re: vaccine found...wanting
zen machine, is it really necessary to post the same web address reference repeatedly? I have dealt with this issue already.
Reposting: Many of you may have heard of the new vaccine from the U of Pittsburgh. Quite promising, but it won't remove the need for antivirals for quite a while as this discussion from "Effect Measure" reveals.
"Still, there is a long way to go. It has to be shown that such a vaccine is both safe and effective in humans. Protecting mice is relatively easy. Protecting humans is another matter. There may be a lot of natural immunity to adenovirus 5 that could interfere with the efficacy of the vaccine, which might require a move to another serotype or vector. Not an insurmountable problem but one that takes time. The safety issue isn't trivial when hundreds of millions or even billions might be vaccinated in a pandemic setting. A risk of death of only one in a million, while very favorable in the risk-risk trade-off calculus, might be a significant psychological barrier if in the first weeks of a mass immunization campaign the public sees several dozen deaths related to vaccination. Finally there is the problem of scaling up to produce adequate amounts of vaccine. This will be easier for this kind of vaccine than an inactivated whole virus one, but won't be trivial.
Let's hope we are closer and have enough time to get to where we need to go."
and some comments linked to this:
"there are lots of obstacles yet. First, does it work in humans? Even there we might not know until the event happens as it is possible to have an antibody response that isn't protective. Second, scale up. What is involved, how complex and how costly? That goes to some of your questions. Third, safety. Even relatively rare serious side effects start to pile up when you are vaccinated billions. Let's just look at the US. If the risk of death from the vaccine is one in a million and you vaccinate everyone, that's 300 vaccine associated deaths. Even if you said the risk-risk trade-off was worth it, the psycological barriers might be large if a couple of dozen people died in the first month of an immunization campaign and many people started to refuse.
And all this is still probably a minimum of a year down the line, probably much longer. So the news isn't really that good if a pandemic hits in the next year. If in five years, yes, this gives us a chance to dramatically soften the blow, still a good thing."
"As for a vaccine, many executives of drug companies have recently stated that even using a cell culture method, they do not have enough capacity to produce large amounts of such a vaccine. It would take at least 3 to 5 years to add this capacity. At the University of Pittsburgh, they will use 72 volunteers, for a period of one year, starting soon , to determine if the vaccine is effective. So this vaccine will not save humanity from bird flu in the near future. "
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