Because vaccines are in short supply. The choice isn't AZ+Moderna+JJ+PB vs Moderna+JJ+PB. the real choice today is AZ+Moderna+JJ+PB+NOTHING vs Moderna+JJ+PB+NOTHING, with the size of nothing being larger in the second case.
So really it is c: you vaccinate everyone with whatever you can get your hands on. Once everyone has had some vaccine you look at data of what is working and give everyone with a less effective vaccine an additional dose of whatever works - which will probably be a new vaccine that doesn't exist yet!
Don't forget that mutations are continuous. We might be looking at another mutation in 3 months as supply catches up that evades vaccines in a completely new way.
> give everyone with a less effective vaccine an additional dose of whatever works - which will probably be a new vaccine that doesn't exist yet!
I would be careful about assuming that's an option. The vaccines have been tested individually, but have not been tested together. It's not out of the realm of possibility that getting some combination triggers some kind of immune reaction or something else.
> Don't forget that mutations are continuous. We might be looking at another mutation in 3 months as supply catches up that evades vaccines in a completely new way.
This is, sadly, a reason for poorer countries to delay vaccination. If there's going to be a mutation that evades this vaccine, and you can only afford one round of vaccines for everyone, you'd be better off waiting for the vaccine that prevents both.
Based on the last article about this, SA doesn't have the money to do 2 rounds of vaccines. A lot of the money was spent suspiciously, but now funding is limited. It seems that anyone who gets a subpar vaccine is just going to be stuck with subpar coverage.
That works both ways: the sooner the alternatives are available in adequate quantities, the less the harm (if there is anything to be concerned about) of continuing to use the AZ vaccine at least until then.
Fair point, but the others won't be available in adequate quantities anytime soon. I'm not sure where SA stacks up, but nobody is getting adequate quantities before this summer at best.
As a) is likely to reduce the serious cases faster, that seems like a point in its favor.
One complication might be if people getting mild cases end up spreading the variant faster, because they are not incapacitated by it - but it is not as if it is having much difficulty spreading now, despite the serious cases it creates, as it seems to spread before it incapacitates. I don't think this possibility demands that we stop using this vaccine until this issue is unequivocally settled.
Healthcare professionals are first in line in the South African vaccine rollout. It's possible that not protecting against moderate to severe illness is an inadequate outcome for this group. Skipping this group in order to vaccinate others may not be politically palatable.
Skipping this group is not an inevitable consequence of continuing to uze the AZ vaccine. The rate at which this group can be vaccinated with other vaccines is an orthogonal issue.
people in other groups may be unwilling to take the AZ vaccine, but so long as they are not being coerced to do so, this is not an issue.
There have been serious side effects documented for these vaccines. Bruising, soreness, "covid mouth", miscarriages, deaths, anaphylactic shock, etc. The vaccine has also not been out long enough to know of any long term health issues.
The data is not in whether they are effective against death. They didn't test the super vulnerable in the studies. If you look at the places that have high vaccination numbers, you don't actually see any significant drop in covid cases or deaths. If anything, those places are staying high while the rest of the world is dropping. They were released under emergency authorization which means that they haven't fully testing and verified them to the level that would normally be done.
If they are as effective as the hype, we should be seeing significant positive results by now.
If you look at places that have high vaccination numbers, oh wait, there aren't any. Israel is leading the world with only about 20% of their population having undergone a full vaccination regimen, and it takes a few weeks after the second dose for immunity to reach its highest level. Given how fast they are vaccinating, a very high proportion of that 20% was given that second shot in the last few days.
In other words, there is no place on Earth where we would expect vaccination to have an impossible to dispute effect on the top-line deaths or hospitalization numbers... yet. Give it 6 weeks.
To your other points about side effects, nearly 100m people globally have gotten at least one shot. The mild side effects which require a day off work are completely worth it, and the severe ones happen extremely rarely, to where a risk adjusted decision even for a very young and healthy person would still be to get the vaccine.
Only one of your points is even mildly valid, that the vaccines haven't been out long enough to know if there are any long term health issues. While we won't know this for generations, because of the definition of "long term," we also have no reason to believe that there would be long term health issues, while we know that SARS-COV-2 infection can DEFINITELY cause long term health issues in a significant minority of people infected.
Lastly, many folks pushing anti-vaxxer propaganda are selling something: usually quack cures. Ignore the parent comment, and focus on the facts.
>we know that SARS-COV-2 infection can DEFINITELY cause long term health issues in a significant minority of people infected.
Only 10% of positive cases (not including asymptomatic, untested cases) have any symptoms after 3 weeks.[1]
This is not significant compared to say, pneumonia.[2]
>we also have no reason to believe that there would be long term health issues
Medical history is replete with doctors and pharmaceutical companies making this claim for new treatments which ended up having horrible long term effects for many people.
Asking whether these covid vaccines work is not anti-vaxxer. The antithesis also holds true, what data shows that they are working? Your example of Israel is the most troubling because they have the highest proportion of vaccinations, but their statistics of cases/deaths are not falling as fast as the rest of the world (or even the Palestinian population that isn't getting vaccinated). Does it mean that the vaccines don't work? Not necessarily. It could be as you suggested, not yet. It could mean that people are changing their behaviors now they are vaccinated. It could mean that at risk people are getting sick on the way to/from getting the vaccine.
> Your example of Israel is the most troubling because they have the highest proportion of vaccinations, but their statistics of cases/deaths are not falling as fast as the rest of the world (or even the Palestinian population that isn't getting vaccinated). Does it mean that the vaccines don't work? Not necessarily. It could be as you suggested, not yet.
. . .
Early this week, with the country reporting a clear and sustained drop in the number of people age 60 and older who are severely ill, experts became confident they were seeing the effects of the vaccine. People over 60 were prioritized in the initial stages of Israel’s vaccine rollout, so this was where the signal was expected to show up in national COVID-19 statistics.
“We say with caution, the magic has started,” tweeted data scientist Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, on Feb. 1, noting that COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and severe illness were all falling among the over-60s.
What’s more, follow-up studies conducted by one of Israel’s largest HMOs, Maccabi Healthcare Services, suggest that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, which has been used for most of the shots given so far, is working almost as well in the real world as it did in clinical trials, with over 90% efficacy after two doses. This was not a guarantee: Drugs and vaccines may perform slightly differently outside of the controlled bounds of clinical testing.
As the charts above and below show [see article URL], the decline in severe cases began in mid-January, shortly after a steep rise in the number of older Israelis getting their second vaccine shots.
Only 31 out of 163,000 Israelis vaccinated by Maccabi Healthcare Services were diagnosed with COVID-19 in their first 10 days of full-strength protection, its top vaccine statistics analyst, Anat Ekka Zohar, told The Times of Israel on Thursday.
Maccabi found that an equivalent sample of unvaccinated Israelis was 11 times more likely to be diagnosed with the coronavirus, which allowed it to calculate the effectiveness rate.
> Your example of Israel is the most troubling because they have the highest proportion of vaccinations, but their statistics of cases/deaths are not falling as fast as the rest of the world
Care to cite a source? I see the Times of Israel disagrees with you.
Is OpenVAERs a legitimate source of information for vaccine injury? The site claims the data is sourced from the HHS. Has this been validated? If so, is this raw data or has it been reviewed and vetted by HHS. Self-reported data from non-medical professionals likely needs significant vetting, analysis and interpretation.
You do realize that these events must be compared to the natural rate of these events, right?
There will be people who die the day after their vaccine, because they are old and fat and will have a heart attack.
There will be people who die of rare diseases within hours of their vaccine, because we are intending to vaccinate the entire world and these things happen naturally and likely have nothing to do with the vaccine.
Until you have data in a control group comparing the rate of these events to the vaccinated group, you have absolutely nothing other than fear mongering.
Completely agree except for "Until you have data in a control group comparing the rate of these events to the vaccinated group, you have absolutely nothing other than fear mongering."
If these vaccines were released under a normal process, it meant that there was enough trials/scientific consensus that they were effective and did not cause significant adverse reactions. There were limited trials and many at risk people were excluded from them. So you can't say that "its safe for a pregnant woman to take the vaccine". You can only say, "there is no information that says it is not safe for a pregnant woman to take the vaccine". All you know is that 5 adverse reactions (miscarriages) were reported. How adverse reactions was it based on how many took it? You don't know. It wasn't in a trial.
All the data we have suggests AZ is probably 100% effective at preventing death from the South African strain.
(Mostly) everyone agrees we want to have a vaccine that is:
-safer than not vaccinating
-effective against death
-actually available to use
AZ is all 3 of these in South Africa (and everywhere).
It also provides some additional benefits, like:
-cheap
-no cold storage
-easier to administer
By banning AZ you aren't trading it for Pfizer, you are trading it for no vaccine.