• Visitors can check out the Forum FAQ by clicking this link. You have to register before you can post: click the REGISTER link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. View our Forum Privacy Policy.
  • Want to receive the latest contracting news and advice straight to your inbox? Sign up to the ContractorUK newsletter here. Every sign up will also be entered into a draw to WIN £100 Amazon vouchers!

The UK has become the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech jab

Collapse
X
  •  
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    #51
    Originally posted by Whorty View Post
    There are checks and balances in place. Everyone who gets the vaccine will get a QR code tattooed on the arm that can be scanned by pubs, gyms, police etc in the future as needed. Also, if there are problems with the vaccine then a quick scan will show who had which vaccine.

    Sounds like a great plan ... where do I sign up
    Dying for a pint eh?
    First Law of Contracting: Only the strong survive

    Comment


      #52
      Originally posted by AtW View Post
      That Plan A is busted, they had to go old school Plan B that involves low tech tattoos
      Do it proper old school:

      And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666.

      Comment


        #53
        Originally posted by Jacob Rees-Mogg View Post
        We could only approve this vaccine so quickly because we have left the EU. Last month we changed the regulations so a vaccine did not need EU approval which is slower.
        The sunny upside
        Brexit is having a wee in the middle of the room at a house party because nobody is talking to you, and then complaining about the smell.

        Comment


          #54
          Originally posted by darmstadt View Post
          The sunny upside
          A very subtle way of saying the EU has put measures in place to prevent genocide and so we have had to bypass them completely
          Vote Corbyn ! Save this country !

          Comment


            #55
            Originally posted by fullyautomatix View Post
            Jews were led to slaughter by Nazis in concentration camps, this will be ten times worse. An entire generation will get wiped out in the excuse of a vaccine for a virus which was only discovered 10 months ago.

            Go ahead and take the jab but don’t come and moan here that nobody warned you.
            The biggest misconception is the work on the vaccine started when the pandemic began.
            Before Covid, 330 people had been given ChAdOx1 based-vaccines for diseases ranging from flu to Zika virus, and prostate cancer to the tropical disease chikungunya.


            Originally posted by AtW View Post
            False - there were no vaccines for coronaviruses (common cold), also Pfizer uses mRNA platform which is until now untested in humans
            Oxford vaccine: How did they make it so quickly? - BBC News

            Ten years' vaccine work achieved in about 10 months. Yet no corners cut in designing, testing and manufacturing.
            They are two statements that sound like a contradiction, and have led some to ask how we can be sure the Oxford vaccine - which has published its first results showing it is highly effective at stopping Covid-19 - is safe when it has been made so fast.

            So, this is the real story of how the Oxford vaccine happened so quickly.

            It is one that relies on good fortune as well as scientific brilliance; has origins in both a deadly Ebola outbreak and a chimpanzee's runny nose; and sees the researchers go from having no money in the bank to chartering private planes.

            he biggest misconception is the work on the vaccine started when the pandemic began.

            The world's biggest Ebola outbreak in 2014-2016 was a catastrophe. The response was too slow and 11,000 people died.

            "The world should have done better," Prof Sarah Gilbert, the architect of the Oxford vaccine, told me.

            In the recriminations that followed, a plan emerged for how to tackle the next big one. At the end of a list of known threats was "Disease X" - the sinister name of a new, unknown infection that would take the world by surprise.

            The Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford - named after the scientist that performed the first vaccination in 1796, and now home to some of the world's leading experts - designed a strategy for defeating an unknown enemy.

            "We were planning how can we go really quickly to have a vaccine in someone in the shortest possible time," Prof Gilbert said.

            "We hadn't got the plan finished, but we did do pretty well."

            The central piece of their plan was a revolutionary style of vaccine known as "plug and play". It has two highly desirable traits for facing the unknown - it is both fast and flexible.

            Conventional vaccines - including the whole of the childhood immunisation programme - use a killed or weakened form of the original infection, or inject fragments of it into the body. But these are slow to develop.

            Instead the Oxford researchers constructed ChAdOx1 - or Chimpanzee Adenovirus Oxford One.

            Scientists took a common cold virus that infected chimpanzees and engineered it to become the building block of a vaccine against almost anything.

            Before Covid, 330 people had been given ChAdOx1 based-vaccines for diseases ranging from flu to Zika virus, and prostate cancer to the tropical disease chikungunya.

            The virus from chimps is genetically modified so it cannot cause an infection in people. It can then be modified again to contain the genetic blueprints for whatever you want to train the immune system to attack. This target is known is an antigen.

            ChAdOx1 is in essence a sophisticated, microscopic postman. All the scientists have to do is change the package.

            "We drop it in and off we go," said Prof Gilbert.

            While much of the world was having a lie-in after New Year's Eve, Prof Gilbert noticed concerning reports of "viral pneumonia" in Wuhan, China. Within two weeks scientists had identified the virus responsible and began to suspect it was able to spread between people.

            "We'd been planning for disease X, we'd been waiting for disease X, and I thought this could be it," Prof Gilbert said.

            At this point, the team did not know how important their work would become. It started out as a test of how fast they could go and as a demonstration of the ChAdOx1 technology.

            Prof Gilbert said: "I thought it might only have been a project, we'd make the vaccine and the virus would fizzle out. But it didn't."

            It sounds strange to say it, almost perverse, but it was lucky that the pandemic was caused by a coronavirus.

            This family of viruses had tried to jump from animals to people twice before in the past 20 years - Sars coronavirus in 2002 and Mers coronavirus in 2012.

            It meant scientists knew the virus's biology, how it behaved and its Achilles heel - the "spike protein".

            "We had a huge head start," Prof Andrew Pollard from the Oxford team said.

            The spike protein is the key the virus uses to unlock the doorway into our body's cells. If a vaccine could train the immune system to attack the spike, then the team knew they were odds-on to succeed.

            And they had already developed a ChAdOx1 vaccine for Mers, which could train the immune system to spot the spike. The Oxford team were not starting from scratch.

            "If this had been a completely unknown virus, then we'd have been in a very different position," Prof Pollard added.

            It was also lucky that coronaviruses cause short-term infections. It means the body is capable of beating the virus and a vaccine just needs to tap into that natural process.

            If it had been a long-term or chronic infection that the body cannot beat - like HIV - then it's unlikely a vaccine could work.

            On 11 January, Chinese scientists published and shared with the world the full genetic code of the coronavirus.

            The team now had everything they needed to make a Covid-19 vaccine.

            All they had to do was slip the genetic instructions for the spike protein into ChAdOx1 and they were good to go
            Continued ....
            "A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices," George Orwell

            Comment


              #56
              ChAdOx1 technology.

              Is not mRNA.

              How does the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine work? | East Lothian Courier

              Does it differ to Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccine?

              Yes. The jabs from Pfizer and Moderna are messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines.
              First Law of Contracting: Only the strong survive

              Comment


                #57
                Oxford’s vaccine is based on (chimps) adenovirus, a more common, better studied (from safety point of view) platform for vaccines, which is likely why its efficacy is closer to 50% rather than 100%.

                If mRNA turns out to be safe long term then it will be really good thing to deal with future viruses

                Comment


                  #58
                  Originally posted by AtW View Post
                  Oxford’s vaccine is based on (chimps) adenovirus, a more common, better studied (from safety point of view) platform for vaccines, which is likely why its efficacy is closer to 50% rather than 100%
                  Brexiteers would possibly be genetically closer to humans than chimps are. They're also more plentiful in the UK.

                  Comment


                    #59
                    Is it so hard for people to understand the difference?

                    The UK has approved mRNA vaccine, this isn't your grandad's vaccine technology. It invades your own cells, a tricks them to produce the virus spike and your own immune system attacks and kills your own cells.

                    This is uncharted stuff in humans. Normally something as radical and new as this approach would need a 10 year study.
                    First Law of Contracting: Only the strong survive

                    Comment


                      #60
                      Could COVID-19 mRNA vaccines cause autoimmune diseases? | The BMJ

                      In the understandable socioeconomic rush towards mass vaccination without longer-term safety testing, it would seem that an essential stage in any vaccine licensing process should involve careful analysis of the human proteome against vaccine peptide sequences. This should minimize the risks both of acute autoimmune reactions to inoculation and future chronic autoimmune pathology.
                      Be my guest, we need this study done by super willing volunteers.
                      First Law of Contracting: Only the strong survive

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X