I think im lucky no one in my family, neighbours, friends circle have died or even got hospitalised from Covid-19.
Loss of smell and breathlessness were the only symptoms from mild covid I know.
Next week US and EU starts dosing in multiple countries. Serbia has 5 sites alone. Parexel remember are dedicated to doing a fast trial in non UK countries.
So the 2 per day on average will massively increase to around 20+ per day as more sites come online.
I would worry with those results not giving a true picture.
Issue 1 - Headline Result
'CT scans of the lungs showed the improvement was approximately double that shown in patients treated with Foralumab as compared to those in the control group.'
The control group used had no actual treatments in use so results will look good. I wonder what the results would be against a proper standard of care placebo. SOC ie with Dex you would see much improved lung CT scans using this drug. There may not be much difference between the 2 drugs?
Issue 2 - Steroids
'Many patients had received steroids prior to enrollment in the trial but those patients stopped taking steroids on enrolling in the study. Thus, the cohort 2 included priming with 3 days of orally administered dexa along with 10 days of treatment with nasally administered Foralumab to assess if inclusion of Dexa may affect the action of Foralumab. There were no significant differences between cohort 2 and 3.
Looks to be an issue when used with steroids to me. There is a drop off in efficacy when used with Dex from the table posted. There was no 'significant' differences is how they put it. In cohort 2 they 'primed' the patient for 3 days with Dex. I'm guessing that means they gave Dex for first 3 days and on day 4 started Foralumab treatment? The average treatment course for Dex is 6 mg once a day orally for 7 to 10 days / (three 2 mg tablets or 15 ml of 2 mg/5 ml oral solution) So how well does it perform running alongside Dexamethasone for 10 full days in standard of care?
Compare to Dex alone
Does it reduce mortality?
Time to recovery?
Does it prevent worsening disease?
The big questions is how well it performs against standard of care.
Yes spontaneously popped up in multiple locations independently. This suggests natural evolution of the virus will incorporate E484K once selection pressure is applied. Other countries in near future will likely see similar mutations.
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1356365178330378251
Now picked up by twitter - UK govt may have to come clean and tell us it may not be the SA variant
This is not good.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/957504/Variant_of_Concern_VOC_202012_01_Technical_Briefing_5_England.pdf
Detection of E484K mutation in B.1.1.7 VOC 202012/01
The COG-UK dataset (total sequences 214,159) was analysed on 26/01/2021. The spike protein mutation E484K (found in VOC 202012/02 B1.351 and VOC 202101/02 P1) has been detected in 11 B1.1.7 sequences. Preliminary information suggests more than one acquisition event.
Sense the main stream media narrative changing here....
EMA approved at 59.5% efficacy based on AZN's clincial trial data.
The 90% number was based on a small sample size in the UK that excluded anyone over 55 years old and had iirc just 6 events. This cohort was also an accident due to a dosing error. Hardly a basis to give any confidence in a result.
Similar the AZN trial data gave just 6% vaccine efficacy for over 65's. Similar to the 90% number the data cannot be trusted as sample size far too small so results can easily be skewed.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55889391
Urgent testing for the South Africa variant of coronavirus is to start in parts of England, after cases were found with no known links to travel or previous cases. Door to door testing planned for Woking.
If the South Africa variant spreads (E484K) mutation it will be a major issue for UK governments delayed dose strategy.
Phizer after 1 dose - In the elderly population 7/15 people tested in Gupta lab did not neutralise the SA variant. Only 3 weeks after 2nd dose did these same people neutralise the virus.
Astra after 2 does is 59.5% efficacy - we do not know what level of protection over 65s get nor how good it is after 1 dose vs SA variant.
As you can see this SA variant needs to be nipped in the bud urgently though rapid testing/tracing and isolating people.
Surprised the SP is not higher on this news. Biofuel/green shares have been the rage recently and this hasnt really moved up too much.
The EMA approved the AZN vaccine and are the best placed to give an accurate asessment. Here is the data and decision.
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ema-recommends-covid-19-vaccine-astrazeneca-authorisation-eu
Approved at 59.5% from 2 doses for all ages. However as Macron says it dubious this vaccine has good efficacy in older people.
Extract here
The safety of the vaccine has been demonstrated across the four studies. However, the Agency based its calculation of how well the vaccine worked on the results from study COV002 (conducted in the UK) and study COV003 (conducted in Brazil). The other two studies had fewer than 6 COVID-19 cases in each, which was not enough to measure the preventive effect of the vaccine. In addition, as the vaccine is to be given as two standard doses, and the second dose should be given between 4 and 12 weeks after the first, the Agency concentrated on results involving people who received this standard regimen.
These showed a 59.5% reduction in the number of symptomatic COVID-19 cases in people given the vaccine (64 of 5,258 got COVID-19 with symptoms) compared with people given control injections (154 of 5,210 got COVID-19 with symptoms). This means that the vaccine demonstrated around a 60% efficacy in the clinical trials.
Most of the participants in these studies were between 18 and 55 years old. There are not yet enough results in older participants (over 55 years old) to provide a figure for how well the vaccine will work in this group. However, protection is expected, given that an immune response is seen in this age group and based on experience with other vaccines;
Yesterday Jeremy Farrar tweeted a paper
https://twitter.com/JeremyFarrar/status/1355601609372430336
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.06.425392v3
Its a complex read but pretty brilliant paper.
Basically in the lab they have experimented with virus evolution. In vitro evolution can mimic natural evolution, on a much faster time scale so we can predict what likely mutations will occur next.
Predicted Q498R mutation
Q498R was first observed in library B4, but established itself only in B5. This mutation emerges only together with N501Y, suggesting an epistatic effect between the two mutations. Indeed, deep-mutational scanning of single RBD mutations 6 showed Q498R to negatively affect both protein stability and binding, while we show that in combination with N501Y binding affinity is improved by ~4-fold above N501Y alone.
Rapid spread of N501Y in the population increases the likelihood for the emergence of the Q498R mutant, which will probably have even higher infectivity. Conversely to Q498R, both the N501Y and E484K mutations established themselves independently, allowing for their rapid in vitro selection and emergence in SARS-CoV-2. This suggests that with the spread of the “British”, “Brazilian”, and “South African” variants, we project that the Q498R mutation will appear in the future, on top of these mutations. The synergism of Q498R with N501Y and E484K increases ACE2 binding by ~50-fold relative to WT.
4 to 50 fold increase in infectivity thats bad!
However the good news is for vaccine/drug designs we get a heads up of how the virus will likely mutate in the future. In theory we could develop vaccine boosters in preperation for when this likely mutation occurs.
Download the pdf and read the discussion and conclusion section as gives you a good idea of whats coming next. Interesting that cloth face masks won't cut it and everyone will need N95 masks in the near future.
He got out at £2.50 odd and all this time has been researching posting stuff for fun?
I agree distribute what they have got now.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-france-germany-coronavirus-vaccine-frankfurt-df5e622611a52bd706a5171c5047688a
I note Sanofi are going to use their manufacturing capacity to produce more Phizer vaccines in the interests of getting the pandemic under control.
Similar example, once J+J approved would it be better to use some of AZN's capacity to manufacture the J+J vaccine? From a pandemic response and ethical view it would be better to have AZN help make the J+J vaccine. Essentially 1 dose means double the amount of people worldwide gets vaccinated. Costs of the vaccines are similar.
AZN produce the vaccine at cost so no issue with loss of revenue so its an ethical question. Possible big pharmas team up here?
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ema-recommends-covid-19-vaccine-astrazeneca-authorisation-eu
Approved at 59.5% from 2 doses and for all ages.
Looks like J+J 1 dose vaccine is the better option for the world as it has higher protection and needs just 1 dose.
As far as I know until Q2/Q3 thats all the major vaccines now announced so shouldn't be any more shock news.
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1355140385144598533
The JNJ vaccine results of 44,000 Phase 3 trial, a single dose. Overall 66% efficacy, with the contrast of 72% in US but 57% in South Africa, confirming immune escape/resistance of B.1.351 variant seen by Novavax
Bitcoin making another run at 38k
Its a better attempt at a cross ramp of another stock than we normally see here to be fair :)
The only links are from old newsletter type articles that happen to mention both company names together. The twitter is just trying to use SNGs news as a promotion for its own company.
Doge was up 800% yesterday.
Elon and social media backing amongst a breakdown in trust of the financial markets we could see bitcoin head toward 100k in the near future. Seems far fetched but we are in a mad bubble.