(2021-03-25) ZviM Covid 03/25 Own-Goals

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 3/25: Own Goals... the main event remains the race between new strains and vaccinations.

AstraZeneca has made quite the mess of things. First they screwed up their initial studies in ways that kind of boggle the mind. Then, with the studies designed to repair trust, fix the problem and allow approval, they report incomplete results in order to make themselves look better, even though inevitably they were caught doing this within a day – it’s pretty inevitable that you’ll be caught when you do something in public that someone already warned you not to do, especially when that someone is also the regulatory authority. Oops.

In addition to AZ’s own goals, health officials continue to score additional own goals around the whole issue of blood clots

the main event remains the race between new strains and vaccinations.

Those developments are infuriating, and also enlightening as to how the system of the world functions these days

In America the race is plausibly close.

In Europe the race is not so close. Vaccinations are running far slower, with no short term hope for things to get much better.

Vaccinations

When can anyone who wants a vaccine fail to load a crashing website where they will eventually be able to book an appointment? Here’s a handy guide.

mostly the exact time of your appointment does not matter at the big sites so long as you’re there the same day.

If you want the Johnson & Johnson shot, that’s going less well. It seems that when officials said explicitly they have no plan, that did not bode so well.

That’s on top of J&J failing to produce that much supply, which is also not going well.

One source of that seems to be that a contract manufacturer Catalent they used needed its own emergency use authorization which they only got this week. That was holding back millions of doses, and the delay plausibly killed thousands.

The whole debacle makes it clear that the FDA is causing far more delays in vaccine manufacturing and delivery with its red tape than one would guess only looking at the topline delays in authorizations.

AstraZeneca Vaccinations Resume In Europe

As expected, elites that backed halting vaccinations in order to show how Very Serious they were got the Official Word right away and pivoted to explaining how important it was to be cautious for no reason

With 30-60 million doses in reserve, and no intention of approving or using the AstraZeneca vaccine until after we have enough vaccines without it (we’re getting closer than when I wrote this section, but not closer enough, see below), we generously agreed to send 4 million of them overseas.

AstraZeneca’s American trial results were in (WaPo). Sample size of 32,449. The headline numbers are 79% effectiveness against symptomatic Covid-19 and 100% (once again!) against severe disease and death, although that was only 5 cases versus 0 cases so it doesn’t mean much.

There were already real messaging issues with the AstraZeneca vaccine, as it is less effective than Moderna/Pfizer, and now the Europeans have muddied the waters further, to the point where introducing AstraZeneca in America might end up doing more harm than good via confusion and increasing overall vaccine reluctance

The part where we can trust the initial release was decisively disproven. The part where any deception would be quickly spotted seems strongly confirmed. The mystery is how in the world AstraZeneca thought they would ever get away with this

Or, alternatively, did Oxford really find a pharmaceutical company so incompetent that they did this by mistake, on top of giving an entire trial segment the wrong dose of vaccine the first time around? These are some rather epic screwups.

you gotta admire the chutzpah of saying vaccine manufacturers are ‘defending their monopolies’ when many vaccines still sit ready to go, safe and effective yet unapproved, the rest were delayed for needless months, and while companies are forced to accept fixed monopsony prices from governments who refuse to pay for more capacity or speed, and who pause for investigation and cripple public faith in all vaccines when there are side effects at below the rate in the general population. I mean, yeah, wow.

The Safe Distance For Children Has Always Been Three Feet. That is all.

Public Broadly Supports Challenge Trials

In general, if something has 75% popular support, and those who best understand it give it 90% support, that’s a pretty popular thing, and when the only thing stopping it is that it’s illegal, supporting legalization seems like a very good political issue for either or both parties or any politician to take up and make their own

In Other News

I hadn’t heard what was going on with Novavax for a while despite it looking like they had a proven safe and effective vaccine, found this article from early in March saying they’re on track to ship in June. Article in question doesn’t seem to notice this is a problem.