1708

The more I learn about this AstraZeneca trial, the more I want them to go back and rerun it. Serendipitous findings are nice and all, but do not lead me to feel very confident considering that importance of getting this right.

1709

They need to enroll more people which sets them months behind. I’m fine with them making a mistake, but that doesn’t mean they get to cheat on sample size.

1710

Fully agree. If they think they have a winning protocol now, run a new study to get the sample size up, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of cases right now. They’ll hit their infected number soon enough, in Brazil or anywhere else.

1711

I feel the same way. Very little confidence in them.

1712

This seems like the kind of PR hiccup/disaster that Moderna narrowly averted when they made the tough choice to adjust their trial to include more minorities and postpone the results.

Still, I’m hopeful that stories like this might build trust in the scientific process and public scrutiny we’ll need to get one or more vaccines that work.

1713

I feel like even the 62% mark has some value to go ahead with distribution for now in places where the other vaccines aren’t going to be avaliable, but they should run more tests. I would not want the vaccine for myself though, I’d wait for one of the other two , my concern would be effectiveness not safety.

1714
1715

Final results from the trials of Moderna’s vaccine against Covid-19 confirm it has 94% efficacy and nobody who was vaccinated with it developed severe disease, says the company, kickstarting the approval process with regulators around the world.

The US company is submitting the data to the regulators in the US, Europe and the UK for an emergency licence. It expects the Food and Drug Administration in the US to consider it at its meeting on 17 December, Moderna said.

The UK has bought 7m doses of the vaccine – 5m on the day Moderna announced its interim result of 94.5% efficacy and a further 2m last week. But supplies of the vaccine to the UK are not expected until March. Moderna, based in Massachusetts, has received $2.48bn in US federal funds and was a key part of the Trump administrations Operation Warp Speed.

1716

They’ve now written a paper on the effectiveness of the approach.

It’s a bit odd. They’re claiming it was a massive success that reduced prevalence by 80% in two weeks. But looking at the data that the various statistics websites have, their curve looks basically the same as in comparable countries.

1717

Yes, it appears to match with the impact of many other European countries lock downs. And be reversing.

91-DIVOC-countries-normalized-Slovakia
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1718

Why would you skip testing younger kids? They’re just as much a vector as anyone else, maybe worse since you rarely see them exhibit symptoms.

1719

The rationale that i could think would make this ok, is that if the kids have Covid, their parents are going to have it, so you will catch it in the testing anyway.

1720

COVID-19: “Just a normal flu”, turned up 500%, with a bonus chance of getting diabetes. (If I read the conclusion correctly)

1721

Five-fold worse than influenza is much lower than IFR estimates suggest. (Not saying it’s wrong, just that this is a tension that needs resolving).

1722

This study uses CFRs, which are determined as much as by who gets tested as by who dies. It seems basically guaranteed that the testing strategy wasn’t the same for Covid vs. flu, which makes this comparison really risky.

Looking at the data in the appendix (in particular tables 6 and 7) seems to confirm this. A couple of examples:

  • There’s a very consistent pattern that people who tested positive for influenza have a lower mortality rate than people who tested negative. This is across all age groups, and for all three years of flu stats they have.
  • People testing negative for the flu had about 2x the mortality rates than those testing negative for Covid.

Those results make no intuitive sense, unless their flu testing was skewed in very odd ways. I didn’t read through the actual paper, so can’t tell if they tried to control for this in some way.

1723

Yeah, and it’s really the risk of dying with Covid relative to dying with the flu, not of the diseases, right?

1724

Norwegian stats professor crocheted a representation of R0

1725

That’s fucking hot.

1726

TWiEVO video covering the new variants observed first in the UK.

The host is Vincent Racaniello, but most of the conversation as they walk through the data is being driven by an evolutionary biologist Nels Elde, who provides a TON of really helpful commentary as they walk through the data. This conversation gets some additional flavor from VR’s virology background and his understanding of previous pitfalls in analysis for similar observations made in other viral outbreaks like the original SARS outbreak.

Perhaps worth watching if you’re a real data geek - I get a lot out of looking being walked through primary data in a way similar to a journal club.

Interesting stuff starts off at ~19 minutes in, so I’ve started the video there to save you some time.

[Hopefully at some point soon they’ll get an epidemiologist on, this problem seems to require a number of disciplines to fully understand]

1727

Are (coronavirus) antibodies gendered in some way? There are UK ads running on podcasts at the moment asking for male people who have had coronavirus to donate plasma.