VAKCINA

CoronaVac, the vaccine against the novel coronavirus manufactured by Butantan Institute in collaboration with Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac, has a general efficacy of 50.38%. The information was announced by the São Paulo state government on Tuesday (Jan. 12).
Last week, the government had said that the efficacy rate of the vaccine was 78 percent. But this refers only to light cases and those that require medical attention.
The results were observed in studies carried out in Brazil on health agents, who are more exposed to the virus. However, when light cases that demand no medical care whatsoever are taken into account, efficacy was lower. “Other studies, from other manufacturers, did not include cases with people who had a headache for two days, even with a positive RT-PCT outcome. But we did,” said Ricardo Palácios, medical director for clinical research with Butantan Institute.
In the testing phase, general efficacy is gauged by comparing the amount of all registered COVID-19 cases (light, moderate, and severe) between volunteers who were vaccinated and the volunteers that received the placebo.
Over the course of the efficacy study in Brazil, 252 volunteers experienced a light COVID-19 case (no need for medical assistance), 85 of whom had received the vaccine and 167 the placebo. Of all Brazilian volunteers, 4,653 were given the vaccine and 4,599 took the placebo. The result for the efficacy for light cases in patients who needed to receive some sort of medical assistance was 77.96 percent—a group within which seven had received the vaccine and 31 the placebo.

Chinese #COVID19 vaccines got a presidential welcome in #Serbia on Sat. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic received one million doses of Sinopharm's vaccine – said to be the first large-scale arrival of the three types of vaccines it purchased – at the Belgrade Airport. pic.twitter.com/pCVvmMyBJS

— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) January 16, 2021

buffalo bill wrote:

Chinese #COVID19 vaccines got a presidential welcome in #Serbia on Sat. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic received one million doses of Sinopharm's vaccine – said to be the first large-scale arrival of the three types of vaccines it purchased – at the Belgrade Airport. pic.twitter.com/pCVvmMyBJS

— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) January 16, 2021

New coronavirus variants could cause more reinfections, require updated vaccines
By Kai Kupferschmidt Jan. 15, 2021 , 4:55 PM

Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

When the number of COVID-19 cases began to rise again in Manaus, Brazil, in December 2020, Nuno Faria was stunned. The virologist at Imperial College London and associate professor at the University of Oxford had just co-authored a paper in Science estimating that three-quarters of the city’s inhabitants had already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic coronavirus—more than enough, it seemed, for herd immunity to develop. The virus should be done with Manaus. Yet hospitals were filling up again. “It was hard to reconcile these two things,” Faria says. He started to hunt for samples he could sequence to find out whether changes in the virus could explain the resurgence.

On 12 January, Faria and his colleagues posted their initial conclusions on the website virological.org. Thirteen of 31 samples collected in mid-December in Manaus turned out to be part of a new viral lineage they called P.1. Much more research is needed, but they say one possibility is that in some people, P.1 eludes the human immune response triggered by the lineage that ravaged the city earlier in 2020.


Emerging variants of the coronavirus have been in the news ever since scientists raised the alarm over B.1.1.7, a SARS-CoV-2 variant that first caught scientists’ attention in England in December and that is more transmissible than previously circulating viruses. But now, they’re also focusing on a potential new threat: variants that could do an end run around the human immune response. Such “immune escapes” could mean more people who have had COVID-19 remain susceptible to reinfection, and that proven vaccines may, at some point, need an update.

At a World Health Organization (WHO) meeting on 12 January, hundreds of researchers discussed the most important scientific questions raised by the wave of new mutations. WHO also convened its COVID-19 Emergency Committee on 14 January to discuss the impact of the new variants and the travel restrictions that many countries are imposing to contain them. The committee called for a global effort to sequence and share more SARS-CoV-2 genomes to help track mutations. It also asked countries to support “global research efforts to better understand critical unknowns about SARS-CoV-2 specific mutations and variants.”

The more transmissible variant, B.1.1.7, is already spreading rapidly in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Denmark, and probably in many other countries. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a modeling study on Friday showing the strain could become the predominant variant in the United States in March. But scientists are just as worried about 501Y.V2, a variant detected in South Africa. Some of the mutations it carries, including ones named E484K and K417N, change its surface protein, spike, and have been shown in the lab to reduce how well monoclonal antibodies combat the virus. In a preprint published earlier this month, Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, showed that E484K also reduced the potency of convalescent sera from some donors 10-fold—although he is quick to add this does not necessarily mean the mutation would cause people’s immunity to the new strain to drop 10-fold.

P.1 adds to the concerns because it appears to have hit on a similar constellation of mutations and has emerged in a place with a high level of immunity. “Anytime you see the same mutations arising and starting to spread multiple times, in different viral strains across the world, that’s really strong evidence that there’s some evolutionary advantage to those mutations,” Bloom says.

Like B.1.1.7, the variant identified in Manaus is already on the move. Just as Faria was finishing his analysis of the Brazilian genomes, a report was published of a variant detected in travelers arriving in Japan from Brazil—and it turned out to be P.1.

Bad friends

How these new variants are affecting the course of the pandemic is still unclear. In Manaus, for example, P.1 might have nothing to do with the new surge in infections; people’s immunity might simply be waning, says Oxford epidemiologist Oliver Pybus. In a press conference today, WHO’s Mike Ryan cautioned that changes in human behavior are still the major driving force for the resurgence. “It’s too easy to just lay the blame on the variants and say it’s the virus that did it,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s also what we didn’t do that did it.”

Even if the variant plays a crucial role it might be driving the boost because it is transmitted more easily, like B.1.1.7, not because it can evade the immune response. “Of course it could be a combination of these factors, too,” Pybus says. Similarly, in a recent modeling study, researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine calculated that South Africa’s 501Y.V2 variant could be 50% more transmissible but no better at evading immunity, or just as transmissible as previous variants but able to evade immunity in one in five people previously infected. “Reality may lie between these extremes,” the authors wrote.

Ester Sabino, a molecular biologist at the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, is launching a study to find reinfections in Manaus that could help decide between these hypotheses for P.1. She is also working to sequence more samples from Manaus from January to follow the variant’s spread. “We don’t have the data yet, but my guess is, it will be at 100% now,” she says. Lab studies investigating the variants are also underway. The United Kingdom today launched a new consortium, G2P-UK (for “genotype to phenotype-UK”), headed by Wendy Barclay of Imperial College London, to study the effects of emerging mutations in SARS-CoV-2. One idea discussed at the 12 January WHO meeting is to set up a biobank that would aid studies by housing virus samples, as well as plasma from vaccine recipients and recovered patients.

Interactions between the new mutations may make it harder to tease out their effects. The variants from the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Manaus all share a mutation named N501Y, for instance, or Nelly, as some researchers call it. But the mutation, which affects the spike protein, also occurs in some variants that do not spread faster, suggesting N501Y does not operate alone, says Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research: “Nelly might be innocent, except maybe when she’s hanging with her bad friends.”

Bloom thinks none of the changes is likely to let the virus escape the immune response entirely. “But I would expect that those viruses have some advantage when a lot of the population has immunity”—which might help explain the surge in Manaus.

Vaccine updates

So far, the virus does not appear to have become resistant to COVID-19 vaccines, says vaccinologist Philip Krause, who chairs a WHO working group on COVID-19 vaccines. “The not-so-good news is that the rapid evolution of these variants suggests that if it is possible for the virus to evolve into a vaccine-resistant phenotype, this may happen sooner than we like,” he adds. That possibility adds to the urgency of putting good surveillance in place to detect such escape variants early on, says biostatistician Natalie Dean of the University of Florida. But it also adds to the urgency of vaccinating people, says Christian Drosten, a virologist at Charité University Hospital in Berlin. “We have to do everything we can now to vaccinate as many people as fast as possible, even if that means running the risk of selecting for some variants,” he says.

If vaccine-resistant SARS-CoV-2 strains emerge, vaccines might need to be updated. Several vaccines could be easily changed to reflect the latest changes, but regulators might balk at authorizing them without seeing updated safety and efficacy data, Krause says. If new variants circulate alongside older strains, multivalent vaccines, effective against several lineages, might even be needed. “To be clear: These are downstream considerations,” Krause says. “The public should not think that this is imminent, and that new vaccines will be needed.” But Ravindra Gupta, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, says manufacturers should start to produce vaccines designed to generate immunity to mutated versions of the spike protein, because they keep cropping up. “It tells us that we should have these mutations in our vaccines, so that you shut off one of the avenues for the virus to go down.”


For now, increased transmissibility is the biggest worry, says virologist Angela Rasmussen of Georgetown University. “I’m puzzled why [that] isn’t a bigger part of the conversation,” she says. The U.S. hospital system, she says, “is at capacity in many places and further increases in transmission can tip us over the edge where the system collapses. Then we’ll start seeing potentially huge increases in mortality.”

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/new-coronavirus-variants-could-cause-more-reinfections-require-updated-vaccines

Hungary reaches deal to buy China’s Sinopharm vaccine
Jan 14, 2021
Hungary’s government said on Thursday (14 January) it has reached a deal with China’s Sinopharm to buy its coronavirus vaccine, the country’s latest move to break away from Brussels as it tries to speed up inoculations to lift curbs on the economy.
Hungary would be the first EU country to accept a Chinese vaccine if approved by Hungarian authorities. Under European Union rules it would have to give an ultra-fast emergency use approval, rather than waiting for the European drug regulator EMA to give the go-ahead for the Chinese vaccine.
Britain took a similar approach in December before it exited the bloc. It approved Pfizer Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine on 2 December, jumping ahead of the rest of the world in the race to begin a mass inoculation programme.
Hungary’s nationalist government has sharply criticised the EU for what it said were way too slow vaccine purchases and deliveries that now threatened an economic rebound.
Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said in a Facebook post on Thursday that due to the “scandalously” slow vaccine procurements of the European Commission, a fast rollout of vaccines could not happen early this year.
“If we look beyond the EU’s borders, we can see that in the US, in Britain and in Israel, people are vaccinated at warp speed,” Szijjártó said.
The government also passed a decree on Thursday allowing it to start procurements outside the EU’s centralised scheme.
Szijjártó’s spokesman told Reuters the approval process for the vaccine developed by Sinopharm’s Beijing-based affiliate, Beijing Institute of Biological Products Co., Ltd (BIBP), was already “underway”.
Beyond the supply bottlenecks, Hungarians are fairly sceptical about the new vaccines, with just about one in five people definitely planning to get a shot based on a late-December survey by the Central Statistics Office.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s chief of staff Gergely Gulyas told a briefing on Thursday that vaccine shipments under the EU’s programme were arriving too slowly, with weekly shipments of less than 100,000 doses, and Hungary would continue talks with Russia and China about additional vaccine purchases.
“We have practically made an agreement with Sinopharm,” Gulyas said. “The first shipment could include up to one million doses.”
The timing of the Chinese shipment depends on how fast Hungarian health authorities authorize use of Sinopharm’s vaccine, which has been used to immunise some 20 million people, he added.
Gulyas said the second wave of the pandemic has peaked in Hungary and new infections have dropped but restrictions cannot be eased yet.
China approved the shot developed by Sinopharm’s BIBP in late December, its first COVID-19 vaccine for general public use.
No detailed efficacy data of the vaccine has been publicly released but BIBP has said the vaccine is 79.34% effective in preventing the disease based on interim data. Pakistan has already negotiated a supply deal for the vaccine.
The vaccine, along with another candidate developed by a Wuhan-based subsidiary of Sinopharm, is included in China’s emergency use programme launched in July, which targets limited groups of people facing high risk of virus exposure.
Since 11 November, all secondary schools have been closed in Hungary, as have hotels and restaurants except for takeaway meals, a 1900 GMT curfew has been in place, and gatherings have been banned.

Exclusive: International COVID-19 vaccine poll shows higher mistrust of Russia, China shots

LONDON (Reuters) - People across the world are generally likely to say yes to getting a COVID-19 vaccine, but would be more distrustful of shots made in China or Russia than those developed in Germany or the United States, an international poll showed on Friday.

The survey, conducted by the polling company YouGov and shared exclusively with Reuters, found Britons and Danes were the most willing to take the COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available to them, while the French and Poles were more likely to be hesitant.

The poll was based on questions put to almost 19,000 people.

It also found that willingness to take the COVID-19 vaccine has been improving in many countries in recent weeks, just as shots developed by companies in the United States, Russia, China, Germany and Britain were starting to be delivered and administered in countries across Europe, North America and Asia.

In Britain, 73% of people said they would get vaccinated, while in Denmark the number was 70%.

In the United States, however, just less than half of those surveyed said they would be willing to have a COVID-19 vaccine, a figure that has remained broadly stable since July.

More than a third of people surveyed in Poland and almost half in France - 37% and 48% respectively - said they would say no to a COVID-19 shot if offered it.

WAIT AND SEE

Confidence among populations about vaccines will be a key factor in governments’ efforts to curb the rate of infections in the year-long SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic, which has infected more than 92 million people worldwide and killed at least 1.98 million.

A study published by vaccine confidence researchers in November found that conspiracy theories and misinformation fuels mistrust and could push COVID-19 shot uptake rates below levels needed to protect communities against the disease.

Friday’s YouGov poll found that, while sizeable minorities in many countries said they would not take the COVID-19 vaccine now, most gave their reason as preferring to wait and see if the vaccines were safe, and few were driven by entrenched “anti-vaxxer” views.

In France, for example, the proportion of the population saying they’d refuse the vaccine because they were “opposed to vaccines in general” was highest at 9%, but still far lower than the percentage who would reject a COVID-19 vaccine specifically.

With COVID-19 vaccine production and delivery beginning to ramp up, the YouGov poll also surveyed attitudes to compulsory COVID-19 vaccination - a policy under discussion by some governments to try and get as many people as possible immunised.

Such a move was most popular in India at 77%, Indonesia at 71% and Mexico at 65%. Britons were split, with 40% supportive and 42% opposed, Americans tended to oppose the idea, at 46% compared with only 29% who would back mandatory vaccinations.

Hans wrote:Čitao sam o bezbednosti ruske vakcine pre koji dan i zapao sam u konfuziju. Tass je javio da su na 700000 primalaca imali potpun uspeh što se tiče bezbednosti, u Argentini su je ispitivali na 30nešto hiljada i 1% je imao neželjene efekte, ali minorne, dok neka ruska dr za BBC objašnjava da je procenat neželjenih efekata u nekoj od faza bio 24% (isto bezopasne tegobe), ali da to ovi neće da objave jer (moja interpretacija) vakcina mora biti savršena.
Ništa ja ne razumem osim da je mnogo toga u ovoj priči politika.

lalinea wrote:

Hans wrote:Čitao sam o bezbednosti ruske vakcine pre koji dan i zapao sam u konfuziju. Tass je javio da su na 700000 primalaca imali potpun uspeh što se tiče bezbednosti, u Argentini su je ispitivali na 30nešto hiljada i 1% je imao neželjene efekte, ali minorne, dok neka ruska dr za BBC objašnjava da je procenat neželjenih efekata u nekoj od faza bio 24% (isto bezopasne tegobe), ali da to ovi neće da objave jer (moja interpretacija) vakcina mora biti savršena.
Ništa ja ne razumem osim da je mnogo toga u ovoj priči politika.

To je upravo problem sa neobjavljivanjem podataka, tj sto nikako da publikuju taj peer-reviewed report te trece faze.... Sta su ti nezeljeni efekti? Jel 24% ispitanika bolela ruka (kao moju mamu od fajzera) ili su bili pola dana u krevetu (kao ja od vakcine protiv gripa)... Ovako je sve nagadjanje.

Mór Thököly wrote:Ako na 30k u Argentini niko nije umro - toeto. Meni nista vise ne treba kad je bezbednost u pitanju ako je to tacno. Učinkovitost je naravno druga stvar.