Latest Vaccine News

gwb-trading said:
A politician tweeted a list showing how much the EU has agreed to pay for the leading vaccines, confirming rumors of Moderna's sky-high price
https://www.businessinsider.com/cos...oderna-vaccine-eu-revealed-belgian-mp-2020-12
  • A Belgian politician on Friday tweeted a list showing how much the EU has agreed to pay major drugmakers for doses their vaccines.
  • Eva De Bleeker, Belgium's Budget State Secretary, was criticized for breaching confidentiality, and said it was "a mistake on the part of the communications team."
  • De Bleeker deleted the tweet, but screenshots show that the cheapest to the EU is AstraZeneca's, at $2.18 a dose, while the most expensive is Moderna's, at $22.06 per dose.
  • "We wanted to offer full transparency, but we have been a bit too generous," a spokesperson for De Bleeker told The Brussels Times.
A Belgian politician has revealed how much the EU will pay for doses of the major vaccines, validating predictions that Moderna's vaccine would be the most expensive.

On Friday, Eva De Bleeker, Belgium's Budget State Secretary, tweeted a list showing how much the EU was paying per dose for six of the leading treatments, as well as how many units the government had ordered.

De Bleeker quickly deleted the tweet, but not before local news outlets were able to publish screenshots.

De Bleeker was criticized for breaching confidentiality, and blamed the gaffe on "a mistake on the part of the communications team," the Belgian news outlet HLN reported.

Here's the price list shared by De Bleeker:
  • Oxford University and AstraZeneca: $2.18 (1.78 euro)
  • Johnson & Johnson: $10.42 (8.50 euro)
  • Sanofi and Glaxo Smith Klein: $9.27 (7.56 euro)
  • Pfizer and BioNTech: $14.71 (12 euro)
  • CureVac: $12.26 (10 euro)
  • Moderna: $22.06 (18 euro)
EpdCZfZXYAE6_PR


Business Insider contacted the drugmakers for comment. Moderna said in August that it expected its vaccine would be the most expensive of those in development.

De Bleeker tweeted the list amid a dispute with a right-leaning opposition party, who claimed the government hadn't set aside sufficient funds to buy enough vaccines, The Brussels Times reported.

Belgium is purchasing 33.5 million vaccines at a cost of 279 million euros, the screenshot shared by De Bleeker shows.

"We wanted to offer full transparency, but we have been a bit too generous," a spokesperson for De Bleeker told The Times. "Technically, those prices should not have been released, so we removed the tweet."

On Friday, a spokesman for the European Commission said: "We can't say anything about this case, everything about vaccines and prices are covered by confidentiality clauses, in the interests of society and also in the interests of negotiations ongoing," according to the Guardian.

The prices of the vaccines to the EU revealed by De Bleeker will differ from the cost paid by the likes of the US and Canada.

In some cases, the European price may be a reflection of how much funding the companies received from EU authorities.

For example, the EU appears to be paying 24% less for shots of the Pfizer vaccine compared with the US, the Guardian reported, citing analysis from Bernstein Research. The EU contributed significant funding to BioNTech, who developed the vaccine for Pfizer.

Similarly, the US is paying $4 a dose for the vaccine produced by AstraZeneca and developed in Oxford, UK, while the EU will pay $2.18 (€1.78,) Bernstein said.

Moderna's vaccine, developed in Massachusetts, received $2.5 billion in funding from the White House and will cost 20% more in Europe, the Guardian said.

It costs $15 in the US, but $18 in Europe.
More...

Yes, the U.S got a better deal and it is definitely good to have several choices as we go forward in order to keep things competitive.

Thank you again, President Trump.
 
WHO (Finally) Admits PCR Tests Create False Positives
Warnings concerning high CT value of tests are months too late…so why are they appearing now? The potential explanation is shockingly cynical...

The MIQE guidelines for PCR use state:

Cq values higher than 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported,”

This has all been public knowledge since the beginning of the lockdown. The Australian government’s own website admitted the tests were flawed, and a court in Portugal ruled they were not fit for purpose.

Even Dr Anthony Fauci has publicly admitted that a cycle threshold over 35 is going to be detecting “dead nucleotides”, not a living virus.

Despite all this, it is known that many labs around the world have been using PCR tests with CT values over 35, even into the low 40s.

So why has the WHO finally decided to say this is wrong? What reason could they have for finally choosing to recognise this simple reality?

The answer to that is potentially shockingly cynical: We have a vaccine now. We don’t need false positives anymore.

Notionally, the system has produced its miracle cure.

So, after everyone has been vaccinated, all the PCR tests being done will be done “under the new WHO guidelines”, and running only 25-30 cycles instead of 35+.

Lo and behold, the number of “positive cases” will plummet, and we’ll have confirmation that our miracle vaccine works.

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/who-finally-admits-pcr-tests-create-false-positives
 
Wallet said:
WHO (Finally) Admits PCR Tests Create False Positives
Warnings concerning high CT value of tests are months too late…so why are they appearing now? The potential explanation is shockingly cynical...

The MIQE guidelines for PCR use state:

Cq values higher than 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported,”

This has all been public knowledge since the beginning of the lockdown. The Australian government’s own website admitted the tests were flawed, and a court in Portugal ruled they were not fit for purpose.

Even Dr Anthony Fauci has publicly admitted that a cycle threshold over 35 is going to be detecting “dead nucleotides”, not a living virus.

Despite all this, it is known that many labs around the world have been using PCR tests with CT values over 35, even into the low 40s.

So why has the WHO finally decided to say this is wrong? What reason could they have for finally choosing to recognise this simple reality?

The answer to that is potentially shockingly cynical: We have a vaccine now. We don’t need false positives anymore.

Notionally, the system has produced its miracle cure.

So, after everyone has been vaccinated, all the PCR tests being done will be done “under the new WHO guidelines”, and running only 25-30 cycles instead of 35+.

Lo and behold, the number of “positive cases” will plummet, and we’ll have confirmation that our miracle vaccine works.

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/who-finally-admits-pcr-tests-create-false-positives
More...

zerohedge is gonna zero
 
2nd COVID-19 vaccine authorized in US is shipped out
https://www.wral.com/2nd-covid-19-vaccine-authorized-in-us-preparing-to-ship-out/19437806/

Initial shipments of the second COVID-19 vaccine authorized in the U.S. left a distribution center Sunday, a desperately needed boost as the nation works to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control.


The trucks left the Olive Branch, Mississippi, factory, near Memphis, Tennessee, with the vaccine developed by Moderna Inc. and the National Institutes of Health. The much-needed shots are expected to be given starting Monday, just three days after the Food and Drug Administration authorized their emergency rollout.

In Louisville, Kentucky, UPS driver Todd Elble said his vaccine shipment was the “most important load that I've hauled” in a 37-year career. His parents contracted COVID-19 in November, and his 78-year-old father died. He said the family speculates that his father got infected while traveling on a hunting trip with four other relatives to Wyoming, and some are still sick.

“I'm going to take the vaccine myself. I'm going to be first in line for my father — I'll tell you that much — and any others that should follow," he said. “I feel in my heart that everybody should, to help get this stopped.”

He added: “To bring this back, I feel Dad was in the truck with me today.”

Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the chief science adviser to the federal government's vaccine distribution effort, said on CNN's “State of the Union” that nearly 8 million doses will be distributed Monday, about 5.9 million of the Moderna vaccine and 2 million of the vaccine from Pfizer Inc. He said the first Moderna shots should be given Monday morning.

Also on Sunday, an expert committee began considering who should be next in line for early doses of the Moderna vaccine and the one from Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech. Pfizer's shots were first shipped out a week ago and started being used the next day, kicking off the nation’s biggest vaccination drive.

Public health experts say the shots — and others in the pipeline — are the only way to stop a virus that has been spreading wildly. Nationwide, more than 219,000 people per day on average test positive for the virus, which has killed over 316,000 in the U.S. and nearly 1.7 million worldwide.

Slaoui also predicted the U.S. will experience “a continuing surge,” with larger numbers of coronavirus cases possible from gatherings for Christmas.

“I think, unfortunately, it will get worse,” he said.

The Pfizer and Moderna shots shipped so far and in the next few weeks are nearly all going to health care workers and residents of long-term care homes, based on the advice of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

There won’t be enough shots for the general population until spring, so doses will be rationed at least for the next several months. President-elect Joe Biden pledged earlier this month to have 100 million doses distributed in his first 100 days in office, and his surgeon general nominee said Sunday that it's still a realistic goal.

But Vivek Murthy, speaking on NBC's “Meet the Press,” said it's more realistic to think it may be midsummer or early fall before coronavirus vaccines are available to the general population, rather than late spring. Murthy said Biden’s team is working toward having the shots available to lower-risk individuals by late spring but doing so requires “everything to go exactly on schedule.”

“I think it’s more realistic to assume that it may be closer to mid-summer or early fall when this vaccine makes its way to the general population,” Murthy said. “So, we want to be optimistic, but we want to be cautious as well.”

Meanwhile, Trump's surgeon general, Jerome Adams, defended the administration's handling of the Pfizer vaccine Sunday, a day after the Army general charge of getting COVID-19 vaccines across the U.S. apologized Saturday for “miscommunication” with states over the number of doses to be delivered in the early stages of distribution. At least a dozen states reported they would receive a smaller second shipment of the Pfizer vaccine than they had been told previously.

Gen. Gustave Perna told reporters in a telephone briefing that he made mistakes by citing numbers of doses that he believed would be ready. Slaoui said the mistake was assuming vaccines that had been produced were ready for shipment when there was a two-day delay.

“And unless it’s perfectly right, we will not release vaccine doses for usage,” he said. “And, sometimes, there could be small hiccups. There have been none, actually, in manufacturing now. The hiccup was more into the planning.”

But Adams, speaking on CBS' “Face the Nation," said that “the numbers are going to go up and down.”

“It absolutely was not poor planning,” he said. “There’s what we plan. There’s what we actually allocate. There’s what’s delivered, and then there’s what’s actually put in people’s arms.”

Adams, who is Black, said he understands that mistrust of the medical community and the vaccine among Blacks “comes from a real place,” the mistreatment of communities of color. He cited the decades-long Tuskegee experiment in Alabama, where Black men with syphilis were not treated so the disease could be studied.

He also said immigrants in the U.S. illegally should not be denied the vaccine because of their legal status because “it’s not ethically right to deny those individuals.”

“I want to reassure people that your information when collected to get your second shot, if you get the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, will not be used in any way, shape or form to harm you legally,” Adams said. “That is something that I have been assured of.”

The expert panel members are leaning toward putting “essential workers” next in line, because people like bus drivers, grocery store clerks and others are getting infected most often. But other experts say people 65 and older should be next, along with people with certain medical conditions, because those are the Americans who are dying at the highest rates.

The expert panel’s advice is almost always endorsed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. No matter what the CDC says, there will be differences from state to state, because various health departments have different ideas about who should be closer to the front of the line.

Both the Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer-BioNTech shot require two doses several weeks apart. The second dose must be from the same company as the first. Both vaccines appeared safe and strongly protective in large, still unfinished studies.
 
Wallet said:
So will the infection count when they start testing properly.
More...

You only need to watch the hospitalization numbers versus the capacity level of the hospitals for those that have a problem with the infection numbers.

wrbtrader
 
So when the vaccine is ready to be distributed to the masses, will we be given the opportunity to choose which vaccine we want?

In the next few weeks Johnson and Johnson, AstraZeneca will have their dead-virus vaccines ready. Much safer Imo.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top