Israel has turned itself into a test case for the Pfizer vaccine. It persuaded Pfizer to get early access to sufficient volumes for just this purpose. It also paid double to ensure it. Now it’s panning out:
The Pfizer vaccine not only prevents infection but also reduces the risk of contracting a serious case of COVID-19, new data released Sunday by Clalit Health Services shows.
The data, which was based on a study of 1,200,000 people – 600,000 who received the vaccine and 600,000 who did not – showed 94% fewer symptomatic coronavirus cases and 92% fewer cases of serious illness among those who were vaccinated.
The study showed that the vaccine was equally as effective among people 70 and older as it was among younger participants. Among those who were vaccinated, some 170,000 people were over the age of 60.
It was also found that the Pfizer vaccine is most effective one week after the second dose, mirroring the company’s own clinical studies.
Clatit is Israel’s largest healthcare provider and this is an epic sample size. The national data is also encouraging:
Thankfully, Australia is about to receive its first deliveries of the Pfizer vaccine, after delays thanks to ScoMo’s dodgy deal with Astra Zeneca.
Jab the oldies and dump the lockdown.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
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Does that mean we can dump the “number of daily cases” as a metric and what will happen to the media’s panicked reporting on this stat ?!.
They are not doing as well as Sweden, when it comes to having reached heard immunity. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
Also they are doing no better than most of the countries that haven’t vaccinated. All that is happening in most of them is the worst of the northern hemisphere flu season has already passed.
Sweden is so yesterday.
“Jab the oldies and dump the lockdown.”
Scomo would be frothing at the mouth to use the Pfizer vaccine to restart the immigration ponzi and get the farm slaves back pronto!
I know. But property is going up anyway and locking down the population isn’t an answer.
Even with low NOM, Australia is still seeing strong demand for property as many expatriate Australians return and look for accommodation, while the tree changers push up demand in regional centres and friction leaves plenty of places empty.
I am not moving back permanently any time soon but count me as one expat Aussie that just purchased prime regional land for cash. Financed from the sale of a California investment property that returned lottery like gains. Not selling the coastal California homestead ever though as prime california is an even worse market to buy back into than anywhere in Australia. 40 million Californians all want to live in the same places.
Good buying. If I had $20 million fall in my lap, I would also be buying prime agricultural land with good management.
I understand that there is now net emigration out of California? Is that the case?
25m people living from LA to the Mexican border, but declining access to water, relying on snowfalls on the mountains seems to be unsustainable. San Diego gets less than 12 inches of rain annually on the coast, so I’d say the region will be a global warming hotspot by 2035.
Personally I would not drink bottled water if Pfizer had handled it, but I suppose that makes me a Karen.
This organisation appear to be general anti-vaccination nutters, but the individual case data seems quite detailed and credible, and sad.
https://medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?TABLE=ON&GROUP1=AGE&EVENTS=ON&VAX=COVID19&DIED=Yes
In my view the danger of taking one of these rapidly developed medications far outweighs the risks of contracting a disease with minimal prevalence in the Australian community, and that would not be likely to kill me. If it was Ebola running rampant across the nation and killing 90% of victims I’d sign right up, but that just isn’t the case.
They make some great blue pills.
Mmm. All fun and games until someone ends up in emergency screaming in pain and the medical staff have to admit they have no idea how to make one of those go down.
Oh, they know how, you just don’t want to know.
I’m sure it involves pressure relief, and not the good kind.
I’ve seen some how-to videos on that
I think that had already been tried. I think they just didn’t want to say amputation.
You can take your jab for the elderly and shove it DLS or are you advocating for mandatory jabs ? You know kind of like no jab no benefits, no age pension, no bingo, no entry to clubs, the list really is endless.
Seems reasonable to me.
The 20 to 49 age group statistically are most infected and hence most vulnerable to be covid sick and spreaders.
Vaxxxing these is obviously the rational solution.
According to that news grab, its inconclusive whether the study covered asymptomatic infection, or if it only covered symptomatic infection and serious illness. No mention of preventing asymptomatic infection (which would be hard to study because few would bother to get tested unless they had symptoms). Unless the vaccine is shown to prevent all infection (including asymptomatic), then best to vaccinate the most vulnerable rather than the biggest spreaders. I don’t think it should be compulsory though.
@Gral, asymptomatic carriers would seem to have strong immune systems holding the thing at bay. Got it but under control. Ideally and theoretically a jab will help them along to wipe all the thing
And look how many 20 to 49s are dying from it.
Thanks mate, I knew you were barking mad, just needed your response to prove it.
I have no issues with those opposed to taking the vaccine. But when you’re sick and need to be hospitalised with COVID symptoms, I would free up your bed for someone more deserving. Choices, mate.
it s amazing and besides covid this mRNA vaccines will have tons of application to fight cancers/others diseases/personalize therapies
Yep. mRNA technology will revolutionise some areas of medicine. Where a normal flu/covid jab takes 6-12 months to modify for variants, the mRNA can be tweaked weekly. The delivery is the same, the ‘message’ it delivers changes. Almost ‘digital’ medicine.
It takes only few hours to generate a personalize dose !!! . I remember we were talking about it at the uni over 20 years ago as one of the holy grail for anti-cancer, it never got out off the ground until this covid opportunity
Sooooo….the commenters who said there’s no way vaccines (Pfizer included) could stop transmission look to be wrong? They were quite adamant.
Be interesting to see the variants this data is based on.
Completely disagree with vax the oldies and dump the lockdown.
So everyone else should pay for their delicate sensibilities?
Jab the boomers.
DSL Click baiting.
Maybe sponsored by Phizrael?
Offer the oldies the vaccine and throw open the borders a few months later.
If they don’t want it, fair enough but society need not continue to lockdown for geriatric Luddites.
Rrrrrright so only older people get sick from this
Err… Basically yes, Swampy. Old and fat. You smoking something?
Nope. The vaccine trials didn’t study the effectiveness of stopping transmission – as it would have taken longer. So they didn’t know if the vaccine would stop transmission. They always assumed that with lowing symptoms there is less viral load, so less spread. No one was saying that the vaccine would not stop transmission besides the quacks who are promoting Hydroxychloroquine.
Agreed Swampy. For the sake of a few weeks’ waiting for everyone to get vaccinated we are going to let the virus rip. As though when the virus actually does rip everyone else will simply accept they could get very sick or die and go about their normal lives as good little consumers. An election winner right there…or not.
I’m one jab down and one to go (Moderna). I’ve been partying like crazy. Park City last weekend. Breckenridge this weekend. Variant shmariant. Boom times ahead!
I want a Pfizer vaccine not this second rate Astra Zeneca vaccine with old technology that can’t fight variants.
Anything from Israel is dubious. People are suffering significant side effects, maiming and death. These stats are from the official VAERS site in the US that tracks the impact of vaccines – 650+ dead, many maimed, etc. This is just the US data.
https://www.openvaers.com/covid-data
I posted the same link, with the caveat that as I understand it VAERS aren’t “official” in the sense of being a government agency. They’re a privately funded anti Vax crew. Still, the individual case data is thought provoking.
I have friends in California who received the vaccine. Some suggested it felt like the were hit by a bus,24 hours later all good. Considering upwards of 50M have been vaccinated. Still amazing odds.
I got Moderna on a Friday. All good. Woke up with a sore throat Tuesday. Headaches Wednesday to Friday. No days off work. I’d had enough by Friday and took ibuprofen. All good after that. Second shot coming on Friday.
I’ve had a quick look at some of the cases. Far from a proper look. Mostly they are the expected headache and other symptoms like hot flushes or flu like symptoms. Some were treated by ibuprofen, and a couple involved blood pressure perturbation. In the first 20 or so I noticed a patient complaining that if he lay on that arm at night he experienced localised pain (duh). Another case was a patient failing to disclose a recent vaccination for something else, therefore not adhering to protocol. So these incidents make up the vast majority of the 12,500 odd cases.
Jumping to the deaths, the first two were people in a facility with a COVID outbreak dying before the vaccine could provide protection. I’m not sure that I would classify them as vaccine deaths. A couple more were patients with serious co-morbidities, in a Hospice. Administering the mRNA vaccine to these patients is a difficult decision I don’t want to second-guess, but they could be examples.
In general the data set is superficially comforting, but frustrating in its lack of classification and patient history. One key piece of information I didn’t see was whether this was the first or second treatment in the course. Given the number of inoculations claimed and the expected nature of most complaints, it looks pretty good. There are some more serious reactions in people with allergies, and there is a readiness to vaccinate very sick people on a veritable cocktail of drugs that I thought might warrant more research, but overall fairly reassuring if this is all we get from several million vaccinations.
I think we should just wait a bit longer. If the rest of the world wants to be guinea pigs then let them. Give it a few more months so we can get a better handle on side-effects, etc. We don’t need to throw open the international borders, and quarantine just needs some tweaks. We’ll be OK.
I am amazed how many anti-vaxxers there are posting.
Is it the same idiots who live in Melbourne and think Dan Andrews has done a great job?
No. No crossover in that Venn.
I was thinking the same. The anti-vaxxers are the qanon reading libertarians that still think Trump is president and the virus is fake.
Israel definitely creates an interesting datapoint within the whole Covid story but for me India is far more interesting.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56037565
Cases are falling and Deaths are falling but they’re absolutely nowhere near herd immunity. It all makes one question our models of how infectious diseases really spread.
Maybe all spreaders are not equal. maybe less than 1/10 of the population accounts for 90% of all infections and close to 100% of the seeding of new clusters. If this is true then it goes a long way towards explaining why we have these waves of infection rather than a simple single bell curve.
Who knows, it might be sufficient to inoculate only certain people with lifestyles that make them predisposed to be super-spreaders. Or maybe we should restrict the number of super-spreading venues that one is allowed to visit in a single week.
there’s a whole world of Covid data to collate and lots of opportunities to prove that there are models which fit data much better then a single bell curve.
You need to look behind the headline of California out migration. It’s true in total numbers but the out migration is primarily working or middle class that struggle with the cost of living. The wealthy stay and still more arrive from other places despite higher taxation. As an economy California is bigger than India and just behind Germany with half the population. I don’t doubt climate change will have an impact. My city already uses desalination. I’m pretty confident in the future. But I did this for diversification and for lifestyle.
The graphs don’t really show anything considering that almost all the elderly are vaccinated.
South Africa has been much more successful at flattening the second wave despite vaccines given to a tiny percentage of people.
“Thankfully, Australia is about to receive its first deliveries of the Pfizer vaccine, after delays thanks to ScoMo’s dodgy deal with Astra Zeneca. Jab the oldies and dump the lockdown.”
Rubbish. The lockdown is our friend.
The best thing we can do for ourselves and our country is not to vaccinate until we are forced to by an opening border. Until that time, not vaccinating will force the government to keep the border closed. That will stop the ponzi in its tracks for a bit longer.
Totally agree.