Quote:
Originally Posted by pmax
You can get those directly without the vaccine.
The 1st generation vaccines have a good chance of failing if I read it correctly.
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The antibody cocktails (e.g. REGN- COV2) will be in extremely short supply. IIRC, Regenron is talking about being able to make 4-8MM doses/yr at the low dose level (the "prevention" dose) and that's with big pharma (Roche) helping. For the high dose (the "treatment" dose, they might be able to make 100K doses in 2021.
All the vaccines currently in ph 3 clinical trials reliably induce production of neutralizing antibodies at levels higher - in some cases vastly higher - than measured in pts who have recovered from Covid. They also induce T cell responses. That is in persons in the 18-70 y/o range. Data hasn't been that plentiful for pediatric or older, though it is starting to come out.
The vaccines may not be effective, or not as effective as hoped, but failure to produce antibodies won't be the reason (again, can't say if that's true for kids/older yet).
Edit: I meant that to apply to the vaccines in US and other Western trials. There is at least one Chinese vaccine that I am pretty dubious about. They used a viral vector that is already endemic in humans, as a result something like a third (don't recall exactly) of ph 2 subjects demonstrated pre-x immunity to that viral vector and hence did not have much of an antibody response. I don't know if they are doing ph 3 trials - the Chinese seem to have decided that ph 3 trials aren't needed (being sarcastic but that seems to be effectively what is going on) or (my cynical speculation) they've already done secret non-consensual ph 3 trials on populations who can't say no (Yighurs, say). Similar comment for the Russian vaccine (for which little data has been released, other than Putin approves it).