Results for “first doses” 105 found
Christopher DeMuth on national conservatism
I thought the recent WSJ Op-Ed by DeMuth was one of this year’s more important essays. DeMuth argues that conservatism needs a new [and also older], less libertarian, less cosmopolitan turn. Here is his core message:
When the leftward party in a two-party system is seized by such radicalism, the conservative instinct for moderation is futile and may be counterproductive. Yet many conservative politicians stick with it, promising to correct specific excesses that have stirred popular revulsion. Republicans will win some elections that way—but what will they do next? National conservatives recognize that in today’s politics, the excesses are the essence. Like Burke after 1789, we shift to opposing revolution tout court.
Why national conservatism? Have you noticed that almost every progressive initiative subverts the American nation? Explicitly so in opening national borders, disabling immigration controls, and transferring sovereignty to international bureaucracies. But it also works from within—elevating group identity above citizenship; fomenting racial, ethnic and religious divisions; disparaging common culture and the common man; throwing away energy independence; defaming our national history as a story of unmitigated injustice; hobbling our national future with gargantuan debts that will constrain our capacity for action.
The left’s anti-nationalism is another sharp break with the past.
Do read the whole thing, as they say. I cannot summarize his entire argument, but here are some points of push back:
1. It is a mistake to start by defining one’s view in opposition to some other set of views, in this case progressivism. You will end up with something limited and defensive and ultimately uninspiring.
2. Unlike many classical liberals, I’ve long made my peace with nationalism, but for pragmatic reasons. I view it as morally arbitrary, but also as the only possible solid foundation for a stably globalized world, given the psychologically collectivist tendencies of most humans. DeMuth opposes national conservatism to globalization for the most part, but strong nations and strong globalizations go together. There is talk of “global markets that eclipse the nation and divide its citizens,” but the case needs to be stronger and more specific than that. National security arguments aside (yes we Americans should produce more chips domestically), which exactly are the global markets that are eclipsing us? And is it global markets that are polarizing us? Really? Which ones exactly and how?
3. Virtually every critic of globalization wants to pick and choose. There is plenty of “globalization for me, not for thee” in these ideological arenas. (In similar fashion, I don’t quite get the Peter Thiel bitcoin > globalization point of view….crypto has been quite international pretty much from the beginning, and often at least in spirit directed against national monies.) And which exactly is the national body we are going to trust with micro-managing globalization? Some DC bureaucracy that operates as effectively as the CDC and is filled 90% or more with Democrats? From a national conservative point of view, or for that matter from my point of view, why do that?
4. For better or worse, Biden is far more of a nationalist than DeMuth makes him out to be. “Confiscating vaccine patents” is the only example given of this supposed excess cosmopolitanism, but hey just look at the allocation of those third doses, something Biden has pushed hard himself. On many matters of foreign policy, including China, the differences between Trump and Biden are tiny. And Europe isn’t exactly happy with Biden either.
5. The policy recommendations toward the end of the piece are underwhelming. Common carrier regulation to prevent Facebook from taking down controversial opinions is the first suggestion. Whether or not you agree with that proposal, the major social media companies were not doing much in the way of “take downs” as recently as ten years ago. To return to that state of affairs, but with the whole thing enforced by government (“Some DC bureaucracy that operates as effectively as perhaps the CDC and also is filled 90% or more with Democrats?”), is…uninspiring.
6. The next set of policy recommendations are “big projects” for cybersecurity and quantum computing. Again, whether or not you agree with those specific ideas, I don’t see why they need national conservatism as a foundation. You might just as easily come to those positions through a Progress Studies framework, among other views. And is a centralized approach really best for cybersecurity? How secure were the systems of the Office of Personnel Management? Doesn’t the firming up of all those soft targets require a fairly decentralized approach?
7. DeMuth refers to our “once-great” museums as deserving of revitalization. I would agree that the visual arts of painting and sculpture were more culturally central in earlier decades than today. But putting aside the National Gallery of Art in D.C. (in a state of radical decline…maybe blame the national Feds?), and the immediate problems of the pandemic, American museums are pretty awesome. MOMA for instance is far better than it used to be. If there has been a problem, it is that 9/11 made foreign loan contracts for art exhibits more difficult to pull off, in part for reasons of insurance. In other words, the contraction of globalization has hurt American museums.
8. I wonder how he feels about crypto, Web 3.0, and the Metaverse? I think it is perfectly fine to regard the correct opinions on those topics as still unsettled, but is national conservatism really such a great starting point? Aren’t we going to rather rapidly neglect the potential upside from those innovations? Shouldn’t we instead try to start by understanding the technologies, and then see if a nationalist point of view on them is going to make sense?
More generally, if you are going to do the NatCon thing, how about embracing the tech companies as America’s great national champions? Embracing them as your only hope for countering left-wing MSM? Somehow that is missing from DeMuth’s vision.
So I liked the piece, but I say it is a rearguard action, destined to fail. We need a more positive, more dynamic approach to a free society of responsible individuals, and that is probably going to mean an ongoing expansion of globalization and also a fairly new and indeed somewhat unsettled understanding of what the nation is going to consist of. What DeMuth calls “empirical libertarianism,” as he associates with Adam Smith, I still take as a better starting point.
What’s the Right Dose for Boosters?
The Biden administration says booster shots are coming, but the FDA hasn’t decided on the dose. Moderna wants a half-shot booster. Pfizer a full shot. But could the best dose for Americans and for the world be even less?
COVID-19 vaccines are the first successful use of mRNA vaccine technology, so a lot remains unknown. But identifying the smallest dose needed to provide effective boosting is critical to protect Americans from adverse effects, increase confidence in vaccines, and mitigate global vaccine inequity.
We’ve known since earlier this year that a half-dose of the Moderna vaccine produces antibody levels similar to the standard-dose and newer information suggests that even a quarter-dose vaccine may do the same. If a half or quarter dose is nearly as effective as a standard dose for first and second shots then a full dose booster may well be an overdose. The essential task of a booster is to “jog” the immune system’s memory of what it’s supposed to fight. Data from the world of hepatitis B suggest that the “reminder” need not be as intense as the initial “lesson.” And in the cases of tuberculosis, meningitis, and yellow fever vaccines, lower doses have been as good or better than the originals.
Lower doses could also reduce risks of adverse effects.
That’s myself and physicians Garth Strohbehn and William F. Parker on the Med Page Today. Strohbehn is an oncologist and specialist in optimizing doses for cancer drugs. William Parker is a pulmonologist and professor of medicine at the University of Chicago.
A new hurdle for vaccine development
Unless countries that have purchased vaccine doses and companies that have already brought vaccines into use agree to find ways to resolve the problem, manufacturers that trail the first wave of producers may not be able to prove that their vaccines work. Not only will that slow efforts to vaccinate the planet, it will block development of next-generation vaccines, and it will stymie efforts to answer key public health questions, like whether boosting with a different vaccine would generate better protection, or whether giving smaller — fractional — doses could protect more people more quickly…
The problem stems in part from the fact that at this point in the pandemic, it isn’t considered ethical to test new vaccines against placebos; instead they would have to be tested against one of the existing shots. But getting one’s hands on licensed or authorized vaccines for study purposes is nigh on impossible; all available doses have been snapped up by countries keen to vaccinate as many of their citizens as possible.
Contracts for those doses contain rigid stipulations about how the vaccines can be deployed. The doses often have to be used in the country that made the purchase; when the Biden administration wanted to share AstraZeneca doses with Canada and Mexico in March, it loaned the doses to get around the restrictions. Contracts also often stipulate that doses that have been purchased must be used for outbreak control, not for research purposes, Lurie said.
Here is the full story by Helen Branswell. Obviously there is a market-oriented solution here, if only we care enough to implement it…
Thursday assorted links
1. Skeptical results on prediction markets.
2. Jasper Johns owns some pretty amazing small Cezanne watercolors (scroll through to see them all).
3. Did urbanization come first?
4. Distributed teams in academia.
The Biden administration populist thinking about vaccine export
…top White House aides rejected that [export] recommendation over concerns that the domestic stockpile was not large enough yet — and that the optics of sending doses abroad during a big push to make vaccines more available to U.S. citizens. In subsequent weeks they repeatedly overruled administration health experts who felt it was a mistake to keep millions of doses in storage as outbreaks intensified across the world.
“The optics clearly were that we needed to take care of our own population first. Let’s not worry about the demand yet, we still have a problem at home,” said one person briefed on the matter, who requested anonymity to describe the internal divisions. “The public health people don’t see that in the same way.”
Here is the full story.
India’s Pandemic and the World
Shruti Rajagopalan is right, helping India isn’t just about India.
India’s role in the global pandemic is unique. The developing world is counting on affordable Indian vaccine-makers such as Serum Institute of India Pvt. Ltd. for their supplies. With India now reserving virtually all its doses for domestic use, those countries will have to wait even longer to be vaccinated. And if the pandemic disrupts production at Indian pharmaceutical companies, it could affect crucial non-Covid medications as well. Half the world’s children have been vaccinated by Serum Institute.
The Biden administration can do two things to help. The first is to ease restrictions on critical exports, imposed under the Defense Production Act to prioritize the needs of U.S. companies.
Vaccine production requires very specific, medically approved inputs, which are difficult to substitute quickly in the middle of a pandemic. Currently, U.S. producers must secure permission before exporting such things as special sterile filters, disposable bags for cell cultures, cell culture media and single-use tubing. The embargo has led to major bottlenecks. Serum Institute says that without those inputs, it may not be able to deliver the 160 million vaccine doses it had planned to produce next month.
Second, the U.S. should immediately share doses from its own supply of Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
I have three things to add. First, I have already noted the foreign policy implications which weigh strongly in favor of taking a more active role in the world pandemic.
Second, India should move immediately to delay the second dose of the AZ vaccine to 12 weeks. The federal government has already recommended a 6-8 week schedule, as this improves efficiency of the AstraZeneca (Covishield) vaccine, but many people so fear shortages that they are getting a less-effective second dose at four weeks. An enforced 12 week schedule would improve efficiency and might also reassure people that there will be supplies in 12 weeks.
Third, and this is more speculative, but the rising pandemic in India provides an opportunity to test fractional dosing of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in a real world setting. There is currently a small-scale Belgian trial testing Moderna at 50 mcg and Pfizer at 20 mcg. We already have reasonable information that 50 mcg of Moderna induces a robust immune response in adults. The mRNA vaccines wouldn’t work in all of India but would be fine in the cities and perhaps there is an opportunity for an exchange similar to what Israel promised to get early supplies.
A Foreign Policy Disaster in the Making
NYTimes: A lethal, fast-paced second wave of the coronavirus pandemic has brought India’s health care systems to the verge of collapse and is putting millions of lives and livelihoods at risk.
On Sunday and Monday, the country recorded more than 270,000 and 259,000 cases, respectively, of Covid-19, a staggering increase from about 11,000 cases per day in the second week of February. Reported coronavirus infections shot up from about 20,000 per day in mid-March to more than 200,000 by mid-April.
The newspapers and social media are scrolls of horror and failure of the health system. There are reports of lines of ambulances with patients waiting outside the largest Covid facility in Ahmedabad in the western state of Gujarat because ventilator beds and oxygen had run out.
On Friday in the northern city of Lucknow, Vinay Srivastava, a 65-year-old journalist, shared his falling oxygen levels on Twitter, tagging government authorities for help. Overburdened hospitals and laboratories wouldn’t take calls from his family. The last tweet from Mr. Srivastava’s handle described his oxygen saturation level at 52, way below the 95 percent, which is considered normal. Nobody helped. He died on Saturday.
When I left India in February of 2020 I feared that COVID would rip through its dense, urban populations which were already under stress from some of the world’s worst air and water pollution. I feared that COVID would overwhelm India’s weak public health care system and leave its low-capacity state flailing. As it happened, I should have worried more about America’s poorly cared for nursing home populations, its high obesity rate, and its low state-capacity. It was the US state that ended up flailing, as it and the public became absorbed by media spectacles, impeachments and scandals du jour even as thousands died daily. The virus mocks us all.
All of this will require some rethinking. Today, however, I want to point to a foreign policy disaster in the making. America’s role as the guarantor of a globalized, mostly peaceful, and orderly world–already deeply hurt by four years of “America First,”–is now under further threat by an increasing perception that we are vaccine hoarders. Conspiracy theories are running wild in India on WhatsApp and elsewhere that we have hundreds of millions of spare doses. It isn’t true, of course. We ordered more doses than we needed because we didn’t know which vaccine would work and so we smartly placed multiple bets. Our advance-purchases from Pfizer and big investments in Moderna and related parts of the vaccine supply chain have paid off big time. As the US is vaccinated, our investments will benefit the entire world. Our investments in Novavax, AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson were also smart investments but those bets have yet to pay off in a big way. We don’t have hundreds of millions of doses stockpiled but maybe tens of millions of some AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson vaccines.
We have, however, used the Defense Production Act to prioritize American vaccine manufacturing at potentially great cost to India. As The Economist reports:
Production lines in India, making at least 160m doses of covid vaccine a month, will come to a halt in the coming weeks unless America supplies 37 critical items.
A shutdown of vaccine production in India would be a disaster for India and also for the United States. Our image in Asia will be tarnished at a time when we want to be making allies to counter Chinese influence. Moreover, the US benefits tremendously from a globalized world. Indeed, the US cannot supply its own vaccine needs without inputs from the rest of the world so flouting the rules will boomerang, leaving us and everyone else worse off. Autarchy is very bad for vaccine production.
The Biden Administration has some leeway. We have over 60 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines on hand and more arriving every day. We do not need to pause our own vaccination efforts to help others. We can donate what AstraZeneca stockpiles remain at no cost to us. A I said in my testimony to Congress, forget being humanitarians, there are health, economic and political reasons to vaccinate the world.
So let’s make it clear that we have an American plan to vaccinate the world before perceptions solidify that we are the villain and not the hero of the story.
Africa fact of the day
More than 1.7 million doses of the world’s first malaria vaccine have been administered in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, benefitting more than 650,000 children!
Here is more.
My Congressional Testimony
I thought the meeting went well. I made four points.
- It is not too late to do more.
- We should invest in nasal and oral vaccines.
- We should vaccinate the world.
- We should stretch doses through fractional dosing and delaying the second dose, this will be important to vaccinate the world quickly.
One observation. Lots of people are talking about vaccine hesitancy but I am one of the few people who have been talking about nasal and oral vaccines which are the only really solid approach to the issue that I have seen.
My best line:
The unvaccinated are the biggest risk for generating mutations and new variants. You have heard of the South Africa and Brazilian variants, well the best way to protect your constituents from these and other variants is to vaccinate South Africans and Brazilians.
I also got in the last word in Q&A when discussing the pause of J&J:
For the rest of the world it is important to underline that it is most important to get vaccinated now. Use the AstraZeneca vaccine, use the Johnnson & Johnson vaccine…don’t wait for Moderna or Pfizer, it is going to take too long…start your vaccination program early…vaccinate as quickly as possible, that is the route to health and wealth.
See Western Warnings Tarnish Vaccines the World Badly Needs for the beginnings of a disaster. Note that if J&J and AZ are tarnished or knocked out of the vaccine arsenal then dose stretching and investing in more capacity are going to be even more important.
I also submitted five excellent and important pieces to Congress:
Canadian statement on delaying the second dose.
National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) Canada. 2021. “COVID-19 Vaccine Extended Dose Interval for Canadians: NACI Recommendation.” Government of Canada. March 3, 2021. https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/immunization/national-advisory-committee-on-immunization-naci/rapid-response-extended-dose-intervals-covid-19-vaccines-early-rollout-population-protection.html.
Value of vaccine capacity and additional investments.
Castillo, Juan Camilo, Amrita Ahuja, Susan Athey, Arthur Baker, Eric Budish, Tasneem Chipty, Rachel Glennerster, et al. 2021. “Market Design to Accelerate COVID-19 Vaccine Supply.” Science, February. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg0889.
Efficacy of the first dose from NEJM.
Skowronski, Danuta, and Gaston Serres De. 2021. “Letter to the Editor on Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 MRNA Covid-19 Vaccine.” New England Journal of Medicine, February 17, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMc2036242.
Overview of dose stretching policies (with links in the online version).
Tabarrok, Alex. 2021. “What Are We Waiting For?” Washington Post, February 12, 2021, sec. Outlook. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/12/first-doses-vaccine-rules-fda/
A plan to vaccinate the world.
Agarwal, Ruchir, and Tristan Reed. 2021. “How to End the COVID-19 Pandemic by March 2022” SSRN. 2021. https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/181611618494084337/how-to-end-the-covid-19-pandemic-by-march-2022
In praise of Alex Tabarrok
Here’s a question I’ve been mulling in recent months: Is Alex Tabarrok right? Are people dying because our coronavirus response is far too conservative?
I don’t mean conservative in the politicized, left-right sense. Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University and a blogger at Marginal Revolution, is a libertarian, and I am very much not. But over the past year, he has emerged as a relentless critic of America’s coronavirus response, in ways that left me feeling like a Burkean in our conversations.
He called for vastly more spending to build vaccine manufacturing capacity, for giving half-doses of Moderna’s vaccine and delaying second doses of Pfizer’s, for using the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, for the Food and Drug Administration to authorize rapid at-home tests, for accelerating research through human challenge trials. The through line of Tabarrok’s critique is that regulators and politicians have been too cautious, too reluctant to upend old institutions and protocols, so fearful of the consequences of change that they’ve permitted calamities through inaction.
Tabarrok hasn’t been alone. Combinations of these policies have been endorsed by epidemiologists, like Harvard’s Michael Mina and Brown’s Ashish Jha; by other economists, like Tabarrok’s colleague Tyler Cowen and the Nobel laureates Paul Romer and Michael Kremer; and by sociologists, like Zeynep Tufekci (who’s also a Times Opinion contributor). But Tabarrok is unusual in backing all of them, and doing so early and confrontationally. He’s become a thorn in the side of public health experts who defend the ways regulators are balancing risk. More than one groaned when I mentioned his name.
But as best as I can tell, Tabarrok has repeatedly been proved right, and ideas that sounded radical when he first argued for them command broader support now. What I’ve come to think of as the Tabarrok agenda has come closest to being adopted in Britain, which delayed second doses, approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine despite its data issues, is pushing at-home testing and permitted human challenge trials, in which volunteers are exposed to the coronavirus to speed the testing of treatments. And for now it’s working: Britain has vaccinated a larger percentage of its population than the rest of Europe and the United States have and is seeing lower daily case rates and deaths.
Vaccine Roundup
1. Politico: The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies….The vaccination hubs, which are run by FEMA and staffed in part by National Guard troops and other Pentagon personnel, have administered…about 67,000 shots a day, according to a series of internal FEMA briefing documents and data sets obtained by POLITICO….By comparison, the federal retail pharmacy program reported March 11 it had administered nearly 1 million doses over a single day.
Using the retail pharmacies is what Scott Duke Kominers and I argued for in mid-February in our piece titled, America’s Pharmacies Can Do a Lot More Vaccinations. Good to see the Biden administration is making adjustments. Nothing wrong with the clinics, by the way, only use the pharmacies more.
2. New CDC study of health care workers in the United States shows that the first dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine is 80% effective within two weeks. Big cuts in transmission as well. N.B. not an RCT.
3. One common criticism of delaying the second dose or of using the AstraZeneca vaccine or of making or not making other changes was that this would increase “vaccine hesitancy.” Frankly, in my view this was just an all-purpose rationalization for inaction. I thought that delaying the second dose could just as easily reduce vaccine hesitancy as increase it–not that I knew this would happen, I simply knew what would happen was uncertain. More generally, I thought that we should do the thing designed to save the most lives simpliciter, address vaccine hesitancy directly, and not try to do some complicated bank-shot based on ill-informed psychological speculation. Well Britain did everything that people were worried about–Britain delayed the second dose, used the AstraZeneca vaccine, used the AstraZeneca in the elderly and didn’t halt the use of the AZ vaccine and the result is the least vaccine hesitancy of 26 countries surveyed.
More from Sure
The excellent Sure in the comments. I would draw attention to “I believe in evidence based medicine, not eminence based medicine” from last time and “methodolotry” from today. And to think this website is free.
A Biden Plan for World Vaccination
Canada has approved the AstraZeneca vaccine. The US has not. The US has paid for an AstraZeneca factory in Baltimore and stockpiled millions of doses. The US should lease the factory to Canada or simply make the doses available for export. The same factory will also produce the J&J vaccine so it’s possible that there is some small opportunity cost. Exporting vaccine to our close ally, trading partner, and neighbor, however, would create significant political, economic, and health benefits for the United States.
More generally, the US is focused on vaccinating its residents first. That’s understandable. But step two is vaccinating the world. The Kremer team advocated going big on vaccine capacity for two reasons. First, we needed a lot of capacity to vaccinate the US fast and fast was valuable. Second, going big meant that the US could vaccinate its population quickly but then have that capacity available to vaccinate the rest of the world.
Contrary to what many people feared, Operation Warp Speed hasn’t taken doses from the rest of the world, Operation Warp Speed has built the infrastructure to deliver doses to the rest of the world. Our motto in advising governments and NGOs was ‘Capacity is the antidote to conflicts over distribution.‘
The United States will soon be the first big country with a fully vaccinated population. The US will then have a chance to lead the world into the post-pandemic era with a “Biden plan” for world vaccination akin to the Mashall Plan.
Invest more. Vaccinate the world. End the pandemic.
Start with Canada.
Market Design to Accelerate Vaccine Supply
Market design to accelerate COVID-19 vaccine supply is my new paper in Science, co-authored with Camilo Castillo, Michael Kremer, Eric Budish, Susan Athey and others. We make three vital 
points. First, governments invested much less than our group advised. We spent trillions on fiscal support and maybe $20 billion or so on vaccines, far too little. Nevertheless, the 3bn courses we have (conservatively) in 2021 capacity is worth on the order of $17.4 trillion or $5800 per course. If advance market commitments moved us from 2 billion to 3 billion courses then they were worth 2.4 trillion dollars. I feel pretty good about the work we did to encourage Operation Warp Speed and other advance purchases.
Second, it’s not too late to do more. If we could get an additional billion courses in capacity online by July 2021 that would speed up vaccination in high-income countries by 1.4 months and in the world by 4.3 months. A few months might not seem like much but that speed-up is worth half a trillion to the world economy. If we could get additional capacity online by April it would be worth a trillion dollars.
You might think that getting more capacity online by April isn’t possible but you can do a lot for a trillion dollars. Moreover, we can increase capacity not just by building more factories but by using the doses we have now more wisely. Low-dose syringes, for example, can increase supplies by 20%. I think the health authorities know this now (although they should have been prepared) but even at this late stage almost everyone is under-estimating how much it would be worth spending to get 20% more vaccine capacity. Similarly, going to half-doses is equivalent to doubling the number of Moderna and Pfizer factories. Even if we did half doses for the young alone, that’s a big increase in supply. We calculate that additional capacity is worth $576 to $989 per annual course, far higher than the price.
Third, we also give advice on how to structure contracts. Buying doses isn’t optimal because companies can just agree and put you to the back of the queue. Optimal rewards and penalties are very difficult to implement, especially when optimal penalties could bankrupt firms many times over (because the social value of vaccines is much greater than the private value.) So it’s much better to subsidize capacity with an option to buy doses at a discount produced from that capacity–this is similar to what Operation Warp Speed did with Moderna and Novavax.
Finally, here’s a fourth important point I haven’t made earlier. We suggest procurement auctions to surface prices on necessary inputs. Ordinarily, an increase in demand to a final producer such as a vaccine manufacturer is transmitted along the entire supply chain through the signaling and incentive mechanism of prices. When final goods prices are limited socially or by law, however, the supply chain can become dis-coordinated. Capacity contracts could be fulfilled, for example, and the producer could yet claim an inability to produce because raw materials are in short supply. Thus, we need a mechanism to coordinate supply chains.The US Defense Production Act is one such mechanism. An alternative procedure that may work more quickly is to organize procurement auctions for all the inputs and complementary goods required for vaccine production. The advantage of a procurement auction is that it can attract and incentivize firms globally, firms that are well beyond the reach of the DPA.
Read the whole thing and the appendix with details on methods and calculations.
The AstraZeneca Vaccine Works Well
A new study looking at essentially the entirety of the Scottish population finds that both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccine work very well at preventing hospitalizations from the first dose.
UK policy for use of vaccines against COVID-19 involves an offer of a first dose followed by a second dose 12 weeks later. To our knowledge, this is the first study of COVID-19 vaccine effect against hospitalisation for an entire nation after a single dose of vaccine. We found that a single dose of BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine was associated with a vaccine effect (VE) of 85% (95% CI 76 to 91) for COVID-19 hospitalisation 28-34 days post-vaccination. A single dose of ChAdOx1 vaccine was associated with a vaccine effect 94% (95% CI 73 to 99) at 28-34 days post-vaccination. VEs increased over time with a peak at 28-34 days post-vaccination for both vaccines. Comparable VEs were seen in those aged ≥80 years for prevention of COVID-19 hospitalisation with a high combined VE of 81% (95% CI 65 to 90) at 28-34 days post-vaccination.
Arne Akbar, president of the British Society for Immunology, noted “…overall these new findings should provide reassurance around the UK’s decision to offer the two doses of the vaccine 12 weeks apart.”
Another important point is that the AstraZeneca vaccine actually shows a higher effectiveness than the Pfizer vaccine. The study wasn’t designed to compare the vaccines and the populations getting the vaccines aren’t random samples. Nevertheless, the AstraZeneca vaccine appears to work well and it was actually given to a greater proportion of elderly patients.
The new results from Scotland support the UK, EU, and WHO decisions to authorize the AstraZeneca vaccine. If the US had authorized the AstraZeneca vaccine in late December at the same time as did the UK, millions more Americans could have been vaccinated saving many lives.
Where is the FDA’s cost-benefit calculation?