CanSino and Sinopharm, and Sinovac.
Coronavirus 2019-2020 thread (no unsubstantiated rumours!)
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CanSino and Sinopharm, and Sinovac.
Hi KYli,
Sinopharm is likely the first to be approved, since a lot of countries had already ordered in advance , showing the efficacy of its vaccine.
CanSino said that it would begin interim analysis when 50 infection cases are found. It is unfortunate that CanSino couldn't enlist countries for phase 3 trial sooner even though it was the first vaccine to enter the phase 2 trial. Sinovac is further along than CanSino but Sinopharm definitely looks to pull ahead with 3 EUA and many contracts and endorsement.
Hi KYli,
Yeah, as always politics played a role, I never thought that China will do that, well the Chinese knows that they had more than three to choose from.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
More dominos falling. The much touted Oxford Vaccine just announced ‘early’ results today, with only 70% efficacy rate.
The total infected numbers are higher (131 vs 90s), which suggests a longer trial period, especially since the test population is only about half the Pfizer vaccine at 20k.
This highlights the biggest concern I have with the madly rushed American results, the sample size is tiny, so any anomalies will skew the results significantly.
I am less concerned with vaccine safety itself, and more with potentially massively inflated efficacy rates. Because people’s behaviour will be directly affected by these efficacy rates. If you get a vaccine with a claimed 95% effective rate, you are going to be less cautious than if you got one that was only 70% or less effective.
The risk is that the American vaccines are nowhere near as effective as their cut short trials suggest, and thus the overall vaccination efforts are far less effective because people are behaving less cautiously and thus continuing to get infected in enough numbers to keep the outbreak ongoing, with the worst case scenario that a low effective vaccine married with continued widespread transition results in a perfect incubator for a super-virus that is resistant to the vaccines coming online, much like how irresponsible antibiotic use is helping to breed superbugs.
The total infected numbers are higher (131 vs 90s), which suggests a longer trial period, especially since the test population is only about half the Pfizer vaccine at 20k.
This highlights the biggest concern I have with the madly rushed American results, the sample size is tiny, so any anomalies will skew the results significantly.
I am less concerned with vaccine safety itself, and more with potentially massively inflated efficacy rates. Because people’s behaviour will be directly affected by these efficacy rates. If you get a vaccine with a claimed 95% effective rate, you are going to be less cautious than if you got one that was only 70% or less effective.
The risk is that the American vaccines are nowhere near as effective as their cut short trials suggest, and thus the overall vaccination efforts are far less effective because people are behaving less cautiously and thus continuing to get infected in enough numbers to keep the outbreak ongoing, with the worst case scenario that a low effective vaccine married with continued widespread transition results in a perfect incubator for a super-virus that is resistant to the vaccines coming online, much like how irresponsible antibiotic use is helping to breed superbugs.
One thing I've found strange is the how Phase 3 trials are touted as the end of testing and ready to roll out to billions.
For example: Pfizer announcing 1.3 Billion does for 2021.
Phase 3 trials involve less than 50000 people and it's been less than 2 months since any vaccine has started their tests.
Yet we've seen previously that it can take a sample size of millions AND years for a side effect to show.
So jumping straight from a Phase 3 trial to mass vaccination of billions seems irresponsible.
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In comparison, Sinopharm is also in the middle of conducting Phase 3 trials.
Plus it has concurrently been running what you could call Phase 4 testing, with 1 million vaccinations so far.
That increase the sample size substantially AND the overall timeline to detect any longer-term side effects.
That is important once you start talking about the risk of vaccinating billions.
So arguably the Sinopharm approach is better, if you have no choice but to start vaccinating billions immediately.
So despite criticism of the Sinopharm vaccine being given to 1 million people so far, it actually is a better and safer approach.
"However, protection was 90% in an analysis of around 3,000 people on the trial who were given a half-sized first dose and a full-sized second dose. "
Somehow given a half first dose would boost the efficacy rate from 62% to 90% with a sample size of 3000. That is definitely an attempt to manipulate the result.
Yeh doesn't make much sense.
They only had 131 infected total. So it could very much be due to chance how their % turn out.
They were likely being pressured by various interests to release the data.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
I think it was mentioned that this different dosing batch was from later testing, so it is likely to drawing its conclusions from a much smaller sample size, who had less time to potentially catch the virus.
This could be a classic example of how rushing the results and trying to draw conclusions from too small a sample size could lead to the wrong conclusions being reached due to outliers and anomalies having a disproportionate impact on the results.
It should also be noted that the two stage vaccines were administered two weeks apart (for the Pfizer vaccine at least, I am not 100% on the Oxford one, but assume it would be the same if not similar). That is to allow time for the body to develop antibodies before the second dose.
I do not have more information on detailed instructions to test subjects, but I would be amazed if there were not requirements for them to shield/self isolated for maybe another 2 weeks after the second dose to give it time to take effect before they start encountering the virus out in the wild. This is especially significant with the rushed results because it would mean that the small number of infected and high efficacy rates of these vaccines is more down to the fact that they hardly have their test subjects any time to actually get infected rather than because their vaccines work.
As the saying goes, the devil is the details. And the more details we get, the worse this stinks.
Rather than engage in self-congratulating circle-jerking, the western scientific community really needs to be asking the obvious hard questions about the rushed nature of these announcements, and the detrimental knock-on affect this is having on vaccine development the world over as everyone else is put under enormous pressure to also rush their own clinical trials to avoid ending up with no orders as governments blindly rush to shower the American companies with orders and public funds.