Early findings showing Pfizer vaccine is...
 

90% effective!? :eek::eek:
Read about this when looking at DOW futures this morning. Up 1500!!

Hopefully some good news that carries forward! Article states Pfizer can't apply for EUA until late November because FDA requires at least 2 months to pass after last injection before EUA can be applied for.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/09/933006651/pfizer-says-experimental-covid-19-vaccine-is-more-than-90-effective

Buy deep freezer stock. Check out it's storage requirement.

Great news for Pfizer, since immunity appears it could be limited to a couple months.
That means billions of doses until the virus becomes rare...

It needs dry ice temps for storage. A deep freeze is not even close to that cold.

I know. I was trying for a bit of levity.

Looking forward to the market surge more than the vaccine news....but if the vaccine can create some normalcy, that will allow us to regain some rights, and freedom, bring it !

Yeah. Was thinking the same. We discussed this last evening. 94 below!
Might want to buy into dry ice as well.

Deep freeze on roids? :D
94 below!! I watched a 60 minutes program on Operation Warp Speed last night. The 4 star running the show for delivery seems to have a good team together and plans for areas that don't have the ability to store at those temps.

Great news for all of us if the 90% holds. Then it will just be a matter of getting enough people to use it. I'm in the moment it's available to the general public.

I read that Pfizer didn’t take govt money and is not part of Warp Speed, so I guess they can hose us with the price.

https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2020/Pfizer-and-BioNTech-Announce-an-Agreement-with-U.S.-Government-for-up-to-600-Million-Doses-of-mRNA-based-Vaccine-Candidate-Against-SARS-CoV-2/default.aspx

NEW YORK & MAINZ, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) and BioNTech SE (Nasdaq: BNTX) today announced the execution of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense to meet the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program goal to begin delivering 300 million doses of a vaccine for COVID-19 in 2021. Under the agreement, the U.S. government will receive 100 million doses of BNT162, the COVID-19 vaccine candidate jointly developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, after Pfizer successfully manufactures and obtains approval or emergency use authorization from U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The U.S. government will pay the companies $1.95 billion upon the receipt of the first 100 million doses, following FDA authorization or approval. The U.S. government also can acquire up to an additional 500 million doses.

https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/07/22/us-government-engages-pfizer-produce-millions-doses-covid-19-vaccine.html
"The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense (DoD) today announced an agreement with U.S.-based Pfizer Inc. for large-scale production and nationwide delivery of 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in the United States following the vaccine’s successful manufacture and approval. The agreement also allows the U.S. government to acquire an additional 500 million doses."

Actually, the MODERNA only requires Negative 4 F (-20 C). Pfizer's requires -94 F (-80C).

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/moderna-and-pfizer-e2-80-99s-covid-19-vaccine-candidates-require-ultra-low-temperatures-raising-questions-about-storage-distribution/ar-BB18rb7X

Was watching some news coverage this morning about the vaccine . Not there yet but promising . My hunch say's we get back to normal around June/July of next year . That prediction is straight out of the butt storage vault 😁

Thanks for the link. At $19/shot that sounds really reasonable. Let's hope they can figure out all the cold storage issues. I wonder if they could/will setup regional manufacturing plants to reduce storage issues.

Correction......

https://news.yahoo.com/pfizers-head-vaccine-development-notes-145930453.html

Pfizer distanced itself from the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed on Monday after announcing some great news about its vaccine candidate.

Pfizer on Monday revealed that a first interim analysis suggested that its COVID-19 vaccine is more than 90 percent effective, and Vice President Mike Pence said that this was "thanks to the public-private partnership forged" by President Trump. But The New York Times reports that Dr. Kathrin Jansen, Pfizer's head of vaccine research and development, "sought to distance the company from Operation Warp Speed," the Trump administration's effort to speed up development of a coronavirus vaccine, and from politics in general.

"We were never part of the Warp Speed," Jansen told the Times. "We have never taken any money from the U.S. government, or from anyone."

Pfizer did announce in July a $1.95 billion agreement with the U.S. government for 100 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate. But Bloomberg notes that "among the frontrunners, [Pfizer's] is the only vaccine project that did not take funding from the White House-led Operation Warp Speed program to bolster research, development or manufacturing." Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla had prevously touted this fact.

My best guess is that Pfizer's vaccine will be directed to larger cities and larger hospitals while Moderna's vaccine, which is very likely to report positive data this month as well, will be directed to smaller cities and facilities.

Moderna will have less supply than Pfizer, but has less stringent cold chain requirements. Astrazeneca's vaccine is only a month or so behind in its clinical trials, and has less demanding cold chain requirements IIRC.

The price Pfizer is initially charging ($20/dose, or $40/person) is similar to other vaccines, and I expect the vaccine will be provided free or nearly free to the consumer.

In general, this data is good news for all the vaccine programs.

I've got a 'cool collar'...will that work?

Any of you "experts" understand how Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are unique from the others? They are using a new technology - mRNA - which has never been used in vaccines. I've read of some experts that are concerned with it's approach. It actually changes every cell in the human body..

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/coronavirus-vaccine-covid-19-cure-doctor-moderna-novavax-oxford-a9523091.html

Many vaccines, like for influenza a.k.a flu, use an inactivated virus that is destroyed by heat or chemicals like formaldehyde so that it can elicit an immune response without infecting you. Others — like for measles, mumps, and rubella — use a live attenuated virus that is cultivated in such a way that it makes the virus weak and unable to hurt you but still able to train your immune system to fight it. Moderna’s messenger RNA vaccine, on the other hand, is completely new and revolutionary to say the least. It uses a sequence of genetic RNA material produced in a lab that, when injected into your body, must invade your cells and hijack your cells’ protein-making machinery called ribosomes to produce the viral components that subsequently train your immune system to fight the virus. In this case, Moderna’s mRNA-1273 is programmed to make your cells produce the coronavirus’ infamous spike protein that gives the virus its crown-like appearance (“corona” is crown in Latin) for which it is named.

In many ways, the vaccine almost behaves like an RNA virus itself except that it hijacks your cells to produce the parts of the virus, like the spike protein, rather than the whole virus. Some messenger RNA vaccines are even self-amplifying. That means they encode not only the protein antigen of interest to elicit an immune response but also produce their own RNA dependent RNA polymerase, so that they can force the cell to replicate more copies of it. At that point, it will be hard to convince conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers that a self-amplifying messenger RNA vaccine is not an artificially created self-replicating virus. In fact, public acceptance of this new paradigm is not something to be easily dismissed nor taken for granted. There are unique and unknown risks to messenger RNA vaccines, including the possibility that they generate strong type I interferon responses that could lead to inflammation and autoimmune conditions.

I won't be initially taking it, nor will my wife or nearly three year old daughter. If I/we were very old or sick, potentially. But it isn't worth the risks that we really have no idea about.

THREE people

THREE out of millions have tested positive to the China virus twice.

And with high false positives (including other cold /corona virus detection) I am surprised it is not more than 3.


We need a number to go along with "limited immunity"

Is this vaccine producing less immunity that contracting the virus?

I have heard from a vaccine company C-Level professional in a public domain meeting that the US might start with just one vaccine if more than one passes muster. Her company is not part of OWS but is developing/evaluation another candidate.

In that same meeting I got some perspective on what FDA is up to with OWS safety and efficacy assessment/evaluation-- pretty straightforward.

Back in the day when I worked for Thomas' bakeries we flash froze the goods at -50F. -94 is damn cold!!

I've mentioned this in other threads, but after broad vaccination is underway, I think the risk to the unvaccinated may be even higher than now.

The reason is that I think social distancing measures will get dialed back, restaurants and bars and offices and theaters will be opened, people will be packing into them with fewer masks.

The vaccines do not seem to be "sterilizing", meaning they don't prevent a person from getting infected in the upper respiratory tract, they just prevent most (90%?) of those infections from becoming symptomatic or serious. That is from animal (monkey) data, the data in humans will be very closely watched. If that proves true in humans, it suggests vaccinated persons may still be able to contract and transmit the virus. While they themselves will be mostly protected, unvaccinated persons in the same bar, bus, office, etc will not be.

Put another way, I am not sure how herd immunity levels are calculated if vaccinated persons are still able to contract and transmit the virus to each other and to the unvaccinated.

Note that therapeutic development has, so far, lagged vaccine development.

All this is my speculation.

Just watched the 60 minutes piece-- very informative and inspirational and well done.

Many people are clearly working very hard, with military, fed regulatory and industry, et cetera working as a team.

Of course public health leadership will factor in as well-- with guidance about how the increasing pool of vaccinated individuals and "relaxing" of public health measures an work together as optimally as possible over time.

2H 2021 is going to be very interesting.

"I am not sure how herd immunity levels are calculated if vaccinated persons are still able to contract and transmit the virus to each other and to the unvaccinated."

I am not sure as well. But I am pretty confident that there is plenty of US expertise engaged in sorting all of this out. Everyone wants the same thing.

And as Buck T. says: "we must not allow a mineshaft gap."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03166-8

More good news:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/novavax-wins-fda-fast-track-designation-for-covid-19-vaccine-candidate-2020-11-09

Pedaling as fast as they can. With diligence.

Let's see if their timeline holds. Hopefully this and many other candidates will come through the process and help on a global scale.

It actually does NOT change every cell in the human body. Stick to real experts.

The problem with vaccines is not how effective they are but how many die or get sick from it due to the side effects which is universal in this case.

Good article.

I’m not concerned about duration of protection. I mean, longer is better. But we can redose every six months if needed, until a better (gen 2) vaccine comes along. And redosing means more revenue ...

Reduction of transmission and efficacy in elderly seem really key. You could imagine a combination (little of either) that would leave older persons behind, as the rest of America goes back to life as normal or close to it. There’s some industries that focus on an older demographic (cruise lines being obvious one) that might live or die on this. However, some of the other vaccines have data in the elderly that looks pretty promising. We’re going to have multiple vaccines available in just a few months, and some may be better than Pfizer’s.

I did a back of envelope, 300 MM popln, 30% refuse vax, 70% get vax, vax 90% effective in those, 30% of the refuse vax + vax ineffective group get infected in 2021, 5% of those hospitalized. Implies still lots of ppl who will really need better therapeutics to be developed. Probably more than manufacturing capacity in 2021. I mention this because all the therapeutics names are down hard today, it’s a knee jerk overreaction in my view.

The 30% is high but not crazy. Somewhere around 20% of Americans will have been infected by the time 2020 ends, and that’s with social distancing. If we drop social distancing efforts, as I suspect we will in 1H2021, and there’s little reduction of transmission from a vaccine, then why couldn’t you see the virus R revert to 3 or 5 as it rips through the rest of America? I suspect that sympathy for vax refusers will be limited, like not enough for the vaxed to close their businesses or wear masks to protect the refusers. Sort of a “serves them right” mentality.

Pfizer saw an infection rate of about 0.43% per month in placebo arm, that is what the limited data available today suggests. That’s about 5-6% per year. People who sign up for a vaccine trial are very likely on the cautious side, they obviously don’t think Covid is a hoax, are probably not going to Sturgis and other super spreading events, and even in the virus hotspots there was some social distancing being done. Getting from 5-6% to 30% doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.

I expect manufacturing capacity to increase under the Defense Production Act, starting in January

Interesting find but only good for 24 hours. easy to store and cheap though.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninashapiro/2020/11/06/ferrets-receive-nasal-spray-to-successfully-prevent-covid-19/?sh=e8c5bc82e896

The caution is warranted.

Gene therapy is not exactly known for its wild successes.

Next time I die after getting a vaccine. I'll make sure to file a grievance.

Interesting. I expect it to increase the moment a vaccine receives EUA. But hey! Maybe we can get GM to start making vaccines too?

I feel fine...

The ghost of Red Beard has spoken!!

Can you still use your pool when you're in ghostly form?

yeah!

The grievance would be a waste of time since these will be administered under a blanket immunity.