Tag: vaccine

Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine may curb transmission, decrease symptomatic coronavirus cases, Israeli research shows

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2021-02-19/covid-19-pfizer-biontech-vaccine-viral-load-drops-first-dose/13156116

Excerpt:

Israeli researchers have found that having just one shot of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine may lead to lower viral loads, making it harder to transmit COVID-19 if someone becomes infected after the first dose.

And it’s not the only positive research about the Pfizer jab to come out of Israel recently.

A separate independent Israeli study, from the country’s largest healthcare provider Clalit, found a 94 per cent drop in symptomatic COVID-19 infections among 600,000 people who received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine.

Researchers also found the fully inoculated group was 92 per cent less likely to develop severe illness from the virus.

Author(s): Lauren Roberts

Publication Date: 18 February 2021

Publication Site: Australian Broadcasting Commission News

North Korea Reportedly Tried to Hack Pfizer Servers to Steal Coronavirus Vaccine

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/north-korea-kim-jong-un-hack-steal-pfizer-coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html

Excerpt:

North Korea, along with the usual suspects of Russia and China, have all been accused of trying to swipe vaccine data from pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and others. “Although it claims to be free of the virus, North Korea has requested coronavirus vaccines and is set to receive nearly two million doses of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, according to the Gavi Alliance, part of the United Nations-backed Covax effort which aims to deliver vaccines to the world’s most vulnerable people,” the Washington Post reports. “The statement by South Korean officials is the latest in a string of accusations against North Korean hackers for attempting to steal vaccine technology, highlighting Pyongyang’s ongoing campaign to obtain sensitive information through nefarious means and its growing cyber capabilities.”

Author(s): Elliot Hannon

Publication Date: 16 February 2021

Publication Site: Slate

Why a COVID Skeptic Finally Took the Vaccine

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/02/vaccine-skeptic-covid-latinos-california.html

Excerpt:

When a vaccine became available, did your dad immediately want it?

Oh, no, of course not. He was still conspiracy minded, and even to this day. But when the vaccine starts, they’re saying it’s going to be for people over 65, and my sisters said that we’ve got to get our dad to get the vaccine. We told my dad, and that’s when he started saying, I don’t need it, they’re saying that’s going to kill you, they’re saying there’s a chip. I don’t need it. I have strong blood and a positive outlook on life and insurance.

Plus, the vaccine is a vaccine of privilege. Let’s clear about that, especially the way it’s rolling out in California. You have to do it online. For weeks, there was only English, no Spanish translation. If you’re 65 and older, and especially if you’re an immigrant, more likely than not you’re not going to be the most social media–fluent of people. So not only do you need somebody you can rely on to translate any internet stuff for you, but you also need someone who’s going to have a job that allows them to be on social media nonstop. It was the luck of the draw that my sister randomly saw a friend who told her about this Instagram post with vaccine info. So she was able to do it immediately.

Author(s): Mary Harris

Publication Date: 16 February 2021

Publication Site: Slate

How a Black bioethicist makes the case for vaccination to people of color

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2021/2/16/22266517/covid-19-moral-obligation-get-vaccinated

Excerpt:

And in the Black community, if we’re just thinking about ourselves, I do think there’s some obligation there to not infect fellow members of your Black population. Black people on average tend to have housing situations with more people, so there’s more chance for more infection. Black people are more likely to be essential workers, working in grocery stores and places where they’re interacting. If they’re not vaccinating themselves, they have an effect on the Black community that they come into contact with daily.

Even if you can’t think about your moral obligation to the general public because of what medicine has done to Black people in the past and currently, I would encourage you to think about what not being vaccinated means for your family, your friends, your community.

Author(s): Sigal Samuel

Publication Date: 16 February 2021

Publication Site: Vox

He started a covid-19 vaccine company. Then he hosted a superspreader event.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/13/1018374/peter-diamandis-covid-superspreader-a360-conference/

Excerpt:

At least 20 people contracted covid-19 at an indoor, mostly unmasked gathering for wealthy executives hosted by Peter Diamandis, the Singularity University and XPrize Foundation cofounder.

At the time, a regional stay-at-home order made the gathering illegal. The outbreak wasn’t reported to authorities as required and rules on health data privacy may have been broken.

Diamandis is not sure how many people have tested positive, citing either 21 or 24 cases, not counting secondary infections.

Author(s): Eileen Guo

Publication Date: 13 February 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

L.A. Tries to Combat Racial Inequities of COVID Inoculations

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.governing.com/community/LA-Tries-to-Combat-Racial-Inequities-of-COVID-Inoculations.html

Excerpt:

As stark disparities emerge in vaccination rates, L.A. County officials are jump-starting efforts to improve access for people of color. Strategies include creating more vaccination sites as well as better public messaging campaigns, improving access to transportation and reserving spots at neighborhood vaccination locations before people from other parts of the county can scoop them up.

“We have a lot of work to do to fix this,” L.A. County public health director Barbara Ferrer said Tuesday at a county Board of Supervisors meeting. “However way you cut this data, it’s clear that in some of our hardest-hit communities, there are populations that are not getting vaccinated at the same rate as other groups.”

On Tuesday morning, Darby stood in line yet again, this time at a vaccination blitz in South Park aimed at administering doses to 800 seniors, particularly Blacks and Latinos, as well as healthcare workers in four days. Though there are historical and cultural issues that may make Black residents skeptical of vaccines, the biggest issue in L.A. County thus far has been access, said Councilman Curren Price, who helped plan the event.

Author(s): RUBEN VIVES, JACLYN COSGROVE AND SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA, LOS ANGELES TIMES

Publication Date: 10 February 2021

Publication Site: Governing

Can Vaccines Keep Up With Rapidly Evolving Coronavirus?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.governing.com/now/Can-Vaccines-Keep-Up-With-Rapidly-Evolving-Coronavirus.html

Excerpt:

Experts told cleveland.com that although the virus may continue to mutate, there’s no reason to think it will render the vaccines ineffective. Pharmaceutical companies are already in the process of updating their vaccines to provide protection against the emerging variants, but the existing vaccines should provide enough protection to get the pandemic under control.

The prevalence of variants is partly the result of a global failure to contain the spread of COVID-19, experts said. The virus has had ample opportunity to evolve while infecting more than 100 million people worldwide.

Vaccines should limit the spread of infection, and that should reduce the chance that another concerning variant might emerge, said Gigi Gronvall, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. There will be even fewer chances for those mutations to occur if everyone who is still waiting for a vaccine continues to follow precautions like wearing face masks.

Author(s): EVAN MACDONALD AND JULIE WASHINGTON, CLEVELAND.COM

Publication Date: 10 February 2021

Publication Site: Governing

Chicago thinks Zocdoc can help solve its vaccine chaos

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/12/1018092/vaccine-signup-chicago-zocdoc-frustrating-as-tech-companies-step-in-deeper-inequalities-harder-to-fix/

Excerpt:

In early February, the Department of Public Health announced a plan to help ease some of those technical problems: a partnership with Zocdoc, the popular online health-care scheduling company. Zocdoc is acting as a unified portal for multiple providers, so that people can sign up with a single, more user-friendly tool rather than wrestle with several different systems at once. While Chicago is the first city to make this specific agreement with Zocdoc, other health agencies are launching similar partnerships with private startups.

Before the pandemic, Zocdoc acted as a one-stop shop where patients could check out different doctors, compare medical providers, and make appointments. The company’s CEO, Oliver Kharraz, says the years spent bridging a fragmented health-care system unknowingly prepared it for taking on covid-19 vaccination appointments. After the idea was tested with the Mount Sinai Health System in New York, Zocdoc says, Chicago reached out about a partnership—and the system was up and running within a few weeks. Zocdoc connects with 1,400 different scheduling systems: doctors’ workflows remain unchanged, but patients all see the same simple interface no matter which provider they’re using.

Author(s): Mia Sato

Publication Date: 12 February 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

Demystifying Vaccination Metrics

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://medium.com/nightingale/demystifying-vaccination-metrics-cd0a29251dd2

Graphic:

Excerpt:

3. Display distribution (supply) and administration (demand) data together for a more complete picture of the vaccine rollout.

To make sense of what was happening with COVID cases, charts from groups like the COVID-19 Tracking Project clustered trends on testing, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths for a more complete picture. Similarly, we can’t look at data on doses administered in isolation to understand how a country or state is performing on vaccine rollout.

The New York Times displays a combination of the percent of people given at least one shot or two shots and information about the doses distributed and the share of doses used. Together, these metrics give a high level snapshot of information about supply distributed and administered. Note that understanding demand requires knowing more than how many people received shots though, which is likely influenced by supply.

Author(s): Amanda Makulec

Publication Date: 1 February 2021

Publication Site: Nightingale at Medium

State goes over 100,000 dose mark in vaccinations of long-term care residents and staff

Mary Pat Campbell
State goes over 100,000 dose mark in vaccinations of long-term care residents and staff

Excerpt:

More than 110,000 doses of COVID vaccine have been administered in the state’s long-term care facilities since late December, and state official estimate they are about two-thirds of the way to completing vaccinations of those residents.

Data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week show that 110,016 vaccines have been administered through the long-term care facility partnership through which CVS and Walgreens pharmacists have vaccinated residents staff at nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Connecticut.

Author(s): DAVE ALTIMARI

Publication Date: 12 February 2021

Publication Site: CT Mirror

How Is The COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign Going In Your State?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/01/28/960901166/how-is-the-covid-19-vaccination-campaign-going-in-your-state

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Since vaccine distribution began in the U.S. on Dec. 14, more than 50 million doses have been administered, reaching 11.2% of the total U.S. population, according to federal data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. is currently administering over 1.6 million shots a day.

Author(s): Pien Huang, Audrey Carlsen

Publication Date: 14 February 2021

Publication Site: NPR

Myths of Vaccine Manufacturing

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/myths-of-vaccine-manufacturing

Excerpt:

The first thing to understand is that these are not, of course, traditional vaccines. That’s why they came on so quickly. mRNA as a vaccine technology has been worked on for some twenty to twenty-five years now, from what I can see, and (as I never tire of mentioning) we’re very fortunate that it had worked out (and quite recently) several of its outstanding problems just before this pandemic hit. Five years ago we simply could not have gone from sequence to vaccine inside of a year. And I mean that “we” to mean both “we the biopharma industry” and “we the human race”.

At this point, let me briefly dispose of an even less well-founded take that’s been going around as well. I’ve seen a number of people say something like “We had the vaccine back in February! It only took until the end of the year to roll it out because of the FDA!” The main thing I’ll say about that idea is that no one who actually works on vaccines, in any capacity, has any time for that statement. Not all vaccine ideas work – we’re already seeing that with the current coronavirus, and if you’d like to talk to some folks about that, then I suggest you call up GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi and ask them what happened to their initial candidate, and while you’re at it, call up Merck and ask them what happened to their two. Note that I have just named three of the largest, most experienced drug companies on the planet, all of whom have come up short. So no, we did not “have the vaccine” in February.

Author(s): Derek Lowe

Publication Date: 1 February 2021

Publication Site: Science Magazine