 91% effective in the first week AFTER the second dose. That is what the data shows - all trial data is freely available on the internet.

There is no evidence whatsoever that it is ever 91% effective after just one dose.

The 91% is an assumption. It may or may not be true. There is simply no actual data that supports it.

And also a consequence of their obsession with grabbing a "British first" tabloid headline for a vaccine developed and manufactured outside of the UK

Oh ffs, this is ridiculous now.
If they order the vaccine it’s ‘Britain first’, if they don’t they’re criticised for not being as efficient as other countries. It’s tiresome now

Have they said if you have been given the vaccine ( both doses ) that you can then go about as normal ? I thought they said you still needed to adher to the tier limitations as they are not sure if you can still transmit the virus even if vaccinated ?
The personal benefit to being vaccinated is that you don't become so unwell that you need treatment, there is a societal benefit in that not as many people will need treatment for the same illness at the same time, but this societal benefit really only kicks in when lots and lots of people have been vaccinated ?
Add in a more transmissable varient and I imagine your aim will be to stop as many people as possible getting really sick as quickly as possible, so if one dose of the vaccines means you might feel a bit bleurgh for a day or so, if you come into contact with the virus, as opposed to needing oxygen in hospital, I can see the rational for doing it.
Or does the 50 or 70% figure relate to the number of people who's immune system kicks in when it comes up against the virus ?
Sorry for all the questions, I know I should google

If the first jab gives 70-80% protection, and the second jab gives an additional 15-25% protection, you clearly get more bang for your buck out of the first injection with regard to herd immunity.
It is suspected (or proven yet?) that the Oxford vaccine gives greater overall immunity if the interval is greater, therefore greater long term good also ensues from this approach.
This weighed against any likelihood of increased mutations.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Theres going to marauding gangs of hells grannies busting out of nursing homes to go on the lam 😆

One dose will stop you from dying of covid.
That's good enough for me.

Seems like a triumph of good sense over red tape.

The dosing regimen would have been based on knowledge of the vaccine and its properties, hence deciding to test it with two doses in the clinical studies. They don't pick these out of thin air; it's usually based on scientific evidence from the early preclinical and human studies. If the scientists felt one dose would be sufficient, they would have tested this as part of the clinical study presumably.

Honestly, would you be happy if they started to offer you half a dose, because that's bound to offer 'some' protection? Change the needle, give the other half to someone else?

Whether it's 50% or 90% after one dose, we only know that this effectiveness relates to 3 weeks - until the next dose was given - no-one can know for sure how effective it will be after 6, 9 or 12 weeks, as this wasn't tested.

I really hope this strategy works, but it's a gamble.

@InterfectoremVulpes

Theres going to marauding gangs of hells grannies busting out of nursing homes to go on the lam 😆

It's going to bring a new meaning to "cocooning" the elderly.

The Oxford one does seem to be Approved for an interval of three months and gives approx seventy percent immunity

However in the press conference, Jonathon what’s his name said it was 91 percent after one, and 95 after the second, and we were only gaining four percent.

I think it’s something to do with the strength of the dose.

Pyewhacket - maybe watch the news. 2nd doses are being cancelled.

@Haffiana - there is good evidence. It's figure 3 and the associated discussion at www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577

We know that, over the entire 3 week period from first to second dose, protection averages out at 52%. We know that there is effectively no protection in the first 12 days. And that figure makes clear that, after that point, the protection is very very good indeed.

What we don't know is how long the protection given by one dose lasts. The MHRA is in effect gambling that the consequences, on a population level, of any early dropoff from that very good level of immunity is less significant than leaving an equal sized cohort with no protection at all.

I understand the decision. I also get it is a decision which would only be made in a crisis, where bodies are piling up and where there isn't enough vaccine to go round. I also totally get why those who have had the first shot are angry. There are no good answers and I'm glad I'm not the one having to decide between the lesser bads.

I had first dose delivered just before Christmas (I'm a community nurse). Was expecting second 19th Jan. will probably be cancelled but if it hurried us back to normal by giving some protection to more people I'm fine with that and just have to trust that the government is listening to good science.

Honestly, would you be happy if they started to offer you half a dose, because that's bound to offer 'some' protection? Change the needle, give the other half to someone else?

With the dosage info around the new Oxford vaccine, this probably isn’t the best example 🤣

It's a desperate times, desperate ways decision one of the very rare rational ones that has been made in 2020. BMA are objecting because of difficulty of cancelling etc.

The Pfeizer vaccine offers only 52% according to the BMJ, so approximately half the amount of people got Covid-19 as in the placebo group (40 odd vs 80).

Therein lies one of the problems, perception of what the vaccine will achieve. It's great to get a reduction of 50% but most people don't think that's what they will be getting- there's going to be a lot of people going around saying 'well, I had the vaccine and then I got covid anyway' which of course is true! It will be hard to measure the benefit of fewer people getting sick, and those people then not being hospitalized as much (apart from rates dropping which they will in the spring anyway).

There is a huge difference in 52% to 95% which was how many got covid the week after the second dose, that means you almost are guaranteed not to get it.

Quite different than the first. I still think rolling it out as it was tested for the first three months is more justifiable as then the actual impact will be very directly obvious (care homes where no-one then gets covid) as opposed to what we are going to end up with which is a reduction due to the vaccine which is difficult to quantify and won't 'feel' so different due to the fact quite a few people having had the vaccine will still get covid (and may be infections, we don't know).

It’s not people to do the jabs that is the problem. They explained that at the conference. It’s supplying the vaccine that’s the problem. And this will not be a decision made by the PM . He has advisors.

@Poppingnostopping - you're misinterpreting the 52%. It's 52% over the entirety of the 3 weeks starting from dose 1. But there's no protection at all for the first 12 days. By the end of the 3 week period the protection is very much higher than 52%. This is shown in the graph labelled figure 3 in the article I linked to above.

@Bluntness100

The Oxford one does seem to be Approved for an interval of three months and gives approx seventy percent immunity

However in the press conference, Jonathon what’s his name said it was 91 percent after one, and 95 after the second, and we were only gaining four percent.

I think it’s something to do with the strength of the dose.

There’s 2 dosing regimens being tested. One where half a dose is given followed by a full dose and it’s this regimen that the 91/95 refers to. This realisation. Was a happy accident after a dosing error in the early trial or something.

I’m going from memory though so might be recalling incorrectly

It’s this government. It wouldn’t be them if it wasn’t a total and complete fucking cock up..
And here's the crux of it - a thinly veiled gov backing thread, nothing to do with the situation at all!

The vaccines depending on the type take about 21 days to have effect by the way so no one should assume vaccination and that the day after all is okay. However many does you have you have that initial period before it kind of kicks in.

Most of us will be well down the list so vaccination is not really going to be relevant for a while except to the extent it might protect enough very old people that we can start to loosen legal restrictions on us all.

[quote Motorina]@Haffiana - there is good evidence. It's figure 3 and the associated discussion at www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577

We know that, over the entire 3 week period from first to second dose, protection averages out at 52%. We know that there is effectively no protection in the first 12 days. And that figure makes clear that, after that point, the protection is very very good indeed.

What we don't know is how long the protection given by one dose lasts. The MHRA is in effect gambling that the consequences, on a population level, of any early dropoff from that very good level of immunity is less significant than leaving an equal sized cohort with no protection at all.

I understand the decision. I also get it is a decision which would only be made in a crisis, where bodies are piling up and where there isn't enough vaccine to go round. I also totally get why those who have had the first shot are angry. There are no good answers and I'm glad I'm not the one having to decide between the lesser bads.[/quote]
Yes, I have read that paper and looked at the evidence.

It actually does NOT show that there is 91% efficacy using one shot of vaccine after day 21. It simply does not, and not one scientist has ever stated that it does. This is so important to understand.

It is really important to understand that there is a difference between evidence and assumptions based on that evidence. The government is making a political decision based on an assumption that may or may not be true. It is a gamble, made for political reasons. People have a right to know that this is the case, and that this gamble may fail.

[quote FourTeaFallOut]www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/12/18/coronavirus-vaccine-single-dose-debate[/quote]
This is very very interesting - I wonder if the government came up with this new idea of vaccinating more people after reading that - it would certainly make you think. I believe if we had the vaccine when cases were very low in the summer you could have afforded to go for the 2 doses within 21 days - but the state we're in now - it does seem sensible to try and vaccinate as many as possible.

It sounds sensible to me (not a scientist). Flu vaccine is only 50% effective I believe and if this way gets some protection out to teachers faster (I'm not a teacher btw) then I'm all for it. My biggest worry would be what this does to the virus and how it might evolve.

The only person I know who's had the vaccine is a doctor friend working on a covid ward. He was told the first does gives 50% protection against getting covid and massively reduces the risk of serious illness if he does get it. In my opinion better twice as many people have that level of protection than half as many are completely protected and the rest are completely unprotected.

Imagine being on a desert island and only having a limited amount of food, do you give everyone a little bit of food, so they're all still hungry, malnutrised even, but nobody dies or just feed some of the people so the people who get the food are completely healthy but some in the other group die?

Motorina I stand corrected. But the overall population effect is to reduce cases by a certain amount after three weeks, that's going to be the net benefit to the NHS and wider society, fewer corona cases, not none. The advice, which I'm sure they are giving to patients then, is to shield for the first two weeks after which the protection is better. This would result in a better than 52% average as presumably the vaccine volunteers were encouraged not to shield and just to live their normal lives.